from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Amillar blocked?

body:
Tim Starling wrote:
> Amillar wrote on [[Wikipedia talk:Bots]]:
...
> The IP I'm having trouble connecting from is 216.99.203.72. Just to verify,
> I resolve www.wikipedia.org as 130.94.122.199, to which I can ping and
> traceroute but not open port 80. Thanks. -- Amillar 15:15 21 Jul 2003 (UTC)
> <<<
>
> I thought this sounded easy enough to fix, since I had seen a list of such
> bots in the /apache/conf directory on larousse. But after some grepping, I
> couldn't find any IP address in his block listed, or his domain name
> (aracnet). I'm out of ideas, does anyone else know what's going on?

Ah yes, this one was so bad that I blocked the IP at the firewall level.
I've unblocked it for now, but please no funny stuff. Swamping the
server is very, VERY not cool.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


list: wikien-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: james duffy

body:
>
>Exactly. No one seems to notice or mind, at least when looking at the
>e-mails. I did clear my browser cache, I did turn off my computer and,
>eventually, I did "notify the developers". What are "many connection
>errors"??
>
>KF
>
The bloody thing is back again. I've an article that cannot be saved because
that stupid message keeps coming up again. WILL SOMEONE FIX THE BLOODY
THING!!! This nonsense has gone beyond a joke. If it is not fixed members
will be driven away! Please do something. This will be the FIFTH article I
will have had to save onto my desktop in 3 days because of these f-ing "many
connection errors.

JT

>----- Original Message -----
>From: "james duffy" <jtdirl at hotmail.com>
>To: <wikien-l at wikipedia.org>
>Sent: Thursday, July 31, 2003 5:16 AM
>Subject: [WikiEN-l] 'larousse.wikipedia.org' is blocked
>
>
> >
> > I cannot get on to wiki. On the rare times I could today (less than 20%
>of
> > all attempts), I could not get into many pages. On those rare occasions
>when
> > I did actually get into something, I could not move between article and
>talk
> > page. If I actually could get onto a talk page I rarely could save
>anything
> > and my watchlist cannot be got to.
> >
> > Instead I'd constantly get the damned message -
> >
> > Host 'larousse.wikipedia.org' is blocked because of many connection
>errors.
> > Unblock with 'mysqladmin flush-hosts'
> >
> > If this error persists after reloading and clearing your browser cache,
> > please notify the Wikipedia developers.
> >
> > I reloaded and cleared the browser cache to no effect. And the 'please
> > notify the Wikipedia developers' message would draw a blank, going
>nowhere.
> > What is going on?
> >
> > JT
> >
> > _________________________________________________________________
> > MSN 8 with e-mail virus protection service: 2 months FREE*
> > http://join.msn.com/?page=features/virus
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > WikiEN-l mailing list
> > WikiEN-l at wikipedia.org
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
> >
>
>
>_______________________________________________
>WikiEN-l mailing list
>WikiEN-l at wikipedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

_________________________________________________________________
The new MSN 8: smart spam protection and 2 months FREE*
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list: wikitech-l

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: RSS feeds?

body:
Tobin Richard wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Has anyone thought of setting up a RSS feed for Wikipedia? I know that
> there was one back in the early days but there doesn't seem to be one
> now... (and from memory the old one wasn't an official feed).

http://pliny.wikipedia.org/tools/

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Database dump

body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:
> I'm sure this could be done automatically if you could trust a script to have
> the type of access controls needed to make a wiki read only.

The whole backup process is automated, but I start the script manually
because we're short on disk space and I prefer to keep an eye on it.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: [Fwd: [Wikide-l] Botrechte]

body:
Thomas Luft wrote:
> Hi there,
>
> there is another bot running on the German Wikipedia and the user wanted
> to set the bot bit in the user database so that the changes made by the
> bot won't appear in the Special:Recentchanges.
>
> Could some one of the developers set the necessary bit?

Done.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: What should I do?

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:
> What should I do to resovle the flush-hosts problem?  If it's hardware
> we need, then it's hardware we shall have.  Is the problem solvable by
> ram?  By CPU?

I've no idea what exactly triggers the connection errors, but increasing
the max_connect_errors (whice I've just done) should keep it from
blocking future access.

> I'm ready to throw some money at this thing again.  Suggestions would
> be much appreciated.

I'd highly recommend a second database server, which would feed off the
main one using MySQL's replication feature.

* It could run searches and nonessential but nice special pages; or
perhaps simply round-robin load sharing

* If the main server crashes again, the wiki can fall back to the second
server instead of being inaccessible.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


list: textbook-l

from_name: Toby Bartels

subject: [Textbook-l] Licenses

body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:

>I just realized something I should have a long time ago; Our use of the GNU
>FDL is completely copyleft. Read below;

>:Permission is granted to copy, distribute
>:and/or modify this document under the
>:terms of the GNU Free Documentation
>:License, Version 1.2 or any later version
>:published by the Free Software Foundation;
>:with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover
>:Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts.

>Note especially "with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no
>Back-Cover Texts." Hence, we only give permission to use our text if the 3rd
>party does /not/ add Invariant Sections, Front-Cover Texts, or Back-Cover
>Texts.

Unfortunately, that's not how the GNU FDL works.

When we use the FDL, we must specify the terms of its use,
which include specifying the invariant sections and the cover texts.
But the "with no ..." clause talks about /our/ release;
it doesn't change the ways that /others/ can release modification.
IOW, it talks about how others can /modify/ our version,
but it doesn't change how they can /release/ their modification.

Rather, how others can release their modifications
is covered in detail in section 4 of the licence, including:
"If the Modified Version includes new front-matter sections
"or appendices that qualify as Secondary Sections
"and contain no material copied from the Document,
"you may at your option designate some or all of these sections
"as invariant."  Such as the section "Why EB kicks Wiki ass".

Also, this says nothing about the Dedications section,
which is invariant and hence not free.
(Other sections are referred to by name throughout the licence;
some of these are problematic as well.)

-- Toby


subject: [Textbook-l] public domain works with marginal notes

body:
>The [[staff lounge]] had some talk about loading public
>domain books on the site with space to make annotations to
>them. While I thought little about it now I realized that
>we could put up the works of William Shakespeare and allow
>people to add comments and explanations on the margin. That
>would be so cool !! There is no site out there that I know
>of that does this. Little by little we could amass a huge
>volume of knowlege on these works in one place that is
>currently only available dispersed throughout various
>printed texts as well as the minds of teachers and
>professors at large. Shakespeare seems like the place to
>start, along with maybe a public domain translation of the
>Bible, or parts of both of those works.

We should reevaluate Project Sourceberg in the light of Wikibooks.
PS is still languishing on <ps.wikipedia.com>
(which should be the Pashto Wikipedia) under Phase I.

-- Toby


subject: [WikiEN-l] Israeli-Palestinian neutrality

body:
Delirium wrote:

>Toby Bartels wrote:

>>That's why interpreting NPOV as the middle ground is a big mistake.
>>On articles such as these, it may be that we can /never/
>>simply state anything as fact, if even basic facts are disputed.
>>If everything in an article says ?X said Y about Z.?,
>>then (assuming that it's undisputed that X did say that)
>>partisans are unlikely to view the article as truly biased.
>>(They may view it as unacceptable wishy-washy, but that's different.)
>>OTOH, if /we/ say something about Z, then add ?But X said Y instead.?,
>>then this can easily be viewed as biased against X.

>In doing this though, we really can't afford to be wishy-washy on
>absolutely *everything* if we hope to still be useful at all as an
>encyclopedia.  For example, we shouldn't have to preface every physics
>article with "is claimed by many/most physicists" to appease the fringe
>people, or to preface the Holocaust discussions with "is claimed by
>those who think the Holocaust happened" to appease the Holocaust
>deniers, and so on.

This has been discussed since the early days of Wikipedia,
mostly in connection with creationism and pages on evolution.
I mention this so that you can find those old discussions.

But now every physics page should begin "In [[physics]],",
which sets the context in a social activity, the study called "physics".
So /if/ the people involved (called "physicists") have a mainstream view,
then that is what one would expect to see on the page -- and so one does.
Opinions of the fringe groups can be identified as such
(although not with insulting words like "fringe" ^_^),
but it's still agreed, even by them, that they're not mainstream.

In the Israeli/Palestinian debate, even the mainstream is contested.

-- Toby


subject: [WikiEN-l] Azuresong@charter.net

body:
Sean Barrett wrote:

>Speaking of messages sent in weird, proprietary, unreadable formats,
>what in the name of Babbage was this?

Neither proprietary nor unreadable, I'd guess.
It's all text, and I managed to understand most of it.
Weird, however, I'll accept.

>   BEGIN:VCARD
>   VERSION:2.1
>   N:Montaig;Azure
>   FN:Azure Montaig
>   EMAIL;PREF;INTERNET:azuremontaig at yahoo.com
>   REV:20030731T075720Z
>   END:VCARD

So, this person's surname is "Montaig",
and their full name is "Azure Montaig".
Their Internet email addres is <azuremontaig at yahoo.com>.
(One must admire this protocol -- if that's what it's doing! --
for recognising that not all email is over the Internet.)
This revision is dated 2003 July 31,
but I don't grasp the "T075720Z" bit.

And all of this comprises something called a "VCARD",
to be interpreted according to version 2.1 of that protocol.
If I wanted to know more, doubtless I'd look that up.

-- Toby


from_name: K Forstner

subject: [WikiEN-l] Again

body:
Could not connect to DB on 130.94.122.197
Host 'larousse.wikipedia.org' is blocked because of many connection errors.
Unblock with 'mysqladmin flush-hosts'

If this error persists after reloading and clearing your browser cache,
please notify the Wikipedia developers.

Whenever I try to access Wikipedia, this is what I get. No one has reacted
to the same message which I posted for the first time 24 hours ago, which I
find rather strange. A number of minor disputes still seem to be going on,
and people do react to them. But how do you work if you can't read, let
alone edit Wikipedia articles? Or is it just me who can't get in?

KF


from_name: Tomasz Wegrzanowski

subject: [Textbook-l] Anonymous contributions

body:
On Thu, Jul 31, 2003 at 01:32:48PM -0700, Daniel Mayer wrote:
> Tomasz wrote:
> >It's legally impossible. Copyright assignment
> >requires a real legal contract, and you can't
> >make those with anonymous people, no way.
>
> Have you taken any law classes? IANAL, but I have. Most contracts are informal
> but still binding - like when Jimbo assigned his own Wikipedia copyrights to
> the Foundation.
>
> And also by using your logic we could not let Anons contribute at all since,
> under your reasoning, we could not bind them to the terms of our license.
>
> Having an easy to find copyright policy and a one line sentence in the edit
> window "By clicking save you indicate that you agree to the copyright terms
> of this website" is more than enough.
>
> Oh and newspapers, magazines and the equivalent online counterparts very
> routinely state that all letters to the editor or posts made to them by the
> public are their property.

"Ustawa o prawie autorskim i prawach pokrewnych"
("Copyright and related rights act"), article 53:
    Umowa o przeniesienie autorskich praw majtkowych wymaga zachowania
    formy pisemnej pod rygorem niewaznosci.

    Contract of transfer of material copyrights requires written form
    to be valid.

Sounds like it cuts all the discussion, at least in Europe (such laws in Europe
are regulated by international treaties and EU directives and differ pretty much
only in details, so it's not likely to be any different in other countries).


subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia more popular than Britannica!

body:
Eclecticology wrote:

>Erik Moeller wrote:

>>Things are looking pretty grim for Britannica. Their Java-based software
>>is a piece of crap, and Encarta has much better marketing. They still have
>>their original content bonus, but even in terms of content they have
>>massive weaknesses in some areas (for example, compare their article on
>>circumcision with ours). I think the Britannica brand will live on, but in
>>terms of competition we should be more worried about Encarta (and vice
>>versa).

>If only Wikimedia could buy out EB........cheap......Imagine!!

But as EB falls in price, it'll reach first
the point where Encarta can buy it but we can't.
If Encarta sees us at that time as a threat,
then they'll be sure to snap EB up before we can.
We can't let them sniff us out until we have to cash to buy EB.

How's /this/ for a slogan:
"Sifterpaedia Britannica(R) -- the free encyclopadia that you can trust"
^_^ ^_^ ^_^

-- Toby


from_name: Pedro M.V.

subject: [Wikitech-l] Number separator

body:
For me, it?s a good idea. How implement it ???

----- Original Message -----
From: "Guillaume Blanchard" <gblanchard at arcsy.co.jp>
To: <wikitech-l at wikipedia.org>
Sent: Thursday, July 31, 2003 3:02 AM
Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] Number separator

No comments ???

----- Original Message -----
From: "Guillaume Blanchard" <gblanchard at arcsy.co.jp>
To: <wikitech-l at wikipedia.org>
Sent: Wednesday, July 30, 2003 6:46 PM
Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] Number separator

> It's why I suggest this only for number more than 4 characters length ;o)
> I suppose <nowiki></nowiki> may solve (rare) case you don't want automatic
> separator.
>
> Aoineko
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Pedro M.V." <macv at interlap.com.ar>
> To: <wikitech-l at wikipedia.org>
> Sent: Wednesday, July 30, 2003 6:05 PM
> Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] Number separator
>
>
> > One could use a tag to indicate : don?t use the separator (i.e. in
spanish
> wikipedia the year 2000 it?s 2000 not 2.000); for example <nsep> ( no
> separator)</nsep>. Excepting  because of this little problem, it?s a good
> idea.
> >
> > Regards.
> > ----
> > Biofuels for your petroleum-car
> > http://www.journeytoforever.org
> > http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/biodiesel
> > ----- Original Message -----
> > From: "Guillaume Blanchard" <gblanchard at arcsy.co.jp>
> > To: <wikitech-l at wikipedia.org>
> > Sent: Wednesday, July 30, 2003 8:57 AM
> > Subject: [Wikitech-l] Number separator
> >
> >
> > > Hi all,
> > > Do you ever discuss about automatic number separator ? (ex: 12512 ->
> 12,512)
> > > In french Wikipedia it is a real problem because our separator is the
> not
> > > veiwable character : " ".
> > > So if we want Wikipedia show "12 512" we need to write "12 512".
> > > This make editable version of article sometine very difficulte to
read.
> > > I would like an *option* to cut all number framed by space (or other
> word
> > > separators) and length more than 4.
> > > Exemple :
> > >
> > > 100 -> 100
> > > 1000 -> 1000
> > > 9999 -> 9999
> > > 10000 -> 10 000 (separator!)
> > > R10000 -> R10000
> > > 123456789 -> 123 456 789 (separator!)
> > >
> > > Any hope to see this feature implemented ?
> > >
> > > Aoineko
> > >
> > > _______________________________________________
> > > Wikitech-l mailing list
> > > Wikitech-l at wikipedia.org
> > > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
> > >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Wikitech-l mailing list
> > Wikitech-l at wikipedia.org
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
> >
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>

_______________________________________________
Wikitech-l mailing list
Wikitech-l at wikipedia.org
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l


subject: [Wikitech-l] bugs/features on the Hindi Wikipedia

body:
Yann Forget wrote:

>One more: would it be possible to use the Hindi numbers for lists ?
>i.e. ? for 1, ..., see http://hi.wikipedia.org/wiki/????
>
HTML/CSS doesn't seem to support this.

The options for list-style-type in CSS2 are:

disc | circle | square | decimal | decimal-leading-zero | lower-roman |
upper-roman | lower-greek | lower-alpha | lower-latin | upper-alpha |
upper-latin | hebrew | armenian | georgian | cjk-ideographic | hiragana
| katakana | hiragana-iroha | katakana-iroha | none | inherit
<http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/cascade.html#value-def-inherit>

To emulate a different style, the wiki parser would have to figure out
the numbering itself and explicitly override the number text for every
item. Could be done, I suppose. If anyone wants to dive into the list
parsing code and make this work...

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Textbook-l] Anonymous contributions

body:
On Thu, Jul 31, 2003 at 07:04:14PM -0700, Daniel Mayer wrote:
> Tomasz Wegrzanowsk wrote:
> >Contract of transfer of material copyrights
> >requires written form to be valid.
>
> The server is in the US. Thus only US law (for all activity within the US) and
> International law (for all activity between the server and those contributing
> outside of US jurisdiction) applies.

If it's copyrighted by anyone living in Europe, European laws apply.


subject: [Textbook-l] Anonymous contributions

body:
Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:

>Daniel Mayer wrote:

>>Can we make copyright assignment compulsory for anonymous contributions to
>>Wikibooks then?

>It's legally impossible. Copyright assignment requires a real legal
>contract, and you can't make those with anonymous people, no way.

We want people to sign over all rights of /use/ to us,
so that we can do whatever we want with it.
Whether we actually own the copyright is irrelevant.

-- Toby


from_name: Karl Wick

subject: [Textbook-l] RE: Anonymous contributions

body:
Wasn't there a lawyer who offered free services to Jimmy a
while back ? An expert opinion would he helpful in many
issues to make a plan that is legal and helps achieve WP
goals and mission, such as regarding the proposed
dedication of copyrights to the Foundation.

--Karl

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software
http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com


from_name: Daniel Ehrenberg

subject: [Textbook-l] Anonymous contributions

body:
--- Toby Bartels <toby+wikipedia at math.ucr.edu> wrote:
> Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
>
> >Daniel Mayer wrote:
>
> >>Can we make copyright assignment compulsory for
> anonymous contributions to
> >>Wikibooks then?
>
> >It's legally impossible. Copyright assignment
> requires a real legal
> >contract, and you can't make those with anonymous
> people, no way.
>
> We want people to sign over all rights of /use/ to
> us,
> so that we can do whatever we want with it.
> Whether we actually own the copyright is irrelevant.
>
If we just do that, we'd need some way to know their
name in order to cite it, which is impossible. Why not
have it all just be the same as Wikipedia is? That
seems to be working. I don't like ownership of
knowledge, and I'd rather that everything contributed
to wikibooks, anonymous or otherwise, is considered
authored by wikibooks, just like Wikipedia.
Additionally, some textbooks (like my Algebra I
textbook, for one) are partially based on Wikipedia
content, so it would be nearly impossible to say that
all of the non-anonymous contributers in any way own
the content; that would just be too broad.
-LittleDan

__________________________________
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Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software
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from_name: Azure Montaig

subject: [WikiEN-l] removal

body:
Please remove me from the Wikien forum or tell me how I might do that!

Azure Montaig (Azuresong)
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list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Vicki Rosenzweig

subject: [Wikipedia-l] [Wikitech-l] Bill pictures

body:
At 12:22 PM 8/1/03 +0900, Aioneko wrote:
>My automatic number separator don't seem to interest people :o(
>I have a question and this time I really hope an answer !
>
>Do we have to put a "specimen" note on the pictures of bill (banknote) we
>want to put on Wikipedia ?

I am not a lawyer, but as I understand it, images of US banknotes are allowed
in the US as long as they're not actual size (there are some specific
numbers for
how far from actual size it has to be). I have no idea what French law says
about euro notes, or for that matter what the US law says about foreign notes.
Given the low (by currency standards) quality of online images, we're probably
safe.

--
Vicki Rosenzweig
vr at redbird.org
http://www.redbird.org


from_name: Nick Reinking

subject: [Wikitech-l] RE: Database dump

body:
On Fri, Aug 01, 2003 at 04:13:10PM +0200, Erik Zachte wrote:
> > The whole backup process is automated, but I start the script manually
>
> > because we're short on disk space and I prefer to keep an eye on it.
>
> I'm confident Jimbo would consider adding diskspace a minor investement,
> provided we don't use anything fancy (raid, SCSI)  (Jimbo am I right?).
> I guess bandwidth costs are the main expense and several orders of
> magnitude larger.
>
> I know that 18 days without a backup is a rare event, but even losing 6
> days of edits, uploads and discussions would give me the shivers. Are
> they stored on a different disk by the way? If backup is a matter of
> minutes per database, then the benefits of a scheduled daily outage far
> exceed the costs, it will even save some bandwidth ;)
>
> Backups are an inconvenience until you need them.
>
> Erik Zachte

If database dumps are cheap, and can be done "on the fly" with MySQL, it
might be a reasonable plan to just throw in an extra disk and have it
dump the database every six hours or so.  At the very least, set up a
wget statement on larousse to have it download the pliny nightly
database dumps...

--
Nick Reinking -- eschewing obfuscation since 1981 -- Minneapolis, MN


from_name: Mark Christensen

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: What should I do?

body:
Here are a couple of standard recommendations for improving DB
performance.

1) A second hard drive for the main database server.  You will generally
see a significant performance improvement from having applications,
logs, and the OS on one drive, and only the DB on the other.

2) Make sure the firewalls on the servers are configured not to allow
random IPs to connect to the DB.

3) Move the remaining wiki's off of the DB server, and shut down
everything you can (PHP, Apache, etc).

4) Memory and (to a lesser extent) CPU upgrades can make a significant
impact on performance under the right conditions.

I don't know where the current bottlenecks are, but if it is anywhere in
the DB, the above might help significantly.
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subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Again

body:
--- koyaanis qatsi <obchodnakorze at yahoo.com> wrote:
> I'm having the same problem, periodically, but I
> didn't respond earlier because there's nothing I can
> do about it.  I understand your frustration, but I
> think that most of the developers aren't around
> right
> now, and do all they can when they are.  Within a
> few
> years we'll probably need as many machines as
> slashdot
> has--which will cost quite a lot--but until then,
> all
> we can do is wait for the code to be optimized,
> which
> takes time.  Until then, given that everyone is a
> volunteer--including the coders--I'd recommend
> patience.  :-)
>
> kq

Jimmy, how is donation to the Wikimedia Foundation
going? I'd like to donate to help buy servers, but
previously you said that donation wasn't fully worked
out.
--LDan

__________________________________
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Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software
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from_name: Nils Kehrein

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: 'larousse.wikipedia.org' is blocked

body:
"K Forstner" <kurt.forstner at chello.at> wrote
...
> I did clear my browser cache, I did turn off my computer and [..]

Hi,
if you're using the MS Internet Explorer, a CTRL + F5 should work well, too.
No need for rebooting or closing the browser...

Regards,
Nils.


from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [Textbook-l] Anonymous contributions

body:
Daniel Ehrenberg wrote:
>If we just do that, we'd need some way to know
>their name in order to cite it, which is impossible.

We have already gone over this while you were gone (I forgot which list..).
Anon contributors work under the pseudonym which happens to be their IP
address. It is their choice to do so. Real names are not needed.

>Why not have it all just be the same as Wikipedia is?
>That seems to be working. I don't like ownership of
>knowledge, and I'd rather that everything contributed
>to wikibooks, anonymous or otherwise, is considered
>authored by wikibooks, just like Wikipedia.

No Dan, that is not how Wikipedia works. All unique content is owned by the
contributors on Wikipedia (same here). However, by placing their work on the
Wikimedia server they all agree to license a copy of their work to Wikimedia
under terms of the GNU FDL.

>Additionally, some textbooks (like my Algebra I
>textbook, for one) are partially based on Wikipedia
>content, so it would be nearly impossible to say that
>all of the non-anonymous contributers in any way
>own the content; that would just be too broad.

In order to comply with the GNU FDL you need to do more to cite just what
material you are using from Wikipedia. On the Algebra I authors page, IMO,
you should list (maybe in a subpage) the Wikipedia articles you copied and
provide link backs to them.

Come to think of it, we need to form a policy on how to use Wikipedia content
(how to cite being the most important thing to consider).

Aside: It would also be nice if links to other Wikimedia projects looked
different than external links. A green color would be nice..

--- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


from_name: Timwi

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Number separator

body:
Pedro M.V. wrote:

>> No comments ???
> For me, it?s a good idea. How implement it ???

Please don't get me wrong, but your one-line postings aren't doing
anything contructive. People would have replied to the first mail if
they were interested.

My impression is that developers are hooked up on much more important
issues just now.

Timwi


from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [Wikitech-l] Pliny feeling the big hurt again...

body:
Jimmy-
> Oh, duh, I didn't realize all of that.

> Where's the 'search' button?  Gone?

> What if I want to search for articles containing 'Thomas Jefferson', but
> more than just the [[Thomas Jefferson]] article?

> Maybe I just overlooked that the main search has been removed for
> performance reasons right now?

It has been removed because ever since the crash, even minimal searches
bog down the database server for reasons that I still don't understand. I
suspect table corruption, but a REPAIR TABLE had no effect.

Regards,

Erik


from_name: Gutza

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: [Wikitech-l] Bill pictures

body:
See
http://www.euro.ecb.int/en/more/communication.GeneralPar.0020.filelinkFile.download/EN_REPRODRULES.pdf

(Page 3, Article 2, Section 3f)

The information is for Euro only, but I expect that's reasonable enough
for any currency.

Bogdan

Guillaume Blanchard wrote:
> My automatic number separator don't seem to interest people :o(
> I have a question and this time I really hope an answer !
>
> Do we have to put a "specimen" note on the pictures of bill (banknote) we
> want to put on Wikipedia ?
>
> Aoineko
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Guillaume Blanchard" <gblanchard at arcsy.co.jp>
> To: <wikitech-l at wikipedia.org>
> Sent: Thursday, July 31, 2003 4:29 PM
> Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] Number separator
>
>
>
>>>Hi all,
>>>Do you ever discuss about automatic number separator ? (ex: 12512 ->
>>
>>12,512)
>>
>>>In french Wikipedia it is a real problem because our separator is the
>
> not
>
>>>veiwable character : " ".
>>>So if we want Wikipedia show "12 512" we need to write "12 512".
>>>This make editable version of article sometine very difficulte to read.
>>>I would like an *option* to cut all number framed by space (or other
>
> word
>
>>>separators) and length more than 4.
>>>Exemple :
>>>
>>>100 -> 100
>>>1000 -> 1000
>>>9999 -> 9999
>>>10000 -> 10 000 (separator!)
>>>R10000 -> R10000
>>>123456789 -> 123 456 789 (separator!)
>>>
>>>Any hope to see this feature implemented ?
>>>
>>>Aoineko
>>
>>_______________________________________________
>>Wikitech-l mailing list
>>Wikitech-l at wikipedia.org
>>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>>


from_name: Imran Ghory

subject: [Textbook-l] Anonymous contributions

body:
On Thu, 31 Jul 2003, Daniel Mayer wrote:

> Tomasz Wegrzanowsk wrote:
> >If it's copyrighted by anyone living in Europe, European laws apply.
>
> All that matters to Wikimedia is what is legal to have on the server in the
> US. When you edit on a US-based server then the laws of the US dictate what
> is legal to have on that server. That doesn't mean you are immune to the laws
> of your own country, but as soon as you post something to the Wikimedia
> server then US law takes over.

Possibly not, as if the work is created by an EU citizen than EU copyright
transfer rules apply, and by international convention the US will be
required to respect the EU copyright. (i.e the transfer of copyright to a
US citizen/group would need to be done under EU law for it to be valid
in the US).

Imran
--
http://bits.bris.ac.uk/imran


from_name: Yann Forget

body:
Hi,

There are a number of bugs / features on the Hindi Wikipedia :
* Week days are not translated by the software, but there are on
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/LanguageHi.php
See the home page : http://hi.wikipedia.org/
* on Mozilla all links are cross out. On Konqueror it's OK
* Users' talk pages are not consistent : on the upper right link when logged,
it is http://hi.wikipedia.org/wiki/?????_??????:Yann, but on the recent
changes list, it is
http://hi.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=%E0%A4%B8%E0%A4%A6%E0%A4%B8%E0%A5%8D%E0%A4%AF_%E0%A4%B5%E0%A4%BE%E0%A4%B0%E0%A5%8D%E0%A4%A4%E0%A4%BE:Yann
and there is also http://hi.wikipedia.org/wiki/??????:?????_:Yann

I mentioned them on http://hi.wikipedia.org/wiki/??????????:Bug_reports

Something I don't understand : on Konqueror, when I am not logged, new links
are displayed in red (as in the French WP for example, both for Konqueror and
Mozilla), but when I am logged they are displayed in black with a question
mark at the end : e.g. Friday?

Thanks,
Yann

--
http://www.non-violence.org
Site collaboratif sur la non-violence
http://www.forget-me.net/ | http://www.antig8.org/
Alternatives sur le Net   | Sommet alternatif au G8


from_name: Guillaume Blanchard

body:
My automatic number separator don't seem to interest people :o(
I have a question and this time I really hope an answer !

Do we have to put a "specimen" note on the pictures of bill (banknote) we
want to put on Wikipedia ?

Aoineko

----- Original Message -----
From: "Guillaume Blanchard" <gblanchard at arcsy.co.jp>
To: <wikitech-l at wikipedia.org>
Sent: Thursday, July 31, 2003 4:29 PM
Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] Number separator

> > Hi all,
> > Do you ever discuss about automatic number separator ? (ex: 12512 ->
> 12,512)
> > In french Wikipedia it is a real problem because our separator is the
not
> > veiwable character : " ".
> > So if we want Wikipedia show "12 512" we need to write "12 512".
> > This make editable version of article sometine very difficulte to read.
> > I would like an *option* to cut all number framed by space (or other
word
> > separators) and length more than 4.
> > Exemple :
> >
> > 100 -> 100
> > 1000 -> 1000
> > 9999 -> 9999
> > 10000 -> 10 000 (separator!)
> > R10000 -> R10000
> > 123456789 -> 123 456 789 (separator!)
> >
> > Any hope to see this feature implemented ?
> >
> > Aoineko
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>


from_name: Matthias Jordan

subject: [Wikitech-l] "sectionedit" in printable version?

body:
Hi, folks!

I'm currently wondering whether it makes any sense to include those
"sectionedit" and "commentedit" links in the printable version of a
page. To be honest, I doubt that, because only few users will want to
click on a link that's printed on a sheet of paper. :-)

If there are no objections, I'd try to change this behaviour.

Bye!

Matthias


from_name: Lightning

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: What should I do?

body:
Mark Christensen wrote:

>1) A second hard drive for the main database server.  You will generally
>see a significant performance improvement from having applications,
>logs, and the OS on one drive, and only the DB on the other.
>
yes, this is a good idea. and it seems economic seeing as hdd are cheap
these days.

>3) Move the remaining wiki's off of the DB server, and shut down
>everything you can (PHP, Apache, etc).
>
I thought this was the plan all along.. To slowly start switching all
the wiki's off the db server as they were all setup with the latest
software.

>4) Memory and (to a lesser extent) CPU upgrades can make a significant
>impact on performance under the right conditions.
>
>
It seems at the moment memory is our pain problem, memory gets full and
the server starts swapping and thats just a horrible horrible viscious
cycle.

>I don't know where the current bottlenecks are, but if it is anywhere in
>the DB, the above might help significantly.
>
>
I believe they are mostly in the DB. I'm trying to look through the code
and find some DB bottle necks, but I am having a pretty hard time
because I guess I'm not that familiar with the codebase and since its so
different from my normal programming style It takes longer for me to put
everything together.

All this talk of upgrading is great, but it all requires money. I am
personally ready to pitch in a bit, I can't afford much, but I would
like to throw in what I can. I wish I could donate more actual work, but
I'm having trouble with the codebase.  Jimbo recently mentioned he is in
the process of opening a paypal and merchant account. Hows that process
going?

I think a flowchart of what exactly happens upon a call to the server
would be great. and it would include all function calls and all querys.
there we could see how many query's we are doing. and see what could be
edged out.

Lightning


from_name: Arwel Parry

body:
In message <002101c357dc$20c85f50$d100a8c0 at arcsy.co.jp>, Guillaume
Blanchard <gblanchard at arcsy.co.jp> writes
>My automatic number separator don't seem to interest people :o(
>I have a question and this time I really hope an answer !
>
>Do we have to put a "specimen" note on the pictures of bill (banknote) we
>want to put on Wikipedia ?
>
>Aoineko

Most central banks seem to insist upon it - the Bank of England
certainly does, though I note that they don't adhere to their own
regulations on their own website! (Their regulations say "SPECIMEN" has
to be in black, but on many of their own pictures it's red).

--
Arwel Parry
http://www.cartref.demon.co.uk/


from_name: Alex R.

body:
Regarding US currency, here is the actual law and regulation:
http://www.moneyfactory.com/document.cfm/18/117
alex756, Esq.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Vicki Rosenzweig" <vr at redbird.org>
To: <wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org>
Sent: Friday, August 01, 2003 8:45 AM
Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] [Wikitech-l] Bill pictures

> At 12:22 PM 8/1/03 +0900, Aioneko wrote:
> >My automatic number separator don't seem to interest people :o(
> >I have a question and this time I really hope an answer !
> >
> >Do we have to put a "specimen" note on the pictures of bill (banknote) we
> >want to put on Wikipedia ?
>
> I am not a lawyer, but as I understand it, images of US banknotes are
allowed
> in the US as long as they're not actual size (there are some specific
> numbers for
> how far from actual size it has to be). I have no idea what French law
says
> about euro notes, or for that matter what the US law says about foreign
notes.
> Given the low (by currency standards) quality of online images, we're
probably
> safe.
>
> --
> Vicki Rosenzweig
> vr at redbird.org
> http://www.redbird.org
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
> http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


from_name: Fred Bauder

subject: [Wikitech-l] ES wiki and EL

body:
on 8/1/03 12:21 PM, Lightning at lightning at chaos-productions.com wrote:

> Since EL content is under the GFDL just like the spanish-language wiki
> is there maybe a chance that we could do a mass import of all the
> articles they have that we do not? I mean, theres is no reason not too
> and it could only help the spanish-language wiki.
>
> Or is it a reason that they might get mad and the talks of rejoining
> will die? They seemed to have been pretty fruitless up until now anyways....
>
>
> Lightning

Mass imports are not a good idea because you absorb more material than you
can digest comfortably, but mutual linking of articles with a lot of copying
would be to the advantage of both projects. Why don't you propose that to
them?

Would they get mad? They have no right to under the GFDL but it is only
human to resent "The Competition" copying all your hard work.

Fred Bauder

http://www.internet-encyclopedia.org


from_name: Tim Starling

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: What should I do?

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:
> What should I do to resovle the flush-hosts problem?  If it's hardware
> we need, then it's hardware we shall have.  Is the problem solvable by
> ram?  By CPU?
>
> I'm ready to throw some money at this thing again.  Suggestions would
> be much appreciated.
>
> Of course, it'd also be groovy if everyone who is working on a Phase
> IV idea might be willing to stop porting, or to port with a STRONG eye
> towards helping with the performance problem.  Clever tweaks to the
> site to avoid DB queries would probably be *most* helpful, but which
> queries to avoid?
>
> --Jimbo

See http://www.mysql.com/doc/en/Blocked_host.html for information about
our problem.

I think we should increase max_connect_errors, but I would have liked to
have someone else's opinion on that. I don't know much about SQL. All
the same, I'm convinced it's a good idea. Here's how you would do it:
connect to the DB with a SUPER account, and type:

SET GLOBAL max_connect_errors=1000000;

See http://www.mysql.com/doc/en/SET_OPTION.html to read about what this
does.

That sets the variable until next time pliny is restarted. To make it
permanent, edit my.cnf to include something like the following:

[mysql]
set-variable = max_connect_errors=1000000

I don't know what the underlying problem is. It may be a network
infrastructure problem: say, dodgy cables, a malfunctioning network
card, something like that. But I have to repeat: I REALLY DON'T KNOW
WHAT I'M TALKING ABOUT. There's no harm in setting max_connect_errors to
a high value, unless we really are being attacked by crackers, which I
doubt. So set the variable and cross your fingers that the problem goes
away.

-- Tim Starling


body:
Hi,

One more: would it be possible to use the Hindi numbers for lists ?
i.e. ? for 1, ..., see http://hi.wikipedia.org/wiki/????

Thanks,
Yann

--
http://www.non-violence.org
Site collaboratif sur la non-violence
http://www.forget-me.net/ | http://www.antig8.org/
Alternatives sur le Net   | Sommet alternatif au G8


from_name: Tomasz Wegrzanowski

subject: [Textbook-l] Anonymous contributions

body:
On Thu, Jul 31, 2003 at 09:55:25PM -0700, Daniel Mayer wrote:
> Tomasz Wegrzanowsk wrote:
> >If it's copyrighted by anyone living in Europe, European laws apply.
>
> All that matters to Wikimedia is what is legal to have on the server in the
> US. When you edit on a US-based server then the laws of the US dictate what
> is legal to have on that server. That doesn't mean you are immune to the laws
> of your own country, but as soon as you post something to the Wikimedia
> server then US law takes over.

Location of the server is really a secondary issue here.
It may be important for libel laws and stuff, but ownership over copyrights
is obviously a global thing. You can't have copyright over something
in one country, while somebody else has copyright over it in others
(of course what are your rights here is country-specific)

Oh, and we want Wikipedia to be distributable in Europe too, don't you
remember ?

And I don't really have to care about US laws at any point,
only server owners has ;)


body:
On Fri, Aug 01, 2003 at 04:24:57AM -0700, Brion Vibber wrote:
> Yann Forget wrote:
>
> >One more: would it be possible to use the Hindi numbers for lists ?
> >i.e. ? for 1, ..., see http://hi.wikipedia.org/wiki/????
> >
> HTML/CSS doesn't seem to support this.
>
> The options for list-style-type in CSS2 are:
>
> disc | circle | square | decimal | decimal-leading-zero | lower-roman |
> upper-roman | lower-greek | lower-alpha | lower-latin | upper-alpha |
> upper-latin | hebrew | armenian | georgian | cjk-ideographic | hiragana
> | katakana | hiragana-iroha | katakana-iroha | none | inherit
> <http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/cascade.html#value-def-inherit>

... and most browsers won't support half of these at the moment anyway.


from_name: Kaoslord

subject: [Wikitech-l] Things that migh help performance

body:
In Utf8Case.php we have this huge ~1450 item associative array (
$wikiUpperChars ). Is this really necessary? Is there a way we could
avoid having to load such a huge array into memory for every pageview by
a user in a language that needs it?  This seems like it could pose to be
a problem in the future.. maybe keeping it in shared memory so we dont
have to go regenerating it and having all these instances of it for
every page view? I guess at the time its OK but as UTF8 wiki's gain more
and more popularity this might become a problem. Or am i completely wrong?

 I'm noticing in setup.php that we are include()ing  a whole lot of
stuff. Some of this stuff might never even be used, so why are we
include()ing it? We should probably include JUST what we need, this
would probably save a little tiny bit of memory and processor. I know
it's not much, but at the same time, why waste at all when we don't need
too?  Same thing for Skins.php, it include()s all 3 skins. could we just
include() the one we need?

Is there a possibility of keeping the banlist in shared memory? Since
every single hit requires a query to that table, it might help if we
keep it cached in memory so we can avoid unnecessary querys and load on
the db.

I think the banlist cache and the limiting include()s are my most
reasonable proposals. I also think they would be the easist to
implement. thoughts? The ban list thing could be implemented fairly
quickly, and it might help with performance.

Lightning


subject: [Wikitech-l] Things that might help performance...

body:
In Utf8Case.php we have this huge ~1450 item associative array (
$wikiUpperChars ). Is this really necessary? Is there a way we could
avoid having to load such a huge array into memory for every pageview by
a user in a language that needs it?  This seems like it could pose to be
a problem in the future.. maybe keeping it in shared memory so we dont
have to go regenerating it and having all these instances of it for
every page view? I guess at the time its OK but as UTF8 wiki's gain more
and more popularity this might become a problem. Or am i completely wrong?
I'm noticing in setup.php that we are include()ing  a whole lot of
stuff. Some of this stuff might never even be used, so why are we
include()ing it? We should probably include JUST what we need, this
would probably save a little tiny bit of memory and processor. I know
it's not much, but at the same time, why waste at all when we don't need
too?  Same thing for Skins.php, it include()s all 3 skins. could we just
include() the one we need?

Is there a possibility of keeping the banlist in shared memory? Since
every single hit requires a query to that table, it might help if we
keep it cached in memory so we can avoid unnecessary querys and load on
the db.

I think the banlist cache and the limiting include()s are my most
reasonable proposals. I also think they would be the easist to
implement. thoughts? The ban list thing could be implemented fairly
quickly, and it might help with performance.

Lightning


subject: [Wikitech-l] ES wiki and EL

body:
Since EL content is under the GFDL just like the spanish-language wiki
is there maybe a chance that we could do a mass import of all the
articles they have that we do not? I mean, theres is no reason not too
and it could only help the spanish-language wiki.

Or is it a reason that they might get mad and the talks of rejoining
will die? They seemed to have been pretty fruitless up until now anyways....

Lightning


subject: [Wikitech-l] New translation checker committed

body:
Hi, folks.

I found out that the currently used checktrans.php script does only
check wgAllMessages. I changed the script to find missing translations
in more arrays and committed it to the CVS as checktrans-enhanced.php.

Bye!
Matthias


subject: [Wikitech-l] ES wiki and EL

body:
Oualmakran Youssef wrote:

>Hello,
>
>Lately, I am spending a lot of time on es:.
>Sometimes, I spend some hours a week importing articles
>(I would use that time better, if I have not do that).
>
>The main problems about mass-importing are:
>
>*A lot of void template
>(example: http://enciclopedia.us.es/wiki.phtml?title=Atolinga+%28Zacatecas%29)
>*There are still many ''junk'' articles on  EL
>("hello", obsecenities, questions)
>*Some different naming conventions
>(EL do not make a lot of new subpages, but old ones remain)
>
>Still, I am for a mass-importing tool (ie. a bot)
>
>*A lot of good articles (it takes a lot of time to import them by hand)
>*It could attract more user: more articles and higher position in Google
>
>There is informal collaboration between the two projects, some
>user spend time on both servers. I hope, that EL users will not get
>ungry if I use a bot (I cannot predict their reaction)
>
>There are no talks of rejoining since many months (at least six month,
>I am afraid there will be no new talks before another six months).
>
>My conclusion: I will be pleased that someone make a bot. I would
>like to import say 50-100 articles a day (depending on my free time and
>the availibility of other wikipedians from es)
>
>Thanks in advance if some one could make a bot.
>
>Regards,
>Youssef
>_______________________________________________
>

i was thinking more along the line of just asking them for a db dump and
then importing all the articles they have that we don't with out over
writting any content at all from the wiki. I guess abot would be the
best way to go, but it still needs to be approved. Well, not 'approved'
but discussion would be nice to the contributors at es.wiki can voice
their opinions complaints or concerns.

Lightning


from_name: Thomas R. Koll

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Administrator Coma löscht Abstimmungsergebnisse

body:
On Fri, Aug 01, 2003 at 12:39:53AM +0200, Heinz wrote:
> Habe gerade einen interessanten Beitrag in der Wikipedia gelesen:
> Administrator Coma l?scht Abstimmungsergebnisse.Was wird dies f?r
> Konsequenzen haben?

Erstmal, wo?
Wenn das Ergebnis in's Handbuch eingearbeitet wurde, dann sehe ich die
L?schung des Ergebnisses (es steht ja immer noch im Archiv) als
berechtigt an.

ciao, tom

--
http://www.tomk32.de - just a geek trying to change the world
   -.-       http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benutzer:TomK32
   /|>	         Bonsai - http://bonsaiwiki.tomk32.de
   / \              http://tomk32.bookcrossing.com


body:
Maybe it's time to drop inverse_timestamp? or do we still need it for
something? Could this also help us squeeze a bit more perfomance?

Lightning


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: ES wiki and EL

body:
Matthias Jordan wrote:

> Hi, folks!
>
> Lightning wrote:
>
>> Since EL content is under the GFDL just like the spanish-language wiki
>
>
> Pardon, but what "EL" are you talking about. I'm just curious because
> I can't really imagine that you want to import articles from
> el.wikipedia.org (in Greek) into a spanish Wikipedia.

sorry, i should have specified. EL as in Enciclopedia Libre. A while ago
the es.wiki was forked, the people that forked created a project called
Enciclopedia Libre (literally: Free Encyclopedia). Their project has
since then become a whole lot bigger (3x) than the current es.wiki

Lightning


from_name: Erik Zachte

subject: [Wikitech-l] RE: Database dump

body:
> The whole backup process is automated, but I start the script manually

> because we're short on disk space and I prefer to keep an eye on it.

I'm confident Jimbo would consider adding diskspace a minor investement,
provided we don't use anything fancy (raid, SCSI)  (Jimbo am I right?).
I guess bandwidth costs are the main expense and several orders of
magnitude larger.

I know that 18 days without a backup is a rare event, but even losing 6
days of edits, uploads and discussions would give me the shivers. Are
they stored on a different disk by the way? If backup is a matter of
minutes per database, then the benefits of a scheduled daily outage far
exceed the costs, it will even save some bandwidth ;)

Backups are an inconvenience until you need them.

Erik Zachte


from_name: Wouter Vanden Hove

subject: [Textbook-l] Anonymous contributions

body:
Op vr 01-08-2003, om 06:55 Daniel Mayer wrote:
> We really need a lawyer's opinion here.

Yes. Since the number of wikis is growing, and Wikipedia is example to
them all, we better get this right.

I suggest to send a mail with these questions to the Creative Commons
people. Perhaps Eben Moglen is also willing to answser. After all, the
FSF supports Wikipedia.

Wouter Vanden Hove
www.opencursus.be
www.open-education.org

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subject: [WikiEN-l] Proliferation of temps

body:
on 8/1/03 4:15 PM, Jimmy O'Regan at jimregan at o2.ie wrote:

> james duffy wrote:
>
>> The battle on [[New Imperialism]] is reaching absurd levels. First we
>> had Pizza Puzzle /insisting/ that his rival version to the main
>> article should be advertised on it.
>
> Why not send him on to Fred Bauder's encyclopaedia, whatever it's
> called. Last I looked, the focus of it seemed to be on providing as many
> different POVs as possible.

Well, I did take this little quarrel as an opportunity to post 3 slightly
different articles on New Imperialism, but that doesn't solve anything for
Wikipedia. Vertigo sets in as I try to read them... Perhaps if I knew
something about the subject it would all be clear with the subtle shading
and spins clear. (I'm pretty sure 172 has got to be up to SOMETHING).

Fred Bauder

http://www.internet-encyclopedia.org


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] RE: Database dump

body:
Nick Reinking wrote:

>If database dumps are cheap, and can be done "on the fly" with MySQL, it
>might be a reasonable plan to just throw in an extra disk and have it
>dump the database every six hours or so.
>
Running the dump slows things down a lot. Partly because compressing the
dump is expensive, and there's no disk space to keep an uncompressed
dump. Also, unless we lock the wiki the cur and old databases will be
inconsistent in the backup. (Which is in fact the present state of the
backups for the English wiki.)

Those wikis not moved to InnoDB would additionally be unable to edit
during a backup, as writes to the tables are locked while they're being
read.

Of course, a replicated server would be updated in real time at much
lower performance cost.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


body:
Lightning wrote:

> In Utf8Case.php we have this huge ~1450 item associative array (
> $wikiUpperChars ). Is this really necessary? Is there a way we could
> avoid having to load such a huge array into memory for every pageview
> by a user in a language that needs it?  This seems like it could pose
> to be a problem in the future.. maybe keeping it in shared memory so
> we dont have to go regenerating it and having all these instances of
> it for every page view? I guess at the time its OK but as UTF8 wiki's
> gain more and more popularity this might become a problem. Or am i
> completely wrong?

There are several things to note here:
* We're using PHP-Accelerator, which caches the parsed opcodes in shared
memory as long as the PHP files don't change. The source code isn't
parsed on every page view.
* The performance of the functions using the array may be more
significant than its inclusion.

Do feel free to do some benchmarking and suggest alternate methods.

> I'm noticing in setup.php that we are include()ing  a whole lot of
> stuff. Some of this stuff might never even be used, so why are we
> include()ing it? We should probably include JUST what we need, this
> would probably save a little tiny bit of memory and processor. I know
> it's not much, but at the same time, why waste at all when we don't
> need too?  Same thing for Skins.php, it include()s all 3 skins. could
> we just include() the one we need?

Probably could. Would it make a difference? Try it.

> Is there a possibility of keeping the banlist in shared memory? Since
> every single hit requires a query to that table, it might help if we
> keep it cached in memory so we can avoid unnecessary querys and load
> on the db.

The banlist is checked only on login and article save, not on every hit.

On the other hand, user info is loaded for every hit by a logged-in user
and newtalk is checked for every single hit.

More use of session variables and the possibility of shared memory may
be worth looking into (please feel free to do so). Keep in mind though
that people may be using the same account in multiple browsers
simultaneously, and it would be good to make it easy and safe to use
multiple front-end web servers talking to the same database server
[cluster].

> I think the banlist cache and the limiting include()s are my most
> reasonable proposals. I also think they would be the easist to
> implement. thoughts? The ban list thing could be implemented fairly
> quickly, and it might help with performance.

Please test and benchmark all suggested performance improvements.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


body:
Lightning wrote:

> Maybe it's time to drop inverse_timestamp? or do we still need it for
> something? Could this also help us squeeze a bit more perfomance?

It really wouldn't change performance at all I think, and removing it
would require reindexing the tables, thus taking the wiki down for many
hours.

We might do it at some point if we're changing the table structure
anyway, but no hurry.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: RSS feeds?

body:
Tobin Richard wrote:

> Very nice! Are these updated automatically?

Yes. Every 5 minutes for English, every 30 minutes for other languages
if I recall. It should also be possible to run the script live...
http://blahblah/w/FeedRDF.php

> If so is the script available?

In CVS, under rdf/ directory. It should be called FeedRDF.php, but for
some reason Lee renamed it to recent.phtml and hid it in a new directory.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Angela

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: ES wiki and EL

body:
EL is the Enciclopedia Libre, a fork from the Spanish
Wikipedia. See
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enciclopedia_Libre.

Angela.

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from_name: Geoffrey Thomas

subject: [WikiEN-l] Special characters (was: morphophonics for wikipedia)

body:
A few messages back (on WikiEN-l) I sent some accented
characters that are found in Unicode/UTF-n but not in Latin-1
using Yahoo! Mail. These apparently appeared on Timwi's client
as HTML entities, but on my client they displayed properly.
Is this just a bug with Y!Mail?

Most other special characters cannot be easily displayed
in my browser. I get the digested form, and some messages
use different character sets than others - and Mozilla
autoguesses the character set as a third, in most cases.
In one digest with links to the Hindi Wikipedia and a UTF-8
apostrophe, the default character set was Chinese Simplified.

Is there something the software can do about this? We can't
assume everyone'll send in UTF-8 (which would have been nice),
and for those like me who receive digests, it's impossible to
get the browser to display two character sets on the same
page. Could the digesting software automatically convert all
e-mails to the same character set, preferably UTF-8?

--[[User:Geoffrey|]] Thomas

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subject: [Wikitech-l] Special characters (was: morphophonics for wikipedia)


from_name: james duffy

body:
It is worth mentioning that in terms of academic credibility, Encarta is not
very highly regarded. In fact I have heard it described as a triumph of
image over substance. But it is great to see wiki doing so well. We have
/so/ many quality articles and also other than the 32K limit, we have
greater scope to go into things in more detail.

I think wiki does need as it develops to be able to have some 'final'
articles that, having reached a clear standard of accuracy, readability etc
can he removed from the editing process. The downside of constant editing is
that some articles that reach a high standard then can lose that as those
who produced the standard leave and someone comes on and rewrites it to a
lower standard. Wiki's open edit policy is its major plus, as it allows us
to evolve and update, but its downside is reliability. Can I be sure if at
8.17pm I read an article /everything/ in it is factual or could I have the
bad luck to read it just after some user either through not knowing what
they were doing or deliberately, mucked it up and added in false
information? For example, Jerusalem's status as the capital of Israel is
disputed. That is stated on wiki (after a battle!). But what if a reader at
8.17 reads a version that says in a POV edit it is an 'undisputed' capital.
Or someone doing an essay on JFK reads an edit at 8.17 that says he was the
33rd not the 35th president?

For all their downsides, the 'centainty of standard' is the one major plus
that Brittanica, World Book, Encarta has. When you read an article you are
getting a definitive version, not that moment's edit. At some stage wiki is
going to face a credibility barrier where people ask 'but can I be sure that
King Edward VI of England actually died on that day, or is it a bad edit?
How can I be sure W.T. Cosgrave said that? How and when we deal with the
'certainty of standard' issue will mark the moment we go from being a good
secondary source that may give a fascinating insight but which just to be
sure you might want to cross check, just in case, to a /guaranteed/ reliable
primary source.

Please don't think I am knocking wiki. It is a superb encyclop?dia that I am
proud to associate with. But it still is in its relative infancy. However
just because we get more hits than other encyclop?dias does not mean we are
as generally reliable as they are. (I came across an article on [[John
Redmond]] some time ago that before rewriting would have completely screwed
up any reader's understanding of the early 20th century Irish leader.) As we
grow and become more famous, people's expectations of our reliability and
our 'certainty of standard' will grow and we are going to need to find a
mechanism to ensure that, while not losing wiki's mass participation ethos.

JT
>
>If only Wikimedia could buy out EB........cheap......Imagine!!
>Ec
>
>Erik Moeller wrote:
>
>>Toby-
>>
>>>Jimmy Wales wrote:
>>>
>>>>So, this is pretty interesting.  According to Alexa.com, Wikipedia is
>>>>now more popular than Britannica.
>>>>
>>>We should probably keep in mind that Britannica is also available in
>>>print.
>>>In fact, that's the brand's traditional medium.
>>>
>>
>>Encarta has very much harmed Britannica's print sales. Britannica counted
>>on their brand name and image, but even many of their customers did not
>>see why they would have to pay thousands of dollars for a paper
>>encyclopedia when they could get a decent encyclopedia, plus lots of
>>multimedia stuff, maps etc. for 100 bucks or less, and the whole thing
>>would fit neatly into their back pocket.
>>
>>Swiss investor Jacob Safra bought Britannica in 1996 (it's still based in
>>Chicago), and the sales staff for the paper version was fired shortly
>>thereafter. Since then the focus has been almost exclusively on the
>>Internet and CD-ROM version, which was massively reduced in price and is
>>now dirt cheap. For some time they even had the full text online --
>>remember, those were the dot com days.
>>
>>Things are looking pretty grim for Britannica. Their Java-based software
>>is a piece of crap, and Encarta has much better marketing. They still have
>>  their original content bonus, but even in terms of content they have
>>massive weaknesses in some areas (for example, compare their article on
>>circumcision with ours). I think the Britannica brand will live on, but in
>>  terms of competition we should be more worried about Encarta (and vice
>>versa).
>>
>>Regards,
>>
>>Erik
>>_______________________________________________
>>WikiEN-l mailing list
>>WikiEN-l at wikipedia.org
>>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>>
>
>
>
>_______________________________________________
>WikiEN-l mailing list
>WikiEN-l at wikipedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

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subject: [Wikitech-l] Special characters

body:
Geoffrey Thomas wrote:

>A few messages back (on WikiEN-l) I sent some accented
>characters that are found in Unicode/UTF-n but not in Latin-1
>using Yahoo! Mail. These apparently appeared on Timwi's client
>as HTML entities, but on my client they displayed properly.
>Is this just a bug with Y!Mail?
>
>Most other special characters cannot be easily displayed
>in my browser. I get the digested form, and some messages
>use different character sets than others - and Mozilla
>autoguesses the character set as a third, in most cases.
>In one digest with links to the Hindi Wikipedia and a UTF-8
>apostrophe, the default character set was Chinese Simplified.
>
Links should always be given in the encoded form, eg:
http://hi.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E0%A4%AE%E0%A5%81%E0%A4%96%E0%A5%8D%E0%A4%AF_%E0%A4%AA%E0%A5%83%E0%A4%B7%E0%A5%8D%E0%A4%A0

rather than raw:
http://hi.wikipedia.org/wiki/?????_?????

The downside is that the links are ugly, illegible, and can get very
long when dealing with non-latin writing systems (6 or 9 URL-encoded
bytes per Unicode character). The upside is that they are pure ASCII and
(modulo line break issues) will work transparently.

In most browsers, the encoded form will be shown in the URL bar and
cut-n-pasted via eg right-click-copy-this-link.

>Is there something the software can do about this? We can't
>assume everyone'll send in UTF-8 (which would have been nice),
>and for those like me who receive digests, it's impossible to
>get the browser to display two character sets on the same
>page. Could the digesting software automatically convert all
>e-mails to the same character set, preferably UTF-8?
>

Go to the list page, eg:
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

and put your address in under "edit options" down at the bottom.

Change your options to use MIME digests instead of plain text digests:
this should make the messages individual attachments instead of dumping
everything in one text chunk, and is more likely to not break things
like encodings and messages with their own attachments. Of course, I
don't know if your mail client will work with that...

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [WikiEN-l] Proliferation of temps

body:
The battle on [[New Imperialism]] is reaching absurd levels. First we had
Pizza Puzzle /insisting/ that his rival version to the main article should
be advertised on it. Whatever about advertising a new draft being prepared
that was scheduled to replace the main article, to have the official article
and PP's personal alternative rewrite seemed absurd. Encyclop?dias do not
normally put in two rival versions of an article. I protected the page to
stop the constant attempts of PP to insert it until people had a chance to
discuss whether this was a good idea. (PP refused to wait until it was
discussed and insisted that he be allowed to have his way). We had a vote
and a narrow majority agreed to put in the link /for one week/.

The page has since been redesigned and reduced in size, negating one of PP's
main complaints about the live page. But now it turns out that we have not
just one but TWO temps being placed on the main page.

This temp madness is becoming a joke. It is barely encyclop?dic to put two
rival drafts on the one page. But now THREE??? We have the main one and two
temps. This is plain silly. We have agreed to PP's temp1 being there for one
week but now introducing Temp 2 is madness. I have removed the Temp 2 link
and will be placing a link to it, alongside Temp 1, on then talk page, where
Temp 1 was only supposed to be linked to in the first place.

JT

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from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Please help test new features

body:
Ray-
> When can we hope that the new feature will be implemented on Wiktionary?
>  Structure is a lot more important there than on Wikipedia.

There are still a couple of bugs to fix and some adjustments to be made
before the remaining wikis are upgraded. For Wiktionary, it would be
interesting to have a minimum article length before the TOC is triggered,
since Wiktionary entries often have a lot of headings while being
relatively short (making the TOC mostly pointless).

Regards,

Erik


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: ES wiki and EL

body:
Hi, folks!

Lightning wrote:

> Since EL content is under the GFDL just like the spanish-language wiki

Pardon, but what "EL" are you talking about. I'm just curious because I
can't really imagine that you want to import articles from
el.wikipedia.org (in Greek) into a spanish Wikipedia.

Confused,

Matthias


subject: [Wikipedia-l] [Fwd: Call for Participation Wizards of OS 3]

body:
Jakob-
> Hallo,

> Ein Konferenzvortrag ist zwar etwas mehr Arbeit als ein
> Wikipedia-Artikel und kann auch nur in begrenztem Rahmen
> gemeinschaftlich erstellt werden, aber die Wizards of OS
> sollte man schon ausn?tzen. Ich bin leider am September
> f?r ein habes Jahr im Ausland, aber vielleicht hat der
> eine oder andere Zeit und Lust?

> Angeblich ist Jimbo Wales da, aber ich finde, man sollte
> auch etwas "von unten" aus der deutschsprachigen Wikipedia
> bringen.

Hi,

Jimbo has agreed to participate in this conference, and I will probably
moderate the panel. Other than that I will try to get representatives from
other collaborative writing projects like Everything2 and H2G2. Hopefully
the conference can also become a meeting place for European Wikipedians,
but it's still a bit early to talk about that (WOS 3 is in April 2004).

Regards,

Erik


from_name: Luc Van Oostenryck

subject: [Wikitech-l] ES wiki and EL: compatibility GPL/GFDL ?

body:
Oualmakran Youssef wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Lately, I am spending a lot of time on es:.
> Sometimes, I spend some hours a week importing articles
> (I would use that time better, if I have not do that).
>
> The main problems about mass-importing are:
>
> *A lot of void template
> (example: http://enciclopedia.us.es/wiki.phtml?title=Atolinga+%28Zacatecas%29)
> *There are still many ''junk'' articles on  EL
> ("hello", obsecenities, questions)
> *Some different naming conventions
> (EL do not make a lot of new subpages, but old ones remain)
>
> Still, I am for a mass-importing tool (ie. a bot)
>
> *A lot of good articles (it takes a lot of time to import them by hand)
> *It could attract more user: more articles and higher position in Google
>
> There is informal collaboration between the two projects, some
> user spend time on both servers. I hope, that EL users will not get
> ungry if I use a bot (I cannot predict their reaction)
>
> There are no talks of rejoining since many months (at least six month,
> I am afraid there will be no new talks before another six months).
>
> My conclusion: I will be pleased that someone make a bot. I would
> like to import say 50-100 articles a day (depending on my free time and
> the availibility of other wikipedians from es)
>
> Thanks in advance if some one could make a bot.
>
> Regards,
> Youssef

Hi Youseff,

If EL is under GPL, then my understanding is that you can't import their articles
into wikipedia (which is GFDL) because the GFDL allow som things that are incompatible
with the GPL (for exemple the fact to keep mention 'this article is based on ...' or 'image coutesy of ...').

I think that this precise point was one of the reason of the split ("wikipedia is not enough free" ...).

Looxix


from_name: Jimmy O'Regan

subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia more popular than Britannica!

body:
james duffy wrote:

> I think wiki does need as it develops to be able to have some 'final'
> articles that, having reached a clear standard of accuracy,
> readability etc can he removed from the editing process.

Removing an article from the editing process isn't a great idea; for
example, as books come on to [[Distributed Proofreaders]] we can get
access to public domain images which may have a place in an article; I
have a few pictures from the "Bellows and Blowing Machines" article, as
well as some incomplete text, which could add to the bellows article,
once I have the complete text (and have "weeded" it).

As for the sifter idea, I'd love to see it done like the languages
links; "Click to see a certified version of this article" or whatever,
but I recognise that this would give a catch-22 type situation.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Proliferation of temps

body:
james duffy wrote:

> The battle on [[New Imperialism]] is reaching absurd levels. First we
> had Pizza Puzzle /insisting/ that his rival version to the main
> article should be advertised on it.

Why not send him on to Fred Bauder's encyclopaedia, whatever it's
called. Last I looked, the focus of it seemed to be on providing as many
different POVs as possible.


from_name: b schewek

subject:
=?iso-8859-1?Q?Re: [Wikipedia-l] Administrator Coma l=F6scht
    Abstimmungsergebnisse?=

body:
----- Original Message -----
From: "Heinz" <h-j.luecking at t-online.de>
Date: Fri, 1 Aug 2003 00:39:53 +0200
To: wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
Subject: [Wikipedia-l] Administrator Coma l?scht Abstimmungsergebnisse

Habe gerade einen interessanten Beitrag in der Wikipedia gelesen:
Administrator Coma l?scht Abstimmungsergebnisse.Was wird dies f?r
Konsequenzen haben?

_______________________________________________
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Wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l

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body:
Von: Heinz
> Habe gerade einen interessanten Beitrag in der Wikipedia gelesen:
> Administrator Coma l?scht Abstimmungsergebnisse.Was wird dies f?r
> Konsequenzen haben?

(Pardon wg. letzter leerer Mail)

Da die Wikipedia in erster Linie auf Konsens, und nur wenn es nicht
anders geht auf Mehrheitsentscheidungen arbeitet, hat so etwas
nat?rlich keine 'Konsequenzen'. Was f?r Konsequenzen ?berhaupt?

Mir geht, wie einige andere auch schon angemerkt haben, die ganze
Abstimmerei auf den Nerv. Kompromissbereitschaft und Erarbeiten einer
/breit/ getragenen Linie bleiben immer mehr auf der Strecke.

Schewek
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subject: [Wikipedia-l] PNG format???

body:
Ray Saintonge wrote:

> Jimmy O'Regan wrote:

(stuff)

> That attitude is nothing more than techie talk.

Yeah. But the guy (and I'm basing the presumption on his name, just in
case anyone points out the thread on gender neutrality) said JPG and GIF
were the web standards, I said, in an admittedly techie way, that PNG
was also.

> Many users are satisfied with machinery that fulfils their basic
> requirements.  I expect that many Wikipedia users, who are promarily
> interested in WP's text contents, fall in that category.  They are
> quite rightly annoyed when they are constantly asked to upgrade or
> update their systems to accomodate a technical feature that they never
> wanted and will probably never use.  Keeping track of RFC's may be
> fine for the techies, but it leaves the average user in a fog of
> confusion.  For many users the simple idea of needing to upgrade is
> extremely stressful.

Well, for people who want text only, lynx works perfectly, I've just
checked. If people want all the bells and whistles, there's a certain
level of features their browser should support - it's not like we have
flash, VRML and real video streams all over the shop. This person wanted
us to switch from PNG to GIF and JPG because he, a minority of one so
far, couldn't view them. What next? A friend of mine still uses the
browser that OS/2 came with in 1995, which doesn't support JPG. Should
we get rid of the JPGs for him? And yes, I realise upgrading scares a
lot of people, but there's a tech recession, they should be able to get
a good price from a tech :-P


from_name: Tobin Richard

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: RSS feeds?

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:
> Tobin Richard wrote:
>
>> Hello,
>>
>> Has anyone thought of setting up a RSS feed for Wikipedia? I know that
>> there was one back in the early days but there doesn't seem to be one
>> now... (and from memory the old one wasn't an official feed).
>
>
> http://pliny.wikipedia.org/tools/
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

Very nice! Are these updated automatically? If so is the script available?

Tobin.


from_name: Yann Forget

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: What should I do?

body:
Hi,

I think that some more caching could help.
Why not, by example, generating HTML pages for the home page of every WP (not
only for logged users, as it is now - I think) ?
So the HTML home page would be created each time it's modified.
That would reduce the load on the database. Many PHP project use this kind of
strategy (SPIP, etc.).

Just my 2 c.
Yann

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subject: [WikiEN-l] Proliferation of temps

body:
>From: Fred Bauder  (I'm pretty sure 172 has got to be up to SOMETHING).
>
Yes, writing an academic standard article.

JT

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from_name: Paul Ebermann

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Phase IV

body:
"Timwi" skribis:
> Erik Moeller wrote:
>
> > I encourage you to move forward with this, and to commit all code to a
> > separate CVS module.
>
> Well, to be entirely honest, I'd rather not use the SourceForge CVS
> server. It's cumbersome and full of problems. It doesn't work in Linux
> for me, and in Windows I have to keep entering my password for every
> single request (not just the commits).

I use Cygwin's CVS with SSH-Connection - there you
can create your own private key on your computer,
and upload the public key to Sourceforge (there is
an editbox for this purpose).

After that you don't need to type in the password ...

Paul


from_name: Timwi

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: PNG format???

body:
Ray Saintonge wrote:

> Jimmy O'Regan wrote:
>
> Many users are satisfied with machinery that fulfils their basic
> requirements.  I expect that many Wikipedia users, who are promarily
> interested in WP's text contents, fall in that category. [...]
> IMHO backward
> compatibility should permit nearly full access to Wikipedia for any
> system up to 10 years old, perhaps even older.

It does though. People with hardware and software that is 10 years old
can perfectly well read the text, and perhaps even view some (if not
most) of the images. Which leads us to what you said yourself:

> Of course some features will not work

which is exactly the point. People get access to the really important
stuff (the text) in a backwards-compatible fashion. HTML is
backwards-compatible. CSS declarations and JavaScript are commented out
for backwards compatibility. Even UTF-8 is backwards-compatible with
ASCII, and tomorrow's Internet protocol (IPv6) will be
backwards-compatible with the current protocol (IPv4).

They just can't view the PNGs. Similarly, as mentioned before, users of
an old version of OS/2 can't view JPEGs. If they are so desperate to
view all the images, then they certainly would have upgraded; if they
use 10-year-old hardware and software, then they probably don't make
very high demands at technology and are more easily satisfied.

Analogously, they won't be able to view the Hebrew (Russian, Chinese,
whatever) Wikipedia if their 10-year-old technology can't interpret
UTF-8; but then again, there's probably no way it can do Hebrew anyway,
so it does not matter that they cannot read UTF-8.

Of course we know old software and hardware are still in use, and they
do have their right to exist and continue to exist, but technology is
also advancing, and there's no reason to stay back in stone age. That
would be a major obstacle, as shown above: Without UTF-8, or Unicode in
general, a lot of languages aren't representable at all. (Maybe Hebrew
has an 8-bit character set, but that's not the point.) If someone views
an English article with a few Chinese characters in it, and they can't
view the Chinese characters, they still have the rest of the article
(which usually also contains Pinyin transliterations, etc.).

It's not like we're requiring the newest/latest technology. It's just
that users of 10-year-old technology will get only what their technology
can offer.

Greetings,
Timwi


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Cooperating with IMDB, FreeDB etc.

body:
I think it would be great if we could make attempts to cooperate with
large, proprietary and open content suppliers that do not directly compete
with us. I am specifically referring to databases like

- IMDB.com for movies, games, TV
- freedb.org for albums
- Amazon.com for books and .. lots of other stuff.

We would ask these groups to provide a link for each entry in their
database to the Wikipedia article about that entry, whether it exists or
not. For example, if I looked up "Bowling for Columbine" in IMDB I would
get "Description at Wikipedia: 'Bowling for Columbine is a Academy Award-
winning documentary film starring Michael Moore. It opened ..' (more)"

If I looked up a non-existent movie, I would get "Describe this movie at
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia."

Links to existing articles would point to locally stored copies at IMDB,
with an "edit the current revision of this article at Wikipedia, the free
encyclopedia" link at the bottom.

Why would IMDB do this?

1) IMDB doesn't have many good movie summaries because they lack a
collaborative writing module. They could implement one, but why not just
use existing resources?
2) IMDB visitors would only leave IMDB when following an explicit link to
Wikipedia. Otherwise they would stay within the site.
3) With some Sifter-like interface, we could make sure that IMDB always
has the latest trusted copy, thereby giving them an advantage even over
Wikipedia proper.
4) Because of the FDL, they can tear their bonds with us whenever they
want, without losing the content.
5) Wikipedia already has some brand name recognition. We have a positive
image that might rub off on those who cooperate with us.

Why would we do this?

1) IMDB has a huge community of movie enthusiasts who could contribute
much useful information.
2) Similarly, in the case of freedb, instead of just importing tracklists,
we would invite people to actually describe the content of albums, to
write real articles about them.
3) Being linked prominently from large sites like these would strengthen
our brand substantially and increasingly turn Wikipedia into a household
name.

There are some possible problems:

- Free databases tend to list lots of obscure stuff that probably does not
warrant encyclopedic inclusion. Similarly, we would not want an article
about every toy or product listed at Amazon.com. We would have to
negotiate with each database supplier the criteria for when the Wikipedia
link/copy is shown. For example, we could ask IMDB to only do it on movies
that have a gross earnings listing (usually only the larger ones), or
FreeDB to only do it on albums that have all data fields filled etc.

- We might not want to be associated with shady businesses bent for world
domination like Amazon.com. However, sooner or later we will have to think
about with whom we want to cooperate, and IMHO "only open content people"
is too tight a rule.

- The mere inquiry might inspire these groups to think about creating
their own, proprietary content collaborative writing modules, e.g. an IMDB
article writing module whose contents are copyrighted by their authors and
cannot be used by us. However, if that is a real threat, then it will
probably happen sooner or later anyway, and it could be argued that we
should give these people an alternative *before* they do it.

What do you think? Perhaps we should wait with more concrete inquiries
until we have more resources to handle the traffic, but in general I
believe it's worth giving it a shot.

Regards,

Erik


subject: [Wikitech-l] Using page cache when database is down

body:
I've made some quick hacks to fall back to displaying cached pages where
available when the database can't be connected to.

Change is in CVS and on the test wiki; you can simulate the database
being down here:
http://test.wikipedia.org/w/breakwiki.php

I've also pulled some of the caching stuff out of Article and into a
separate CacheManager class; some more refactoring is likely warranted.

The new code dispenses as well with the duplicate uncompressed cache
files when using gzip mode; a browser that doesn't support gzip-encoded
pages should have the page fed to it uncompressed on the fly. This will
significantly reduce space requirements for the cache at little CPU cost
(most browsers do support gzip, and decoding gzip is relatively
inexpensive).

Please test in various browsers!

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Database dump

body:
> Running the dump slows things down a lot.
> Partly because compressing the dump is expensive,
> and there's no disk space to keep an uncompressed dump.

Brion you mentioned disk space shortage before.

A 120GB Western Digital, IDE, U100, 7200rpm, 8MB cache disk is 135 euro
($ 145) here in Amsterdam. Right now about 15 *un*compressed backups of
all databases could be stored on it. So it will probably solve this
issue for another year. Compressing once a week (as is done now) for
download purposes would suffice.

When there are two hot synched servers one could be brought offline
daily to do the backup. The slower response times during that short
period, if properly announced on the site, are a minor issue compared to
major data loss.

Erik Zachte


from_name: Toby Bartels

body:
james duffy wrote in part:

>I think wiki does need as it develops to be able to have some 'final'
>articles that, having reached a clear standard of accuracy, readability etc
>can be removed from the editing process. The downside of constant editing
>is that some articles that reach a high standard then can lose that as
>those who produced the standard leave and someone comes on and rewrites it
>to a lower standard.

I don't think that an article sould ever be /removed/ from editing,
especially when we don't know what light the future may shed on it.
Even EB doesn't stop editing their articles for the next edition.
Rather, they /capture/ an article when it's good and publish that.

This is what the Sifter project is supposed to do.
I doubt that the time will /ever/ come that people say
?Look it up on Wikipedia -- that's a reliable source.?.
Rather, they'll say ?Look it up on /Sifterpedia/.?.
Nobody's really working on the Sifter project right now --
but that can change at any time.

-- Toby


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Special characters

body:
Geoffrey Thomas wrote in part:

>Most other special characters cannot be easily displayed
>in my browser. I get the digested form, and some messages
>use different character sets than others - and Mozilla
>autoguesses the character set as a third, in most cases.
>In one digest with links to the Hindi Wikipedia and a UTF-8
>apostrophe, the default character set was Chinese Simplified.

Try setting your options for the mailing list
so that the digest comes with MIME enabled.
This is off by default in case of broken readers,
but there's no reason that anybody should leave it off
if they have a decent mail reader -- like Mozilla.
Then if an individual message specifies its charset,
your mail reader will know and won't have to guess.

No guarantees that this will work, but try it.

-- Toby


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Special characters


subject: [WikiEN-l] Proliferation of temps

body:
Jimmy O'Regan wrote:

>JtdIRL wrote:

>>The battle on [[New Imperialism]] is reaching absurd levels. First we
>>had Pizza Puzzle /insisting/ that his rival version to the main
>>article should be advertised on it.

>Why not send him on to Fred Bauder's encyclopaedia, whatever it's
>called. Last I looked, the focus of it seemed to be on providing as many
>different POVs as possible.

It's the Internet Encylcopedia: <http://www.internet-encyclopedia.info/>.

-- Toby


from_name: Gutza

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Cooperating with IMDB, FreeDB etc.

body:
I hate to be a naysayer, but although your idea appeals to me in a
generic way (perfect world kind of way, where everything is
interconnected), I doubt this would be feasible, and even desired by
either party. The problem is politics (well, "religion" would be the
better euphemism): commercial sites generally hate to share their
resources (which they'd have to do, even if in a small measure, by
providing identifiable links to free resources, which in turn could be
back-tracked to build free databases of their content, and nobody could
object). On the other hand there's Wikipedia, for which I don't think
it's such a good idea to associate with commercial sites just yet. And
I'm not referring specifically to your 2nd point in the "possible
problems" section below ("associating with shady businesses bent for
world domination"), it's just the fact that in the post-dot com era,
anyone associating in any way with a commercial *anything* is seen more
or less as having a tendency to go per-pay. That's why I say "I don't
think it's such a good idea just yet" -- maybe some time from now... But
then again, I personally would love the idea. :D

Obviously just my 2c,
Gutza

Erik Moeller wrote:

> I think it would be great if we could make attempts to cooperate with
> large, proprietary and open content suppliers that do not directly compete
> with us. I am specifically referring to databases like
>
> - IMDB.com for movies, games, TV
> - freedb.org for albums
> - Amazon.com for books and .. lots of other stuff.
>
> We would ask these groups to provide a link for each entry in their
> database to the Wikipedia article about that entry, whether it exists or
> not. For example, if I looked up "Bowling for Columbine" in IMDB I would
> get "Description at Wikipedia: 'Bowling for Columbine is a Academy Award-
> winning documentary film starring Michael Moore. It opened ..' (more)"
>
> If I looked up a non-existent movie, I would get "Describe this movie at
> Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia."
>
> Links to existing articles would point to locally stored copies at IMDB,
> with an "edit the current revision of this article at Wikipedia, the free
> encyclopedia" link at the bottom.
>
> Why would IMDB do this?
>
> 1) IMDB doesn't have many good movie summaries because they lack a
> collaborative writing module. They could implement one, but why not just
> use existing resources?
> 2) IMDB visitors would only leave IMDB when following an explicit link to
> Wikipedia. Otherwise they would stay within the site.
> 3) With some Sifter-like interface, we could make sure that IMDB always
> has the latest trusted copy, thereby giving them an advantage even over
> Wikipedia proper.
> 4) Because of the FDL, they can tear their bonds with us whenever they
> want, without losing the content.
> 5) Wikipedia already has some brand name recognition. We have a positive
> image that might rub off on those who cooperate with us.
>
> Why would we do this?
>
> 1) IMDB has a huge community of movie enthusiasts who could contribute
> much useful information.
> 2) Similarly, in the case of freedb, instead of just importing tracklists,
> we would invite people to actually describe the content of albums, to
> write real articles about them.
> 3) Being linked prominently from large sites like these would strengthen
> our brand substantially and increasingly turn Wikipedia into a household
> name.
>
> There are some possible problems:
>
> - Free databases tend to list lots of obscure stuff that probably does not
> warrant encyclopedic inclusion. Similarly, we would not want an article
> about every toy or product listed at Amazon.com. We would have to
> negotiate with each database supplier the criteria for when the Wikipedia
> link/copy is shown. For example, we could ask IMDB to only do it on movies
> that have a gross earnings listing (usually only the larger ones), or
> FreeDB to only do it on albums that have all data fields filled etc.
>
> - We might not want to be associated with shady businesses bent for world
> domination like Amazon.com. However, sooner or later we will have to think
> about with whom we want to cooperate, and IMHO "only open content people"
> is too tight a rule.
>
> - The mere inquiry might inspire these groups to think about creating
> their own, proprietary content collaborative writing modules, e.g. an IMDB
> article writing module whose contents are copyrighted by their authors and
> cannot be used by us. However, if that is a real threat, then it will
> probably happen sooner or later anyway, and it could be argued that we
> should give these people an alternative *before* they do it.
>
> What do you think? Perhaps we should wait with more concrete inquiries
> until we have more resources to handle the traffic, but in general I
> believe it's worth giving it a shot.
>
> Regards,
>
> Erik


subject: [Textbook-l] Anonymous contributions

body:
LittleDan wrote:

>If we just do that, we'd need some way to know their
>name in order to cite it, which is impossible. Why not
>have it all just be the same as Wikipedia is? That
>seems to be working. I don't like ownership of
>knowledge, and I'd rather that everything contributed
>to wikibooks, anonymous or otherwise, is considered
>authored by wikibooks, just like Wikipedia.
>Additionally, some textbooks (like my Algebra I
>textbook, for one) are partially based on Wikipedia
>content, so it would be nearly impossible to say that
>all of the non-anonymous contributers in any way own
>the content; that would just be too broad.

At first, you seem to be saying that we shouldn't change things.
And then you describe the way that you'd like things to work.

Unfortunately, if I've understood you correctly,
then these two things that you're saying are contradictory.
That's absolutely /not/ how Wikipedia works now.
This /is/ basically the suggestion for the change.

-- Toby


body:
Erik Moeller wrote:

>Hmz, this only displays the Main Page for me, not the linked pages where I
>only get the "Sorry, the database is down" text but not the actual
>content.
>
Most pages on the test wiki aren't cached yet. Try any of these:

Anson_County%2C_North_Carolina
Auto-TOC
Aaron
Be
Ashland%2C_Kentucky
Wikipedia%3AHelp
Affirmative_action
Albategnius
Main_Page
Talk%3AMain_Page
Alabaster_Township%2C_Michigan
Wikip%C3%A9dia%3AProjet%2C_Chronologie_du_monde%2Ftest3%2F101

Or visit a few others as an anon first.

>On a related note, wouldn't it make sense to only cache the article body,
>so we can also use the cache for logged in users?
>
Could do, but there are still a lot of options that produce modified
code. Some should be made more stylesheet-friendly, others we can simply
detect and ignore for some users only.

We'd also lose the compression (which shaves about a quarter off our
bandwidth usage IIRC) unless we kept both full-page and body-only copies
(or compressed on the fly, which would use more CPU).

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Fred Bauder

subject: [WikiEN-l] Proliferation of temps

body:
on 8/2/03 6:16 AM, Toby Bartels at toby+wikipedia at math.ucr.edu wrote:

>
> It's the Internet Encylcopedia: <http://www.internet-encyclopedia.info/>.

No, It was up under that name on http://www.featureprice.com but they went
broke and that address is no longer accessable.

Internet_Encyclopedia is hosted on ibiblio (http://www.ibiblio.org) and is
at:

http://www.Internet-Encyclopedia.org

Fred Bauder

http://www.internet-encyclopedia.org


from_name: Christopher Mahan

body:
--- Toby Bartels <toby+wikipedia at math.ucr.edu> wrote:

> This is what the Sifter project is supposed to do.
> I doubt that the time will /ever/ come that people say
> ?Look it up on Wikipedia -- that's a reliable source.?.
> Rather, they'll say ?Look it up on /Sifterpedia/.?.
> Nobody's really working on the Sifter project right now --
> but that can change at any time.

I rather think that people realize that the web is always "under
construction", and that since time generally allows new knowledge to
come to light, the W will generally increase in quality.

Also, the EB is trusted as far as people trust a British commercial
entity. The British, as a nation and to their credit, are probably
the most even keeled in terms of their pov. However, they cannot
touch the diversity of thoughts and points of view that is available
on a truly international encyclopedia. They are still western in
outlook, and maintain quite a fondness for the scientific process, at
the expense in my opinion for more populist notions.

currentMail.rantLevel=0

=====
Christopher Mahan
chris_mahan at yahoo.com
818.943.1850 cell
http://www.christophermahan.com/

__________________________________
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body:
Christopher Mahan wrote:

>Also, the EB is trusted as far as people trust a British commercial
>entity. The British, as a nation and to their credit, are probably
>the most even keeled in terms of their pov.
>
Actually, the EB has been owned and operated in here in the US of A
since the early 20th century. See:
http://corporate.britannica.com/company_info.html

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Rick

body:
Christopher Mahan <chris_mahan at yahoo.com> wrote:
Also, the EB is trusted as far as people trust a British commercial
entity. The British, as a nation and to their credit, are probably
the most even keeled in terms of their pov. However, they cannot
touch the diversity of thoughts and points of view that is available
on a truly international encyclopedia. They are still western in
outlook, and maintain quite a fondness for the scientific process, at
the expense in my opinion for more populist notions.

Isn't the Encyclopedia Brittanica an American commercial entity?

RickK, making his first post on the mailing list

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SBC Yahoo! DSL - Now only $29.95 per month!
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from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] A little more light refactoring

body:
I've broken the user interface functions for the edit page out of
Article.php into a separate EditPage class in (surprisingly)
EditPage.php. Minimal changes so far.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: tarquin

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: morphophonics for wikipedia

body:
Timwi wrote:

> Geoffrey Thomas wrote:
>
>     Geoffrey Thomas / j?f'r? t?'m?s / JEF-ree TAH-muhs
>
Yes but for a UK speaker, the above would be wrong.
TAH and TOH is not the same.
(we have an article on it with sound samples but I can't find it)