subject: [Wikipedia-l] Terms for adminship

body:
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Phroziac wrote:
> You would probably annoy the stewards if you desysop a lot of people,
> but I really don't think you'll have to desysop as many as you think.
> This is a good idea, and I tried to get something similar passed on en
> wiki, and it didn't work....obviously. We have 500 *active* admins, we
> would have to run several re-elections all the time, constantly. So,
> remember, this won't scale well.
>

Playing Devil's Advocate, I dispute that number.

I don't think that all 500 are *active*.

We could try it out for Bureaucrats first...

- --
Alphax                      |   /"\
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list: wikien-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: MacGyverMagic/Mgm

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Taking your eyes off the ball

body:
On 10/1/05, Justin Cormack <justin at specialbusservice.com> wrote:
>
> On 1 Oct 2005, at 02:56, Michael Snow wrote:
>
> > Justin Cormack wrote:
> >
> >
> >> What percentage of articles do you expect to be FAs?
> >>
> >
> > All of them.
>
> Well thats a reasonable goal, but a lot of my areas of interest have
> so few articles at all
> that a bit of work getting stubs and some structure where people can
> start seems necessary
> first. People find time to write about individual roads, but we dont
> even have 2 coherent
> sentences on [[Italian cuisine]].
>
> Justin
If only people spent more time reducing the backlog on requested
articles. Those wouldn't be half as controversial as roads and schools
and help to improve the coverage of Wikipedia. It's not as if they're
writing what they know about anyway, or those road articles would be
near FA instead of stubs.


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: SJ

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikimentaries and multimedia collaboration

body:
On 9/26/05, Cormac Lawler <cormaggio at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Thanks for pointing this out, Sj. I talked about a Wikimentary and the
> logistics thereof at Wikimania with Rory O'Connor (Globalvision) - but
> I'm just wondering, where has the talk taken place since then?
> Privately? Or on-wiki/list (commons-l)..?

Aha!  Was it you who put the bug in his ear?  Once Wikimentary gets
added to the OED, etymologists will want to know.  Talk has largely
been by email and phone with Rory, as part of an older discussion of
how progress with their own short documentary is coming.  I've
transcribed the relevant parts of all private conversations to that
meta-page, so you can see there hasn't been all that much talk yet.

I'm trying to get Rory to edit wikis directly, but it's difficult.   --Sj

> Cormac / [[User:Cormaggio]], eh, ditto ;-)

(-:


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Rowan Collins

subject: [Wikitech-l] {{msg}} URL

body:
On 30/09/05, Stefan Vesterlund <s.vesterlund at telia.com> wrote:
> Half a year ago this was the URL to get the content,
> http://no.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Template:Akershus&action=raw&ctype=text/css.

You want "/w/index.php" instead of "/w/wiki.phtml", and you it's not
CSS, so lose the "&ctype=text/css" [Basically, find the edit page, and
substitute "raw" for "edit"] So:

http://no.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:Akershus&action=raw
or http://no.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Mal:Akershus&action=raw
["Mal" being Norwegian for "Template", it seems]

But, far far better than scraping content off the overloaded Wikimedia
servers would be to download a dump of the content from
http://download.wikimedia.org and process that locally.

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


from_name: Stephen Bain

subject: [WikiEN-l] Afd nominations

body:
Hear hear!

On 10/1/05, Alphax <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA256
>
> Michael Turley wrote:
> > On 9/30/05, SPUI <drspui at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >>Geoff Burling wrote:
> >>
> >>>Just a thought, SPUI: can you think of a traffic circle that you could
> >>>write an article worthy of Featured Article status? I ask this in a
> >>>constructive way, because a very irrefutable argument to anyone who
> >>>writes on AfD to the effect "This is only an X, & all X is non-notable.
> >>>Delete" is "Well, Y is an X, & it is a *FEATURED ARTICLE*!!!"[*]
> >>
> >>If I had better access to historical records, I might be able to do that
> >>for http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonnelle_Circle . It's a very busy
> >>intersection, located on the Route 1 Extension, considered by many to be
> >>the first "super highway" in the United States.
> >
> >
> > Honestly, my memory sucks right now.  I'm not trying to be flippant:
> > Isn't there a famous traffic circle or two worthy of featured article
> > status in London, England?  Perhaps one in Paris, France or Rome,
> > Italy as well?
> >
>
> There's a famous (or rather, infamous) one in Adelaide: Britannia
> Roundabout.
>
> Worst traffic nightmare in the city. Many plans have been made (but
> never carried through) about what to do with it, from turning it into
> traffic lights to building over & underpasses.
>
> Does it exist? Yes.
> Is it verifiable? Yes.
> Have books been written about it? Probably not.
> Has it appeared in the media? Yes.
> Should I write an article about it? Maybe.
> Would said article be speedy deletable? No.
> Would said article be deleted via AfD? Probably.
> Is there enough information to make it to Featured status? Maybe.
>
> What should I do?
>
> Put it in [[Major roads in Adelaide, South Australia]] or similar.
>
> Here's my take on the whole inclusion/deletion thing:
>
> Including things for the sake of inclusion is BAD. You end up with junk.
> Wikipedia is not a place to braindump.
>
> Deleting things for the sake of deleting is BAD. If it's true,
> verifiable, NPOV, etc. it's the sort of information Wikipedia is able to
> accept. Wikipedia is an Encyclopedia. It is SUPPOSED to have INFORMATION.
>
> Inclusionists and Deletionists are playing what they think is a zero-sum
> game. It's WORSE than that: the mere presence of their mindless ranting
> is actually HURTING Wikipedia. By arguing over what should be
> kept/deleted, we lose information. We lose readers. We lose editors.
>
> The solution:
>
> Become more encylopedia-like.
>
> For just about every value of X, where the number of total X is
> sufficiently large, we can make more logical and more comprehensive
> articles by MERGING the bits of information we have (which on their own,
> are perma-stubs) into more comprehensive articles on the topic.
>
> In doing so, we play a BETTER than zero-sum game. We build articles that
> a "traditional" encyclopedia would be jealous of. We HELP Wikipedia by
> having articles that both retain information and look proffessional.
>
> Just remember:
>
> Every time you arbitrarily delete an article, you lose a potential
> editor, who says to themselves, "What a stupid bunch of morons! They
> deleted the article on X!"
>
> Every time you arbitrarily keep an article, you lose a potential editor,
> who says to themselves, "What a stupid bunch of morons! They have an
> article on X!"
>
> If you are careful to only delete things which are copyvios, original
> research, neologisms, dicdefs, and speedy deletable (and they are the
> ONLY criteria under which things should be deleted), you will only keep
> INFORMATION.
>
> If you are careful only to keep things which are verifiable,
> informational, and non-trivial (which is what an ENCYCLOPEDIA should
> have), you will only delete JUNK.
>
> If you use common sense, remember what NPOV is, and merge into DECENT
> ARTICLES, you will save a lot of bother.
>
> Wikipedia is an Encyclopedia.
> Wikipedia is not an experiment in democracy.
> Dont' stuff beans up your nose.
>
> For great encyclopedia!
>
> - --
> Alphax                      |   /"\
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> OpenPGP key ID: 0xF874C613  |    X   Against HTML email & vCards
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>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

--
Stephen Bain
stephen.bain at gmail.com


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] Dump status

body:
Nyenyec N wrote:
> What's the status of the database dumps?
> Editor's in HuWiki are eagerly awaiting the next stats update. :)

Currently testing more improvements to the dump system to speed it up,
will launch another dump this weekend.

The 20050921 dump stopped at jawiki due to lack of disk space; the
server needs to be cleaned out.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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list: foundation-l

subject:
[Foundation-l] Re: [Wikimania-planning-l] Wikimania 2006 - host
	city contest, latest update

body:
Now 4 cities!  See the Boston bid here:

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania_2006/Boston

I also like the looks of some of the unofficial locations...

As for the meeting, anytime tomorrow after 1400 UTC works for me.

> Well, if we have only three cities entering the contest, we might
> decide to shorten the last round to about a week and make a
> decision sometime next week.

I think it would be alright to stick to the original schedule.

--SJ


list: wikimedia-l


from_name: Timwi

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Modification Navigation et ToolBox

body:
Ashar Voultoiz wrote:
>
> Le lien "Version imprimable" visible sur http://fr.wikipedia.org/ est
> disponible ? partir de la version 1.5 (qui devrait sortir bient?t).

Quand imprim?, la "version imprimable" est identique ? la version
"normale". C'est quoi le but?


from_name: Mark Ryan

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Re: Multilingual error messages

body:
On 30/09/05, Mark Williamson <node.ue at gmail.com> wrote:
> Yeah... would it be possible to have a client-side script to determine
> the proper error message based on the requested subdomain?
>
> Mark

That was one option I'd considered (and would have implemented, had I
not run out of mid-semester break). It shouldn't be too difficult,
anyway. If someone wants to spend some time writing some Javascript
for this, inserting %U will insert the whole URL, from which you can
likely get the subdomain. Otherwise, I'll get around to it in the next
couple of weeks and submit it with the few changes that have been
requested by people.

I tested this error message on IE6, Firefox 1.0.6, Netscape 8, Opera
8.02, Lynx, Konqueror, e-Links and NCSA Mosaic (just to see if it
worked in ultra-old browsers). The Javascript works in its entirety in
Konqueror, IE and Firefox/Netscape. Opera does most of it fine except
it doesn't colour the links according to which language is currently
selected, because Opera doesn't currently support document.styleSheet
which is what I used. I suppose the page could be rejigged to remedy
this but it seems like too much effort for what is essentially a
cosmetic thing. Surprisingly, the page displays perfectly in Internet
Explorer (the strikethrough is faded in IE), which may offend some
free software purists out there (hey, I'm sending this email to the
technical list).

~Mark Ryan


body:
On 01/10/05, Timwi <timwi at gmx.net> wrote:
> Ashar Voultoiz wrote:
> >
> > Le lien "Version imprimable" visible sur http://fr.wikipedia.org/ est
> > disponible ? partir de la version 1.5 (qui devrait sortir bient?t).
>
> Quand imprim?, la "version imprimable" est identique ? la version
> "normale". C'est quoi le but?

La "version imprimable" existes seulement parceque utilisateurs a
demand? ca - ils pensent toujours que les menus etc vas imprimer, et
n'essaient pas. Je prefere le nom "Print preview" (je ne sais pas la
Francais), avec un notice qui expliquez que cliquez la lien n'est pas
necessaire. Voir aussi
http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1577

[Pardon que ma Francais n'est pas tout correcte]

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


from_name: Zachary Harden

body:
I would also mention that a group by the name of Featured Article Drive
(FAD) is also trying to help work on articles to get up to that standard,
and they have done a good job so far. But, this is a problem where I run
into and others do: we write about stuff no one cares about. I had some
FAC's fail because no one would comment on them or they do not want to fix
things like the grammar themselves. We should try to point out that at FAC
that though the nominator might say "I think that this article should be FA"
and those coming to the FAC should work with him all they can, instead of
just objecting then leave.

Regards,

Zachary Harden

>From: "Ryan W. (Merovingian)" <bigwiki at earthling.net>
>Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
>To: wikien-l at Wikipedia.org
>Subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Taking your eyes off the ball
>Date: Fri, 30 Sep 2005 21:08:24 -0500
>
>I couldn't have said it better myself.  I think by now that some series of
>articles should be updated together so that they are all featured.  For
>example: nations of the world, US presidents, British monarchs, etc.
>
>There's plenty of information that we have, and plenty that we've
>overlooked.  Coordinated efforts to bring articles up to featured status
>need emphasis.  The Collaborations of the Week are a good start, but the
>track record of past CotW's is poor.
>
>--Ryan
>
> > From: Mark Pellegrini <mapellegrini at comcast.net>
> > Subject: [WikiEN-l] Taking your eyes off the ball
> >
> > I'm going to grouse a bit.
> >
> > I think far, far too much attention gets paid to the worst articles on
> > Wikipedia - the studs, the vanity articles, the stuff of debatable
> > notability (schools!!) while not nearly enough effort goes into making
> > crappy articles into good ones.
> >
> > People on AFD love to argue about the crappiest articles. (It also tends
> > to spill over to this mailing list) On the other side of the spectrum,
> > the percentage of featured articles (number of featured articles / total
> > number of articles) has been rapidly declining since March.
> > (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_article_statistics).
> > And yet no one seems care. Sometime this month, percentage of featured
> > articles will drop below 0.1% -- less than 1 article in 1000 being a
> > featured article.
> >
> > So while our article count is exploding [due to a massive influx of
> > less-than-steller new articles.... think - traffic circles] and while
> > the number of contributors has been steadily increasing, the number of
> > new featured articles being produced has been a fairly steady 30-40 per
> > month.
> >
> > Am I the only one who thinks we have our priorities out of order? We are
> > we spending so much energy arguing about the horrible stuff that (for
> > all intents) will never be seen or noticed when our important articles
> > (think - Michael Brown, Tom DeLay, John  Roberts) are, well, not very
>good?
> >
> > -Mark


from_name: Ray Saintonge

body:
geni wrote:

>On 10/1/05, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
>
>
>>Ahh!  But you ignore the fact that reducing the backlog of requested
>>articles, or other kinds of cleanup, requires _hard work_.   It's so
>>much more energy efficient to routinely type in "Delete nn", and cast an
>>occasional vote here and there.
>>
>>
>Same amount of effort to type in keep. And of course then zero
>responcibilty for dealing with the result.
>
>
>>For some people dealing with what they don't know about is the total
>>extent of what they know.
>>
>>Ec
>>
>>
>This of course applies to both sides.
>
At least keeping gives the benefit of the doubt to the original writer.

Ec


subject: [Wikitech-l] {{msg}} URL

body:
On 01/10/05, Stefan Vesterlund <s.vesterlund at telia.com> wrote:
> The data in {{msg}} is not in the dumps (I'm using those to not put any
> unnecessary lode on Wikipedia servers). It is grate if a separate dump could
> be made with this data (xml, sql or what ever format).

Er... it should be, as long as you're not using the "ns0 only" dump.
It's just page content that's in the "Template" namespace (ns=10).
You've probably not spotted it because namespaces are stored
*numerically* in the database, not as strings, and not as part of the
title. [See also http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Namespace]

So, the page referenced by "{{msg:foo}}" (or "{{foo}}") is called
"Template:Foo", but in the database it will have a "title" of "Foo"
and a "namespace" of 10. That's why it can be called "Template:Foo"
and "Mal:Foo" at the same time, because the first bit isn't really
part of the name.

BTW, "{{msg:foo}}" was deprecated in favour of "{{foo}}" long ago.

I hope this makes at least some sense - feel free to ask if anything
still isn't clear.
--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: LZMA compression for dumps?

body:
Magnus Manske wrote:
>
> At some point, we
> might want to add a "rev_on_disk" field to the revisions table, and move
> the text of revisions older than, say, 3 month to the file system (file
> name generated through article and revision ID).

If and when you are going to do this, hopefully you are going to use the
page_id, not the article title, as otherwise you will have to rename
potentially arbitrary amounts of files upon a page move, and you will
potentially make it impossible to run on Windows due to its filename
character restrictions.


from_name: Stefan Vesterlund

subject: [Wikitech-l] {{msg}} URL

body:
Thanks

The data in {{msg}} is not in the dumps (I'm using those to not put any
unnecessary lode on Wikipedia servers). It is grate if a separate dump could
be made with this data (xml, sql or what ever format).

Regards

Stefan Vesterlund

----- Original Message -----
From: "Rowan Collins" <rowan.collins at gmail.com>
To: "Wikimedia developers" <wikitech-l at wikimedia.org>
Sent: Saturday, October 01, 2005 2:23 PM
Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] {{msg}} URL

> On 30/09/05, Stefan Vesterlund <s.vesterlund at telia.com> wrote:
>> Half a year ago this was the URL to get the content,
>> http://no.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Template:Akershus&action=raw&ctype=text/css.
>
> You want "/w/index.php" instead of "/w/wiki.phtml", and you it's not
> CSS, so lose the "&ctype=text/css" [Basically, find the edit page, and
> substitute "raw" for "edit"] So:
>
> http://no.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:Akershus&action=raw
> or http://no.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Mal:Akershus&action=raw
> ["Mal" being Norwegian for "Template", it seems]
>
> But, far far better than scraping content off the overloaded Wikimedia
> servers would be to download a dump of the content from
> http://download.wikimedia.org and process that locally.
>
> --
> Rowan Collins BSc
> [IMSoP]
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>
>


from_name: Phroziac

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Requested articles

body:
How does the request process work anyway? As far as i know, there's a
[[Special:Requestedpages]] that remembers all the redlinks on the
site.

On 10/1/05, Daniel P. B. Smith <dpbsmith at verizon.net> wrote:
> > If only people spent more time reducing the backlog on requested
> > articles. Those wouldn't be half as controversial as roads and schools
> > and help to improve the coverage of Wikipedia. It's not as if they're
> > writing what they know about anyway, or those road articles would be
> > near FA instead of stubs.
>
> Instead of fussing about improving the AfD process, I'd like to give
> some thought to improving the article _request_ process. Right now
> it's actually quite difficult, as you're expected to thread your way
> through a deeply nested Roget's-Thesaurus-like logical organization
> of the sum of human knowledge to find the place to insert a request.
>
> I'd like _requesting_ an article to be truly as easy as _creating_
> one. That is, I'd a link or button which automatically adds your
> request to some list somewhere... and lets other people sort 'em out
> into categories.
>
> I honestly feel that many problem substubs--the ones which give
> virtually no information that is not in their titles--should be
> treated either in one of two ways. Many substubs look to me like good-
> faith efforts to point out a topic that someone would like covered--
> but does not have the time or the skills to make a usable start on.
> If a stub is not a usable launching pad for an article, then it does
> not serve any function other than pointing out the absence of an
> article on a worthy topic. It is, then, not an article, not a stub,
> not the start of an article--it is an article request made in an
> inappropriate way.
>
> I think the appropriate disposition of such main-namespace-pages is
> to delete them from the main namespace and re-enter them as article
> requests.
>
> --
> Daniel P. B. Smith, dpbsmith at verizon.net
> "Elinor Goulding Smith's Great Big Messy Book" is now back in print!
> Sample chapter at http://world.std.com/~dpbsmith/messy.html
> Buy it at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1403314063/
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


from_name: Mark Williamson

subject: [Wikipedia-l] uh

body:
No -- the list is just inactive.

There are often inactive periods. It's only really very active when
somebody makes a controversial post.

Mark

On 02/10/05, Phroziac <phroziac at gmail.com> wrote:
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
>
> Gerrit Holl wrote:
> > Phroziac wrote:
> >
> >>I have not gotten any list mail for several hours. Is the list down?
> >
> >
> > We should have QOTW (Quote Of The Week) on this list, this one is great
> > (-:
> >
> > Gerrit.
> >
>
> Heh. Well, thanks for confirming it's not. But that's weird to not get
> any email for so long. Did someone ban some trolls?
> - --
> Phroziac                    |   /"\
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>
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> =BYxo
> -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>

--
SI HOC LEGERE SCIS NIMIVM ERVDITIONIS HABES
QVANTVM MATERIAE MATERIETVR MARMOTA MONAX SI MARMOTA MONAX MATERIAM
POSSIT MATERIARI
ESTNE VOLVMEN IN TOGA AN SOLVM TIBI LIBET ME VIDERE


from_name: Bryan Derksen

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Proper response to "crap" AfD nominations

body:
Bryan Derksen wrote:

> Whatever went before, we've now got a revert war going on
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamilton_Township%2C_Mercer_County%2C_New_Jersey
> with a bunch of people who are deleting content about the traffic
> circle from the article solely because of the result of the VfD on the
> traffic circle's own article.

The revert war now seems to have moved over to
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Horse%2C_New_Jersey, for those
following this little drama. A town of less than 10,000 people, and
previously just another Rambot article.


from_name: Daniel Ben Hoz

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Portals

body:
Dear Wikipedia Group,
        Do you think it would be a good idea if we had a wiki portal for a specific state/province/area of a country (examples could be: Madison, WI, Negev, Israel, Nunavut, Wales, and etc.)? Maybe even in other languages (like Tel-Aviv could also be in hebrew, yiddish, russian, arabic, not only in english, etc.). We could make it be like a hub, we have main events listed, etc. Write me back what you think.

Sincerely,
Daniel Hoz


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Portals

body:
Dear Wikipedia Group,
        Do you think it would be a good idea if we had a wiki portal for a specific state/province/area of a country (examples could be: Madison, WI, Negev, Israel, Nunavut, Wales, and etc.)? Maybe even in other languages (like Tel-Aviv could also be in hebrew, yiddish, russian, arabic, not only in english, etc.). We could make it be like a hub, we have main events listed, etc. Write me back what you think.

Sincerely,
Daniel Hoz

:-) -Daniel- :-)


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Multilingual error messages

body:
Mark Ryan wrote:
>
> For a preview, use the following URL:
> http://www.mindspillage.net/braindump/friends/error-utf8.htm

Where do we edit this? How do we contribute more translations?


list: textbook-l

from_name: Anthere

subject: [Textbook-l] Re: New domain name for Wikijunior

body:
Robert Scott Horning wrote:

> Angela wrote:
>
>> So, if there are any objections to moving the finished Wikijunior
>> texts to Wikijunior.org and keeping the editing processes on
>> Wikibooks.org, please raise those, either here, or at the Wikibooks
>> Staff lounge (<http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikibooks:Staff_lounge>).
>>
>> Angela.
>>
>>
> I think both are a poor place to request comments from Wikijunior
> authors, but I don't know of many better places to make such a request
> either.  More generally, the Wikijunior talk page on both Meta and
> Wikibooks are slightly better places to request information, as is the
> talk pages for each major project (especially Wikijunior Solar System)
> that do seem to get quite a bit more attention lately, especially from
> current Wikijunior participants that don't seem to be regular
> participants at the general Wikibooks Staff Lounge.  This mailing list
> is mainly old-timers and a few poor souls who have wandered in aimlessly
> by mistake.  Still, it does get a little bit of attention and a small
> amount of bandwidth, which is why I still read and respond to comments
> on this list.
> A week or two of notification is also clearly not enough time to get
> community input from the Wikijunior participants, in part due to the
> nature of the way things get accomplished on Wikibooks.  You need to be
> quite a bit more patient on Wikibooks than comparible proposals on
> Wikipedia, for instance.
>
> On the whole, I don't think we are anywhere close to having any content
> "moved" to a Wikijunior.org website at the moment.  There is an
> organized effort to try and get the Wikijunior Solar System brought up
> to some higher standards, and there are a couple of sections that are
> perhaps "ready" for a public display on a seperate website.  The rest of
> the Wikijunior pages are not nearly ready for anything like that, unless
> you are ready to make it a full editable wiki domain instead as a full
> Wikimedia sister project.  I don't think that is the purpose of what you
> are proposing either.
>
> In this proposal, I also don't see any discussion over the mechanics of
> how content is going to be nominated to get moved over, who is going to
> maintain the new website, and how the navigation of the content on that
> website is going to be done.  These are not trivial requests or points
> either, and from this alone I think the proposal is incomplete.  Having
> admins from Wikibooks be in charge of this new Wikijunior site might be
> useful, but I'm not convinced that is a good idea either.  The current
> navigation and layout of Wikijunior is designed to encourage
> participation and editing, as well as provides tools and resources for
> people who are adding content.  Certainly that needs a major overhaul if
> we move to a seperate website.
>
> I also don't like the proposal that this turns into "Wikipedia-Junior"
> where all of the articles from the seperate Wikijunior projects are
> merged together into a general encyclopedia format.  That is not the way
> they were written, and I would personally perfer the "Wikiproject"
> portal format instead at the very least, with sub-page naming
> conventions.  This is yet another issue that needs to be debated and
> thought out in detail before this wikijunior site goes "live."
>
> In short, this is not a proposal that has had anywhere near general
> community input and some major details need to be filled in before this
> proposal is accepted.

Hi

If so, may I asked why this request was written some time ago on the
board agenda ?

Anthere


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Fwd: New Internet Rules in China

body:
Andrew Lih wrote:

> On 9/27/05, MacGyverMagic/Mgm <macgyvermagic at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>I'm so happy I'm not Chinese.
>
>
> Perhaps you mean, "I'm glad I'm not residing in the People's Republic of China."
>
>
>>I would hate to be restricted like that.
>
>
> Then again, you have people living in the good old free US, and wind
> up choosing Fox News Channel anyway.
>
> -Andrew (User:Fuzheado)

/me is shocking...


from_name: Ryan W. (Merovingian)

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: RE: Re: Taking your eyes off the ball

body:
I have to admit to being guilty of oppose-and-run.  :(

--Ryan

> From: "Zachary Harden" <zscout370 at hotmail.com>
> Subject: RE: [WikiEN-l] Re: Taking your eyes off the ball
>
> I would also mention that a group by the name of Featured Article Drive
> (FAD) is also trying to help work on articles to get up to that standard,
> and they have done a good job so far. But, this is a problem where I run
> into and others do: we write about stuff no one cares about. I had some
> FAC's fail because no one would comment on them or they do not want to fix
> things like the grammar themselves. We should try to point out that at FAC
> that though the nominator might say "I think that this article should be FA"
> and those coming to the FAC should work with him all they can, instead of
> just objecting then leave.
>
> Regards,
>
> Zachary Harden

--
___________________________________________________________
Sign-up for Ads Free at Mail.com
http://promo.mail.com/adsfreejump.htm


subject:
[WikiEN-l] Re: Becoming more encyclopedia-like: 1: Encephalon's
	comments

body:
Perhaps that's true, but there seems to be a general disagreement when
something is verifiable, original research or NPOV to begin with. I
consider a minor band that doesn't pass WP:MUSIC as vanity which is
essentially a sort of POV that says, I'm important enough for an
encyclopedia even though I haven't released any singles or albums yet.
Others claim, as noted, that they're verifiable, non-original research
and NPOV because the article doesn't promote them. I think the mere
fact of putting something on a high-profile site as Wikipedia could be
seen as an attempt of promotion. -

On 10/1/05, Daniel P. B. Smith <dpbsmith at verizon.net> wrote:
> > From: Alphax <alphasigmax at gmail.com>
> > Inclusionists and Deletionists are playing what they think is a
> > zero-sum
> > game. It's WORSE than that: the mere presence of their mindless
> > ranting
> > is actually HURTING Wikipedia. By arguing over what should be
> > kept/deleted, we lose information. We lose readers. We lose editors.
> >
> > The solution:
> >
> > Become more encylopedia-like.
> >
> > For just about every value of X, where the number of total X is
> > sufficiently large, we can make more logical and more comprehensive
> > articles by MERGING the bits of information we have (which on their
> > own,
> > are perma-stubs) into more comprehensive articles on the topic.
> >
> > In doing so, we play a BETTER than zero-sum game. We build articles
> > that
> > a "traditional" encyclopedia would be jealous of. We HELP Wikipedia by
> > having articles that both retain information and look professional.
>
> I'd like to call attention to some remarks by Encephalon. I hesitate
> to do this because of the context that they're in, and I hope he/she
> will work them up into a standalone essay, but nevertheless. Take a
> look in
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/
> Lingnan_Primary_School
>
> near the bottom, the portion that begins:
>
> Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. That is the very first thing you read
> under Key Policies (WP:RULES), the main page of the essential rules
> that govern this encyclopedia. It is the very first thing that you
> read in the fundamental five pillars (WP:5P). The fundamental
> requirements of encyclopedia writing are enshrined in the basic,
> fundamental tenets of its policies. WP:V, WP:NOR, WP:NPOV are each
> and all fundamental rules that we may not ignore as we please...
>
> ...and the subsequent discussion, and this _very interesting_ comment:
>
> "I am using the criteria all of us should use: the principles central
> to writing encyclopedic articles on WP. Pages which violate those
> policies should be removed, whether they've been on WP for 3 weeks or
> 3 years, whether they pertain to the United States or to sub-Saharan
> Africa. Likewise, pages that are written in accordance with such
> principles should be kept, no matter how obscure or unknown to WPns
> at large."
>
>
>
> --
> Daniel P. B. Smith, dpbsmith at verizon.net
> "Elinor Goulding Smith's Great Big Messy Book" is now back in print!
> Sample chapter at http://world.std.com/~dpbsmith/messy.html
> Buy it at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1403314063/
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


subject:
[Foundation-l] Re: [Wikimania-l] Wikimania 2006 - shortlist chat -
	20.00 UTC Sunday 2 Oct.- #wikimania on freenode

body:
Those of you interetsed in Wikimania might check to see what it would
cost for them to attend each of the bid cities, and update their
'Transportation' sections accordingly.    Some day this will all be
automatic...

It would be especially nice to have representatives from South
America, Asia, and Africa take part in the discussion tomorrow; so
encourage your friends from those continents to attend, even if they
don't think they could make it to any of the proposed locales.

On 10/1/05, Delphine M?nard <notafishz at gmail.com> wrote:
> please note that existing proposals can be edited till the meeting starts. ;-)

ehhmm, that's good for those proposals that have been actively edited
in the past days...

> Please make sure you have as many supporters for your city as possible
> ;-).

...Or at least a few Very Dedicated supporters.  (-8

--
++SJ


from_name: geni

body:
On 10/1/05, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> Ahh!  But you ignore the fact that reducing the backlog of requested
> articles, or other kinds of cleanup, requires _hard work_.   It's so
> much more energy efficient to routinely type in "Delete nn", and cast an
> occasional vote here and there.

Same amount of effort to type in keep. And of course then zero
responcibilty for dealing with the result.

> For some people dealing with what they don't know about is the total
> extent of what they know.
>
> Ec

This of course applies to both sides.

--
geni


subject: [Foundation-l] Quarto 3 transfer on Wikimedia Foundation.

body:
<whoosh> That went quickly... ryo, you're amazing.

A reminder to everyone who has represented Wikimedia, Wikipedia,
Wikinews, or any other project at a conference in the past six months;
or has attended a conference relevant to the free knowledge or
collaboration : the rest of the communit[y|ies] would love to hear
about it!

Please write about your experience and reception; in your user space,
on meta, wherever; and leave a link to it on the Quarto drafting
board:

       http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WQ/Draft

Even if you simply followed closely a conference where another
wikimedian (most likely Jimbo) was presenting, this would be
interesting to hear a few words about.  Wikimedia is now part of
dozens of conferences a year; we can make of this an excellent and
informative calendar.

Fall cheer,
  Sj

On 10/1/05, Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Hello everyone
>
> We need help for copying several quarto version from meta to the
> Wikimedia Foundation website.
>
> The current versions to move are
> * the english : http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Translation_requests/WQ/3/En
>
> * the french :
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Translation_requests/WQ/3/Fr
>
> * the polish :
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Translation_requests/WQ/3/Pl
>
> The place where to put them is
> http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Quarto
>
> You do not need to understand the language to do so... but you need to
> have a valid account though.
>
> Thanks in advance
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>

--
++SJ


from_name: Dennis Dikkerboom

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Date and time-formats

body:
Dear all,
My name is Dennis Dikkerboom and since a couple of days I'm the new
ambassador of the Frisian Wikipedia. Since the new version of wikimedia (3th
of July) changed the format of dates and times to an American style, like
this: 22:10, 2005 jul 4 (UTC). We wondered if we could change it somehow
back to the original style, like this: 23.02, 1 jul 2005 (UTC).

Best regards,
 Dennis Dikkerboom


from_name: Angela

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Date and time-formats

body:
> My name is Dennis Dikkerboom and since a couple of days I'm the new
> ambassador of the Frisian Wikipedia. Since the new version of wikimedia (3th
> of July) changed the format of dates and times to an American style, like
> this: 22:10, 2005 jul 4 (UTC). We wondered if we could change it somehow
> back to the original style, like this: 23.02, 1 jul 2005 (UTC).

I'm not sure why it's changed, but the best way to request it be
changed back would be to file a request at bugzilla.wikimedia.org

Angela.


from_name: MacGyverMagic/Mgm

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Requested articles

body:
There is a page [[Wikipedia:Requested articles]] which lists requests
by subject. But there's so many of them it's become unwieldy and hard
for newbies to find their way through.

--Mgm

On 10/1/05, Phroziac <phroziac at gmail.com> wrote:
> How does the request process work anyway? As far as i know, there's a
> [[Special:Requestedpages]] that remembers all the redlinks on the
> site.
>
> On 10/1/05, Daniel P. B. Smith <dpbsmith at verizon.net> wrote:
> > > If only people spent more time reducing the backlog on requested
> > > articles. Those wouldn't be half as controversial as roads and schools
> > > and help to improve the coverage of Wikipedia. It's not as if they're
> > > writing what they know about anyway, or those road articles would be
> > > near FA instead of stubs.
> >
> > Instead of fussing about improving the AfD process, I'd like to give
> > some thought to improving the article _request_ process. Right now
> > it's actually quite difficult, as you're expected to thread your way
> > through a deeply nested Roget's-Thesaurus-like logical organization
> > of the sum of human knowledge to find the place to insert a request.
> >
> > I'd like _requesting_ an article to be truly as easy as _creating_
> > one. That is, I'd a link or button which automatically adds your
> > request to some list somewhere... and lets other people sort 'em out
> > into categories.
> >
> > I honestly feel that many problem substubs--the ones which give
> > virtually no information that is not in their titles--should be
> > treated either in one of two ways. Many substubs look to me like good-
> > faith efforts to point out a topic that someone would like covered--
> > but does not have the time or the skills to make a usable start on.
> > If a stub is not a usable launching pad for an article, then it does
> > not serve any function other than pointing out the absence of an
> > article on a worthy topic. It is, then, not an article, not a stub,
> > not the start of an article--it is an article request made in an
> > inappropriate way.
> >
> > I think the appropriate disposition of such main-namespace-pages is
> > to delete them from the main namespace and re-enter them as article
> > requests.
> >
> > --
> > Daniel P. B. Smith, dpbsmith at verizon.net
> > "Elinor Goulding Smith's Great Big Messy Book" is now back in print!
> > Sample chapter at http://world.std.com/~dpbsmith/messy.html
> > Buy it at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1403314063/
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > WikiEN-l mailing list
> > WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> > To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
> >
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>
>
>


from_name: Delphine Ménard

subject:
[Foundation-l] Wikimania 2006 - shortlist chat - 20.00 UTC Sunday 2
	Oct.- #wikimania on freenode

body:
Meeting to decide of the three shortlisted city will take place Sunday
2nd October 2005 in the #wikimania irc channel on freenode at 20.00
UTC.

Official bids as of today are:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania_2006/Boston
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania_2006/London
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania_2006/Milano
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania_2006/Toronto

please note that existing proposals can be edited till the meeting starts. ;-)

Please make sure you have as many supporters for your city as possible
;-). The meeting will last no more than half an hour, after which the
jury will make their decision.

Best,

Delphine
--
~notafish


from_name: Anthony DiPierro

body:
On 10/1/05, Daniel P. B. Smith <dpbsmith at verizon.net> wrote:
>
> > On 10/1/05, Anthony DiPierro <wikispam at inbox.org> wrote:
> >>
> >> OK, now I'm interested. What was the article like when it was
> >> deleted? Can't
> >> we copy these things somewhere before deleting them? I'd like to
> >> include the
> >> article in Jnanabase.
>
> I thought you were already running an automated 'bot that pumps all
> the articles deleted from Wikipedia into McFly?

No, that's way too hard of a thing to automate. I was able to keep it going
for a while, but there are a lot of technical impediments and it just
required way too much attention. Between the fact that VfD kept changing out
from under me and the fact that some moron got the bright idea of creating
blank pages over top of the deleted pages and then protecting them, I gave
up on the bot. The cabal has spoken, they don't want me to be able to view
deleted articles. In this case, information just didn't want to be free.


body:
On 10/2/05, Phroziac <phroziac at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
>
> geni wrote:
> > On 10/2/05, Phroziac <phroziac at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Quite a few people when people wont stop recreating the page.
>
> For some reason I don't think that's what he meant. Certainly we need a
> way to stop delete wars. I protect blank pages occasionally. The way he
> said it makes it sound like they're doing it just to keep people from
> ever re-creating it, after an afd.

The easiest way to stop delete wars would be to desysop the admins who get
involved in them. I'm not sure why people do it (protect blank pages), all I
know is it helps make it damn near impossible to collect deleted pages so
they can be distributed on another site. From what I gather legitimate
speedy deletion has been expanded beyond just nonsense pages as well, so
without any support from an admin or a developer I'd be fighting a losing
battle.


from_name: DF

subject: [WikiEN-l] AFD 100 Days, take 2

body:
For those around here that like statistics, I have
updated my automated statistical analysis of AFD,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:AFD_100_days

to include some information on outcomes.

For the cliffnotes version:

100 Days of AFD, June 1 - September 8
11211 AFDs, 75% deleted
86773 votes, 7202 voters
170 individuals closing at least 1 AFDs

The empirically determined threshold for dividing
delete and keep outcomes is 63.5% favoring deletion.
This does not account for any vote discounting that
may have occurred.  If one assumes that most socks are
there to vote keep, then this is probably consistent
with the two-thirds majority that most people talk
about as beign required for AFD consensus.

This threshold (63.5%) is enough to predict the
outcome of 94% of AFDs.  Suggesting that only about 6%
of AFDs are subject to any significant degree of vote
interpretation from admins.

Inspection of the closing patterns for the most active
admins suggest that none are substantially different
than this, with the exception of Tony Sidaway who
already admits having stronger deletion requirements
than most, i.e.:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Tony_Sidaway/Deletion/Closing

Curiously there are some admins that like to mostly
close as delete or mostly close as keep, but they
don't seem to be stretching expectations in order to
do so.

I also noted a number of AFDs (about 2%) that
statistically speaking seemed to stretch credibility.
Keep results for AFDs with no apparent keep votes,
Delete results for AFDs with 80% keep votes, etc.
However after inspecting a few of these, I've yet to
find one that really looked like an abuse.  Some seem
to be sockpuppet fests (i.e. 23 votes, 5 from
established accounts).  Some are cases of my parser
failing to count votes because they are written as
essays or otherwise expressed in strange ways.  And at
least one is the result of temporarily brain-dead
admin writing "delete" on a vote he decided to close
as "keep".  There are still many many more I haven't
looked at, but I am optimistic that most AFDs are
being closed in a reasonably consistent manner.

Anyway, just a little more fuel for the endless
debate.  ;-)

-DF


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Language creation

body:
Hi Oliver,

There are a number of things I would recommend.

First of all, I would recommend looking for other Wikipedians who
speak Illocano, and asking them to express support on the `requests
for new languages` page.

Second of all, I recommend that you create a test-wikipedia, at
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/test-wp/ilo/

Hopefully, Illocano will become the 5th Philippines language Wikipedia!

Mark

On 01/10/05, oliver cacananta <ocacananta at hotmail.com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I proposed the creation of an Ilokano Wikipedia in the "Requests for new
> languages" page. This is not in the List of Wikipedias and I was instructed
> to ask someone in the mailing list to "create one," which I assume is the
> template. I am not new to Wikipedia, but I am in new territory as far as
> starting a new language version, so please bear with me. I would appreciate
> advice and input. Let me know if I need to do anything else (I am now
> translating pages offline). Thanks much.
>
> Cheers, Oliver
> User:Oavcacananta
>
> _________________________________________________________________
> Express yourself instantly with MSN Messenger! Download today - it's FREE!
> http://messenger.msn.click-url.com/go/onm00200471ave/direct/01/
>
> _______________________________________________
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> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>

--
SI HOC LEGERE SCIS NIMIVM ERVDITIONIS HABES
QVANTVM MATERIAE MATERIETVR MARMOTA MONAX SI MARMOTA MONAX MATERIAM
POSSIT MATERIARI
ESTNE VOLVMEN IN TOGA AN SOLVM TIBI LIBET ME VIDERE


body:
On 10/2/05, Phroziac <phroziac at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
>
> > Anthony DiPierro wrote:
> > The easiest way to stop delete wars would be to desysop the admins who
> get
> > involved in them.
> I'm talking about the kind where users are repeatedly making attack
> pages, or some other type of vandalism, hoax, or CSDable material..

Judging from the large number of these pages, the kludge of a "solution"
doesn't seem to be working.

> I'm not sure why people do it (protect blank pages), all I
> > know is it helps make it damn near impossible to collect deleted pages
> so
> > they can be distributed on another site. From what I gather legitimate
> > speedy deletion has been expanded beyond just nonsense pages as well, so
> > without any support from an admin or a developer I'd be fighting a
> losing
> > battle.
> It helps for the reason I just mentioned. Why does it make it impossible
> to collect those pages?
>

It contributes, along with a number of other things. It makes it difficult
to know whether or not a page is deleted, and it makes it difficult to find
what the page looked like before it was destroyed by an admin. The only way
to get the deleted pages, without being an admin, is to download every
single revision of every single page as the revisions happen. It's too much
work to get around something which would be much better solved in another
way.


from_name: Christian Thiele

body:
Hi,

thanks for the multilingual error messages. May you add

  type="text/javascript"

to all <script>-Tag (and remove "language")? The last <script>-Tag
is after the </body>-tag, which is wrong, too.
This would be fine ;)

Mark Ryan <ultrablue at gmail.com> schrieb am Sat, 01 Oct 2005 08:51:06 +0200:

> Surprisingly, the page displays perfectly in Internet
> Explorer (the strikethrough is faded in IE), which may offend some
> free software purists out there (hey, I'm sending this email to the
> technical list).

Why? IE "invented" the style attribute for elements in Javascript and this
became a standard in DOM 2. So it's not really suprising that
style-changing related functions are working in IE.

sincerely
Christian Thiele


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Information in advance about mowiki happenings

body:
Well, as you can see by
http://mo.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Ronline/Alegeri_pentru_administratori&curid=1930&diff=7053&oldid=7052
, apparently the total length of the vote is 2 days (!).

In addition to the other strange things going on, Mihaitza has
suddenly decided that the vote was only to last for 2 days.

Mark

On 01/10/05, Mark Williamson <node.ue at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Currently there is a sysop election on mowiki, where 3 candidates are
> pitted against each other rather than being voted on separately: Me,
> Dmitriid, and Jeorjika.
>
> I have 131 contributions in the main namespace, Dmitriid has 10, and
> Jeorjika has 0.
>
> Now, there are a number of issues here which I wish to consult with
> the wider community over.
>
> First of all, who is allowed to vote.
>
> As it stands now, everybody who has already "expressed an opinion"
> about the Wikipedia may vote. The majority of people who have
> "expressed an opinion" are ro.wikipedians, with a minority of
> Moldovans and others (including people such as Oleg Alexandrov,
> Landroni, Dmitriid, Jeorjika, Gabix who are Moldovans, OldakQuill,
> Monedula, who are from elsewhere).
>
> This has always seemed unfair to me, since most of these people have
> less than 10 contributions total, and only a few of them have any
> contributions in the main namespace.
>
> When suggesting that only people with a certain number of
> contributions prior to a certain date (say, 10) be allowed to vote, I
> was labelled as antidemocratic. When an "outsider", Christopher
> Sundita, attempted to vote, his vote was deleted on the grounds that
> he had not previously "expressed his opinion".
>
> To be perfectly clear, the main issues in this election are
> unreasonable and have nothing really to do with sysops. Currently, it
> has been painted by one user, Goie (whose total contributions to ALL
> Wikipedias are small), as more of an election for president.
>
> It seems that those who are against the existance of mo.wikipedia are
> voting for Jeorjika, while those who understand that these elections
> are for "janitors" rather than "presidents" seem to be planning to
> vote for me (notably, Oleg Alexandrov and OldakQuill).
>
> Currently, there are over 200 articles on the Moldovan Wikipedia.
> Jeorjika said, in his campaign, that "under node", the Moldovan
> Wikipedia hasn't progressed fast enough (!). Apparently, it is the
> responsibility of the sysop to make sure that a Wikipedia grows at a
> certain rate, or else... sort of like Speed 3: Wikipedia.
>
> The main issue seems to me that the criteria of who can vote, and who
> cannot, are difficult to determine. Of course, it's best to always let
> the community handle such things, but in this case it's not clear who
> is and isn't part of the community -- most of the people who are
> eligible to vote have not made even a tiny peep on this Wikipedia for
> months, while I, Gabix, and a few dedicated anons have written
> articles.
>
> Mark
>

--
SI HOC LEGERE SCIS NIMIVM ERVDITIONIS HABES
QVANTVM MATERIAE MATERIETVR MARMOTA MONAX SI MARMOTA MONAX MATERIAM
POSSIT MATERIARI
ESTNE VOLVMEN IN TOGA AN SOLVM TIBI LIBET ME VIDERE


from_name: Gerrit Holl

subject: [Wikipedia-l] uh

body:
Phroziac wrote:
> I have not gotten any list mail for several hours. Is the list down?

We should have QOTW (Quote Of The Week) on this list, this one is great
(-:

Gerrit.

--
Temperature in Lule?, Norrbotten, Sweden:
| Current temperature   05-10-01 23:39:49   10.3 degrees Celsius ( 50.5F) |
--
Det finns inte d?ligt v?der, bara d?liga kl?der.


subject: [WikiEN-l] AFD 100 Days, take 2

body:
On 10/2/05, Ryan Delaney <ryan.delaney at gmail.com>
wrote:
> DF wrote:
>
> >For those around here that like statistics, I have
> >updated my automated statistical analysis of AFD,
> >
> >
> This is fantastic, thank you. I would like to call >
everyone's attention to something, though. On your
> table of the most common AFD closers, there is
> User:Jni, who closed 117 AFDs. Of each AFD he
> closed, 100% were deletes, with a 30% estimated
> threshold for delete votes.
>
> If I'm reading this correctly, that means he only
> needed 30% of the votes to be delete to decide that
> there was consensus to delete.
>
<snip other stuff>

Jni is something of a special case.  In 117 closes, he
never closed as Keep.  Hence at some empirical level,
his threshold might equally well be anything below his
weakest consensus.  The algorithm being used picks a
number in the middle of the many equivalent values, so
it may be skewing a lot lower than is sensible.  A
more useful column to look at in cases like this is
the "Est. Deviation", this shows how many AFDs he
might have been expected to close differently had he
been using a 63.5% value which is the average.  For
Jni, that value is 2, meaning that he closed as delete
roughly two AFDs with less than 63.5% votes for
deletion.

Sorry for the confusion.

-DF


body:
On 10/2/05, Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen at shaw.ca> wrote:
> The revert war now seems to have moved over to
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Horse%2C_New_Jersey, for those
> following this little drama. A town of less than 10,000 people, and
> previously just another Rambot article.

Or to put it another way somewhere out of the way where people are not
going to notice and it is unlikely to have any effect on the running
of wikipedia. I'm failing to see a downside.

--
geni


body:
Hello everyone

We need help for copying several quarto version from meta to the
Wikimedia Foundation website.

The current versions to move are
* the english : http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Translation_requests/WQ/3/En

* the french :
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Translation_requests/WQ/3/Fr

* the polish :
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Translation_requests/WQ/3/Pl

The place where to put them is
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Quarto

You do not need to understand the language to do so... but you need to
have a valid account though.

Thanks in advance


subject: [Foundation-l] Floss conference report

body:
Hello

Last week I was in South Africa for the second Floss and Free Knowledge
Workshop. I put a summary/report about the conference here :
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Conference_reports/FLOSS%2C_South_Africa_2005/Workshop_2

I am also planning to add in the next few days/weeks on meta
* the powerpoint of the presentation I did there (focused on Wikiversity)
* 3-4 of the presentations I found most interesting for some of the
issues we are trying to explore (such as some about Africa and use of
Floss or others about Publishing)
* A summary of the conclusions reached during the workshop.

I was very happy to meet as well during this trip, Alias from South
Africa, as well as 7-8 people in Amsterdam.

Cheers

Anthere


subject: [Foundation-l] Floss conference report


subject: [Foundation-l] Wikimania and Quarto

body:
Hello again.

Sinnnnnnnce we are talking about Wikimania, I'd be very happy if some of
the participants to the last Wikimania (our greatly successful Frankfurt
one) could talk about it in Quarto.

Here is the page :
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Translation_requests/WQ/4/En/7

You'll notice that currently, the text there is old stuff

What would be nice is a summary of how things went by. Links to all
relevant places where readers may find the presentations, the papers, or
the audio recording.

Additional great stuff would be a short summary of the press coverage,
maybe the most proeminent articles after it.

Possibly mention of the ARTE display during the event (is there a link
available on the net ?)

And yes, pictures of people. Funny quotes. Feedback on Ward or Stallman
speeches.

Dorm sharing. Quality of pasta at lunch. Opportunity to get a job.
Criticisms...

Whatever you can think of... even just a little bit.

So that all those not there can share a little bit how nice it was.
And... make the next one even better (a challenge imho).

Everybody is welcome to edit this page. Take the opportunity.

Mostly, do not forget the pictures...

Thanks

Anthere


subject: [Foundation-l] Wikimania and Quarto


from_name: Ryan Delaney

subject: [WikiEN-l] AFD 100 Days, take 2

body:
DF wrote:

>For those around here that like statistics, I have
>updated my automated statistical analysis of AFD,
>
>
This is fantastic, thank you. I would like to call everyone's attention
to something, though. On your table of the most common AFD closers,
there is User:Jni, who closed 117 AFDs. Of each AFD he closed, 100% were
deletes, with a 30% estimated threshold for delete votes.

If I'm reading this correctly, that means he only needed 30% of the
votes to be delete to decide that there was consensus to delete.

If this table isn't proof that we are in a state of pure admin deletion
already, because it is totally up to the closing admin what constitutes
"consensus" and what doesn't, I don't know what would be. Not only is
whether an article to be deleted or kept more in the hands of the
closing admin than it is in the hands of the voters, especially in the
case of controversial articles (the most important ones!), but the
illusion that AFD constitutes the general will of the community makes
the decisions arising from it unassailable.

- Ryan


subject: [WikiEN-l] AFD 100 Days, take 2

body:
DF wrote:

>Jni is something of a special case.
>
Thanks for the clarification. Still, I could just as easily make the
same point by comparing, say, Tony_Sidaway (80%) with JeremyA (43.9%),
or ABCD (47.3%) with Sjakkalle (70%).

Incidentally, I'm on there twice, since I was renamed from
User:Malathion to User:Ryan_Delaney somewhere in the middle of when you
started gathering these stats, it seems.

- Ryan


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Wikipedia as community service

body:
Greg Andrews wrote:

> As part of a college class I am in, we are required to, along with at
> least a few other students, do 10 hours of community service.  We are
> allowed to present our ideas to the class for others to join our
> cause.
>
> My thought is to use Wikipedia as a community service project.  Pledge
> to spend those 10 hours (ideally non-consecutive) editing, cleaning,
> and writing for Wikipedia.
>
> I'm set to propose this idea to my class tomorrow.  Has anyone done
> something like this before, and what are you opinions on it?
>
> -Greg

Hi, if you know well a non-english language, I can give you a
translation assignement if you are interested.

Ant


body:
> The question is: What is The Bit of Wikipedia Formerly Known as AfD
> designed to do? Is it to get articles that you don't like deleted? Or is
> it to seperate the chaff from the grain?

It's to give an air of legitimacy to the deletion of articles which a large
portion of Wikipedia don't feel should be deleted. Don't like that X was
deleted? You should have voted to keep it. Don't have time to vote keep on
hundreds of articles a month even though you think they should be kept?
Tough luck. You do have time to vote on hundreds of articles a month? Then
expect to be banned from voting just like I was. Don't even bother asking
for a reconsideration. No, a mighty quorum of 7 out of the 450,000
Wikipedians have spoken, and 5 out of those 7 wanted it deleted. That's
right, 5 out of 450,000 - a consensus!

Anthony


subject: [Wikipedia-l] fair use on french wikipedia

body:
I could not resist informing you on the outcome of the vote on fair use
images on the french wikipedia.

There were 3 choices

Fair use never accepted			81 votes	48.8 %
Fair use always accepted		7 votes		4.2 %
Fair use accepted under certain rules	78 votes	47 %

http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikip?dia:Le_Bistro/1_octobre_2005#R.C3.A9sultats_du_vote_sur_le_fair_use

This is consensus no ?

Ant


body:
On 10/2/05, Phroziac <phroziac at gmail.com> wrote:
> Who's creating blank pages over deleted pages and protecting them?

Quite a few people when people wont stop recreating the page.

--
geni


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Re: Re: RE: Re: Taking your eyes off the ball

body:
Blargh, I don't know.  I was talking more about AfD, though.

Nevertheless, the FAC process needs to go faster.  Look at last week: we gained four and lost three FAs.  That comes out to a total gain of one.  This is unacceptable.

> From: Phroziac <phroziac at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Re: RE: Re: Taking your eyes off the ball
>
> Ryan W. (Merovingian) wrote:
> > I have to admit to being guilty of oppose-and-run.  :(
> Why would you even consider that?

--
___________________________________________________________
Sign-up for Ads Free at Mail.com
http://promo.mail.com/adsfreejump.htm


from_name: Tony Sidaway

body:
On 10/2/05, Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen at shaw.ca> wrote:
>
> Bryan Derksen wrote:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Horse%2C_New_Jersey

Excellent. Now a rambot article which has existed for nearly three years,
and has had a link to the now deleted article about the White Horse Circle
since January, has been updated to include useful information about that
local landmark.


from_name: oliver cacananta

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Language creation

body:
Hello,

I proposed the creation of an Ilokano Wikipedia in the "Requests for new
languages" page. This is not in the List of Wikipedias and I was instructed
to ask someone in the mailing list to "create one," which I assume is the
template. I am not new to Wikipedia, but I am in new territory as far as
starting a new language version, so please bear with me. I would appreciate
advice and input. Let me know if I need to do anything else (I am now
translating pages offline). Thanks much.

Cheers, Oliver
User:Oavcacananta

_________________________________________________________________
Express yourself instantly with MSN Messenger! Download today - it's FREE!
http://messenger.msn.click-url.com/go/onm00200471ave/direct/01/


from_name: Michael Turley

body:
On 10/2/05, Anthony DiPierro <wikispam at inbox.org> wrote:
> > The question is: What is The Bit of Wikipedia Formerly Known as AfD
> > designed to do? Is it to get articles that you don't like deleted? Or is
> > it to seperate the chaff from the grain?
>
>
> It's to give an air of legitimacy to the deletion of articles which a large
> portion of Wikipedia don't feel should be deleted. Don't like that X was
> deleted? You should have voted to keep it. Don't have time to vote keep on
> hundreds of articles a month even though you think they should be kept?
> Tough luck. You do have time to vote on hundreds of articles a month? Then
> expect to be banned from voting just like I was. Don't even bother asking
> for a reconsideration. No, a mighty quorum of 7 out of the 450,000
> Wikipedians have spoken, and 5 out of those 7 wanted it deleted. That's
> right, 5 out of 450,000 - a consensus!

This is exactly why I'd like Wikipedia's deletion and featured article
functions to act less as a shredder and a limelight, and more like a
fractional distillation tower.

If we have three "levels" of Wikipedia, we can have a whole lot more
middle ground for the deletionists and inclusionists to meet on.

Top level is featured articles and any articles rated to be best in
class; on par with or better than commercial encyclopedias.  Fully
referenced, cited, and illustrated as appropriate for the topic; these
articles take a keen eye to find room for improvement.  These also
would be ready-made for any published edition of Wikipedia on CD, DVD,
or paper.

Middle level is Wikipedia's general section; this is where our main
body of work resides.  A decent paragraph or two sized article, or a
bit of notabilty is needed to rise to this level.

Bottom level is stubs, works in process, and all other articles that
aren't "approved" by consensus to rise to middle or top level, but
aren't speedy-deletable either.  Requirements to be kept here do not
include notability, but must be verifiable and NPOV.

Users browsing the encyclopedia can set a default level of viewing on
arrival, but bottom level articles are, by default, not included.

If necessary, there could be additional levels, especially at the top,
but I think three would be enough.
--
Michael Turley
User:Unfocused


subject: [WikiEN-l] AFD 100 Days, take 2

body:
On 10/2/05, DF <dragons_flight at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>
> Jni is something of a special case. In 117 closes, he
> never closed as Keep. Hence at some empirical level,
> his threshold might equally well be anything below his
> weakest consensus. The algorithm being used picks a
> number in the middle of the many equivalent values, so
> it may be skewing a lot lower than is sensible. A
> more useful column to look at in cases like this is
> the "Est. Deviation", this shows how many AFDs he
> might have been expected to close differently had he
> been using a 63.5% value which is the average. For
> Jni, that value is 2, meaning that he closed as delete
> roughly two AFDs with less than 63.5% votes for
> deletion.
>
>
Thing is, some admins specialise in early closes, and some specialise in
late closes--you choose which day log to process and depending on its
position in the list of day logs you'll find yourself processing old or new
listings. The early closers will have a very high number of straight keep or
delete closes (mostly deletes), the late closers will have a fairly high
number of no consensus keep closes.

I'm shocked at the extremely low figure at which the sample seemed to close
with delete. 63% is absolutely not to be confused with consensus.

On the other hand, 75% of closes beingdelete is a much lower hit rate than I
expected before I went and examined a few completed day logs myself. I
naively expected the delete rate to be around 90% or more.


from_name: Daniel P. B. Smith

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Three levels

body:
> From: Michael Turley <michael.turley at gmail.com>
>
> If we have three "levels" of Wikipedia, we can have a whole lot more
> middle ground for the deletionists and inclusionists to meet on.

If they want to meet.

> Users browsing the encyclopedia can set a default level of viewing on
> arrival, but bottom level articles are, by default, not included.

Ideological pure-Wiki advocates might suggest that by putting these
article on the bottom level you were preventing people from seeing
them and improving them.

--
Daniel P. B. Smith, dpbsmith at verizon.net
"Elinor Goulding Smith's Great Big Messy Book" is now back in print!
Sample chapter at http://world.std.com/~dpbsmith/messy.html
Buy it at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1403314063/


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Three levels

body:
On 10/2/05, Daniel P. B. Smith <dpbsmith at verizon.net> wrote:
>
> > From: Michael Turley <michael.turley at gmail.com>
> >
> > If we have three "levels" of Wikipedia, we can have a whole lot more
> > middle ground for the deletionists and inclusionists to meet on.
>
> If they want to meet.

The thing is, eventually there's going to be no choice. I'm surprised the
system lasted this long.

> Users browsing the encyclopedia can set a default level of viewing on
> > arrival, but bottom level articles are, by default, not included.
>
> Ideological pure-Wiki advocates might suggest that by putting these
> article on the bottom level you were preventing people from seeing
> them and improving them.

It's unclear what it means for bottom level articles to be "not included".
Not included in search and in random page are obvious*, but there would
almost certainly be a link there for anyone who typed in the exact term. We
already have a link that says "View X deleted
edits<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Undelete/Brian_Torby>?"
For bottom level articles, you'd actually be able to view those edits by
clicking on that link (the text of which would probably be rephrased).

In that sense "deletion wars" would become a thing of the past, because
simply editing a bottom level page would not in itself promote the page.
There would thus be no more need for the kludge of creating a blank page and
protecting it. I suppose this depends in part on whether or not
promotion/demotion would be an admin task, though. If it were kept simple,
for instance a "{{non-notable}}" link at the top of the page, then there
might be some revert warring involved.

I can only see two real arguments against it. The first can be fixed, the
second can't. The first argument is that it's complicated. This is
especially true if more than three levels are implemented, and personally
I'd argue for two. The second argument is that it doesn't wipe "bad
content/crap/cruft/whatever" off the face of the earth.

* Actually, I just checked, and even deleted articles are already included
in search.


from_name: Kelly Martin

body:
On 10/2/05, Tony Sidaway <f.crdfa at gmail.com> wrote:
> Come on, who ever thought there'd be a law case called " U.S. v.
> One Package of Japanese
> Pessaries<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._v._One_Package_of_Japanese_Pessaries>
> "?

I love seizure cases.

I've expanded this article somewhat.

Kelly


from_name: Arbeo M

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Language creation

body:
Hi Oliver!

Like Mark has already written, it would be very
helpful if you could find a couple more native
speakers willing to help you in starting the Ilokano
Wikipedia. It's quite a bit of work and if there are
two or three of you for a start, things will be a lot
easier (and more fun, too).

Apart from that, I think a Wikipedia in Ilokano is a
very promising project and I wish you all the best for
it.

Regards,

Arbeo

___________________________________________________________
Was denken Sie ?ber E-Mail? Wir h?ren auf Ihre Meinung: http://surveylink.yahoo.com/wix/p0379378.aspx


body:
On 10/2/05, Ryan W. (Merovingian) <bigwiki at earthling.net> wrote:
> Blargh, I don't know.  I was talking more about AfD, though.
>
> Nevertheless, the FAC process needs to go faster.  Look at last week: we gained four and >lost three FAs.  That comes out to a total gain of one.  This is unacceptable.

The standards for a FA are increaseing.

--
geni


from_name: Alfio Puglisi

subject: [Wikipedia-l] uh

body:
On Sun, 2 Oct 2005, Phroziac wrote:

> I have not gotten any list mail for several hours. Is the list down?

When you have such doubts, check the list archive:

http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/

Alfio


from_name: SJ

subject: [Foundation-l] Wikimania and Quarto

body:
On 10/1/05, Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> So that all those not there can share a little bit how nice it was.
> And... make the next one even better (a challenge imho).
>
> Everybody is welcome to edit this page. Take the opportunity.
>
> Mostly, do not forget the pictures...

And, in this case, the sound and video clips.

I hope I can find audio from Gerard's seminar when everyone in the
room tried to pronounce exotic words without choking...

SJ

PS - If you're writing about wikimania and looking for media you can
ask for permissions to use, don't forget
http://flickr.com/photos/tags/wikimania/


subject: [Foundation-l] Wikimania and Quarto


from_name: FlaBot

subject: [Wikitech-l] LatexDoc.php - extensions unter Win XP ?

body:
Hi ! I use MiKTeX unter Win Xp and want to use the LatexDoc-Extension.

The DVI/PDF Buttons are shown but when pressing the buttions there is an
error message :

LaTeX error

Command: pdflatex -interaction=batchmode -quiet \input
"C:\htdocs\wiki/upload/latexdoc/ltd_2fe00d8bf090e354f95afd999a12711e.tex"
2>&1
Output: entering extended mode

---
Content of texput.log
This is pdfeTeX, Version 3.141592-1.21a-2.2 (MiKTeX 2.4) (preloaded
format=latex 2005.10.1) 2 OCT 2005 13:36
entering extended mode
**\input C:\htdocs\wiki/upload/latexdoc/ltd_2fe00d8bf090e35
4f95afd999a12711e.tex
! Emergency stop
*** (job aborted, file error in nonstop mode)

Here is how much of TeX's memory you used:
5 strings out of 95502
125 string characters out of 1189316
44801 words of memory out of 1048577
3216 multiletter control sequences out of 60000
3640 words of font info for 14 fonts, out of 1000000 for 2000
14 hyphenation exceptions out of 4999
4i,0n,3p,1b,8s stack positions out of 5000i,500n,10000p,200000b,32768s
PDF statistics:
0 PDF objects out of 300000
0 named destinations out of 300000
1 words of extra memory for PDF output out of 65536
No pages of output.
 What to do ?

Greeting Flacus

--
[[Benutzer:Flacus]][[Benutzer:FlaBot]]
http://www.flacus.de/wikipedia/Interwiki-Link-Checker/


from_name: Andre Engels

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Information in advance about mowiki happenings

body:
2005/10/1, Mark Williamson <node.ue at gmail.com>:
> Hi all,
>
> Currently there is a sysop election on mowiki, where 3 candidates are
> pitted against each other rather than being voted on separately: Me,
> Dmitriid, and Jeorjika.

This I find a strange situation. Especially when there is a situation
with different parties, the best solution seems to be to have
representers of all sides be made sysops rather than vote between them
(unless there is a comromise candidate acceptable for all).

Could you perhaps try to resolve the situation by promising that if
you get elected, you will nominate the other candidates for sysophood
as well, and ask them to make a similar promise in return?

--
Andre Engels, andreengels at gmail.com
ICQ: 6260644  --  Skype: a_engels


from_name: JAY JG

subject: [WikiEN-l] Afd nominations

body:
>From: Michael Turley <michael.turley at gmail.com>
>
>On 9/30/05, JAY JG <jayjg at hotmail.com> wrote:
> > It depends on judgement, which we are supposed to exercise. There is a
> > difference between the Wikipedia article on Harry Truman, and David
> > McCullough's 1120 biography of Truman.  Why not include every single
>fact
> > found in McCullough's book? And from Brian Burnes's and Margaret
>Truman's
> > and Ralph Keyes works, and Harry Truman's own autobiography as well?
> > Because it is an encyclopedia article, and 3,000 page encyclopedia
>articles,
> > even if broken up into hundreds of smaller sub-articles, aren't useful
>to
> > the audience we are trying to serve.
>
>If all of these works are broken up into smaller sub-articles, good
>editors will combine them into any number of different, useful and
>comprehensive articles that include all the knowledge that all of
>these works contain.  In other words, every verifiable fact from David
>McCullough's book does not have to end up in the Harry Truman article,
>but there's no reason every verifiable fact should not be included in
>Wikipedia.
>
> > >Wikipedia is revolutionary and important because the level of detail
> > >captured is beyond that of any prior work.  This is why many here
> > >enjoy Wikipedia more than any other reference.  This is also why
> > >Wikipedia is gaining editors every day.  The dominant cultural message
> > >is "Your knowledge is useful, please add it.  We'll help you sort,
> > >organize, and present it."  Filtering the input stream is helpful, as
> > >is merging data to appropriate locations, but to actively work against
> > >adding verifiable NPOV information is a fool's errand that can only
> > >lead to frustration in the long term.
> >
> > The level of detail we *can* capture, and the level of detail we
>*should*
> > capture, are two entirely different things.  This is still intended to
>be a
> > general purpose encyclopedia for a general audience.  We are writing
> > articles, not PhD dissertations, or multi-volume histories.  Again,
>there is
> > a reason why the History of England article does not contain the same
>amount
> > of information as Churchill's four volume "A History of the English
>Speaking
> > Peoples" that has nothing to do with "Wikipedia is not paper" and
>everything
> > to do with "Wikipedia is an encyclopedia".
>
>See my reply above for why I believe this is a specious argument.  Our
>software-based encyclopedia is capable of presenting the general
>audience whatever level of detail that they choose to suit their
>interest.  Just as there is a "History of Malta" link in the "Malta"
>article, we're capable of splitting articles as they become too large
>for the general "first view".  I see no reason why this cannot
>continue to scale much further than it has.

Michael, Google.com states its mission as follows:
"Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it
universally accessible and useful."

How do you see that as differing from Wikipedia's mission?  How do you think
the end products should differ?

Jay.


from_name: charles matthews

body:
Geni wrote

>The standards for a FA are increasing.

Amazingly, in line with the need for a daily article.

FAs recognise some of the good work that goes on.  Not all of it, by a long
chalk.  It's now an institution, but not representative of what wiki-en can
do in areas that are harder to research or expound.

Charles


from_name: Alphax

body:
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Ray Saintonge wrote:
> Daniel P. B. Smith wrote:
>
<snip>
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Lingnan_Primary_School
>>
>> near the bottom, the portion that begins:
>>
<snip>
>> ...and the subsequent discussion, and this _very interesting_ comment:
>>
>> "I am using the criteria all of us should use: the principles central
>> to writing encyclopedic articles on WP. Pages which violate those
>> policies should be removed, whether they've been on WP for 3 weeks or
>> 3 years, whether they pertain to the United States or to sub-Saharan
>> Africa. Likewise, pages that are written in accordance with such
>> principles should be kept, no matter how obscure or unknown to WPns
>> at large."
>
<snip>
>
> My first impression of the last quoted paragraph is that it's
> tautological.  Then by being referenced there it confuses standards with
> the application of standards.  The time and place references in the
> paragraph are redundant since the princilples would be equally
> applicable without them.  The paragraph could be summarized in, "If it's
> a good page keep it; if it's a bad page delete it."  Who would argue
> against that?
>

Well, it's not that far from what I've been saying. If the article
contains useful information that could be merged into a better article,
merge it. If the article could be transwikied to solve problems with
WP:NOR or WP:NOT, transwiki it. If the article is a copyvio or CSD,
delete it. Other than that, if it's informative, neutral, contains
references, and is suitable for any other encyclopedia, keep it.

> The underlying assumption is that the article proposed for deletion is a
> bad one, and since everybody knows that it's guilty why bother with a
> trial?"  Let's proceed directly to the execution.  I'm sorry but the
> rest of us are not so brilliant as to understand this swift logic, we
> still need to be shown why it's a bad unencyclopedic article.

Well, it's because it's listed at a page called "Articles for Deletion",
 isn't it!

Time to rename AfD. AGAIN.

When it was called "Votes for Deletion", people thought it was some kind
of contest. Editcountitis crept into it and people would vote for the
sake of voting. Extreme Article Deletion crept into it too. People would
say "Damn! Pokemon is in! Better get rid of schools, bands, roads and
all those Rambot stubs to make up for it! Double bonus points for
deleting whole countries nobody's heard of!"

The question is: What is The Bit of Wikipedia Formerly Known as AfD
designed to do? Is it to get articles that you don't like deleted? Or is
it to seperate the chaff from the grain?

Hrm.... "Wikipedia:Article Threshing". I like it :)

- --
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MacGyverMagic/Mgm wrote:
> Perhaps that's true, but there seems to be a general disagreement when
> something is verifiable, original research or NPOV to begin with. I
> consider a minor band that doesn't pass WP:MUSIC as vanity which is
> essentially a sort of POV that says, I'm important enough for an
> encyclopedia even though I haven't released any singles or albums yet.
> Others claim, as noted, that they're verifiable, non-original research
> and NPOV because the article doesn't promote them. I think the mere
> fact of putting something on a high-profile site as Wikipedia could be
> seen as an attempt of promotion. -
>

I would have thought that WP:MUSIC was a breakdown of how WP:NOR works
wrt. musical groups...

Of course, writing an article about your own band kinda breaks NPOV
anyway, doesn't it? Well, NPOV is always available from Carlos behind
the 7-11 :)

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body:
On 10/2/05, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 10/2/05, Ryan W. (Merovingian) <bigwiki at earthling.net> wrote:
> > Blargh, I don't know. I was talking more about AfD, though.
> >
> > Nevertheless, the FAC process needs to go faster. Look at last week: we
> gained four and >lost three FAs. That comes out to a total gain of one. This
> is unacceptable.
>
> The standards for a FA are increaseing.

If this is an accurate statement of the problem, and the reason for it, then
I fail to see a real problem. Articles whose quality degrades over time can
be reverted to an acceptable version. If the problem is rising standards,
stop raising the standards.

And adopt a more productive process. The current process is sterile,
masturbatory and in my opinion does not produce articles of high quality,
but rather encourages editors to indulge the stylistic quibbles of a few
voters.

What if we took 100 articles every day, chosen at random. Debate whether
they are not worthy of featured status. After five days all articles
*except* those for which there is a consensus that they aren't featurable
are raised to featured status. There is no reason why we shouldn't treat any
random article as featurable on our front if there is not a good argument
not to.

We could delete AfD and redirect to this process. I'm only half joking.
Think of it as a Modest Proposal. If the problem is that keep voters on AfD
are squandering their talents on borderline articles, get them to refocus on
cleaning up potential FAs.

As a test, here are the first ten articles I obtained just now by pressing
the Random Page link. I did a quick cleanup where on the first one
(Mis-Teeq) but left the others alone. I see no reason why any one of these,
save one, shouldn't appear on our front. They're all informative on their
subject and correctly represent Wikipedia as a very eclectic work in
progress. Come on, who ever thought there'd be a law case called " U.S. v.
One Package of Japanese
Pessaries<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._v._One_Package_of_Japanese_Pessaries>
"?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mis-Teeq

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_Party_of_Abkhazia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Society_of_Wildlife_Trusts

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Swingers

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nimrod_Hunt

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codex_Belli

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comstock_Law

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_wages

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_Chi_Alpha

The exception of the ten is this one, which in my opinion needs extensive
cleanup and expansion.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_views_on_contraception


from_name: geni

body:
On 10/2/05, Tony Sidaway <f.crdfa at gmail.com> wrote:
><http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._v._One_Package_of_Japanese_Pessaries>
> "?
Anyone who had spent any time with law students

>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mis-Teeq
>
short lack pictures
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_Party_of_Abkhazia
>

short not enough references

> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Society_of_Wildlife_Trusts
>
 short no references whatsoever
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Swingers
>

 short no references whatsoever no pics should probaly have some info
on some of the other music they have produced.

> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nimrod_Hunt
>

stub no refernces shortage of pics (come on some one must have a copy
to scan the cover)
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codex_Belli
>

Not bad needs references and wikifying

> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comstock_Law
>
Needs NPOVing references and expanding

> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_wages

Needs expanding
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_Chi_Alpha
>
A little short. LAcks context for non us readers. Needs references

> The exception of the ten is this one, which in my opinion needs extensive
> cleanup and expansion.
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_views_on_contraception

Try advertiseing it on christian and athiest messgae boards. With luck
the resulting edit war should improve it somewhat.
--
geni


body:
On 10/2/05, Tony Sidaway <f.crdfa at gmail.com> wrote:
> If this is an accurate statement of the problem, and the reason for it, then
> I fail to see a real problem. Articles whose quality degrades over time can
> be reverted to an acceptable version. If the problem is rising standards,
> stop raising the standards.

Or start a new system. Current system is to focused on the main page space.
--
geni


from_name: Jason Y. Lee

subject: [WikiEN-l] Return of the AFD List

body:
I am pleased to announce that the AFD List has returned.  Please see:
[[User:AllyUnion/AFD List]].

----
Jason Y. Lee
AKA AllyUnion


subject: [Wikitech-l] A simple request for a server...

body:
The request for a server is simply a request for a central repository of
Wikimedia scripts that are used in the maintainance of any of the
Wikimedia servers, such as Wikipedia.  As it current stands, it is
contributors who run their own copy of their scripts located somewhere in
the world.  Should that person ever disappear from the project, it is
likely that his/her useful source code that was written disappears
forever.  It is immensely difficult to classify this as a SourceForge
project, especially when it is many different pieces of code running for
different purposes.  Additionally, there is a greater concern to not
release some of the scripts to the general public for fear that they may
be used for vandalism purposes.  However, it should be noted that the code
is still useful to someone else who wishs the time and effort to
continuously update it, especially with the changing MediaWiki software.
Furthermore, there is no easy collaborative way to update source code
between contributors.
For example, I have several scripts that run a specific purpose.  If
wished for someone else to take the task of improving my script, I would
have to ask them personally and they would have to send the changes to me.
 There is no easy way to merge changes, like a CVS or SVN service.  We
have many programmers who contribute to the Wikipedia, who write in
various languages, in order to perform a certain maintainance task.  Their
skills may not be up to par in order to become a developer for the

MediaWiki software, but they, as do I, want to use their programming
skills in some manner to help one of the Wikimedia projects.  It would be
immensively useful for a single Wikimedia server to be used as a place for
trusted Wikimedia individuals to perform collaborative programming
projects in the assistance of maintaining various Wikimedia pages.

One of the things about source code that is so great is that it is
universal and can be read by anyone who understands the programming
language.  Case in point, if I wrote a simple bot script that reset the
Sandbox on the English Wikipedia, and someone from the Chinese Wikipedia
wanted to adapt it for the Chinese Wikipedia, he or she, as long they were
a long standing trusted Chinese Wikipedian user, could take my code, and
readapt it for their purposes.

Case in point, English Wikipedian User Kevin Rector wrote KevinBot to do
some bot work, that is explicitly written in C++ (I think).  But his code
is now out of date due to the changes in MediaWiki code causing his bot
code to break.  Someone asked me to update his bot and send me the
executable, but that doesn't help me since I can't make any changes to the
source code to correct his bot.

Part of the frustration of bot code writing is that the MediaWiki code
changes to the point that bots break.  And bot programmers are people who
struggle to maintain their own scripts... they don't have a group of
people assisting them in the effort.  If bot scripts can be updated with a
group of people just like the MediaWiki software, it would be less
frustrating and the bot code would be updated faster.

As it stands, bots are scripts and/or programs that run on individual
computers and servers maintained by Wikipedians.  If anything happens to
them, that small piece of knowledge in which the script is written in
disappears.  And if, for any reason, their computer breaks or their server
breaks... their bot is inactive for an unknown period of time.  There is
no fallback.  Furthermore, their server specs may not be something that a
university or this organization can get.  The power, speed, and stable
connectivity is something that individuals can not achieve on their own.
Granted, if someone leaves, someone can rewrite the work that they did.
But the point is that they are reinventing the wheel just for that to
work.

I don't know where else to ask this, so I figured to email it to this list.

----
Jason Y. Lee
AKA AllyUnion (English Wikipedia Administrator)


from_name: Laura Scudder

subject: [WikiEN-l] Afd nominations

body:
As silly as it is to cling to process over content when we're writing
an encyclopedia, I can see their fear that VfU could become AfD take
2.  I don't really want another AfD, but the whole "it's only about
process" mantra reeks of a beauracratic culture.

Laurascudder

On 9/30/05, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 9/30/05, Tony Sidaway <f.crdfa at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On 9/30/05, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > > Sounds very like an obsessive deletionist who's more concerned with
> > > process than product. AFD seems to encourage that sort of thing.
>
> >  Have you tried visiting Votes for undeletion lately?  I did so recently and
> > argued for undeletion of an article.  I was asked if I was addressing the
> > content or the process.  Why the content, of course, I said.  I was then
> > told that this wasn't what VFU was for.  Sure enough, the phrase in the
> > undeletion policy that refers to Wikipedia being a better place with an
> > article than without was nowhere to be seen on the page.  I updated the
> > instructions *directly* from the undeletion policy.  This was reverted
> > several times.  Some people claimed that policy had been changed.  I pointed
> > out, by reference to the actual policy, that it hadn't.  Whereupon a
> > proposal to change policy was made--to exclude any reference undeletion
> > based ona judgement that the content was good for wikipedia.
> >  At that point I decided it was time to leave people who wanted to play
> > silly buggers to get on with it.
>
>
> That's really breathtakingly stupid behaviour. I suppose I'm going to
> have to look and find who these morons are.
>
>
> - d.
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