subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re:  takubot

body:
>One hour was not long enough. A few days to a week for
something like this is
>warrented so that most people can respond. I responded
right away and in fact
>only had one minor complaint about the format. But other
people may have had
>other issues to express - if only they had the time.

Yeah, I understand I was little reckless that one and half
hour is actually not long enough.


list: wikipedia-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: sannse

subject: [Wikipedia-l] takubot

body:
Takuya Murata wote:

> Technically speaking, he can say at least something if he
> checks the villag pump. It seems to me like I say I am going
> to rub and people are wating until I actually did!
>
> And actually I waited not about a hour but one and half hour.
>
> I am saying it is unfair that even sysops have time to
> dicuss but they didn't. They can simply say don't do it or
> wait. And then how long should I have waited? A day, a week,
> a month?
>
> >Have you looked at the [[Wikipedia: Bots]] page?
>
> Yeah.

Remember that many people on Wikipedia will be in a different time-zone to
you.  It was before 5 in the morning for me when you posted at the pump so I
was very asleep (I'm not a sysop, but the same would apply for many of them
I'm sure).  And even if they are on similar timings to you, not everyone
checks the pump, or the mailing list very often  (well OK, I do several
times a day and I know several other people do as well (Hi mav!) but you
can't count on that for everyone).

I think the most important part of the [[Wikipedia:Bots]] page from your
point of view, is the part about bots being registered.  That way they have
explicit permission and won't show up on Recent changes where they will
cause the most annoyance.

Perhaps adjusting the bot to add a little more content to each article will
also make it more welcome (if you have agreement to use it first I mean).
Maybe the articles could at least say what the author has written?

sannse


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia mascot

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:

>Dolphins, whales,
>ants, bees etc. all work nicely. Of course, we could also choose a monkey
>sitting behind a typewriter ;-)
>
Termites are co-operative animals.  In some ways we are like them in our
work on the House of Intellectual Property.  They are so maligned that
there is little chance that anyone has chosen them as a mascot before.

Eclecticology


list: wikien-l

from_name: Tony Wilson

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re edit wars and users & etc

body:
Jimbo got it 100% right, and just about everybody that does useful work
here knows it.

Tony (Tannin)


list: wikitech-l

from_name: tarquin

subject: [Wikitech-l] Request for User Contribs page

body:
Could a User contributions page also give a "diff" link for "top" edits?

thus:

18:45 Feb 22, 2003 2000s <http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000s> (top)
[diff] [rollback
<http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=2000s&action=rollback>]


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Wikipedia mascot

body:
Magnus Manske wrote:

> Lee Daniel Crocker wrote:
>
>>> (The Cunctator <cunctator at kband.com>):
>>> The [[slime mold]] is obviously the best choice.
>>>
>>
>> ...but it's really hard to turn into a recognizable logo.
>>
> Try http://www.mykoweb.com/photos/Slime_mold(ms-04).jpg

Hmm!  That looks like five red light-bulbs with white eyes painted on.
 The people who support slime-molds must be the same ones that say that
walking on the moon didn't just happen in a Hollywood special FX lab.   :-D

Ec.


from_name: elian

subject: [Wikipedia-l] feature idea: drop down menus for languages

body:
Hello,

just some small ideas for improving the detoriating situation of the growing
of language links in some articles and on
the main page (can one say this in English?):

someone of the German Wikipedia suggested to make the two-times display at
the top and the bottom of the page configurable in the user prefs:

people could switch on: [x] "display language links only on top"

My suggestion:
user prefs: [x] "display language links as drop down menu" (like the
specialpages menu)

What do you think?

We have already twelve or more language links in some articles and they
will becoming more (if at one point we have three lines of language links
in many articles, we could easily switch the default setting to drop down
box)

greetings,
elian


from_name: Jay Bowks

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Interlingua Language list

body:
Oops! Thanks Richard,
I hadn't noticed that! But I'll jump
right on it, lots of progress on the
ia.wiki and I'm thankful for your
visit and the fact that you enjoyed
seeing how easy it is to understand
with minimal study. Interlingua is
sort of a common denominator
language based on the living Latin
that survives in Spanish/Portuguese,
French, Italian, and in English too.

If anyone notices any such big
or little oopses please bring it
to my attention or to any of the
other interlingua users at
interlingua-coollist at yahoogroups.com
Thanks,
Jay B.

Wops! Gratias Richard,
Io non habeva notate isto! Ma io saltara
sur illo, multo progresso con le
ia.wiki e io te regratia tu visita
e le facto que te gustava
vider como facile es comprender
Interlingua con studio minime.
Illo es un lingua basate sur le
latino vivente in espaiol/portugese,
francese, italiano, e anglese etiam.

Si alcuno nota un grande o
parve wops per favor dice me
lo o a qualque altere del altere
usatores de interlingua a:
interlingua-coollist at yahoogroups.com
Gratias,
Jay B.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Richard Grevers" <dramatic at xtra.co.nz>
To: <wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org>
Sent: Saturday, February 22, 2003 4:15 PM
Subject: [Wikipedia-l] Interlingua Language list
> http://ia.wikipedia.com/ seems to have based its (single!) language link
> list on the English one - hence there is one language missing from it -
> English!
> I only came across interlingua for the first time yesterday. It's a
> fascinating concept, and I find that with my limited French (2 years of
> study 20 years ago) I can follow 75% of an interlingua text, even before
> studying its grammar.
> Richard Grevers


from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia - the multilingual encyclopedia

body:
> The problem; the ONLY problem here, is that the list of language links
> gets very long when more than about a half-dozen languages are listed.

Why not simply reduce the font size?

Regards,

Erik


from_name: Thomas Corell

body:
elian wrote:

> someone of the German Wikipedia suggested to make the two-times display at
> the top and the bottom of the page configurable in the user prefs:
> people could switch on: [x] "display language links only on top"
> My suggestion:
> user prefs: [x] "display language links as drop down menu" (like the
> specialpages menu)

And just another one:

[x] Display other languages as ISO-3166-1 country-codes

Meens instead of printing: Other languages: Dansk, English, German, ...
Just print: Other languages: DA, EN, DE, ...

Greetings
Smurf
--
-------------------------  Anthill inside! ---------------------------


body:
Brion Vibber <vibber at aludra.usc.edu> writes:

> I'm generally leery of drop-down boxes as they don't show the available
> options until you've gone to the trouble of asking what's available. And
> if the available options are different for each page, that's going to
> spell trouble. People will check a few times, then stop looking once
> they've found that their language never comes up.

That is why I proposed the drop down boxes as a user pref. It should be
switched off by default to allow people to discover the multilinguality of
wikipedia. But if someone speaks only one language and isn't interested in
others his GUI shouldn't be cluttered up with for him useless language
links.

Thomas' idea of taking the language code is another idea I would favour.

BTW, in some Wikipedias (Czech, Esperanto, Svedish, Polish) the language
links are translated into this language, making it difficult for someone
who doesn't know czech f.e. to find the link to "his" wikipedia. Maybe we
should add a comment in Language.php that the list of languages should not
be touched and localized.

greetings,
elian


subject: [Wikipedia-l] japanese wikipedia: article count and embassy

body:
Hello,

sorry, I just can't stop posting today ;-) I paid the Japanese Wikipedia a
visit today and besides lots of strange characters I couldn't read and
much activity on recentchanges I saw on their statistics page that they
had over 2000 pages but only 200 described as articles. That seems rather
dubious to me...

Our article count is based on commas, isn't it? Is Japanese a language
without commas?

And my other question: I wanted to put an interlanguage link to them on
the German Mainpage, but copy and paste didn't work. So I wanted to ask
someone but all pages are in Japanese... Could someone of the Japanese
Wikipedia (is there anyone here?) set up one page in English, f.e. a
Japanese embassy?

Later I found out that [[ja:HomePage]] worked, without any strange
characters...

greetings,
elian


body:
Brion Vibber wrote:
> On Sat, 22 Feb 2003, Thomas Corell wrote:

> Country codes aren't appropriate, as they in many cases don't match up
> with language codes.
> We could have an option to show the ISO 639 language codes, though.

Well, ISO 639-2 seems a better choice for wikipeda. 3 chars are still
better / shorter than most of the real language names. ISO 3166-1 is the
usual response of an ASN.1 (ISO 8824-1) native speaker ;)

Greetings
Smurf

--
-------------------------  Anthill inside! ---------------------------


from_name: Andre Engels

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: HomePage

body:
On Sun, 23 Feb 2003, Richard Grevers wrote:

> I agree completely. I fail to detcet any logic behind the selection of the
> 10 languages on the "short" list. It certainly isn't based on number of
> speakers, and doesn't seem to be based on number of articles, which leaves
> the fact that they are all European languages feeling slightly offensive.

Well, it might well be based on number of pages - it IS the 10 largest
non-English ones in number of pages.

Andre Engels


from_name: The Cunctator

subject: [Wikipedia-l] takubot

body:
On 2/22/03 7:23 PM, "Takuya Murata" <takusi at manjiro.net> wrote:

>> Wikipedia is a collaboration--and that collaboration is founded upon the
>> presumption that each participant is responsible for his/her actions. If
>> errors are made, others will help correct them.
>
> No. We are making things together not each one is making
> things with help of others.

We're saying the same thing.

>> I'm not blaming you for your action, but you're blaming me
> for mine.
>
> Yes, because you can tell me about the rule before I started
> using bots? Once again, why didn't you tell me? The job of
> sysops should include not only catch the mis-behavior but
> also prevent it if possible. You can stop before I actually
> did me but you didn't. Why is that?

Why didn't I tell you? Because Wikipedia is not my job. It's not my life. I
don't check in every 15 minutes, every hour, on every discussion, to monitor
what goes on.

That's why.

I wouldn't mind being omniscient and omnipotent, but I'm not. You shouldn't
be upset with me for not knowing everything.

But I do appreciate that you think I should be able to know everything.


from_name: K Forstner

subject: [WikiEN-l] Koyaanis Quatsi

body:
Could anyone tell me what happened to Koyaanis Quatsi? Why is his user page
empty?

KF


from_name: Chuck Smith

subject: [Wikipedia-l] it's me again...

body:
As you can expect, I'm back to join the discussion.
This time though no long rants about language rights.
:)

I think it would be good to include all Wikipedias
that have more than 1000 articles in the top list and
have a drop down box somewhere in the *middle* of the
screen that says "Wikipedia in your language" that you
could click and then pops up all the languages
including one that says "Other" which goes to the page
with the list of languages.  Drop down lists catch the
eye quite well and I think most people would see them.
 Now, the question is, how do we put a drop down list
in the middle of a wiki page?!

I think we should let the top links stay as they are
on all the other pages of Wikipedia.  How does this
sound?

Chuck

=====
Learn Esperanto! - http://www.lernu.net/
Enciklopedio: http://eo.wikipedia.org/

___________________________________________________
Yahoo! M?viles
Personaliza tu m?vil con tu logo y melod?a favorito
en http://moviles.yahoo.es


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Mis-spellings

body:
It happens not rarely that what is a misspelling in Dutch (or another language)
is correct spelling in English (or another language). This causes problems
on the mispeelings-page, because pages are mentioned where the text is only
on interwiki links. For example, the Dutch 'Oktober 2002' page is on the list
for misspelling 'oktober' as 'october' because it has an interwiki-link to
'October 2002' on EN, and 'insect' is on the list for misspelling 'insect'
as 'insekt' because it has an interwiki-link to 'Insekt' on DE. Is it possible
to skip these interwiki-links in checking for misspellings?

Andre Engels


body:
"Guillaume Blanchard" <gblanchard at arcsy.co.jp> writes:

> > > lots of strange characters I couldn't read and
>
> You can't read because you don't know japanese or because you see odd
> characters ?

Because I don't know...I love foreign scripts but I never had the chance
to learn Japanese :-(

> > > Our article count is based on commas, isn't it? Is
> > > Japanese a language
> > > without commas?
>
> Japanese use commas. Not the ASCII commas "," but a japanese style commas
> "、".

So the article count is propably wrong?

> > > And my other question: I wanted to put an
> > > interlanguage link to them on
> > > the German Mainpage, but copy and paste didn't work.
>
> You can copy & paste from the french homepage ;o)

I hope to do this in the future with interlanguage links of articles,
putting my full trust in you that you have it right in the french WP ;-)

> I will open a Japanese embassy on the french Wikipedia.
> And if there are no one else to do that, I can also do it on the english
> one.

That's great! May I add your name on the German embassy list, as well?

> > Aoineko could probably help you, but he is currently
> > busy changing a dozen nappies per day :-) I'll copy
> > this message on his french page

Thank you, Anthere!

> Dozen per hour :o))

I've seen on your user's page... congratulations!

greetings,
elian
--
*censored*


from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject: [WikiEN-l] edit war at [[Jewish ethnocentrism]]

body:
I don't agree with everything the Cunc has to say, however...

The Cunctator wrote:
> [[m:WikipediAhimsa]]: "When in doubt, don't ascribe bad motives to
> people"

I think that even this is too "aggressive".  I don't think it's really
ever useful to ascribe bad motives to people on talk pages or in the
comments field.

First, it tends to escalate any conflict by rising the ire of the
other person.  If you already think the other person has bad motives,
keep in mind that they probably don't think so, and that you're saying
so will just tend to make them dig in their heels.

Second, it leaves a less-clean "paper trail" in case the person needs
to be banned.  YOU be an angel, and let the OTHER PERSON be the devil,
and then if it's absolutely impossible to resolve the situation
otherwise, I have a clean paper trail, clearer proof of who was not
working co-operatively.

But the irony is, I believe, strict adherence to civility will mean
that we almost never get to the 2nd point, because problems will
usually be worked out amicably.

--Jimbo


in_reply_to: <002c01c2daae$3dc21750$bfbefdd0@impressario>; from jjbowks@adam.cheshire.net on Sat, Feb 22, 2003 at 03:08:55PM -0500

body:
Jay Bowks wrote:
> How about a drop down list box,
> such as the one on the TEJO site?
> That would be very economical
> as to space and give plenty of
> options to choose from.

A drop down list box is a common solution to this exact sort of
problem.  It could be sorted so that the most popular languages are
at the top, and the rest in alphabetical order, with "popularity"
determined by either number of articles/contributions or number of
hits or number of native speakers of the language or whatever.

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Australian news coverage

body:
http://www.heraldsun.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5478,6017606%255E11869,00.html

The interview is fairly accurate.  A few discrepancies between what I
said (or thought I said) and why was reported, but nothing material.

Let me just comment on two paragraphs:

>"For example, there are always two or three people working on
>television programs, so we have a lot of coverage there, but then
>there are a group of people who are history buffs, specifically on
>World War II," he said.

I would say that I actually gave "World War II" buffs as an example of
the type of person who might have comprehensive knowledge of a
particular area, even without formal training.  I'm not at all sure
that it's accurate to say that we actually have a "group of" them,
although our WWII coverage is certainly good in places.

>"It really depends on who comes in. We have an MIT (Massachusetts
>Institute of Technology) mathematician who works on it almost every
>day so we have excellent coverage of mathematical concepts for a
>general encyclopedia."

I would say that I actually gave Michael Hardy (a net friend of mine
for many years) as an example of a type of person who might have
comprehensive knowledge in a certain area AND with formal training,
and as an example of the high caliber of credentials some of our
contributors have.  There's no question that his contributions in the
math area are good, but the way this is written, it makes him seem
responsible for the whole math section, which isn't really fair to
many others.

Anyhow, it's a good article!

--Jimbo


from_name: Richard Grevers

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Interlingua language list.

body:
http://ia.wikipedia.com/ seems to have based its (single!) language link
list on the English one - hence there is one language missing from it -
English!
I only came across interlingua for the first time yesterday. It's a
fascinating concept, and I find that with my limited French (2 years of
study 20 years ago) I can follow 75% of an interlingua text, even before
studying its grammar.

--
Richard Grevers
Christchurch, NZ.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Interlingua Language list

body:
http://ia.wikipedia.com/ seems to have based its (single!) language link
list on the English one - hence there is one language missing from it -
English!
I only came across interlingua for the first time yesterday. It's a
fascinating concept, and I find that with my limited French (2 years of
study 20 years ago) I can follow 75% of an interlingua text, even before
studying its grammar.

--
Richard Grevers


from_name: Guillaume Blanchard

body:
> > Hello,
> >
> > sorry, I just can't stop posting today ;-) I paid
> > the Japanese Wikipedia a
> > visit today and besides lots of strange characters I
> > couldn't read and

You can't read because you don't know japanese or because you see odd
characters ?

> > much activity on recentchanges I saw on their
> > statistics page that they
> > had over 2000 pages but only 200 described as
> > articles. That seems rather
> > dubious to me...
> >
> > Our article count is based on commas, isn't it? Is
> > Japanese a language
> > without commas?

Japanese use commas. Not the ASCII commas "," but a japanese style commas
"、".

> > And my other question: I wanted to put an
> > interlanguage link to them on
> > the German Mainpage, but copy and paste didn't work.

You can copy & paste from the french homepage ;o)

> > So I wanted to ask
> > someone but all pages are in Japanese... Could
> > someone of the Japanese
> > Wikipedia (is there anyone here?) set up one page in
> > English, f.e. a
> > Japanese embassy?

I will open a Japanese embassy on the french Wikipedia.
And if there are no one else to do that, I can also do it on the english
one.

> > Later I found out that [[ja:HomePage]] worked,
> > without any strange
> > characters...

You can also use [[ja:]]

> > greetings,
> > elian
>
> Aoineko could probably help you, but he is currently
> busy changing a dozen nappies per day :-) I'll copy
> this message on his french page

Dozen per hour :o))

Aoineko


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: HomePage

body:
On Sat, 22 Feb 2003 00:42:33 -0500, Tom Parmenter
<tompar at world.std.com> wrote:

> That doesn't tell me why three lists are better than one.  Put it
> anywhere you like, but why duplicate it?  More to the point, why have
> lists of languages that are *not* duplicates?
>
> If I read Arabic, my eye would absolutely leap to a bit of Arabic text
> no matter where it appeared on the page, I am sure.
>
> I believe we should have one list and it should be complete and not
> discriminate against any language that has a wikipedia project.  In
> other words, all 30 languages, and when the Tagalog and Shoshone and
> Pig Latin editions are available, add 'em.  If the list has 300
> languages, well, cool.  People will still be able to find their own
> language just as well with one list as with three.

I agree completely. I fail to detcet any logic behind the selection of the
10 languages on the "short" list. It certainly isn't based on number of
speakers, and doesn't seem to be based on number of articles, which leaves
the fact that they are all European languages feeling slightly offensive.

So I would suggest a text list of all languages on the main page, although
I find the current strung-together list quite hard to read. A table or list
layout might be better.

I do believe that a dropdown list/redirector would be the best way to offer
a second listing. The main page could have both text and dropdown versions,
and the dropdown form could be provided on some other pages. It could even
be an off-by-default user option on all pages (only multilingual users are
likely to enable it).
The dropdown could be a static include, generated and distributed to the
various wikipedias as part of the system for creating a new language.
>
> How to present?  Alphabetical order, according to the alphabet (or
> other equivalent sorting technique) of the language of the main page.
> Maybe there could be a link to other presentations, sorting by number
> of articles, chronological order of appearance, little flags, maps,
> pulldowns by linguistic groups . . .
>
Flags and maps are never good indicators of language. I agree that language
names need to be written in their own language not the language of the
page. Languages which use non-latin writing systems do need a latin variant
to cope with user agents which can't handle unicode. (including speech
browsers etc!)

--
Richard Grevers


from_name: Matthew Woodcraft

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re:  takubot

body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:
> Have you read our policy on bots yet? Please do - it explains the
> pros, cons and procedures.

The Wikipedia:Bots page currently says

| Ideally one should check with an administrator before using a bot, or
| have the bot move slowly enough that errors can be quickly caught and
| checked by others before damage is done.

Now, I would strongly support changing this to say 'You must get
permission from', rather than 'Ideally one should check with'. But it's
a bit harsh to jump on people for taking the page literally.

-M-


body:
> That's great! May I add your name on the German embassy list, as well?

Sure, but I don't speak german ;o)
Please link to my french talk page.

> I've seen on your user's page... congratulations!

Thanks

Aoineko


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Alphabetical article index

body:
Toby Bartels wrote:

>Brion VIBBER wrote in part:
>
>>Other things: currently the list includes redirects. Some redirects
>>should definitely stay -- alternate names that would not appear near
>>each other, for instance. Others (spelling, caps variations) could maybe
>>be dropped, but that's harder to do consistently. Or more simply, we
>>could just italicize redirects or something.
>>
>
>I favour using #DEPRECATED in addition to #REDIRECT.
>This would be used for misspellings, CamelCase, etc,
>while #REDIRECT would be kept for alternate titles
>that might well appear in page text but for whatever reason
>(naming conventions, arbitrary choices) aren't the page title.
>
>For the most part, these would behave the same,
>but we can distinguish them in indexes of this sort.
>We can also do a special maintenance search for
>links to #DEPRECATED pages, since these will usually
>(not quite always, however) be a mistake in the page's text.
>To begin with, there will be no #DEPRECATED pages,
>but whenever we notice (say) CamelCase in the Allpages list,
>then we know that there's a #REDIRECT to change to #DEPRECATED.
>
I see this as the sort of thing that a few people will use, but most of
us will ignore.  People would prefer not to cope with these subtle
distinctions.

It could be used on a page that's a candidate for deletion, but which
has been kept to avoid breaking the links in somebody's browser.  A
#DEPRECATED page could be deleted if it has not reached a predetermined
level of accesses over a specified period of time.

Eclecticology


subject: [Wikipedia-l] HomePage

body:
elian wrote:

>Wikipedia, at the moment, is maybe best compared to a multifamily
>residence, where Mr Smith has ten signs on his door reading: "Mr Miller is
>living on the right" "Mr Gates is living over there" and "there is the
>apartment of Mrs Williams"... The others have also ten signs, saying the
>same.
>
In neighborhoods where all houses are built according to the same set of
construction plans, these signs can be useful.  After an evening of
concentrated carousing a little help is sometimes needed so that you
don't accidently end up in a neighbour's bedroom.  And if you're in no
condition to read, you're probably also in no condition to remember what
happened in the neighbour's bedroom.

Ec


from_name: Zoe

subject: [WikiEN-l] "Susan Mason"

body:
A new user showed up named Susan Mason soon after Vera Cruz was banned.  "She" seems to have some of the same arguments and defensiveness as ol' Vera.  May be a good idea to keep an eye on "her".

Zoe

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subject: [Wikipedia-l] "You have new messages"

body:
Every time I go to the Recent Changes page, I have "You have new messages" at the top of the page, even though there's nothing new on my Talk page.

Zoe

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body:
> A drop down list box is a common solution to this exact sort of
> problem.  It could be sorted so that the most popular languages are
> at the top, and the rest in alphabetical order, with "popularity"
> determined by either number of articles/contributions or number of
> hits or number of native speakers of the language or whatever.

But as Brion has pointed out, it's a bad solution, because it hides
information that varies a lot per page. I personally don't think long
lists are a problem, esp. with a smaller font. We should just adhere to
the simple principle: Only link if there's really a page at that place.
Instead of having the redundant links in the main page body, I think we
should put a text there:

"Wikipedias have been set up in every world language. The ones linked on
top are the currently active ones. See [[Multilingual coordination]] for
information on starting a Wikipedia in your language."

We should, of course, add Wikipedias that are reasonably active (e.g.
Chinese, Russian, maybe Catalan) to the list of interlanguage links on
Main Page.

And if "scalability" really should ever be a problem, we can set a
threshold of language links per page at which a dropdown is used, or the
links are shortened, or whatever.

Regards,

Erik


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikipedia-l] "You have new messages"

body:
On Sun, 2003-02-23 at 15:47, Zoe wrote:
> Every time I go to the Recent Changes page, I have "You have new
> messages" at the top of the page, even though there's nothing new on
> my Talk page.

Hmm, try forcing a reload on your talk page (ctrl+F5)...

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [Wikitech-l] Citation of versions by timestamp?

body:
A wikipedian has recently been trying to find a good way to cite
particular revisions of articles in the bibliography for a paper.

Current we can give URLs for the _current_ version of an article
(current as of whenever it is visited), or of _previous_ versions (as of
when the citation was made):

current:
  http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foobar
old:
  http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Foobar&oldid=12345

There are two main problems with this (aside from the ugliness of the
old-reference URLs):

* There is no way to reference the current version _as of the time of
citation_. Since that revision isn't in the old table, it has no oldid
assigned yet.

* oldid values sometimes can change, as when an article is deleted and
subsequently restored (done also when recombining histories of articles
that have been broken by crude renaming). Possible rearrangements of the
database (such as combining all languages into a single table) could
require reassigning oldids en masse. They are *not* reliable long-term
citations.

One possible solution would be to provide a way of citing articles as of
a particular timestamp, for instance:

  http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foobar?version=20030224161134

which would pull up either a cur or old version with that timestamp.
(It could also be prettified: version=2003-02-24-16:11:34 etc)

Advantages:
* consistent, no fuss, no worries about rearrangement of db structure
* citation URL can be provided in a nice handy link at the bottom of
every page

Disadvantages:
* timestamp has 1-second resolution. Generally this is going to be
unique (at least per article), but it may occasionally not be,
particularly in cases of recombined histories. Some articles had
multiple revisions'  timestamps set to the same time due to bugs in the
rename code and other db tweaks in early '02.
* for this reason it's not suitable as the mainline url for drawing up
old history revisions via the history list; so people have to remember
to find and use the citation url separately

Alternatively, we could supply _both_ timestamp and oldid in the URL,
and let timestamp have priority if an exact match on both is not found.

Thoughts?

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [WikiEN-l] "Susan Mason"

body:
Zoe wrote:

> A new user showed up named Susan Mason soon after Vera Cruz was
> banned.  "She" seems to have some of the same arguments and
> defensiveness as ol' Vera.  May be a good idea to keep an eye on "her".
>
Yup.
Her points on the opening paragraph of [[Richard Wagner]] sound exactly
like Vera's arguments about Asimov, recently seen on this list.

I think it's Lir / Vera... AGAIN.


subject: [WikiEN-l] "Susan Mason"

body:
> Zoe wrote:

>> A new user showed up named Susan Mason soon after Vera Cruz was
>> banned.  "She" seems to have some of the same arguments and
>> defensiveness as ol' Vera.  May be a good idea to keep an eye on "her".
>>
> Yup.
> Her points on the opening paragraph of [[Richard Wagner]] sound exactly
> like Vera's arguments about Asimov, recently seen on this list.

> I think it's Lir / Vera... AGAIN.

No premature conclusions, please. She's only made a few edits so far.

Regards,

Erik


from_name: Anthere

body:
 julien tayon <julien at tayon.net> wrote:

Oh damn, I like this project and I wonder when will be the day africans
open their own encyclopedias so that we can share their knowledge ?

Wikipedia is really a cool project !

Dear Jul,

It would be *really* cool that African open encyclopedia in their dialects, but I fear it won't be easy to share their knowledge if they keep it in these dialects.

On the other hand, many africans speak french (for example) just as well. So, they already *have* their encyclopedia. I would be very curious to see how our very-certain-commonly-asserted-strongly-opiniated-westernish-oriented-scientific beliefs stand in front of theirs

---------------------------------
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Tax Center - forms, calculators, tips, and more
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body:
From: "julien tayon" <julien at tayon.net>
> inspir? Richard Grevers <elektra at dramatic.co.nz> ?crivait la plume
> alerte :
> > http://ia.wikipedia.com/ seems to have based its (single!) language
> > link list on the English one - hence there is one language missing
> > from it - English!
> > I only came across interlingua for the first time yesterday. It's a
> > fascinating concept, and I find that with my limited French (2 years
> > of study 20 years ago) I can follow 75% of an interlingua text, even
> > before studying its grammar.

Otay! Lang Link is fixed, there's now an "anglese"
link to the main page of English wiki...

> Though I am french I have the same feeling, it really worths a look. I
> would like to hear feedback from non latin speaking people. I found the
> latin without accent a quite fun concept too : latin used to play the
> role of technical english in middle age. I'd rather be interested in
> simplified greek since I was an hellenist :P
> Listen to the paster noster in mp3 (<troll>should be ogg no?</troll>)
> http://www.wikipedia.com/upload/paternoster-ia.mp3

It's pretty cool you have the same
feeling as a native French speaker.
I'm a native Spanish speaker and
when I first started reading Interlingua
I was hooked by it's simplicity and
it's somehow classic beauty it's like
Latin withouth all the yucky grammar
and endings! Pretty cool indeed!

> I am looking forward a breton (a celtic dialect),  creols wikipedia, and
> other dialectish wikipedia.

That would be neat, I know there
are other auxilinguas that merge
several languages by taking what
is common about them and presenting
it as a working language, there's a
Scandinavian and a Slavic project
somewhere being worked on.
Interlingua is the name of two
very similar languages, one by
the "infinite curve" formula famous
mathematician Giuseppe Peano
in the early XX century and then
in 1951 after 24 years of development
and research the International
Auxiliary Language Association
refined the interlingua by placing
the rule that a word must appear
in at least three of the source langs
Fr, It, Pt/Sp, En, in order to be
incorporated into the vocabulary.
The result is very readable!

> Oh damn, I like this project and I wonder when will be the day africans
> open their own encyclopedias so that we can share their knowledge ?

Isn't Swahili a sort of African
interlingua? A sort of Bantu
substratum with borrowings
from Arabic, English, Portugese,
etc.

> Wikipedia is really a cool project !
> Julien Tayon

Indeed!
w/ regards,
Jay B.


subject: [Wikitech-l] deletion management

body:
> Improvements in management of the deleted files.
> Right
> now, it's *very* difficult to find a file which has
> been erased, then to check it to estimate whether it
> should be restored or not.
> It would be great if this page could at least be
> sorted out by date of deletion, author of deletion,
> name space and alphabetical order. Does anybody else
> have trouble with this log ?

Okay, the noise of comment hurt my ears, so, I'll do
it another time

Here's our deletion log
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikip%E9dia:Deletion_log

About maybe 100 pages were deleted in the past four
days.

I think (though we of course all trust one another),
an *error* is always possible.

Especially when the page "votes for deletion" is not
used at all, so any sysop basically delete those pages
he wants to delete, whenever he decides to (yup, me
too, in rome, do as the romans).

We assume *peer pressure* when creating/editing
articles. Peers being given the same tool than the
editors.

Right now, we have *very* little tool to do *checking*
of our fellows sysop in terms of deletion (you know
*sample checking*...)

It takes about 15 seconds to delete an article, about
5 mn to find it (when we find it) in the page for
deleted articles.

Look at that huge deletion log !!!!!!!

Ok, if nobody wants to help me on that, could someone
just tell me...a sort of sql query...which would allow
me to get a list of the last deletions, with direct
access to the article in the bin (something like the
deletion log but with access to the deleted articles)

--------

Or imagine the worse, a sysop gets mad and start
deleting articles very unwisely. Gonna be a mess to
recover everything quickly....

__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Tax Center - forms, calculators, tips, more
http://taxes.yahoo.com/


from_name: Fred Bauder

body:
I need this too, indeed anyone who uses a wikipedia article for a source
needs it. All you can do now is to cite the url, page title and the date you
took it off wikipedia like this:

http://www.internet-encyclopedia.info/statistics.html -- Original source: Statistics - Wikipedia,
February, 2003, Revised: February 23, 2003

Copyright © 2003 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation
License

By the way, do you think this copyright and link to the GNU license is
sufficient?

Fred Bauder

http://wwww.internet-encyclopedia.info

> From: Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com>
> Reply-To: wikitech-l at wikipedia.org
> Date: 23 Feb 2003 21:41:13 -0800
> To: wikitech-l at wikipedia.org
> Subject: [Wikitech-l] Citation of versions by timestamp?
>
> A wikipedian has recently been trying to find a good way to cite
> particular revisions of articles in the bibliography for a paper.
>
> Current we can give URLs for the _current_ version of an article
> (current as of whenever it is visited), or of _previous_ versions (as of
> when the citation was made):
>
> current:
> http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foobar
> old:
> http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Foobar&oldid=12345
>
> There are two main problems with this (aside from the ugliness of the
> old-reference URLs):
>
> * There is no way to reference the current version _as of the time of
> citation_. Since that revision isn't in the old table, it has no oldid
> assigned yet.
>
> * oldid values sometimes can change, as when an article is deleted and
> subsequently restored (done also when recombining histories of articles
> that have been broken by crude renaming). Possible rearrangements of the
> database (such as combining all languages into a single table) could
> require reassigning oldids en masse. They are *not* reliable long-term
> citations.
>
> One possible solution would be to provide a way of citing articles as of
> a particular timestamp, for instance:
>
> http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foobar?version=20030224161134
>
> which would pull up either a cur or old version with that timestamp.
> (It could also be prettified: version=2003-02-24-16:11:34 etc)
>
> Advantages:
> * consistent, no fuss, no worries about rearrangement of db structure
> * citation URL can be provided in a nice handy link at the bottom of
> every page
>
> Disadvantages:
> * timestamp has 1-second resolution. Generally this is going to be
> unique (at least per article), but it may occasionally not be,
> particularly in cases of recombined histories. Some articles had
> multiple revisions'  timestamps set to the same time due to bugs in the
> rename code and other db tweaks in early '02.
> * for this reason it's not suitable as the mainline url for drawing up
> old history revisions via the history list; so people have to remember
> to find and use the citation url separately
>
> Alternatively, we could supply _both_ timestamp and oldid in the URL,
> and let timestamp have priority if an exact match on both is not found.
>
> Thoughts?
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
>


subject: [Wikipedia-l] takubot

in_reply_to: <200302221731.EEQ54109@vmms8.verisignmail.com>; from takusi@manjiro.net on Sat, Feb 22, 2003 at 11:31:25AM -0600

body:
Takuya Murata wrote:
> wait. And then how long should I have waited? A day, a week,
> a month?

A day or a week sounds good to me.  We love bots, but it's good for
people to talk it over first, because usually the bots can be much
improved with some discussion, and because a bad bot could do a lot of
harm.  And I am NOT saying that yours is bad, mind you!  I haven't
even seen what it does yet.

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikipedia-l] takubot

in_reply_to: <200302221919.EEQ57310@vmms8.verisignmail.com>; from takusi@manjiro.net on Sat, Feb 22, 2003 at 01:19:27PM -0600

body:
Takuya Murata wrote:
> Then why didn't anyone, including you, tell me about it when
> I posted about using bots? If no one knows that rule, it is
> not the rule.
>
> Again, I am not talking about how to use bots but fairness.

Fair enough.  We should make it more clear, then.

Please keep in mind that our rules, including this one, are social
norms that are sometimes informal, and don't get formalized until we
have something that pushes us to get more formal.  I mean, there are
so many possible things that people might do, for better or worse,
that we can't (and shouldn't try) make a formal rule for everything in
advance.

"Get approval before running a bot" is a good idea.  Approval from
who?  Well, you know, some sysops.  One sysop?  Probably more than
one?  From Jimbo?  No, not unless ultimately there's trouble
establishing unanimity and we just need a ruling to get on with
things.

How long to wait before starting?  One hour?  Too short.  One day?
Maybe too short, probably o.k. One week?  If there's no controversy
and lots of people have seen the proposal, that's plenty of time.

Is this vague?  Yes.  But we'd still be Nupedia if we talked about
every rule endlessly before we just jumped in and started doing.

--Jimbo


in_reply_to: <8gOR$ggCpVB@erik_moeller>; from erik_moeller@gmx.de on Sun, Feb 23, 2003 at 05:01:00PM +0100

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:
> But as Brion has pointed out, it's a bad solution, because it hides
> information that varies a lot per page.

I missed this objection to a drop-down box, can you explain it again?
I'm sorry, I really just must have missed something.

--Jimbo


subject: [WikiEN-l] September 11th casualties

in_reply_to: <20030224120320.GG83616@mrtall.compsoc.man.ac.uk>; from jason@jasonandali.org.uk on Mon, Feb 24, 2003 at 12:03:20PM +0000

body:
Jason Williams wrote:
> I know this has been discussed again and again, but can we *please*
> just delete articles that consist of a name, date of birth, place
> of employment, bland description of how much they loved their kids,
> and the fact that they happened to die on September 11th?

Have these been moved over to sep11.wikipedia.org?

I think the general consensus is that this stuff isn't encyclopedic
(i.e. too unverifiable to be genuinely NPOV) and the consensus WAS
that it should go to sep11.wikipedia.org.  But the latest consensus
was that it should probably go to a non-wikipedia domain, for two
reasons: (1) is isn't encyclopedic, so it doesn't belong on a
wikipedia domain and (2) a tribute might actually be better if it
wasn't trying to be NPOV.

Since people spent time typing it it, it seems a shame to just
delete any of it, so moving it to sep11 for now seems like a good
idea, and then later on, sep11.wikipedia.org can be given a new
domain name, which I'm happy to supply and pay for if someone has
a good idea that isn't taken.

This is sort of Cunc's baby, so I'm happy to follow whatever he
wants to do here.

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikitech-l] www.wikipedia.pl

body:
Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
> So when Polish Wikipedia will be moved to www.wikipedia.pl ?

Who owns that domain?  Is it pointed at the machine correctly?  Are
they promising to turn the domain over to the nonprofit foundation at
the appropriate time?

--Jimbo


from_name: julien tayon

body:
Le Sun, 23 Feb 2003 10:02:33 +1300,
inspir? Richard Grevers <elektra at dramatic.co.nz> ?crivait la plume
alerte :
> http://ia.wikipedia.com/ seems to have based its (single!) language
> link list on the English one - hence there is one language missing
> from it - English!
> I only came across interlingua for the first time yesterday. It's a
> fascinating concept, and I find that with my limited French (2 years
> of study 20 years ago) I can follow 75% of an interlingua text, even
> before studying its grammar.
>
Though I am french I have the same feeling, it really worths a look. I
would like to hear feedback from non latin speaking people. I found the
latin without accent a quite fun concept too : latin used to play the
role of technical english in middle age. I'd rather be interested in
simplified greek since I was an hellenist :P
Listen to the paster noster in mp3 (<troll>should be ogg no?</troll>)
http://www.wikipedia.com/upload/paternoster-ia.mp3

I am looking forward a breton (a celtic dialect),  creols wikipedia, and
other dialectish wikipedia.

Oh damn, I like this project and I wonder when will be the day africans
open their own encyclopedias so that we can share their knowledge ?

Wikipedia is really a cool project !

--
Julien Tayon
http://www.tayon.net/			       http://libroscope.org/
Si la v?rit? est une femme, essayons de la s?duire avant de la saisir.


from_name: Poor, Edmund W

body:
Actually, Cunctator, I completely agree with you. I never really liked seeing Vandalissm in Progress or Edit Wars in Progress articles -- there must be a better way to deal with vandalism (as in graffiti) and edit wars (as in my POV is more neutral than yours!).

KQ and I are both coming over to wash and wax your car, shovel your driveway and paint your house. Just tell us HOW.

Uncle Ed, aka Ed Poor

-----Original Message-----
From: The Cunctator [mailto:cunctator at kband.com]
Sent: Saturday, February 22, 2003 1:38 AM
To: wikien-l at wikipedia.org
Subject: Re: Re: [WikiEN-l] edit war at [[Jewish ethnocentrism]]

On Sat, 2003-02-22 at 01:09, koyaanisqatsi at nupedia.com wrote:
>
> >I just want to note that "protecting" a page to deal with edit conflicts
> >is a mediocre solution at best.
> >
> >This could have been handled so much better.
>
> Please explain the ways it could have been handled better.  I will
> paint your fence, I will wax your car; just put me on the path to
> slack, zen, nirvana.
>
I just edited the entry. I also am trying to get rid of the depressing
edifices of antagonism that others have constructed while I haven't been
watching, like "Wikipedia:Edit wars in progress" etc.

We have Ed saying that "edit wars" is a less provocative term than
"vandalism", and noone comments? What do you think "war" is?

The whole Vandalism in progress thing was an ugly and bad idea from the
start, and it's just getting worse. I mean, "Wikipedia:Votes for
sanction"? C'mon.

[[User:The Cunctator/How to build Wikipedia]]: "Avoid Cabals", "Be
Respectful but Firm"
[[m:WikipediAhimsa]]: "When in doubt, don't ascribe bad motives to
people"

Sorry for the aggrieved tone, but it bothers me to see the current
situation on Wikipedia, where Jimbo is banning people on a frequent
basis, juvenile hissy-fights occur on innumerable pages, and the
supposedly responsible people are either avoiding the fray or fanning
the flames.

Okay. Enough procrastination for me. Back to better things.

--tc

_______________________________________________
WikiEN-l mailing list
WikiEN-l at wikipedia.org
http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l


body:
On Mon, 24 Feb 2003, Neil Harris wrote:
> Well, we could also have
>
> http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foobar?md5=1234f53fa34f253f3453abf00f549120
>
> which would identify a unique version with high probability, and also provide a way of verifying the integrity of the old version

Well heck, why use the name at all? (After all, pages can be renamed.) Add
a hash field to the table, index it, and presto! Lookup an arbitrary
version of any page, no matter how it's been shuffled around:

http://www.wikipedia.org/cite/1234f53fa34f253f3453abf00f549120

Crazy perhaps, but a thought. ;)

I'm not much for ugly incomprehensible URLs though...

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikitech-l] Load shedding

body:
On Mon, 24 Feb 2003, Neil Harris wrote:
> Observing the Wikipedia moving up to a very high level of load today,
> (loadav  10.39, 12.58, 13.45)

Load is up, by the way, because I've disabled browser-side caching until
the remaining kinks are worked out. (See suggestions in previous threads.)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikitech-l] Load shedding

body:
On a mud, at least at Batmud, you are put in a queue. Then as the load
lightens you advance in the queue until you can enter the game. Of course
this assumes you have to log in to do anything.

Fred

> From: Neil Harris <usenet at tonal.clara.co.uk>
> Reply-To: wikitech-l at wikipedia.org
> Date: Mon, 24 Feb 2003 15:30:43 +0000
> To: wikitech-l at nupedia.com
> Subject: [Wikitech-l] Load shedding
>
> Observing the Wikipedia moving up to a very high level of load today,
> (loadav  10.39, 12.58, 13.45) it occurs to me that a "load shedding"
> function would be useful, where requests may be bounced with an error
> 502: "*Service Temporarily Overloaded". This would have the effect of
> dropping load until the server returns to normal load levels, preventing
> congestion collapse.
>
> A human-readable text should be added in the user's own language, saying
> something like:
>
> Wikipedia is experiencing very high load at the moment. We are taking
> measures to control the load of the system. Please try your request
> again in a few minutes when load should be lower".
>
> Well-behaved spiders should any pages sent with 502 errors.
>
> To prevent a sudden turn-on of error 502 for all users, with the
> possibility of load oscillation, we could make the 502 errors
> progressively more probable as the load increases beyond a certain
> point.  This could also be used to ensure that logged-on users and
> "important" transactions suge as page edits maintain a higher QoS during
> these periods, until load reaches the point at which even they have to
> be bounced.
>
> -- Neil
>
> *
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikipedia.org
> http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l


subject: [WikiEN-l] September 11th casualties

body:
On 2/24/03 7:03 AM, "Jason Williams" <jason at jasonandali.org.uk> wrote:

> I know this has been discussed again and again, but can we *please*
> just delete articles that consist of a name, date of birth, place
> of employment, bland description of how much they loved their kids,
> and the fact that they happened to die on September 11th?

Like what? Name the entries.

> Or can I add an article on myself, and on my mother, and my
> girlfriend, and the people I work with, and my dog? Perhaps
> we should just import electoral registers into the wikipedia.

Probably not your dog, but if there are references to back up the
information you put in your entries, I see no reason not to put in an entry
on yourself, etc.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Another milestone reached

body:
The English section of Wikipedia is now big enough that I can't fit the
backup dumps of both the current and old revisions tables on a single
CD-R.

Go Wikipedia! ;)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Neil Harris

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:

>>
>>One possible solution would be to provide a way of citing articles as of
>>a particular timestamp, for instance:
>>
>>http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foobar?version=20030224161134
>>
>>which would pull up either a cur or old version with that timestamp.
>>(It could also be prettified: version=2003-02-24-16:11:34 etc)
>>
>>Advantages:
>>* consistent, no fuss, no worries about rearrangement of db structure
>>* citation URL can be provided in a nice handy link at the bottom of
>>every page
>>
>>Disadvantages:
>>* timestamp has 1-second resolution. Generally this is going to be
>>unique (at least per article), but it may occasionally not be,
>>particularly in cases of recombined histories. Some articles had
>>multiple revisions'  timestamps set to the same time due to bugs in the
>>rename code and other db tweaks in early '02.
>>* for this reason it's not suitable as the mainline url for drawing up
>>old history revisions via the history list; so people have to remember
>>to find and use the citation url separately
>>
>>Alternatively, we could supply _both_ timestamp and oldid in the URL,
>>and let timestamp have priority if an exact match on both is not found.
>>
>>
Well, we could also have

http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foobar?md5=1234f53fa34f253f3453abf00f549120

which would identify a unique version with high probability, and also provide a way of verifying the integrity of the old version (otherwise, you're just trusting the owner of the archive). For fanatical levels of caution, you could do:

http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foobar?version=20030224161134&md5=1234f53fa34f253f3453abf00f549120

For the truly paranoid, you could substitute SHA-1 for MD5.

Perhaps we need a "permalink" at the bottom of this page marked
"permanent link to this version"?

-- Neil


from_name: Jason Williams

subject: [WikiEN-l] September 11th casualties

body:
I know this has been discussed again and again, but can we *please*
just delete articles that consist of a name, date of birth, place
of employment, bland description of how much they loved their kids,
and the fact that they happened to die on September 11th?

Or can I add an article on myself, and on my mother, and my
girlfriend, and the people I work with, and my dog? Perhaps
we should just import electoral registers into the wikipedia.

--
jason at jasonandali.org.uk    http://www.jasonandali.org.uk/jason/


from_name: Lee Daniel Crocker

body:
>> http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foobar?md5=1234f53fa34f253f3453abf00f549120
>> which would identify a unique version with high probability, and also
>> provide a way of verifying the integrity of the old version

> Well heck, why use the name at all? (After all, pages can be renamed.) Add
> a hash field to the table, index it, and presto! Lookup an arbitrary
> version of any page, no matter how it's been shuffled around:
>
> http://www.wikipedia.org/cite/1234f53fa34f253f3453abf00f549120

Yep, renaming is a sticky issue here, and the fact that "current"
articles and old version are in different tables makes implementation
a pain.  As an initial effort, I think a title/date link could be
implemented that will work most of the time and only fail on
renamed articles; at some later point in the evolution of the
software we can make it work correctly in all cases.  I don't see
any way the hashes wil help.

--
Lee Daniel Crocker <lee at piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/>
"All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past,
are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified
for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC


subject: [Wikitech-l] deletion management

body:
On Mon, 24 Feb 2003, Anthere wrote:
> Ok, if nobody wants to help me on that, could someone
> just tell me...a sort of sql query...which would allow
> me to get a list of the last deletions, with direct
> access to the article in the bin (something like the
> deletion log but with access to the deleted articles)

The archive table (which holds deleted pages) does not keep track of when
articles were deleted. Currently the only way to see when a page was
deleted was to look in the deletion log, which currently provides no
connection to the undelete system.

Yeah, it sucks.

What I've suggested before, and if I have time I'll try to implement it,
but it'd be lovely if someone else got to it because I'm stretched a
little thin right now, is to have a deletion log _table_. (Or perhaps a
general 'event log' which also keeps track of bans, protections, unbans,
unprotections, creation of user accounts, sysopization, etc; of which we
can extract just deletions for purposes of showing a deletion log).

This could then be easily sorted by timestamp or by deleting user, and for
sysops a link to the undelete could be made instantly available.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [WikiEN-l] "Susan Mason"

body:
I put the following on Susan Mason's talk page. I hope
I have not scared off a real, live new contributor!!
----
Um, yes. If you are someone other than Adam [name omitted for privacy reasons],
please disregard the following, but in case you are:

* You can get away with another name change, provided
  you have finally decided to settle down and follow
  Jimbo's policies.
* You will actually find it easier to get along here
  if you apologize for past deeds and ask for mentoring;
  the risk of having your pretense pierced is rather high.

In any case, I'm not interested in trying to get to the
bottom of this; I'd prefer to believe it's a new person
and will assume so unless and until proved wrong.

Welcome to the Wikipedia, Susan!
----

Uncle Ed, aka Ed Poor


from_name: Tomasz Wegrzanowski

subject: [Wikitech-l] www.wikipedia.pl

body: So when Polish Wikipedia will be moved to www.wikipedia.pl ?


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [Wikitech-l] www.wikipedia.pl

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:

>Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
>
>>So when Polish Wikipedia will be moved to www.wikipedia.pl ?
>>
>
>Who owns that domain?  Is it pointed at the machine correctly?  Are
>they promising to turn the domain over to the nonprofit foundation at
>the appropriate time?
>
Does Polish law allow the domain to be transferred to an entity outside
of Poland?
Ec.


subject: [Wikitech-l] A Line in LocalSettings.php

body:
On Mon, 24 Feb 2003, Lars Aronsson wrote:
> If you just let MySQL 3.x match the phrase "dime a dozen", it will
> return any entries that contain either "dime" or "dozen" and give
> higher ranks to those that contain both or lots of these words.

Yup.

>  It's
> more of an "or" than an "and", but it works very well.  Is it really
> worth the hassle to go through the splitting and anding?  Do all users
> really want the strict "and"?

All I know is I hear complaints when I change to the straight search
method as a performance hack and people find that "John Smith" turns up
mostly results like "John Wigglesworth" and "Michael Smith".

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


body:
On Mon, 24 Feb 2003, Lee Daniel Crocker wrote:
> Also, the min-length thing is independent of that choice anyway.  By
> default, MySQL won't index any word fewer than 4 letters long, and we
> got lots of complaints that you couldn't search for "PNG" or "XP".
> MySQL has to be recompiled to change that limit, and the local setting
> just informs the wiki software of how MySQL was compiled so it knows
> what it can hand to the indexer.

Well, yes and no. If we don't parse the query into separate words, it
doesn't matter how much we hand to it: a MATCH AGAINST( "Windows XP" )
will still turn up all the results for "Windows", whereas MATCH AGAINST(
"Windows" ) AND MATCH AGAINST ("XP") returns nothing at all -- that's why
we need to be aware of it and remove the too-short words from the search
using our hackish boolean system.

However, it would be nice to spit out a little message to the effect of
"The word 'XP' has been ignored in your search because MySQl doesn't like
it," whatever the search method.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikitech-l] www.wikipedia.pl

body:
Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:

>On Mon, Feb 24, 2003 at 02:01:05PM -0800, Ray Saintonge wrote:
>
>>Jimmy Wales wrote:
>>
>>>Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
>>>
>>>>So when Polish Wikipedia will be moved to www.wikipedia.pl ?
>>>>
>>>Who owns that domain?  Is it pointed at the machine correctly?  Are
>>>they promising to turn the domain over to the nonprofit foundation at
>>>the appropriate time?
>>>
>>Does Polish law allow the domain to be transferred to an entity outside
>>of Poland?
>>Ec.
>>
>
>Why shouldn't it ?
>
Many countries (including Canada where I am) have rules restricting who
can own national domain names to people who have a connection with the
country.

Ec.


body:
On Mon, 24 Feb 2003, Lee Daniel Crocker wrote:
> Yeah, the issues are intertwined a bit.  BTW, I compiled MySQL on the
> wikipedia server with a minimum word length of 2, so "XP" works fine.

Still doesn't help with "vitamin E" or "C sharp"...

Any reason we can't take it down to 1?

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikitech-l] Load shedding

body:
Observing the Wikipedia moving up to a very high level of load today,
(loadav  10.39, 12.58, 13.45) it occurs to me that a "load shedding"
function would be useful, where requests may be bounced with an error
502: "*Service Temporarily Overloaded". This would have the effect of
dropping load until the server returns to normal load levels, preventing
congestion collapse.

A human-readable text should be added in the user's own language, saying
something like:

Wikipedia is experiencing very high load at the moment. We are taking
measures to control the load of the system. Please try your request
again in a few minutes when load should be lower".

Well-behaved spiders should any pages sent with 502 errors.

To prevent a sudden turn-on of error 502 for all users, with the
possibility of load oscillation, we could make the 502 errors
progressively more probable as the load increases beyond a certain
point.  This could also be used to ensure that logged-on users and
"important" transactions suge as page edits maintain a higher QoS during
these periods, until load reaches the point at which even they have to
be bounced.

-- Neil

*


from_name: The Cunctator

subject: [WikiEN-l] September 11th casualties

body:
On Mon, 2003-02-24 at 13:09, Jason Williams wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 24, 2003 at 10:37:08AM -0500, The Cunctator wrote:
> > On 2/24/03 7:03 AM, "Jason Williams" <jason at jasonandali.org.uk> wrote:
> >
> > > I know this has been discussed again and again, but can we *please*
> > > just delete articles that consist of a name, date of birth, place
> > > of employment, bland description of how much they loved their kids,
> > > and the fact that they happened to die on September 11th?
> >
> > Like what? Name the entries.
>
> Somebody has compiled a list at
>
>  http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:September_11%2C_2001_Terrorist_Attack/Memorial_wiki_pages
>
Bryan's list includes many entries that have more than the above. I see
few with a bland description of how much they loved their kids. In
particular most have links to external references.

And many of those listed have obvious significance, like [[Jeremy
Glick]], [[Neil D. Levin]], and [[Carolyn Beug]]. But I concede that
someone like [[Barbara Keating]] is uninteresting, because she never
worked on a music video.

I was hoping that you would instead be pointing out entries such as
[[Valerie Tschetter]] which is most likely apocryphal, or [[Matthew
Rogan]], which is just a tribute.

There is absolutely no good reason to delete or move most of these
entries. Rather, this is one of the few places where Wikipedia can beat
traditional encyclopedias.


body:
On Mon, 24 Feb 2003, Lee Daniel Crocker wrote:
> > (Brion Vibber <vibber at aludra.usc.edu>):
> > Still doesn't help with "vitamin E" or "C sharp"...
> >
> > Any reason we can't take it down to 1?
>
> Two problems I can see: first, "A" and "I" clearly can't have
> meaningful indexes, so even if we make "Vitamin C" searchable, it
> won't work for "Vitamin A", causing confusion.

24/26ths less confusion than none of them working, I'd wager.

>  Also, single letters often appear in articles as links (see list of
> diseases, for example) or at outline labels, etc., and would further
> make single-letter searches less meaningful.

In most cases they'd be meaningful _enough_ though, for two reasons:

a) alphabetical lists, "I", and "a" are very rare in article titles, which
we search separately from body text. Yes, there's going to be the
occasional spurious "Biographical index -- C through G", but does that
negate the utilitity of returning "C programming language" (and a few
other pages) instead of nothing to the hapless kid searching for that hip
programming language?

b) in most cases such searches will be in conjunction with other words.
"Vitamin C" or "Malcom X" will appear more often in conjunction when they
are in fact mentioned together than in random unrelated lists. There will
be some false positives, but that's better than many many false negatives.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikitech-l] www.wikipedia.pl

body:
On Mon, Feb 24, 2003 at 06:10:49AM -0800, Jimmy Wales wrote:
> Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
> > So when Polish Wikipedia will be moved to www.wikipedia.pl ?
>
> Who owns that domain?

Kpjas

>  Is it pointed at the machine correctly?

$ host pl.wikipedia.org
pl.wikipedia.org        A       130.94.122.197
$ host www.wikipedia.pl
www.wikipedia.pl        CNAME   pl.wikipedia.org
pl.wikipedia.org        A       130.94.122.197

> Are they promising to turn the domain over to the nonprofit foundation at
> the appropriate time?

Kpjas said:
> I really do own it but I see this domain as a property of the community of
> the Polish Wikipedia. In fact several people donated some money towards
> buying this domain. I personally seem to be in favour of transferring it to
> the nonprofit but the decision must be first agreed upon within the Polish
> Wikipedia. Now it is too soon to tell even without the slightest idea what
> the nonprofit is going to be. I think we will act the same as other
> Wikipedias (De, NL, Fr, Be). We are the Europeans ;-)

So yes, unless this foundation will be something no good.


body:
> (Brion Vibber <vibber at aludra.usc.edu>):
> On Mon, 24 Feb 2003, Lars Aronsson wrote:
> > If you just let MySQL 3.x match the phrase "dime a dozen", it will
> > return any entries that contain either "dime" or "dozen" and give
> > higher ranks to those that contain both or lots of these words.
>
> Yup.
>
> >  It's
> > more of an "or" than an "and", but it works very well.  Is it really
> > worth the hassle to go through the splitting and anding?  Do all users
> > really want the strict "and"?
>
> All I know is I hear complaints when I change to the straight search
> method as a performance hack and people find that "John Smith" turns up
> mostly results like "John Wigglesworth" and "Michael Smith".

Also, the min-length thing is independent of that choice anyway.  By
default, MySQL won't index any word fewer than 4 letters long, and we
got lots of complaints that you couldn't search for "PNG" or "XP".
MySQL has to be recompiled to change that limit, and the local setting
just informs the wiki software of how MySQL was compiled so it knows
what it can hand to the indexer.

--
Lee Daniel Crocker <lee at piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/>
"All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past,
are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified
for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC


from_name: Erik Moeller

body:
> Erik Moeller wrote:
>> But as Brion has pointed out, it's a bad solution, because it hides
>> information that varies a lot per page.

> I missed this objection to a drop-down box, can you explain it again?
> I'm sorry, I really just must have missed something.

Quoth Brion:

>I'm generally leery of drop-down boxes as they don't show the available
>options until you've gone to the trouble of asking what's available. And
>if the available options are different for each page, that's going to
>spell trouble. People will check a few times, then stop looking once
>they've found that their language never comes up.

>Wiki is about serendipidous discovery; part of that is seeing that a link
>to Chinese or Polish or Esperanto or Volapuk or Latin or French is
>available without having thought to seek it out.

Regards,

Erik


body:
> (Brion Vibber <vibber at aludra.usc.edu>):
>
> Well, yes and no. If we don't parse the query into separate words, it
> doesn't matter how much we hand to it: a MATCH AGAINST( "Windows XP" )
> will still turn up all the results for "Windows", whereas MATCH AGAINST(
> "Windows" ) AND MATCH AGAINST ("XP") returns nothing at all -- that's why
> we need to be aware of it and remove the too-short words from the search
> using our hackish boolean system.
>
> However, it would be nice to spit out a little message to the effect of
> "The word 'XP' has been ignored in your search because MySQl doesn't like
> it," whatever the search method.

Yeah, the issues are intertwined a bit.  BTW, I compiled MySQL on the
wikipedia server with a minimum word length of 2, so "XP" works fine.

--
Lee Daniel Crocker <lee at piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/>
"All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past,
are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified
for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC


from_name: Gareth Owen

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Possible Aged Copyright Violation

body:
At the end of August last year, anonymous contributor 24.80.230.145
contributed this,
http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Gardner_Fox&oldid=191349
sprung full formed from the head of Zeus, and a few other comic book writer
progiles, then abruptly vanished.

Well, thats uncannily like this:
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:_L8AdgxKTRwC:www.geocities.com/Athens/8580/gardfox.html
Firstly, the wiki article is clearly based on the geocities one, (or vice
versa, but I'd say thats unlikely) and the wording is very similar but
different. How close must texts be to be a breach of copyright?
--
Gareth Owen
"I love the wikipedia, but sometimes I get the impression that certain people
 on this list are very bored, and so argue about something when there's really
 bugger all to argue about. Edit some articles, for god's sake." -- LP


body:
> (Brion Vibber <vibber at aludra.usc.edu>):
> On Mon, 24 Feb 2003, Lee Daniel Crocker wrote:
> > Yeah, the issues are intertwined a bit.  BTW, I compiled MySQL on the
> > wikipedia server with a minimum word length of 2, so "XP" works fine.
>
> Still doesn't help with "vitamin E" or "C sharp"...
>
> Any reason we can't take it down to 1?

Two problems I can see: first, "A" and "I" clearly can't have
meaningful indexes, so even if we make "Vitamin C" searchable, it
won't work for "Vitamin A", causing confusion.  Also, single
letters often appear in articles as links (see list of diseases,
for example) or at outline labels, etc., and would further make
single-letter searches less meaningful.

--
Lee Daniel Crocker <lee at piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/>
"All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past,
are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified
for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC


subject: [WikiEN-l] September 11th casualties

body:
On Mon, Feb 24, 2003 at 10:37:08AM -0500, The Cunctator wrote:
> On 2/24/03 7:03 AM, "Jason Williams" <jason at jasonandali.org.uk> wrote:
>
> > I know this has been discussed again and again, but can we *please*
> > just delete articles that consist of a name, date of birth, place
> > of employment, bland description of how much they loved their kids,
> > and the fact that they happened to die on September 11th?
>
> Like what? Name the entries.

Somebody has compiled a list at

 http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:September_11%2C_2001_Terrorist_Attack/Memorial_wiki_pages

--

jason at jasonandali.org.uk    http://www.jasonandali.org.uk/jason/


from_name: Offer Kaye

subject: [WikiEN-l] GT page

body:
Hi,
I saw somewhere (I can't find it now :-( ) a list of various articles which
were stubs (a simple definition and no more), so I picked one at random and
added some info. Just FYI'ing y'all since I thought some admin would want to
update that stubs list page I can't find again (BTW it had a yellow
background).
The page I updated is:
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/GT

If replying, please do so to this email (oferk AT oren DOT co DOT il), as I
am not subscribed to the list. Thanks.
Offer Kaye


from_name: Magnus Manske

subject: [WikiEN-l] Another milestone reached

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:
> The English section of Wikipedia is now big enough that I can't fit the
> backup dumps of both the current and old revisions tables on a single
> CD-R.
>
> Go Wikipedia! ;)

Let's aim for too-large-for-DVD! (Especially with BluRay breathing down
our necks ;-)

Magnus


body:
On mar, 2003-02-25 at 04:46, Tomos at Wikipedia wrote:
> I then wrote about it in [[Wikipedia_talk:What is an article]], but I guess
> it didn't get much attention. I am glad to find out that elian brought this
> up on this list.

Past attempts to reform the article count have been thwarted by people
unwilling to let their precious article count drop. Oh my! It might make
us look bad! :P

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wiktionary redirections

body:
On lun, 2003-02-24 at 22:09, Jay Bowks wrote:
> Hey Brion,
> thanks so much for doing all the work of redirecting the Wiktionary
> entries. How'd you change the caps so quick ? :-)))

The magic of perl scripts!

  while( $x = <> ) {
	$x =~ s/^(\[\[[A-Z \(\)]+\]\])/lc "$1"/e;
	print $x;
  }

However I've only got P-Z done so far and I'm dang tired. :) If anyone
else wants to have a go before I get back to it, feel free.

Also, I've probably missed some that need to be capsed.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [Wikitech-l] and not

body:
On mar, 2003-02-25 at 01:15, Andre Engels wrote:
> In the past, I found it useful to be able to use "and not" in my search (in
> particular to filter out the Rambot pages when looking for years). I recently
> found that it does not work - or more precisely, that it does not work on the
> English Wikipedia. It does work on the others (checked only Dutch and German).
> What is going on, and why?

Search is one of the slowest things on the wiki. I disabled our boolean
search to cut down on the number of matches it tries to perform.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: [Wikipedia-l] Wiktionary redirections

body:
On mar, 2003-02-25 at 07:39, The Cunctator wrote:
> Because I love syntactic sugar, I can't help saying that the above can be
> reduced to
>
> while(<>) { s/^(\[\[[A-Z ()]+\]\])/lc $1/e; print }
>
> Or, using the -p tag:
>
> perl -p -e "s/^(\[\[[A-Z ()]+\]\])/lc $1/e"

I, on the other hand, like to be able to read my scripts when I come
back to them later. ;)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Lars Aronsson

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:

> MySQL's FULLTEXT indexing is used for the search function; the index by
> default ignores words shorted than some number of letters (3 or 4?).
>
> Our search function does a primitive boolean search by parsing the search
> query into words (eg, "dime a dozen" -> "dime", "a", "dozen") and doing
> separate MATCH queries on each one using the index, then ANDing the
> results together logically. So an article has to match all words to come

If you just let MySQL 3.x match the phrase "dime a dozen", it will
return any entries that contain either "dime" or "dozen" and give
higher ranks to those that contain both or lots of these words.  It's
more of an "or" than an "and", but it works very well.  Is it really
worth the hassle to go through the splitting and anding?  Do all users
really want the strict "and"?  When I use Google I don't really want
an empty hit list.

--
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se/


subject: [Wikitech-l] www.wikipedia.pl

body:
On Mon, Feb 24, 2003 at 02:01:05PM -0800, Ray Saintonge wrote:
> Jimmy Wales wrote:
>
> >Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
> >
> >>So when Polish Wikipedia will be moved to www.wikipedia.pl ?
> >>
> >
> >Who owns that domain?  Is it pointed at the machine correctly?  Are
> >they promising to turn the domain over to the nonprofit foundation at
> >the appropriate time?
> >
> Does Polish law allow the domain to be transferred to an entity outside
> of Poland?
> Ec.

Why shouldn't it ?

With exception of maybe farming land there isn't any concept
of Polish and foreign ownership in Polish law.


subject: [Wikitech-l] Thinking about Phase IV

body:
On Fri, Feb 21, 2003 at 05:31:51PM -0600, Lee Daniel Crocker wrote:
> Other suggestions/questions/answers humbly requested
> (including "Are you nuts? Let's stick with Phase III!" if
> you have that opinion).

My suggestion:
* first, add all most important features we need (SVG,
    more rending engines, XHTML, PS/PDF output, what else ?)
    and move everything to UTF-8 and some nice skin like
    Cologne Blue without link underlining with minimal
    amount of changes
* then, make Phase IV

If we do step 2 before step 1 we will have to redesign
it into Phase V soon.


subject: [Wikitech-l] www.wikipedia.pl

body:
On Mon, Feb 24, 2003 at 03:14:01PM -0800, Ray Saintonge wrote:
> >>Does Polish law allow the domain to be transferred to an entity outside
> >>of Poland?
> >
> >Why shouldn't it ?
> >
> Many countries (including Canada where I am) have rules restricting who
> can own national domain names to people who have a connection with the
> country.

But these are just rules made by ccTLD administration, not real laws passed
by the Parliament, right ?


subject: [Wikitech-l] www.wikipedia.pl

body:
Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:

>On Mon, Feb 24, 2003 at 03:14:01PM -0800, Ray Saintonge wrote:
>
>>>>Does Polish law allow the domain to be transferred to an entity outside
>>>>of Poland?
>>>>
>>>Why shouldn't it ?
>>>
>>Many countries (including Canada where I am) have rules restricting who
>>can own national domain names to people who have a connection with the
>>country.
>>
>
>But these are just rules made by ccTLD administration, not real laws passed
>by the Parliament, right ?
>
The registering agency is a branch of the government, and they list a
series of conditions necessary for registration. If you don't fulfill
the conditions you don't get the domain registered -- simple as that!
The question of whether proper procedure was used for making this
provision into a law may be a fine legal argument, but not one where I
would spend a lot of time. Canada is not the only country with this kind
of restriction on top level domains.

Eclecticology


from_name: Jay Bowks

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wiktionary redirections

body:
Hey Brion,
thanks so much for doing all the work of redirecting the Wiktionary
entries. How'd you change the caps so quick ? :-)))
Anyway, it's a great start and a strong framework
to build on individual entries for each word.
Thanks so much for your help!

Sincerely,
Jay B.
ILVI


from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject: [Wikitech-l] www.wikipedia.pl

in_reply_to: <3E5AA739.2070107@telus.net>; from saintonge@telus.net on Mon, Feb 24, 2003 at 03:14:01PM -0800

body:
Ray Saintonge wrote:
> Many countries (including Canada where I am) have rules restricting who
> can own national domain names to people who have a connection with the
> country.

And yet, I own some Canadian domains.  Like all silly rules, there
are easy ways around them.  The way this is typically done is that
the registrar has a connection to the country, and maintains technical
ownership in that country, while turning over all rights of use and
disposal to the real owner.


from_name: Richard Grevers

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Wikipedia - the multilingual encyclopedia

body:
On Mon, 24 Feb 2003 06:00:57 -0800, Jimmy Wales
<jwales at bomis.com> wrote:

> Erik Moeller wrote:
>> But as Brion has pointed out, it's a bad solution, because it hides
>> information that varies a lot per page.
>
> I missed this objection to a drop-down box, can you explain it again?
> I'm sorry, I really just must have missed something.
>
Brion argued that the information isn't visible until the user opens the
dropdown.
However, my suggestionw as that the front page have both a full text list
and a dropdown (rather than a full text kist and 2 short text lists) and
that the dropdown be available optionally (disabled by default) on some/all
other pages.
--
Richard Grevers


subject: [WikiEN-l] September 11th casualties

body:
On Mon, Feb 24, 2003 at 03:42:57PM -0500, The Cunctator wrote:
> Bryan's list includes many entries that have more than the above. I see
> few with a bland description of how much they loved their kids. In
> particular most have links to external references.

Okay, "bland description of how much they loved their kids" was
supposed to reflect the *kind* of thing I was talking about, not
a specific example. Like, for instance, the story about how
[[Kevin Michael Williams]] proposed to his "high school
sweetheart".

> I was hoping that you would instead be pointing out entries such as
> [[Valerie Tschetter]] which is most likely apocryphal, or [[Matthew
> Rogan]], which is just a tribute.

[[Zoe Johnson]], [[Pamela Boyce]], [[Melissa Harrington-Hughes]],
[[Donald Adams]], [[Kevin Michael Williams]] and [[Juanita Del Freje]]
are a few of the ones I'm talking about more specifically.

--

jason at jasonandali.org.uk    http://www.jasonandali.org.uk/jason/


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wiktionary redirections

body:
You're the pearl of perl, or the earl of perl,
one or the other, or both! Thanks so much
for your help. It was past 1 am when I was
uploading so "dankon"...

How does one do the scripts on the pages,
one has to be a sysop, this isn't for newbies
at wiki is it? After all these years with Un*x
I'm still a bit of a script kiddie :-)))

w/ regards,
Jay B.
ILVI ( means "I love vi" :-)

From: "Brion Vibber" <brion at pobox.com>
n lun, 2003-02-24 at 22:09, Jay Bowks wrote:
> Hey Brion,
> thanks so much for doing all the work of redirecting the Wiktionary
> entries. How'd you change the caps so quick ? :-)))

The magic of perl scripts!

  while( $x = <> ) {
 $x =~ s/^(\[\[[A-Z \(\)]+\]\])/lc "$1"/e;
 print $x;
  }

However I've only got P-Z done so far and I'm dang tired. :) If anyone
else wants to have a go before I get back to it, feel free.

Also, I've probably missed some that need to be capsed.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Andre Engels

subject: [Wikitech-l] and not

body:
In the past, I found it useful to be able to use "and not" in my search (in
particular to filter out the Rambot pages when looking for years). I recently
found that it does not work - or more precisely, that it does not work on the
English Wikipedia. It does work on the others (checked only Dutch and German).
What is going on, and why?

Andre Engels


subject: Article basement (was: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Semantic links (was: Labelling links))

in_reply_to: <BA8124E2.700B%cunctator@kband.com>; from cunctator@kband.com on Tue, Feb 25, 2003 at 01:49:22PM -0500

body:
The Cunctator wrote:
> Wikipedia's long-term health and strength comes from a commitment to
> simplicity and readability.

I'm keenly interested in these meta-data proposals, because I think
there's great merit in what we could do.  But I think that Cunc has
it right here -- whatever we do, we should always try to keep it so
any random person on the net can come in and click 'edit this page'
and have a pretty decent idea of what to do, just from looking at
what's already there.

--Jimbo


body:
On 2/25/03 1:36 AM, "Brion Vibber" <brion at pobox.com> wrote:

> On lun, 2003-02-24 at 22:09, Jay Bowks wrote:
>> Hey Brion,
>> thanks so much for doing all the work of redirecting the Wiktionary
>> entries. How'd you change the caps so quick ? :-)))
>
> The magic of perl scripts!
>
> while( $x = <> ) {
> $x =~ s/^(\[\[[A-Z \(\)]+\]\])/lc "$1"/e;
> print $x;
> }
>
Because I love syntactic sugar, I can't help saying that the above can be
reduced to

while(<>) { s/^(\[\[[A-Z ()]+\]\])/lc $1/e; print }

Or, using the -p tag:

perl -p -e "s/^(\[\[[A-Z ()]+\]\])/lc $1/e"

to get that sedlike functionality.


from_name: s

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Wikipedia-l digest, Vol 1 #1043 - 8 msgs

body:
As far as language-links can't it be a simple matter of script
categorization?:

<LANGA - would be understood by most any latin-based reader as a potential
start point.... This would lead to a a disambiguation page of Latin based
languages...
<Simplified Kanji here) is readable by Chinese, Japanese, Koreans...etc...
             That alone takes care of probaby 85 percent of the world...
<arabic-based text here>  - could even be Aramaic! - for an icon, it is
similar enough, and could be the basis of all Aramaic -based languages..
Hebrew, Arabic... Urdu..?
Three Icons, and weve taken care of ninety2 percent of the world...
The rest... what... Cyrillic? - might be combined in the Latin. with a
backwards N or something...
Thai, and various different types of script can be incorporated... Thai into
Semitic or Asian.... etc...  - In other words Icons are the way to go, you
just have to understand how they work to elicit a response... To someone who
prefers to read Kanji, the (middle sign) or the (Character sign) is an
island in the ocean...

Stevertigo...


from_name: Tomos at Wikipedia

body:
Regarding Japanese article count:
yes, the number is kind of inaccurate. The problem is not unique to
Japanese, but shared with Chinese and others, I believe. The reason is as
pointed out - Japanese writing can go in length without an alphabetical
comma.

The problem has been known to some Japanese users, because one user
translted [[Wikipedia:What is an article]] and noticed the article count's
behavior. I also experimented with a fairly long article (10921 bytes). As
soon as I deleted all the commas and saved, the article count dropped one.
When I reverted, the count went up one.

I then wrote about it in [[Wikipedia_talk:What is an article]], but I guess
it didn't get much attention. I am glad to find out that elian brought this
up on this list.

Regarding Embassy, I don't mind setting one up on English wiki, (I'm a
native Japanese speaker and understand English okay), but I am afraid I
cannot fully function as an ambassador. Is a limited staffer embassy and
part-time ambassador accepted?

Tomos

_________________________________________________________________
MSN 8 helps eliminate e-mail viruses. Get 2 months FREE*.
http://join.msn.com/?page=features/virus


from_name: Chuck Smith

subject: [Wikipedia-l] most international articles statistics?

body:
I asked this before, but I don't think anyone replied.
 Is there anyway to see a list of articles based on in
how many languages they're in?  It would be interested
to see which articles are the most international or
the most important...

Thanks,
Chuck

=====
Learn Esperanto! - http://www.lernu.net/
Enciklopedio: http://eo.wikipedia.org/

___________________________________________________
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Personaliza tu m?vil con tu logo y melod?a favorito
en http://moviles.yahoo.es


subject:
Article basement (was: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Semantic links (was:
	Labelling links))

body:
On 2/25/03 1:41 PM, "Magnus Manske" <magnus.manske at web.de> wrote:

> Neil Harris wrote:
>> Don't worry, Lars, I'm not daunted. I know the idea of relations in
>> Wikipedia is a good one, and I'm not the only person who has suggested it.
>> The problem is making the notation non-frightening.
>
> OK, new crazy approach:
> Every article has a "basement", which is just another editable text,
> like the article itself. All the meta information (semantic links as an
> example) goes there.
> Normal people (you know, the other ones;-) will be scared of the
> basement, and won't go there, even though they could. So, noone's
> bothered, except for a "basement" link on each page.
>
Neil Harris's idea is much better. Or, the basement could exist, but it
should be able to be automatically generated from normal information in the
article (or from linkages between articles).

Wikipedia's long-term health and strength comes from a commitment to
simplicity and readability.


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [WikiEN-l] RE: Protected pages

body:
On Tue, 25 Feb 2003, Poor, Edmund W wrote:
> [[GNU_FDL]]
> [[Wikipedia:Copyrights]]
> [[Wikipedia:Text_of_the_GNU_Free_Documentation_License]]

These cover our copyright & license, which we're quite sure we don't want
tampered with. :)

> [[Three_People's_Principles]]

This is protected while investigating a 'vanished edit' problem. (It
appears the edit was never saved, however, or at least never made it to
the server.) It can be unproteced safely at this point, I suppose.

> [[Wikipedia:Blocked_IPs]]

This used to be an auto-generated page that listed (and controlled) the
blocked IPs. It is now just a redirect.

> [[Wikipedia:Deletion_log]]
> [[Wikipedia:Most_wanted_articles]]
> [[Wikipedia:Upload_log]]

Auto-generated pages.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Poor, Edmund W

subject: [WikiEN-l] RE: Protected pages

body:
Here are the 24 protected pages, as of 2/25/03: the main
page, 3 articles, 2 or 3 user pages and an assortment of
admin pages.

[[Main_Page]]

[[GNU_FDL]]
[[List_of_American_people]]
[[Three_People's_Principles]]

[[User:Lir]]
[[User talk:Lir]]
[[User:Maveric149]]

[[Wikipedia:2003_Press_Release]]
[[Wikipedia:Administrators]]
[[Wikipedia:Blocked_IPs]]
[[Wikipedia:Copyrights]]
[[Wikipedia:Database_queries]]
[[Wikipedia:Deletion_log]]
[[Wikipedia:Deletion_log_archive/October_2002]
[[Wikipedia:IP_probation_watchlist]]
[[Wikipedia:Most_wanted_articles]]
[[Wikipedia:Naming_conventions]]
[[Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_view]]
[[Wikipedia:Policies_and_guidelines]]
[[Wikipedia:Policy_on_permanent_deletion_of_pages]]
[[Wikipedia:Recentchanges]]
[[Wikipedia:Text_of_the_GNU_Free_Documentation_License]]
[[Wikipedia:Upload_log]]
[[Wikipedia:Wikipedia_press_release_1]]

Uncle Ed, aka Ed Poor


subject: [WikiEN-l] Restoration of kq

body:
At kq's request, I have un-deleted his talk and user talk pages.

Uncle Ed, aka Ed Poor


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Semantic links (was: Labelling links)

body:
Neil Harris wrote:

> I note that this is similar to what I was suggesting about relations.
> Nobody liked the notation I was suggesting,
>
> #RELATION [[TonyBlair]] is-camelcase-of [[Tony Blair]]
>
> and then everyone went quiet for a bit.

The problem is that this is too close to a programming language, and
one of Wikipedia's strengths is that it is simple, so that people
don't need to be programmers to be able to contribute, and yet so
powerful.  If you want to make it more powerful, the challenge is to
do this without intruding on the simplicity.

Here is a clue: If people go silent, it is because their lives are too
short to waste on stupid ideas that will never take off.  Instead of
trying to convince you that the idea is dead on arrival, they want to
spend their time on ideas they believe in.  Only your relatives or
very close friends will try to talk you out of a stupid idea.  All
others will find it easier just to ignore you.

If anything like this were really a good idea, and people still ignore
you, why don't you go away and start your own project based on it?
Surely, with your supreme ideas you should be able to bypass Wikipedia
and everything else in a few months.  Prove your concept.

Please don't take this personally.  I don't know you.  You might be a
wonderful person, but please learn from my observation of the economy
of voluntary work: To get people to work on your ideas, your ideas
need to be really good (such as Larry Sanger's idea of the Wikipedia).
If people go away, you have to rethink your ideas.  This is fundamental.
(Actually, Wikipedia is Larry Sanger's way of rethinking Nupedia.)

The human head is round, to allow for ideas to change directions.

--
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se/


subject: [Wikitech-l] Reminder: cross-site scripting bugs

body:
Just a reminder to all -- when inserting user-supplied text directly into
the output stream, always remember to run it through htmlspecialchars() or
some other filter to avoid injection of JavaScript or other potentially
malicious goodies. (As well as accidentally page-ugliness due to someone
talking about an html tag in an edit summary, etc.)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Axel Boldt

subject: [WikiEN-l] RE: Protected pages

body:
--- Brion Vibber <vibber at aludra.usc.edu> wrote:
> On Tue, 25 Feb 2003, Poor, Edmund W wrote:
> > [[GNU_FDL]]
> > [[Wikipedia:Copyrights]]
> > [[Wikipedia:Text_of_the_GNU_Free_Documentation_License]]
>
> These cover our copyright & license, which we're quite sure we don't
> want tampered with. :)

[[GNU_FDL]] can be unprotected and should redirect to [[GNU Free
Documentation Licence]], not to [[Wikipedia:Copyrights]]. The copyright
link at the bottom of every page should go to [[Wikipedia:Copyrights]]
and not to [[GNU_FDL]].

Axel

>
> > [[Three_People's_Principles]]
>
> This is protected while investigating a 'vanished edit' problem. (It
> appears the edit was never saved, however, or at least never made it
> to
> the server.) It can be unproteced safely at this point, I suppose.
>
> > [[Wikipedia:Blocked_IPs]]
>
> This used to be an auto-generated page that listed (and controlled)
> the
> blocked IPs. It is now just a redirect.
>
> > [[Wikipedia:Deletion_log]]
> > [[Wikipedia:Most_wanted_articles]]
> > [[Wikipedia:Upload_log]]
>
> Auto-generated pages.
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at wikipedia.org
> http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

__________________________________________________
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http://taxes.yahoo.com/


subject:
Article basement (was: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Semantic links (was:
 Labelling links))

body:
On Tue, 25 Feb 2003, Neil Harris wrote:
> Maybe the metadata in the basement could be written in
> Basic-English-subset statements?

Wikipedia isn't just in English, folks. An English-dependent syntax is
*not* acceptable.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Neil Harris

body:
Lars Aronsson wrote:

>Neil Harris wrote:
>
>
>
>>I note that this is similar to what I was suggesting about relations.
>>Nobody liked the notation I was suggesting,
>>
>>#RELATION [[TonyBlair]] is-camelcase-of [[Tony Blair]]
>>
>>and then everyone went quiet for a bit.
>>
>>
>
>The problem is that this is too close to a programming language, and
>one of Wikipedia's strengths is that it is simple, so that people
>don't need to be programmers to be able to contribute, and yet so
>powerful.  If you want to make it more powerful, the challenge is to
>do this without intruding on the simplicity.
>
>
>
Don't worry, Lars, I'm not daunted. I know the idea of relations in
Wikipedia is a good one, and I'm not the only person who has suggested it.

The problem is making the notation non-frightening. Here's another go at
the problem: no notation _at all_.
Instead, we use simple natural language parsing, or simply pattern
matching of stock phrases, on the article contents. Mining the Wikipedia
for simple phrases of the form:

[[X]] is a [[Y]] ...

might well be a useful way of picking out the relationships.  We could
then have more...

[[X]] is an <adjective> [[Y]] ...
[[X]] is part of [[Y]] ...
[[X]] was the father of [[Y]] ...
[[X]] is not a [[Y]] ...
[[X]], which is a [[Y]] ...

and even "If [[X]] is a [[Y]] ..." which perhaps might be taken to mean
"some [[X]] are [[Y]]"?

It might be possible to have a "template bank" of simple language
patterns, allowing this to be ported to other languages. A bit of
googling seems to show some promising candidates.

Advantages:
* some of the knowledge is already there
* writing a 'dumb' natural language parser is easy, providing you are
willing only to parse a tiny fragment of the English language, and
accept a certain error rate: think "blocks worlds" and chat-bots like Eliza
* the language pattern bank could even be edited in the wiki way: think
about the mis-spellings page.

Disadvantages:
* won't find information expressed in many quite normal complex sentences
* might encourage Basic English sentences: [[Henry VIII]] was the
[[king]] of [[England]]. [[England]] is a place in [[Europe]].
[[Europe]] is a [[continent]].... etc.
* will have false hits in some places

Of course, this then generates _really_ crude metadata by simply
ignoring most of the fine distinctions of natural language processing:
but then perhaps this is the correct wiki-way to do it -- 50% of the
goodness for 1% of the complexity?

Neil