from_name: Pieter Suurmond

subject: [Wikitech-l] Postgres

body:
Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
>
> On Tue, Jan 07, 2003 at 03:38:09PM -0800, Brion Vibber wrote:
> > On mar, 2003-01-07 at 14:40, Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
> > > * it might be good idea to consider making our own searching system
> > >     instead of relying on something provided by database
> >
> > Hell, why rely on a database? Why not write our own storage system? And
> > filesystem... and virtual memory... and process manager... :)
> >
> > We shouldn't have to be a wheel factory; if a good, fast, flexible
> > search mechanism is available in our database we should use it.
>
> Searching doesn't seem like something "general",
> it's almost always specific to given usage.
>
> Examples of magic that would be nice to have (nothing urgent):
> 1. On Polish Wikipedia, if someone tries a query and no hits are
>    generated, and it didn't contain any diactrics,
>    try to search undiactricized version of whole database.
>    Some people for some reason write ASCII Polish while on Internet.
> 2. Dictionary searches would also need more magic. See:
>    http://wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Alternative_vision_of_multilingual_dictionary
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikipedia.org
> http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

Hi there,

I'm VERY new here. Just read Alternative_vision_of_multilingual_dictionary and I think these
are 'wise words'. Think I agree with most things said there. It is indeed a very
fundamental problem. :-)
The more I think about it, the less I want to say about it.
I am just wondering whether we can learn from Kohonen's Self-Organising-algorithm.
Can we use neural networks (fuzzy logic, etc) at all in Wiki software? ?
(In general, neural networks don't perform well on 'symbolic' data, I know that
 but maybe,.. with a lot of preprocessing,... gathering statistical data, link-counts,
 and such,.... maybe then, the software could be made as 'self-organising' as
 humans are?
I've played around a bit with Self-Organising-Maps and pattern-recognition in 'raw' data.
But I'm not too familiar with linguistics,... or the 'symbolic-approach'.

As Wikis evolve, we'll need more and more sub-structuring, and more and more 'protection'.
(Like in Kohonen's SOM, where 'neighbourhood-space' decreases during self-organisation,
 more and more (groups of!) people will start using their OWN Wiki-site.
 Because Wiki-SOFTWARE does not reorganise itself, humans will have to do it

Someone here on this list familiar with Kohonen-SOM-stuff?

This is a 'tricky' discussion here, on this list.... very exciting yes, on the one hand,
but I also think it is a bit of an 'endless discussion', it's a very fundamental problem.... :-)

Just keep adding more and more features to the software will not solve the problem.
Better think about removing 'options for the user' than adding new ones.
Very curious how Wiki will develop in the future.

Does anyone know if there are C or C++, CGI or standalone-server versions
of WikiSource?

Thanks,
Pieter Suurmond


list: wikien-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: james duffy

subject: [WikiEN-l] Micronations

body:
I agree totally, Zoe. This sort of stuff may be humourous, but there is a
time and a place, and this isn't the time and Wiki isn't the place. This
micronations stuff has to be stopped before other people get the idea that
they should try to add in their own 'stuff' too, and discredits the whole
project.

JT.

>From: Zoe <zoecomnena at yahoo.com>
>Reply-To: wikien-l at wikipedia.org
>To: wikien-l at wikipedia.org
>Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Micronations
>Date: Tue, 7 Jan 2003 21:35:54 -0800 (PST)
>
>
>I strongly agree with this.  By allowing nonsense like this to exist in the
>Wikipedia, it taints the entire project.
>Zoe
>  daniwo59 at aol.com wrote:In a message dated 1/7/2003 10:01:05 PM Eastern
>Standard Time, cunctator at kband.com writes:
>
>On Tue, 2003-01-07 at 21:20, daniwo59 at aol.com wrote:
> >We now have an extensive and linked list of imaginary countries,
>including my
> >personal favorite, "Purple Bunny" (I kid you not). Another link is to the
> >Confederate Online States. Will we have an article for each state in the
> >"confederacy" too? I think this is getting a tad excessive. Anyone else
>think
> >so too?
> >
>My question is, so what? Wikipedia is not paper. If you think it's
>excessive, then don't contribute to it.
>
>The real problem is that most of the entries are being written in CIA
>World Factbook style, not Wikipedia style.
>
>
>I would like to think that we are trying to put together a serious
>encyclopedia. It has nothing to do with whether we are paper or not.
>
>
>---------------------------------
>Do you Yahoo!?
>Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now

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from_name: koyaanisqatsi at nupedia.com

subject: [WikiEN-l] Micronations

body:
>I again submit my key criterion for inclusion of information in
Wikipedia:
>The information needs to be *factually verifiable*. If someone adds
>information about their fictional micronation project to Wikipedia,
our main problem is
>this: If this is not written down anywhere except by that person, it
is not
>sufficiently verifiable. Nobody else can update the article because
nobody
>else can, with reasonable effort, attain the degree of factual
familiarity
>necessary.

This falls under the "no original research" rule, except in this case
there's not even much research.  (Incidentally, that's why I have been
deleting the [[wikibriq]] article & will probably continue to do so.)

kq

wikikarma payment (I've been forgetting):
[[Korea]] at 03:24 Jan 8, 2003 (a paste job from a source in the
public domain)
[[Demographics of North Korea]] at 03:20 Jan 8, 2003, other pages of
North Korea at around the same time
[[Henriette Roosenburg]] at 05:49 Jan 5, 2003 (creation of page, not a
paste)
[[Mark Jonathan Harris]] at 22:32 Jan 5, 2003 (new page from notes
hearing him speak)


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: wiki pedista

subject: [Wikipedia-l] non-profit? language neutral www.wikipedia.org?

body:
Hello all,
   I wanted to know the status of a couple of issues.
First: how is the non-profit going? Will we have
wikipedia foundation this year?
Second: was there any agreement about making
www.wikipedia.org the face of the whole project, not
just
the english wikipedia?
Happy New Year, (just over a week late)

AstroNomer

__________________________________________________
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Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now.
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from_name: Anthere

body:
--- tarquin <tarquin at planetunreal.com> wrote:
>
>
> wiki pedista wrote:
>
> >Second: was there any agreement about making
> >www.wikipedia.org the face of the whole project,
> not
> >just
> >the english wikipedia?o/wikipedia-l
> >
> There were two problems:
> 1. It will upset Google. Well, folks, at the moment
> we are largely
> Google-blind. Might be a good time to move!

ey, could anyone explain how we "measure" how much we
are known by google ?

> 2. What to put at www.wikipedia.org. This boiled
> down to:
>
> a) a multilingual portal page
> b) a browser-sniffing thing that would send users to
> the right place
>
> and nobody could agree on which was best.
>
> That was about it, right?

Maybe we need more ideas...:-)
Maybe newcomers ? after they spend hours trying to
find and read last fall messages on the topic on the
mailing list :-))
Then maybe we could think over how to take a decision
together properly ? :-)))

http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consensus_decision_making

> Now copy the above text and send it to yourself 500
> times to simulate
> the ongoing debate ;-)

May we do a reply all to have some fun ?

Does anybody have a nice free picture of a french "bar
parisien" taken on a trip in our absolutely beautiful
capital ? Or a shot of an old country inn ? We need one...

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from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [WikiEN-l] Micronations

body:
> We now have an extensive and linked list of imaginary countries, including
> my
> personal favorite, "Purple Bunny" (I kid you not). Another link is to the
> Confederate Online States. Will we have an article for each state in the
> "confederacy" too? I think this is getting a tad excessive. Anyone else
> think
> so too?

The [[Micronation]] page is OK. The [[List of micronations]] page is a bad
idea, because it suggests that we want separate articles for every single
fantasy project out there, which is not the case. It should be incorporated into
the [[Micronation]] article, with links only to those micronations with some
actual history and participation and the others listed, without links, in the
"creative fiction" department.

I again submit my key criterion for inclusion of information in Wikipedia:
The information needs to be *factually verifiable*. If someone adds
information about their fictional micronation project to Wikipedia, our main problem is
this: If this is not written down anywhere except by that person, it is not
sufficiently verifiable. Nobody else can update the article because nobody
else can, with reasonable effort, attain the degree of factual familiarity
necessary.

Furthermore, we do not like articles that are destined to remain stubs
forever - these should better be incorporated into other articles.

Compare [[K. Kay Sheain]]. Kay is a Wikipedia contributor (Isis) and has
created an article about herself. To make the information factually verifiable,
she has uploaded scanned newspaper articles (further information can be found
on the web as well).

Regards,

Erik

--
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NEU: Mit GMX ins Internet. Rund um die Uhr f?r 1 ct/ Min. surfen!


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] C-source and trouble with Netscape on IRIX

body:
On mer, 2003-01-08 at 03:13, Pieter Suurmond wrote:
> Another thing I want to mention: On Silicon Graphics (IRIX6.5) and
> Netscape 4.7x, pages on XX.wikipedia.org look scrambled,... something
> goes wrong with layers or so:

Netscape 4.x is notoriously bad at following standard HTML and CSS. If
you log in you can disable the quickbar in your preferences, and you'll
have an easier time of it.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikipedia-l] www.wikipedia.org

body:
My opinion is that:

a)www.wikipedia.org should be a multilingual greeting
page,
with the language recognition used to highlight that
language's wikipedia link (I think I saw an example of
this somewhere).

b)www.wikipedia.org/wiki/something should still point
to
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/something for back compatibility
reasons.

Ok. Now I have to send this only 499 more times.

AstroNomer

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body:
Brion Vibber wrote:
>
> On mar, 2003-01-07 at 19:28, Pieter Suurmond wrote:
> [a bunch of stuff beyond my ken]
> [...]
> > Does anyone know if there are C or C++, CGI or standalone-server versions
> > of WikiSource?
>
> There are quite a few different implementations of the wiki concept in
> various languages and with various backends, including some standalone
> servers. See the big list at: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiEngines
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikipedia.org
> http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

Thanks Brion,

I've carefully inspected http://c2.com/cgi/wiki and I've read about a
C version (which seems to be lost) but I cannot find it anywhere.

Another thing I want to mention: On Silicon Graphics (IRIX6.5) and
Netscape 4.7x, pages on XX.wikipedia.org look scrambled,... something
goes wrong with layers or so:
http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kort_Overzicht is quite UNreadable.

Well, thanks anyway.
I like Wikipedia,
Pieter Suurmond


from_name: tarquin

subject: [WikiEN-l] Am I wasting my time?

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:

>>I agree... seems like people are proposing banning at the drop of a hat,
>>now. I
>>think we're getting lazy. So much easier to shoot the bastards than to
>>talk to
>>them, isn't it?
>>
>>
>
>Several people have tried to talk to Frank, but he is just blathering
>incomprehensibly.
>
>
He's found his own corner to blather in:

http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%3AWikiProject_Encyclopedic_Network

Mav, Elo, Zoe -- take note: he has press-ganged you!! ;-)

>
>

>
>


from_name: Neil Harris

subject: [Wikitech-l] Wikipedia in Google

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:

>On mar, 2003-01-07 at 05:25, Erik Moeller wrote:
>Upon noticing that the main pages and mailing list archives _are_
>indexed, I have my suspicions about our robots.txt file; the line:
>
>  Disallow: /w
>
>perhaps should be:
>
>  Disallow: /w/
>
>The former may be accidentally blocking /wiki/<arcticle-name> paths
>-- which of course form the bulk of our content! -- in addition to the
>scripted pages via direct access to the /w subdirectory that it's
>intended to block.
>
>I have updated the robots.txt file; if indeed this is how the googlebot
>was interpreting the line, I hope we can be respidered soon...
>
>-- brion vibber (brion at pobox.com / brion at wikipedia.org)
>
>
>
Alas, I think you're reight. The robots exclusion standard suggests a
simple substring comparison be used in implementations, and all their
examples of directory exclusion use the slash.

-- Neil

>
>
>


subject: [Wikitech-l] Image handling redesign proposal

body:
On Die, 2003-01-07 at 19:37, Magnus Manske wrote:
> >2) Smaller versions of images should be auto-generated in a separate
> >directory similar to the math/ directory used for texvc's images. The
> >small versions would be viewed on the article where the [[Image]] tag is
> >included, whereas the image would link to the original size version.
> >
> Two items with this one:
> 1. A thumbnail should be generated upon upload, so we don't have to wade
> through thaton every page display,
> 2. *if* and *only if* that is necessary. The images DW uploaded lately
> to replace mine don't really need a thumbnail ;-)

As others pointed out, trying to find the "correct" size for an image
automatically is a bad idea. Sometimes you want a large version of the
image in the article, sometimes you do not.

> >3) The image page content should be included by default below the image
> >(preceded by a
). That way when you type
> >
> >	[[Image:foo.jpg]]
> >
> >You get
> >
> >

> >	This is an ugly photo!
> >
> >To suppress this and type a manual caption, you would have to do
> >something like:
> >
> >	[[Image:foo.jpg notext]]
> >
> That will break almost every layout!
> Try a 100-pixel-image, aligned in a table or a div, and put "
This is
> a very long description that will break every damned layout on
> wikipedia!" behind the image...

With proper HTML this is not a problem. See [[Carl Sagan]] for an
example of a relatively long caption in a table. But you are correct
that suddenly showing the content of image pages on the article pages
might break many simple layouts. It would therefore make more sense to
reverse the syntax, that is,

	[[Image:foo.jpg showtext]]

shows the text, whereas by default, it is hidden.

> >- It is somewhat counter-intuitive to have the caption rendered
> >implicitly on a page that includes an [[Image:foo.jpg]] tag. The
> >alternative would be to do away with image pages as regular
> >content-pages altogether. (Realistically, having a separate image
> >namespace may have been a bad idea in the first place.)
> >
> How about the alt tag thingy I installed at the test site?

There's a very limited class of cases where the ALT tag makes sense, and
that is with navigation buttons and the like. In these cases,
blind/disabled users get relevant information, whereas others can, in
some browsers, optionally get the ALT information by hovering, something
many users are familiar with from the toolbar icons in applications like
MS Word.

In almost all other cases, having the caption below the image makes much
more sense:
* Most people won't expect any meaningful text by hovering over photos
* Not all browsers show the text when hovering (Mozilla 1.2.1 doesn't
seem to, for example)
* Some of the browsers that do show the text have trouble with long
lines.

> For an alternative mechanism of handling images, see
> http://nupedia.com/article/long/Polymerase+Chain+Reaction/  (RIP), which
> I hacked some centuries ago ;-)

No offense, but this IMHO clearly demonstrates the problems with the
auto-thumbnail approach. The images are not recognizable in the article,
and it is obvious that for some of them, making them larger would make
sense, whereas for others, the small version is OK. Let's leave that
choice to the editors, and just agree on some policies.

Regards,

Erik
--
FOKUS - Fraunhofer Insitute for Open Communication Systems
Project BerliOS - http://www.berlios.de


from_name: Magnus Manske

subject: [Wikitech-l] Special pages cache?

body:
Axel Boldt wrote:

>--- Erik Moeller <erik_moeller at gmx.de> wrote:
>
>
>>>Some of the special pages, like Most Wanted, have been deactivated
>>>during busy times. Would it be a good idea to store the results of
>>>the last generated version as a "regular" article?
>>>Example: I request "Special:Most Wanted" when it is available. The
>>>link list I get is written into "Wikipedia:Most Wanted".
>>>
>>>
>>Good idea. Should the cached copy perhaps be in the Special:
>>namespace,
>>too, and uneditable? Otherwise people might be surprised when their
>>edits are overwritten.
>>
>>Having Talk: for the special pages might also be useful.
>>
>>
>
>Yes, call it [[Special:Most Wanted (cached)]] and put a note at the top
>about when it was cached. During busy hours, the message at
>[[Special:Most Wanted]] would have a link to the cached version.
>
>
I implemented the Most Wanted cache on test and en (also in the CVS). It
uses the LogPage.php functions, with the exception that the caching
doesn't show on Recent Changes (except for one entry on en, which was a
bug;-)

It will show on Most Wanted once we reach the "busy time" again. I used
the old text for the heading, though.

Magnus


subject:
[Wikitech-l] Alternative proposal for interlanguage links
	redesign and a few other issues

body:
On Die, 2003-01-07 at 19:07, Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
> 1. move everything to Postgres
> 2. move everything to common database, with tables foo_cur, foo_old etc.,
>     where foo are language names
> 3. make single user table (needs some tweaking to allow slightly different
>     preferences), single logging system, single recent changes, and all other
>     nice things we can do with that
> 4. move everything to UTF-8, so we don't have to use %escapes in English Wikipedia
> 5. create table interwiki (source_lang, target_lang, source_title, target_title)
> 6. convert all cur_text by removing interwiki links from page tops,
>     and add apropriate entries to interwiki.
> 7. compute transitive symmetric closure of foo_interwiki, and display that
>     as interwiki links. If there will be many articles of the same language
>     in it display it like: "English (Astronomy), English (Astrophysics), German"
>     In practive it shouldn't be such a big problem.
> 8. when editing add interwiki links on top of page or in separate box.
>     add Javascript button to add all from links from transitive symmetric closure
>     of interwiki
> 9. add some magic functionality that allows changing many interwiki links at time.
>     It is needed as transitive symmetric closure often contains many
>     copies of the same. "delete all interwiki links to this page" and
>     "change all interwiki links from X to Y" would probably be enough.

Have you read my proposal, Tomasz? You seem to be saying the same thing,
only that you want to do other things at the same time (move to
Postgres, have more shared tables etc.).

Regards,

Erik
--
FOKUS - Fraunhofer Insitute for Open Communication Systems
Project BerliOS - http://www.berlios.de


subject: [Wikitech-l] Interlanguage links redesign proposal

body:
On Die, 2003-01-07 at 19:44, Magnus Manske wrote:
> I proposed enhanced interlanguage link manipulation/storage several
> times before (check the archive;-), and gave that some thought.
>
> I propose a new, independent *database*, instead of just a table. We'll
> have to access another database from all but one wikis, anyway (we can't
> store a complete consistent copy of that table in all databases, now can
> we?).
>
> That database could also hold other information, mainly a central user
> database, so multi-language users won't have to create new user accounts
> in every language.

Magnus,

of course the table I suggested would have to reside in some shared
database. This DB could then later also hold user data and other
information we want shared.

I would, however, want this approach to be limited to allow for
Wikipedias that reside on foreign servers. If the central shared
database fails, these Wikipedias should continue to function.

I would also like to suggest that we concentrate on fixing one problem
at a time. If we try to do too many different things at once, we may not
get anything done right in the end. The interlanguage links are an
important problem to start working on.

Regards,

Erik
--
FOKUS - Fraunhofer Insitute for Open Communication Systems
Project BerliOS - http://www.berlios.de


from_name: Andre Engels

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: [Intlwiki-l] cologne blue kills search results

body:
> For the last several months we've been using Cologne
> Blue on the Esperanto Wikipedia and just now I
> realized that our search results have incredibly
> dropped in google to the point of non-existent.  I
> used to be able to type "Rusio", "Indonezio" or
> "Usono" and the Esperanto Wikipedia would be in the
> top ten.  Could we change our software back to the old
> standard, because we're trying to build an
> encyclopedia and not win a web design contest.

I think the problem might be something different. One or two days ago, it
was found that there was an error in the robots.txt, causing Google not to
bookmark most Wikipedia pages. This has now been changed back, but Google
has only indexed part of Wikipedia yet since then (for example, of the
English Wikipedia only about 23,000 pages). It may well be that this is the
reason Wikipedia pages are scoring lower than they used to do.

Talking about Google: It seems that at the moment Google has indexed ONLY
the titles of the Wikipedia pages, not their contents! Is there still
something wrong with the robots.txt file, or is this a quirk in the way
Google is building its database?

(sending a Cc: to wikitech-l)

Andre Engels


body:
wiki pedista wrote:

>Second: was there any agreement about making
>www.wikipedia.org the face of the whole project, not
>just
>the english wikipedia?o/wikipedia-l
>
There were two problems:
1. It will upset Google. Well, folks, at the moment we are largely
Google-blind. Might be a good time to move!
2. What to put at www.wikipedia.org. This boiled down to:

a) a multilingual portal page
b) a browser-sniffing thing that would send users to the right place

and nobody could agree on which was best.

That was about it, right?

Now copy the above text and send it to yourself 500 times to simulate
the ongoing debate ;-)

>
>
>


from_name: Pierre Abbat

subject: [Wikitech-l] New feature: Go button

body:
On Thursday 02 January 2003 10:14, Erik Moeller wrote:
> I have checked in a new feature that adds a "Go" button next to the
> "Search" button (default skin). By using this button, you can display a
> page directly instead of first searching for it and then following the
> link, e.g. you type "CIA", click "Go", and you are put directly on the
> CIA page. Quite handy if you have to jump between articles a lot.
>
> Please let me know if there are any problems.

In Konqueror 3.0.99 it overstrikes the Wikipedia logo. That part didn't use to
without the Go button.

phma


body:
Anthere wrote:

>
>ey, could anyone explain how we "measure" how much we
>are known by google ?
>
Google searches aren't showing us as much as they used to :(

>
>Does anybody have a nice free picture of a french "bar
>parisien" taken on a trip in our absolutely beautiful
>capital ? Or a shot of an old country inn ? We need one...
>
I think ANthere means for here:
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikip%E9dia%3ALe_Bistro

(I needed a drink so I broke in early :-)

>
>


from_name: Paul Ebermann

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Suggestion to promote readability ofhyperlinked documents.

body:
"Brion Vibber" skribis:
> On mer, 2003-01-01 at 19:30, Derek Moore wrote:
> > I think the font sizes in Cologne Blue
> > could stand to be a bit bigger, especially with regard to the menu on the
> > left.
>
> What do you think of the version I've just put on test.wikipedia.org
> which doesn't change your browser's font selection and uses only
> relative font sizes?

This is better than the actual one.

By the way: In the "nostalgic" look is no
ability to get to the user preferences (at
least I didn't find it). Could someone
please fix this?

Paul


from_name: Geoff Burling

subject: [WikiEN-l] Micronations

body:
On Tue, 7 Jan 2003, Zoe wrote:

>
> Micronations are not a subculture.  They are figments of rather fevered imaginations.  And none of your examples is anywhere in the same category.
> Zoe
>  The Cunctator <cunctator at kband.com> wrote:On Tue, 2003-01-07 at 22:06, daniwo59 at aol.com wrote:
>
> > I would like to think that we are trying to put together a serious
> > encyclopedia. It has nothing to do with whether we are paper or not.
>
> We are. We have entries on [[Dyavaprthivi]], [[Georges Clemenceau]],
> [[Post Falls, Idaho]], [[Shanghai solitaire]], [[SPAM]], [[existentialism]],
> etc. Which entries are "serious", and which are not?
>
> The micronations fit right in. Micronationalism is a legitimate and
> interesting subculture that most likely presages large-scale
> sociopolitical dynamics in the coming decades. (As are [[MMORPG]]s, by
> the way. We're sadly lacking a [[The Sims Online]] entry. Terrible!)
>
I'd say yes & no.

I vaguely recall some guys trying to set up a Micronation in the South
Pacific on a coral atoll few decades ago. They made the news when the King
who claimed that atoll (& had a few thousand subject & an army) rounded
them up & put them on the next plane out of his kingdom. If the activities
of some would-be Micronation types actually amount to something tangible,
then let the article stand.

But if there is no proof that this isn't a running joke of a bunch of
drinking buddies, then delete it.

My criteria for any article about a ``Micronation" include some tangible
proof that someone tried to make the idea work, or that the event gathered
enough attention that someone will look for information about it. An example
would be ``Emperor" Norton, a colorful character of 19th century San
Francisco.

Many of the Micronations discussed do not meet the standards I set out.

Geoff


from_name: daniwo59 at aol.com

subject: [WikiEN-l] new military history articles by Vera Cruz

body:
Some of these articles appear to be copyrighted materials,  with certain
phrases changed slightly (and made slightly more inaccurate as a result.
Despite Vera/Lir's protests that there is no other way to write it (which I
don't buy), we are walking a thin line of copyright violation.

Danny
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from_name: Giskart

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: non-profit? language neutral www.wikipedia.org?

body:
Now I think about it, the Multi-language search

http://www.wikipedia.org/tools/wikisearch.php

There is only one hyperlink out of that page and it points to
http://www.wikipedia.com

Can somebody change that to
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_provisional_portal_of_Wikipedia

--
Contact: giskart AT wikipedia.be
Ook een artikeltje schrijven? WikipediaNL, de vrije GNU/FDL encyclopedie
http://www.wikipedia.be


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Wikitech-l digest, Vol 1 #328 - 11 msgs

body:
Message: 3
Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] Alternative proposal for
interlanguage links
redesign and a few other issues
From: Erik Moeller <e.moeller at fokus.gmd.de>
To: wikitech-l at wikipedia.org
Organization: FOKUS
Date: 08 Jan 2003 14:55:32 +0100
Reply-To: wikitech-l at wikipedia.org
On Die, 2003-01-07 at 19:07, Tomasz Wegrzanowski
wrote:
> 1. move everything to Postgres
> 2. move everything to common database, with tables
foo_cur, foo_old
etc.,
>     where foo are language names
> 3. make single user table (needs some tweaking to
allow slightly
different
>     preferences), single logging system, single
recent changes, and
all other
>     nice things we can do with that
> 4. move everything to UTF-8, so we don't have to use
%escapes in
English Wikipedia

I would appreciate very much that you explain to me
very clearly what will be the benefits of switching to
UTF 8. I have no idea, and it must be important if you
think of moving everything this way.

As I understood, meta is coded in UTF-8.

I'll be very clear why this is an important matter to
me : if you move everything to UTF-8, I will just quit
Wikipedia.

The only place I can write properly on the meta is
from work (W2k and IE). And my boss doesn't appreciate
that much.

At home, I can't write any special characters; and if
I edit a page with some (for exemple "accueil" our
home page), I mess everything. It is a matte of
importance in french language.

Opera doesn't support UTF. Netscape doesn't support
some of our characters either, and is all crazy with
the frames (tool bar unusable). And from time to time,
IE refuse to edit long windows (it doesnot cut them as
Opera does, it just displays the visible part of the
edit window, the scrollbar just disappears). And
Mozilla is not working well, and real slow. So the
easiest way to me is to write with no accents. And
never edit pages with special characters.

I can't find a really satisfying option. It is not a
huge problem on meta. But it definitly would make
working on wikipedia articles a real pain. So please,
explain what the real benefits are, and don't make the
switch just a minor issue.
At least on the french one.
It won't be so bad on the english one, for you don't
use special characters much, but likely many people
will have to correct things after me. So, maybe I'll
give up participating on the en.wiki.

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from_name: Fred Bauder

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Open-site.org

body:
Why would we want to merge? It seems like an excellent project with its own
merits which might provide both opportunities and information to us over time.

Fred

At 01:41 PM 1/9/03 +0000, you wrote:
>
>
>Magnus Manske wrote:
>
>> I just found [[Open-Site]] listed on orphaned articles. I was about to
>> delete it, because it looked too much like some newbie trying to
>> describe (and rename) wikipedia. But, I made a Google-search, and
>> found a free, categorized encyclopedia. It only contains a few
>> articles, though.
>>
>> The layout is nice, and they seem to have it organized (more than
>> wikipedia, that is ;-)
>>
>> IMHO they're technically too different to merge (categories etc).
>
>They seem to have only a small amount of material -- see
>http://open-site.org/Arts/Literature/Authors/full-index.html for
>example. They've covered about 6 authors.
>
>It would be an excellent idea to invite them aboard now, while they are
>still young.
>I suggest one of our diplomats (mav maybe) should write to them :-)
>
>-- tarquin
>
>
>
>>
>
>
>_______________________________________________
>Wikipedia-l mailing list
>Wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
>http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


subject: [Wikipedia-l] GNU/FDL and other copyleft restrictions

body:
See
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Coopyrights

Section "Fair Use"

As I understand it, we don't guarantee that the images
and sounds are covered by GNU/FDL, only the text. (But
between a free and a non-free image or sound, the free
one must be prefered).

AstroNomer

P.S. I noticed also there the frase "Wikipedia also
uses text under the fair use doctrine. However, what
is fair for us to use may not be fair for your
intended use of the text. " That troubles me a bit.

__________________________________________________
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subject: [Wikitech-l] New feature: Go button

body:
On Don, 2003-01-09 at 02:44, Pierre Abbat wrote:
> On Thursday 02 January 2003 10:14, Erik Moeller wrote:
> > I have checked in a new feature that adds a "Go" button next to the
> > "Search" button (default skin). By using this button, you can display a
> > page directly instead of first searching for it and then following the
> > link, e.g. you type "CIA", click "Go", and you are put directly on the
> > CIA page. Quite handy if you have to jump between articles a lot.
> >
> > Please let me know if there are any problems.
>
> In Konqueror 3.0.99 it overstrikes the Wikipedia logo. That part didn't use to
> without the Go button.

Can't reproduce in Konqi 3.0.4. Are you referring to the other Go button
perhaps? The one next to the "Special pages" dropdown? That one gets
wrapped if the screen width is too small, and can overlap with the logo
at even smaller width. Note that I also increased the width of the
search box slightly.

What resolution are you using (browser window, not screen size)? If I go
below 640, the logo gets overwritten in Mozilla, too, but that was the
case before the Go button as well. If you use such a low resolution,
another skin really works better.

Regards,

Erik
--
FOKUS - Fraunhofer Insitute for Open Communication Systems
Project BerliOS - http://www.berlios.de


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Open-site.org

body:
>Fred Bauder wrote:
>
>>Why would we want to merge? It seems like an excellent project with its own
>>merits which might provide both opportunities and information to us over
>>time.
>>
>>
>Duplicated effort.
>Reinvention of the wheel.
>
>These things REALLY bug an ENFP. (apparently ;-)

I guess I don't know what an ENPF is.

Anyway, it has been my experience that alternative ways of doing things
generally work out real good for everyone.

I know when I want to buy something or look something up trying several
sources works better than going to just one place.

If Sam Walton had not "reinvented the wheel" we'd still be paying $4 for a
tube of toothpaste. (At least here where I live).

To get back to the original issue. Open-site seems to be a much more
controlled environment than wikipedia, kind of like Nupedia or the sort of
thing that Larry is always advocating. It will work out different (actually
I think it will fail dismally, but that is a different matter). If they
wanted a more free-wheeling situation they could have choosen that but they
didn't. If we merge then I suppose we could tighten up our operation or
they could loosen theirs, but then both choices are lost and we just have
an "elephant" (the animal built by a committee).

We are actally very early in the evolution of on-line reference. There is
no reason not to try different things out and see how they work.

Fred


from_name: Vicki Rosenzweig

body:
At 11:42 PM 1/8/03 -0500, Danny wrote:
>Some of these articles appear to be copyrighted materials,  with certain
>phrases changed slightly (and made slightly more inaccurate as a result.
>Despite Vera/Lir's protests that there is no other way to write it (which
>I don't buy), we are walking a thin line of copyright violation.

Speaking as a writer, editor, and historian, I agree--there's always more than
one way to write things, which is why copyright protects expression but not
facts. At most, she's claiming that *she* isn't a good enough writer to find
another way to express the material. This may be true, but isn't a legal
defense.
--
Vicki Rosenzweig
vr at redbird.org
http://www.redbird.org


subject: [Wikitech-l] Dutch book stores

body:
On Thu, 9 Jan 2003, Andre Engels wrote:

> The Dutch book stores page is misbehaving. There is no list given, instead
> the page is overwritten by a number of error messages like the one below.
> Does someone know what might be the problem?

The actual list array seems to have gone missing from LanguageNl.php, so
it was returning an empty list (which the page generator function doesn' t
handle gracefully).

I've temporarily replaced it with the English list until I find the local
list again...

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [WikiEN-l] Micronations

body:
Wasn't there some guy in the 19th century who declared himself Empreror
of the US -- Empreror Smith IIRC.
I can't find anything about him on Google though


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Open-site.org

body:
>Why should I waste an afternoon researching an article, if someone at
>this other project might have done the same already?
>Why should someone at that project put time into writing articles from
>scratch, when we already have them?
>
>I do not think that competition is necessarily healthy.

Because they may be better.

Because it is fun.

It's my way or the highway that is not healthy, not competition.

Variety is the spice of life.

Fred


subject: [Wikitech-l] UTF

body:
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii

>Opera, Mozilla, IE, Netscape and Konqueror ALL
SUPPORT UTF-8.
I have used them all to edit Polish Wikipedia
(which is UTF-8) and had never any problems about
that. Opera has broken charset autodetection, you may
wish to play with settings a bit.

Not on Macintosh.

Btw, I left you a sample in the sandbox (Opera work).
And I saved the main page at the meta (excuse me, I am
a vandal :-))))) (Netscape work) (I'll restore it
later...)

You sounded so sure of yourself...please have a look.
This is not a minor issue, but I have no idea why
netscape does that...

>Other problems you describe have nothing to do with
UTF-8. If it realy doesn't work, try upgrading your
browser.

The fact they don't have anything to do with UTF
doesn't make them work any better. I forgot one other
bug. With Netscape and UTF, the browser inserts some
random spaces in the text. Brion had to clean after me
a couple of times.
I was told to upgrade to Opera 6. I tried and it
crashed the computer 2 times, so I gave up.

Well, your problem is a *major* one. So I need to find
a way. I'll tried again that Opera 6.

>One reason are Interwiki links, which now must be
coded
by %-sequences, and making en->pl links is very
inconvenient,
especially when using konqueror, which displays normal
characters, not %-sequences in URL bar. But the really
important one is that we really need characters
outside ISO-8859-1. How can I write article about any
Polish city if I can't
write half of Polish diactrics ? The same applies to
most
of central Europe, and to most romanizations schemes
of other
scripts (which use lot of diactrics).
How can I write any article about people from such
places ?
Engish Wikipedia screws this issue completely by
stripping
essential diactrics (like
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lech_Walesa). How can I
write article about some language that doesn't
use ISO-8859-1 (that's some 90% of world languages) ?
Polish Wikipedia contains more linguistic information
than English now, mostly because you can't do any
decent
linguistics without using native scripts. Even if I
wanted
to translate Polish articles to English, I wouldn't be
able
to put them on English Wikipedia.

Ok. That's a major issue. Though...I wonder about how
many articles will be using diactrics on the
fr.wiki...The international links yes. But they should
not be in the article anyway. Could not they be coded
differently ?

Well...I know I bear no chance because we have a
linguist on the fr. wiki, and I know he would *love*
UTF.

But I wonder...even if I succeed to make that Opera 6
work (I have no other option, right ?), that doesnot
change the fact that Wikipedia will not be editable by
a french macintosh user with Netscape 4.5, or IE, or
Opera 5 or Mozilla (and a couple of other minor
versions).

You might say "who care about Macintosh user" ?

Yeah, who care...
Imac were sold a lot in France (much more in % than in
any other country I believe). Many scientific people
use Mac. Basically 100% of graphists, a lot of
journalists... So, yes, that troubles me to know that
most mac editors will maybe be treated as vandals
first.

Please, mac users, what do you use ????

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from_name: Jason Williams

subject: [Wikipedia-l] GNU/FDL and other copyleft restrictions.

body:
On Thu, Jan 09, 2003 at 12:58:10PM +0100, Andre Engels wrote:
> Is there a way around this problem? Is there a way to put such material in
> Wikipedia without getting in these license difficulties? If not, could it
> perhaps be made possible to set it up so? For example, by not having the
> pages themselves fall under the GNU/FDL, but some modified version where
> certain explicitly specified material is left out (the default being that
> there is no such material)?

[[nonfree:Treaty of Rome]] -> http://nonfree.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Rome

?

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


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Open-site.org

body:
>>
>Variety is good, but I don't see a point in just *writing* an article on
>a topic if there's already an article somewhere else, available under
>the same (?) conditions, that can be changed or expanded.

Ah, but the conditions are not the same. On open-site one applies to be an
editor and in a specific area. God knows what the criteria are. On
wikipedia the article can be expanded or changed by anyone, even an
anonymous editor (or perhaps cannot be changed if someone is strongly
defending it). On open-site only an approved editor can change it and who
knows how the interaction between editors would be structured.

Two varieties
>of the same topic would also be bad for the user, because he'd have to
>look up both.

Depends on his needs and the importance of the lookup.

We'd be back to the "encyclopedia google", eventually ;-)

Under the gnu licence that's where were going anyway.
>
>Where variety would be useful is in the *presentation* and
>*reliability*. That's why I suggested the merge of that new project with
>the not-really-existing Sifter.
>
>Magnus

True

Fred


from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: UTF

body:
>If it realy doesn't work, try upgrading your browser.

This is a totally wrong-headed way to look at things.
Most net users have out-of-date browsers and we
shouldn't expect them to upgrade to the latest version
of their browser just to write articles. /Very/
unWiki.

The only major issue I see with UTF support deals with
interlanguage links but there are already plans being
worked-out to have these links outside the main
content window of articles. Therefore the main content
window can be in the charset that is best for that
particular language Wikipedia and the interlanguage
link edit window can be in UTF.

Most browsers can deal with Latin-charset-based accent
marks so this isn't such a big issue anymore. BTW
everyone should be writing in the language of their
Wikipedia. French articles should be in French,
English articles in English, Spanish articles in
Spanish (unless most common usage of the term is to
use the foreign spelling). Yes this means that the
titles of articles are often approximated to fit
within the language you are writing when the two
languages have different alphabets. Most important
terms have more or less widely-used latin-based
approximations. All the less important terms have to
be dealt with on a case-by-case basis.

Wiktionary is UTF though (and rightly so since all
words in all languages are the subjects of articles).
In the encyclopedias, however, the subjects are not
the words, but persons, places, things and ideas (the
names are for indexing purposes only - so that the
information about the subjects can be found by the
target audience). So providing access to your target
audience is more important than using a zillion
different alphabets (just how the subject's name looks
in another language can be expressed in the article
using Unicode).

In short, for now at least, the benefits of using UTF
for Latin-based Wikipedias are over-shadowed by the
negative repercussions.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

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body:
I may be committing blasphemy here, but how much is Wikipedia 'married' to the
GNU/FDL? The reason I'm asking is that I recently wanted to download a picture
of the signing of the Treaty of Rome from the EU website. Only after I did so,
I found that the pictures can be copied only for non-commercial purposes. And
while Wikipedia itself would fall under that heading, the GNU/FDL does not
forbid commercial use. And it's not the first time I've had that problem with
texts or pictures either. The GNU/FDL allows a lot, which is good on itself,
but also means that we cannot use any material under stricter copyleft
restrictions.

Is there a way around this problem? Is there a way to put such material in
Wikipedia without getting in these license difficulties? If not, could it
perhaps be made possible to set it up so? For example, by not having the
pages themselves fall under the GNU/FDL, but some modified version where
certain explicitly specified material is left out (the default being that
there is no such material)?

Andre Engels


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Open-site.org

body:
I just found [[Open-Site]] listed on orphaned articles. I was about to
delete it, because it looked too much like some newbie trying to
describe (and rename) wikipedia. But, I made a Google-search, and found
a free, categorized encyclopedia. It only contains a few articles, though.

The layout is nice, and they seem to have it organized (more than
wikipedia, that is ;-)

IMHO they're technically too different to merge (categories etc). But
maybe this could merge with Larry's "sifter" project?

Magnus


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Open-site.org

body:
Magnus Manske wrote:

> I just found [[Open-Site]] listed on orphaned articles. I was about to
> delete it, because it looked too much like some newbie trying to
> describe (and rename) wikipedia. But, I made a Google-search, and
> found a free, categorized encyclopedia. It only contains a few
> articles, though.
>
> The layout is nice, and they seem to have it organized (more than
> wikipedia, that is ;-)
>
> IMHO they're technically too different to merge (categories etc).

They seem to have only a small amount of material -- see
http://open-site.org/Arts/Literature/Authors/full-index.html for
example. They've covered about 6 authors.

It would be an excellent idea to invite them aboard now, while they are
still young.
I suggest one of our diplomats (mav maybe) should write to them :-)

-- tarquin

>


body:
Anthere wrote:

>
>The only place I can write properly on the meta is
>from work (W2k and IE). And my boss doesn't appreciate
>that much.
>
>At home, I can't write any special characters; and if
>I edit a page with some (for exemple "accueil" our
>home page), I mess everything. It is a matte of
>importance in french language.
>
>
What is your OS at home?
I have Win 98 SE and the Polish wikipedia looks ok in both Mozilla & IE.

(not tried editing though -- what's "sandbox" in polish? could we put
language links on the sandbox pages?)

>
>


from_name: The Cunctator

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Open-site.org

body:
On 1/9/03 1:34 PM, "Magnus Manske" <magnus.manske at epost.de> wrote:

> Fred Bauder wrote:
>
>>> Why should I waste an afternoon researching an article, if someone at
>>> this other project might have done the same already?
>>> Why should someone at that project put time into writing articles from
>>> scratch, when we already have them?
>>>
>>> I do not think that competition is necessarily healthy.
>>>
>>>
>>
>> Because they may be better.
>>
>> Because it is fun.
>>
>> It's my way or the highway that is not healthy, not competition.
>>
>> Variety is the spice of life.
>>
>>
> Variety is good, but I don't see a point in just *writing* an article on
> a topic if there's already an article somewhere else, available under
> the same (?) conditions, that can be changed or expanded. Two varieties
> of the same topic would also be bad for the user, because he'd have to
> look up both. We'd be back to the "encyclopedia google", eventually ;-)
>
> Where variety would be useful is in the *presentation* and
> *reliability*. That's why I suggested the merge of that new project with
> the not-really-existing Sifter.

So do you agree that we shouldn't be duplicating the effort of
planetmath.org?


from_name: Tom Parmenter

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Open-site.org

in_reply_to:
<3E1DC0B0.705@epost.de> (message from Magnus Manske on Thu, 09
	Jan 2003 19:34:24 +0100)

body:
Open-site.org has almost no content.  Let's let them go their way and
we go ours.  Let a thousand flowers bloom (or wither).

Tom Parmenter
Ortolan88

|From: Magnus Manske <magnus.manske at epost.de>
|X-Accept-Language: de-de, en-us, en
|Sender: wikipedia-l-admin at wikipedia.org
|Reply-To: wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
|Date: Thu, 09 Jan 2003 19:34:24 +0100
|
|Fred Bauder wrote:
|
|>>Why should I waste an afternoon researching an article, if someone at
|>>this other project might have done the same already?
|>>Why should someone at that project put time into writing articles from
|>>scratch, when we already have them?
|>>
|>>I do not think that competition is necessarily healthy.
|>>
|>>
|>
|>Because they may be better.
|>
|>Because it is fun.
|>
|>It's my way or the highway that is not healthy, not competition.
|>
|>Variety is the spice of life.
|>
|>
|Variety is good, but I don't see a point in just *writing* an article on
|a topic if there's already an article somewhere else, available under
|the same (?) conditions, that can be changed or expanded. Two varieties
|of the same topic would also be bad for the user, because he'd have to
|look up both. We'd be back to the "encyclopedia google", eventually ;-)
|
|Where variety would be useful is in the *presentation* and
|*reliability*. That's why I suggested the merge of that new project with
|the not-really-existing Sifter.
|
|Magnus
|
|_______________________________________________
|Wikipedia-l mailing list
|Wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
|http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
|


from_name: Tomasz Wegrzanowski

body:
On Thu, Jan 09, 2003 at 04:39:51AM -0800, Anthere wrote:
> > 4. move everything to UTF-8, so we don't have to use
> %escapes in
> English Wikipedia
>
> I would appreciate very much that you explain to me
> very clearly what will be the benefits of switching to
> UTF 8. I have no idea, and it must be important if you
> think of moving everything this way.
>
> As I understood, meta is coded in UTF-8.
>
> I'll be very clear why this is an important matter to
> me : if you move everything to UTF-8, I will just quit
> Wikipedia.
>
> The only place I can write properly on the meta is
> from work (W2k and IE). And my boss doesn't appreciate
> that much.
>
> At home, I can't write any special characters; and if
> I edit a page with some (for exemple "accueil" our
> home page), I mess everything. It is a matte of
> importance in french language.
>
> Opera doesn't support UTF. Netscape doesn't support
> some of our characters either, and is all crazy with
> the frames (tool bar unusable). And from time to time,
> IE refuse to edit long windows (it doesnot cut them as
> Opera does, it just displays the visible part of the
> edit window, the scrollbar just disappears). And
> Mozilla is not working well, and real slow. So the
> easiest way to me is to write with no accents. And
> never edit pages with special characters.

Opera, Mozilla, IE, Netscape and Konqueror ALL SUPPORT UTF-8.
I have used them all to edit Polish Wikipedia
(which is UTF-8) and had never any problems about that.

Opera has broken charset autodetection, you may
wish to play with settings a bit.

Other problems you describe have nothing to do with UTF-8.

If it realy doesn't work, try upgrading your browser.

> I can't find a really satisfying option. It is not a
> huge problem on meta. But it definitly would make
> working on wikipedia articles a real pain. So please,
> explain what the real benefits are, and don't make the
> switch just a minor issue.
> At least on the french one.
> It won't be so bad on the english one, for you don't
> use special characters much, but likely many people
> will have to correct things after me. So, maybe I'll
> give up participating on the en.wiki.

One reason are Interwiki links, which now must be coded
by %-sequences, and making en->pl links is very inconvenient,
especially when using konqueror, which displays normal
characters, not %-sequences in URL bar.

But the really important one is that we really need
characters outside ISO-8859-1.

How can I write article about any Polish city if I can't
write half of Polish diactrics ? The same applies to most
of central Europe, and to most romanizations schemes of other
scripts (which use lot of diactrics).
How can I write any article about people from such places ?
Engish Wikipedia screws this issue completely by stripping
essential diactrics (like http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lech_Walesa).

How can I write article about some language that doesn't
use ISO-8859-1 (that's some 90% of world languages) ?
Polish Wikipedia contains more linguistic information
than English now, mostly because you can't do any decent
linguistics without using native scripts. Even if I wanted
to translate Polish articles to English, I wouldn't be able
to put them on English Wikipedia.


body:
daniwo59 at aol.com wrote:

> Some of these articles appear to be copyrighted materials,  with
> certain phrases changed slightly (and made slightly more inaccurate as
> a result. Despite Vera/Lir's protests that there is no other way to
> write it (which I don't buy), we are walking a thin line of copyright
> violation.

Then we'd better remove them.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Open-site.org

body:
Fred Bauder wrote:

>Why would we want to merge? It seems like an excellent project with its own
>merits which might provide both opportunities and information to us over time.
>
>
Duplicated effort.
Reinvention of the wheel.

These things REALLY bug an ENFP. (apparently ;-)

>
>

>
>


subject: [Wikitech-l] Dutch book stores

body:
The Dutch book stores page is misbehaving. There is no list given, instead
the page is overwritten by a number of error messages like the one below.
Does someone know what might be the problem?

Andre Engels

Warning: Cannot add header information - headers already sent by (output started at /usr/local/apache/htdocs-nl/w/SpecialBooksources.php:37) in /usr/local/apache/htdocs-nl/w/OutputPage.php on line 225


body:
> P.S. I noticed also there the frase "Wikipedia also
> uses text under the fair use doctrine. However, what
> is fair for us to use may not be fair for your
> intended use of the text. " That troubles me a bit.

What is meant here, is a situation like the following: Let's say John Doe
is a famous poet who wrote many poems about the sea. If we write a Wikipedia
page on John Smith, we may include one of his poems (provided it is not too
long) to show the reader the style and such that John Smith is using. That
would be 'fair use'. However, placing the same poems on our site in another
context (for example in a page on the sea he is talking about), or absent of
any context at all, would not be allowed.

Normally under the GNU/DFL, someone would be allowed to takes a little part
of Wikipedia, or several parts, and publish that as a derivative work, provided
he did that under the GNU/DFL as well and gave Wikipedia due credit. But he
would not be allowed to do the same with the poem on the John Doe page. He
would be allowed to publish the page as a whole, but not the poem alone or
with very little additional text.

Andre Engels


in_reply_to:
<200301091532.h09FWdV25788@chakotay.uni-koblenz.de> from Andre Engels
 at "Jan 9, 2003 04:32:39 pm"

body:
I wrote:

> What is meant here, is a situation like the following: Let's say John Doe
> is a famous poet who wrote many poems about the sea. If we write a Wikipedia
> page on John Smith,
          ^^^^^^^^^^

Of course I meant 'a Wikipedia page on John Doe' here.

Andre Engels


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Open-site.org

body:
Fred Bauder wrote:

>>Fred Bauder wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>>>Why would we want to merge? It seems like an excellent project with its own
>>>merits which might provide both opportunities and information to us over
>>>time.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>Duplicated effort.
>>Reinvention of the wheel.
>>
>>These things REALLY bug an ENFP. (apparently ;-)
>>
>>
>
>I guess I don't know what an ENPF is.
>
>Anyway, it has been my experience that alternative ways of doing things
>generally work out real good for everyone.
>
>
Why should I waste an afternoon researching an article, if someone at
this other project might have done the same already?
Why should someone at that project put time into writing articles from
scratch, when we already have them?

I do not think that competition is necessarily healthy.

>
>


body:
On Thu, Jan 09, 2003 at 01:50:31PM +0000, tarquin wrote:
> (not tried editing though -- what's "sandbox" in polish? could we put
> language links on the sandbox pages?)

http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Brudnopis


from_name: Zoe

subject: [WikiEN-l] Micronations

body:
You might try Wikipedia -- [[Emperor Norton]].  :-)
Zoe
 tarquin <tarquin at planetunreal.com> wrote:Wasn't there some guy in the 19th century who declared himself Empreror
of the US -- Empreror Smith IIRC.
I can't find anything about him on Google though

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

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subject: [Wikipedia-l] Open-site.org

body:
Fred Bauder wrote:

>>Why should I waste an afternoon researching an article, if someone at
>>this other project might have done the same already?
>>Why should someone at that project put time into writing articles from
>>scratch, when we already have them?
>>
>>I do not think that competition is necessarily healthy.
>>
>>
>
>Because they may be better.
>
>Because it is fun.
>
>It's my way or the highway that is not healthy, not competition.
>
>Variety is the spice of life.
>
>
Variety is good, but I don't see a point in just *writing* an article on
a topic if there's already an article somewhere else, available under
the same (?) conditions, that can be changed or expanded. Two varieties
of the same topic would also be bad for the user, because he'd have to
look up both. We'd be back to the "encyclopedia google", eventually ;-)

Where variety would be useful is in the *presentation* and
*reliability*. That's why I suggested the merge of that new project with
the not-really-existing Sifter.

Magnus


from_name: tarquin

subject: [Wikitech-l] UTF

body:
Anthere wrote:

>
>Please, mac users, what do you use ????
>
>
>
I Use Mac OS X 10.1
Chimera browser
:-)

Are you still on OS 9?

>
>


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Open-site.org

body:
Fred Bauder wrote:

>If Sam Walton had not "reinvented the wheel" we'd still be paying $4 for a
>tube of toothpaste. (At least here where I live).
>
>
>
I had to look this up -- Founder of Wal-Mart.
Don't they pay employees sub-minimal wages?

Please don't apply the doctrines of capitalism to *everything*.

>
>


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: UTF

body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:

>>If it realy doesn't work, try upgrading your browser.
>>
>>
>
>This is a totally wrong-headed way to look at things.
>Most net users have out-of-date browsers and we
>shouldn't expect them to upgrade to the latest version
>of their browser just to write articles. /Very/
>unWiki.
>
>
Does anyone know a way to detect the browser settings/abilities for UTF?
We could use UTF and convert back-and forth on-the-fly for old browsers...


from_name: Lars Aronsson

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Conference paper online

body:
I just put online the paper on wikis that I presented on November 7 at
a conference on electronic publishing in Karlovy Vary, Czech Republic.
It gives a lot of credit to Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales.

Read it here, http://aronsson.se/wikipaper.html
(This is a static HTML page...)

If you have a pointer to any earlier paper on wikis appearing in a
scholarly/scientific journal or at a conference, I'd like to know.

--
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik
  Teknikringen 1e, SE-583 30 Linuxk?ping, Sweden
  tel +46-70-7891609
  http://aronsson.se/ http://elektrosmog.nu/ http://susning.nu/


from_name: Imran Ghory

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Conference paper online

body:
On 9 Jan 2003, at 21:57, Lars Aronsson wrote:

> I just put online the paper on wikis that I presented on November 7 at
> a conference on electronic publishing in Karlovy Vary, Czech Republic.
> It gives a lot of credit to Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales.
>
> Read it here, http://aronsson.se/wikipaper.html
> (This is a static HTML page...)
>
> If you have a pointer to any earlier paper on wikis appearing in a
> scholarly/scientific journal or at a conference, I'd like to know.

Have a look at the papers by Mark Guzdial and "The Reengineering
Wiki"  by Arie van Deursen and Eelco Visser. Also although not on
wikis a related article was presented at one of the early
International World Wide Web conference (IIRC. It was the fourth
one, but I'm not certain.)

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


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: UTF

body:
On Thu, Jan 09, 2003 at 12:42:53PM -0800, Daniel Mayer wrote:
> >If it realy doesn't work, try upgrading your browser.
>
> This is a totally wrong-headed way to look at things.
> Most net users have out-of-date browsers and we
> shouldn't expect them to upgrade to the latest version
> of their browser just to write articles. /Very/
> unWiki.

There's NOTHING wrong with it. UTF-8 isn't any new technology
and every browser that's not really ancient or really
broken supports that.

If we wanted "every ancient broken browser", then
we shouldn't use PNG, CSS, JavaScript, OGG, colors,
and all things like that in articles, because there's
always some ancient broken browser that doesn't support
that. In fact all these are more likely to cause problems
than UTF-8.

> The only major issue I see with UTF support deals with
> interlanguage links but there are already plans being
> worked-out to have these links outside the main
> content window of articles. Therefore the main content
> window can be in the charset that is best for that
> particular language Wikipedia and the interlanguage
> link edit window can be in UTF.

No, that's rather minor issue, but it should be fixed too.

> Most browsers can deal with Latin-charset-based accent
> marks so this isn't such a big issue anymore. BTW
> everyone should be writing in the language of their
> Wikipedia. French articles should be in French,
> English articles in English, Spanish articles in
> Spanish (unless most common usage of the term is to
> use the foreign spelling). Yes this means that the
> titles of articles are often approximated to fit
> within the language you are writing when the two
> languages have different alphabets. Most important
> terms have more or less widely-used latin-based
> approximations. All the less important terms have to
> be dealt with on a case-by-case basis.
>
> Wiktionary is UTF though (and rightly so since all
> words in all languages are the subjects of articles).
> In the encyclopedias, however, the subjects are not
> the words, but persons, places, things and ideas (the
> names are for indexing purposes only - so that the
> information about the subjects can be found by the
> target audience). So providing access to your target
> audience is more important than using a zillion
> different alphabets (just how the subject's name looks
> in another language can be expressed in the article
> using Unicode).

On Polish Wikipedia the policy is - if word is in Latin-based script,
it should be spelled in Latin characters with all diactrics,
and if it's not, original spelling (be it Cyrillic, Kanji or whatever else)
should be given in article.

If "screw the spelling" is not, as is widely thought now,
just a temporary technical problem, but an oficial policy,
then sooner or later you will see a fork of English Wikipedia.

> In short, for now at least, the benefits of using UTF
> for Latin-based Wikipedias are over-shadowed by the
> negative repercussions.

It's completely opposite. "Problems" of UTF-8, coming
from broken and ancient browsers, are completely irrelevant compared
to benefits of being able to write thing correctly.


from_name: Aldie

subject: [Wikitech-l] Orphans page modification

body:
Hi all,

Back on the 29th of July Koyaanis Qatsi requested modifications to the
Orphans page as per:

http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=588072&group_id=343
73&atid=411195

ie, to show orphans not linked from the article namespace only, therefore
ignoring links from talk: user: wikipedia: etc.

This would be a very handy feature for ferreting out those articles that sit
hidden away.

Cheers,
Aldie


from_name: youandme at poczta.fm

subject: [Wikitech-l] UTF

body:
On 10 Jan 2003 at 0:03, Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 09, 2003 at 12:42:53PM -0800, Daniel Mayer wrote:
> > >If it realy doesn't work, try upgrading your browser.
> >
> > This is a totally wrong-headed way to look at things.
> > Most net users have out-of-date browsers and we
> > shouldn't expect them to upgrade to the latest version
> > of their browser just to write articles. /Very/
> > unWiki.
>
> There's NOTHING wrong with it. UTF-8 isn't any new technology
> and every browser that's not really ancient or really
> broken supports that.
>
> If we wanted "every ancient broken browser", then
> we shouldn't use PNG, CSS, JavaScript, OGG, colors,
> and all things like that in articles, because there's
> always some ancient broken browser that doesn't support
> that. In fact all these are more likely to cause problems
> than UTF-8.

So the problem might be finding out what the standard
for the browser in some parts of the world is and... write
for the browser slightly below the standard.
The policy "share your knowledge with the Wikipedia
with all the high technology that we have" is what makes
me thinking what this all Wikipedias are for...?

> On Polish Wikipedia the policy is - if word is in Latin-based script,
> it should be spelled in Latin characters with all diactrics, and if
> it's not, original spelling (be it Cyrillic, Kanji or whatever else)
> should be given in article.

Mind you thou Tomasz, that there's no consensus
on Polish Wikipedia on exeception: how to deal with words
in Latin-based scripts which have popular or established Polish way
of writing them without diactrics. So your sentence
gave only first approximation of the policy and was lacking sth.
The working copy of the policy and the ratio can be found,
unfortunately in Polish language only at:
http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Zasady_pisowni_nazw_obcoj%C4%99zycznych

> If "screw the spelling" is not, as is widely thought now,
> just a temporary technical problem, but an oficial policy,
> then sooner or later you will see a fork of English Wikipedia.

Let's hope that ancient browsers extinct sooner.

> > In short, for now at least, the benefits of using UTF
> > for Latin-based Wikipedias are over-shadowed by the
> > negative repercussions.
>
> It's completely opposite. "Problems" of UTF-8, coming
> from broken and ancient browsers, are completely irrelevant compared
> to benefits of being able to write thing correctly.

For people with direct access to the Internet, living in the
so called Western World it is a "big" benefit.
For people living in other parts of the world without all the
"very" high technology, using some kind of "lower" high technology
and using future off-line version of Wikipedia it might not be
Both of us are happy because we've got the knowledge
how to make our computers and our browsers deal with UTF-8.
Other people who just to want to read free encyclopedia,
might not be as happy as we are - just watching some
broken texts.
Some people in this world prefer basic knowledge over nice look.

By the way: what about accessability issue and all
the unexpected non-latin characters and strange diactrics?

Youandme

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Rozrywkowe info w portalu INTERIA.PL >>> http://link.interia.pl/f16b8


from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [Wikitech-l] Back in Google

body:
Google seems to be spidering us again. Only a small percentage of articles
is back so far (try "Raelism"), but I presume the problem is solved.
Probably the robots.txt.

Regards,

Erik


subject: [Wikitech-l] UTF

body:
On Fri, Jan 10, 2003 at 03:34:18AM +0100, youandme at poczta.fm wrote:
> On 10 Jan 2003 at 0:03, Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
> > If we wanted "every ancient broken browser", then
> > we shouldn't use PNG, CSS, JavaScript, OGG, colors,
> > and all things like that in articles, because there's
> > always some ancient broken browser that doesn't support
> > that. In fact all these are more likely to cause problems
> > than UTF-8.
>
> So the problem might be finding out what the standard
> for the browser in some parts of the world is and... write
> for the browser slightly below the standard.
> The policy "share your knowledge with the Wikipedia
> with all the high technology that we have" is what makes
> me thinking what this all Wikipedias are for...?

UTF-8 certainly qualifies.

> > On Polish Wikipedia the policy is - if word is in Latin-based script,
> > it should be spelled in Latin characters with all diactrics, and if
> > it's not, original spelling (be it Cyrillic, Kanji or whatever else)
> > should be given in article.
>
> Mind you thou Tomasz, that there's no consensus
> on Polish Wikipedia on exeception: how to deal with words
> in Latin-based scripts which have popular or established Polish way
> of writing them without diactrics. So your sentence
> gave only first approximation of the policy and was lacking sth.
> The working copy of the policy and the ratio can be found,
> unfortunately in Polish language only at:
> http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Zasady_pisowni_nazw_obcoj%C4%99zycznych

Nobody ever suggested stripping diactrics other than from
"traditionally polonized" names. I even remember accents
on all these French names when we had old software.

> > If "screw the spelling" is not, as is widely thought now,
> > just a temporary technical problem, but an oficial policy,
> > then sooner or later you will see a fork of English Wikipedia.
>
> Let's hope that ancient browsers extinct sooner.

Unless somebody can show stats that say there is more than 1% of them,
we can think of them as already extinct.

> > It's completely opposite. "Problems" of UTF-8, coming
> > from broken and ancient browsers, are completely irrelevant compared
> > to benefits of being able to write thing correctly.
>
> For people with direct access to the Internet, living in the
> so called Western World it is a "big" benefit.
> For people living in other parts of the world without all the
> "very" high technology, using some kind of "lower" high technology
> and using future off-line version of Wikipedia it might not be

What do you mean ?
Standard browsers on both Linux and Windows support UTF-8.
How does UTF-8 or not changes that ?

Much bigger problem for them is lack of CD Wikipedia distributions.

> Both of us are happy because we've got the knowledge
> how to make our computers and our browsers deal with UTF-8.

I haven't configured anything. It can deal with it out of the box.

> Other people who just to want to read free encyclopedia,
> might not be as happy as we are - just watching some
> broken texts.
> Some people in this world prefer basic knowledge over nice look.

It's not about look, but correctness. They are losing lot of knowledge
now - after reading description of "Wroclaw" on English Wikipedia
they won't be able to find it on map or in search engine.
They are losing linguistic knowledge, because you can't write that
without UTF-8.

Anyway, how will UTF-8 or not affect them ?

> By the way: what about accessability issue and all
> the unexpected non-latin characters and strange diactrics?

Accessibility isn't handled at all now. In future it should be,
but it will require lot of design changes, about as many as CJK.

If that's what you mean, speech synthetisers won't be able to
pronounce right without right diactrics, so we aren't doing them any good.

CJK and accessibility even have something in common - we should have
optional furigana support on Japanese Wiki and optional speech synthesis
on every Wiki for blind users. Both will require strong default
synthetizers, option of giving additional information (for example that
given word is in other language), and overriding things.


subject: [Wikitech-l] UTF

body:
On 10 Jan 2003 at 4:41, Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:

> On Fri, Jan 10, 2003 at 03:34:18AM +0100, youandme at poczta.fm wrote:
> > > On 10 Jan 2003 at 0:03, Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
> > > If we wanted "every ancient broken browser", then
> > > we shouldn't use PNG, CSS, JavaScript, OGG, colors,
> > > and all things like that in articles, because there's
> > > always some ancient broken browser that doesn't support
> > > that. In fact all these are more likely to cause problems than UTF-8.
> > So the problem might be finding out what the
> > standard  for the browser in some parts of the world is and... write
> > for the browser slightly below the standard.
> >  The policy "share your knowledge with the Wikipedia
> >  with all the high technology that we have" is what makes
> > me thinking what this all Wikipedias are for...?
>
> UTF-8 certainly qualifies.

IMHO UTF-8 at present _only_ qualifies (but is a must in the future),
and OGG is still a matter of "tomorrow".

> > > On Polish Wikipedia the policy is - if word is in Latin-based
> > > script, it should be spelled in Latin characters with all
> > > diactrics, and if it's not, original spelling (be it Cyrillic,
> > > Kanji or whatever else) should be given in article.
> >
> > Mind you thou Tomasz, that there's no consensus
> > on Polish Wikipedia on exeception: how to deal with words
> > in Latin-based scripts which have popular or established Polish way
> > of writing them without diactrics. So your sentence gave only first
> > approximation of the policy and was lacking sth. The working copy of
> > the policy and the ratio can be found, unfortunately in Polish
> > language only at:
> > http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Zasady_pisowni_nazw_obcoj%C4%
> > 99zycznych
>
> Nobody ever suggested stripping diactrics other than from
> "traditionally polonized" names. I even remember accents
> on all these French names when we had old software.

On Polish Wikipedia Kuomintag was changed to Guomindang with tone marks
Tokio was changed to Tokyo with macrons by... you!
(instead of Polish traditionally polonized versions: Kuomintang and Tokio
- and this has priority IMO and in the opinion of others, over the romanization rules).

Let me quote you from another mail:

On 9 Jan 2003 at 14:29, Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
> How can I write article about any Polish city if I can't
> write half of Polish diactrics ? The same applies to most
> of central Europe, and to most romanizations schemes of other
> scripts (which use lot of diactrics).
> How can I write any article about people from such places ?
> Engish Wikipedia screws this issue completely by stripping
> essential diactrics (like http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lech_Walesa).

So I can understand their willing to write Lech Walesa
without our diactrics if that's the way they consider as already
traditional in English language.
However, let anglophones speak for themselves.
For sure you can write articles in English without our diactrics
as I can. There are more painful things in this world.
Writing in any language is writing in this specific language
respecting _it's_ rules, even if the lack of diactrics is a rule.
Instead of rather writing in the language overriden by some
extra syntax. Giving a correct spelling once in parentheses
is what IMO is sufficient.

Going back to:

On 10 Jan 2003 at 4:41, Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
> > Let's hope that ancient browsers extinct sooner.
>
> Unless somebody can show stats that say there is more than 1% of them,
> we can think of them as already extinct.

For sure, results are available somewhere in the net. I'll try to find out.
But I'm doubting... who does research among Third World countries?

> > For people with direct access to the Internet, living in the
> > so called Western World it is a "big" benefit.
> > For people living in other parts of the world without all the
> > "very" high technology, using some kind of "lower" high technology
> > and using future off-line version of Wikipedia it might not be
>
> What do you mean ?
> Standard browsers on both Linux and Windows support UTF-8.
> How does UTF-8 or not changes that ?

Hmm... W98 PL SE + it's standard IE 5.0 made some problems
(that's my experience).
I know people who like to stay on even cheaper system: W95 and IE 3.0
(I guess that's what was installed on W95) - let's hope that they are
in those 1%.

> Much bigger problem for them is lack of CD Wikipedia distributions.

I agree.

> > Both of us are happy because we've got the knowledge
> > how to make our computers and our browsers deal with UTF-8.
>
> I haven't configured anything. It can deal with it out of the box.

Same as me - I use IE 6.0. But I tried to use 5.0 and... failed.
And IE 5.0 is not an extinct one!

> > Other people who just to want to read free encyclopedia,
> > might not be as happy as we are - just watching some
> > broken texts.
> > Some people in this world prefer basic knowledge over nice look.
>
> It's not about look, but correctness.

What's the use of correctness if one cannot see the correct form?

> They are losing lot of knowledge
> now - after reading description of "Wroclaw" on English Wikipedia they
> won't be able to find it on map

For sure they are more intelligent than you suggest!

> or in search engine.

One could say: that's the problem of the search engines, not our!

> They are losing
> linguistic knowledge, because you can't write that without UTF-8.

Yes, they lose that but at _present_ that's not so important.
Many of them don't care about it in daily life: you see how most
of the users of English Wikipedia are happy with what they've got?
Why to make they happier?
Of course, once the English Wikipedia gain more non-anglophone
users it will gain more insight in those things as well.

WIkipedia is aimed to last more that 2 years. So the problem will
be solved somehow sooner or better. But I understand
that you can't wait...

> Anyway, how will UTF-8 or not affect them ?

See above

Youandme

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Rozrywkowe info w portalu INTERIA.PL >>> http://link.interia.pl/f16b8


from_name: Richard Grevers

body:
On Thu, 9 Jan 2003 04:39:51 -0800 (PST), Anthere
<anthere5=/E1597aS9LQAvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org> wrote:

> At home, I can't write any special characters; and if
> I edit a page with some (for exemple "accueil" our
> home page), I mess everything. It is a matte of
> importance in french language.
>
> Opera doesn't support UTF.

Pardon me, but from version 6 onwards Opera not only supports UTF, but
every single string is converted to UTF for it's internal processing!

--
Richard Grevers
Christchurch, New Zealand


from_name: Anthere

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Wikitech-l digest, Vol 1 #329 - 13 msgs

body:
From: tarquin >Please, mac users, what do you use ???? >I Use Mac OS X 10.1 Chimera browser :-) Are you still on OS 9?

Yes. Still on OS 9. I have a G3 (imac graphite 3 years old). It would be possible, but technically not very reasonnable to upgrade it to X. I might increase the memory but the cadency would be too weak anyway.

Besides, I have no problem with any other application I use (and I already know some will likely not work under X), so I am not planning to ruin myself before at least a year, maybe 2. I would be curious to know, but I think the majority of macs are still under 9. Imacs were sold *a lot* about 2-3 years ago, and most wouldnot be under X.

>From: Daniel Mayer
>If it realy doesn't work, try upgrading your browser.
This is a totally wrong-headed way to look at things. Most net users have out-of-date browsers and we shouldn't expect them to upgrade to the latest version of their browser just to write articles. /Very/ unWiki.

Agreed
 Users are not only people at home, on their personnal computer, that they might upgrade or not upgrade (because, they do not necessarily *know* how to do so), but also people working, on the business computer.
I work with a couple of big firms. To simplify administration, the tech team try to have all computers exactly on the same config, worldwide. Same os, same browser, same version. And NEVER the latest one. So all of the config will be supported by "old" 2/3 years old computers, and also because they prefer to wait till bugs are really found out. That means, many working people are not on the latest browsers, and can not change that themselves.
And though my country is not one of the poorest, most computers in schools and librairies are kept for nearly 10 years. What to say of other places ?

What you developers do is *very* important, the wikipedia concept entirely rely on you, and how suitable (readable and editable) you make it to the highest possible number of people. Not only people on the latest PC, with Internet Explorer 6. But also Mac users, and couple of years old hardware, and diactrics users, and near-blind users, and keyboard-without-easy-access-to-accentuated-letters, and modem-users, and 600*800 users. 'Cause we don't always have choice. Sorry, don't mean to hurt anybody, but programing is not an end, just a tool. And please don't say "here's the code, you're welcome, help yourself", I am a programing disabled-person ;-))

Well, if necessary, I think I could find figures for my country. Meanwhile, please don't switch the fr.wiki to UTF 8 before we all know what it will imply in terms of usability.

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from_name: Andre Engels

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Conference paper online

body:
> I just put online the paper on wikis that I presented on November 7 at
> a conference on electronic publishing in Karlovy Vary, Czech Republic.
> It gives a lot of credit to Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales.
>
> Read it here, http://aronsson.se/wikipaper.html
> (This is a static HTML page...)
>
> If you have a pointer to any earlier paper on wikis appearing in a
> scholarly/scientific journal or at a conference, I'd like to know.

I did a search on CiteSeer (http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/), which gives me
the following:

Arie van Deursen, E. Visser: The reengineering wiki. Proceedings 6th European
 Conference on Software Maintenance and Reengineering (CSMR), pp. 217-220.
 IEEE Computer Society, 2002.

(Abstract)
"The ReverseEngineering and ReEngineering research communities have a strong
 tradition of collecting, organizing, and unifying research results. Typical
 examples include the ReverseAndReengineeringTaxonomy, dedicated web sites,
 the ReengineeringBibliography, as well as efforts in ExchangeFormats and
 tool evaluation. In this paper we describe and evaluate the use of a web
 authoring system to integrate such efforts. To that end, we propose the
 ''ReengineeringWiki'', which uses Wiki technology to enable web site visitors
 themselves to maintain and organize pages devoted to their topics of
 interest. This paper covers web authoring criteria, an introduction to wiki
 technology, typical wiki usage, and an evaluation of wiki-based systems.
 Moreover, the paper discusses the organization and contents of the
 Reengineering Wiki, and concludes with an invitation to participate in the
 Reengineering Wiki project."

----

Jonathan Rick, Mark Guzdial, Karen Carroll, Lissa Holloway-Attaway, Brandy
 Walker: Collaborative Learning at Low Cost: CoWeb Use in English Composition.
 CSCL20002. Boulder, CO, January 2002.

(Quote)
"CoWeb is conceptually based on the WikiWikiWeb (or Wiki) by Ward Cunningham.
 The Wiki is a web-site that invites all users to edit any page within the
 site and add new pages using only a common web browser; the text is edited in
 an HTML text area without special applets or plug-ins. The Wiki is an unusual
 collaboration space in its total freedom, ease of access and use, and lack of
 structure. The Wiki is inherently democratic: every user has exactly the same
 capabilities as any other user.

 Like the Wiki, CoWeb looks like a fairly traditional web-site, except that
 every page has a set of buttons at the top that allow the user to do various
 things such as edit the page, (un)lock the page, or view the history of the
 page over time. Links between pages are easily created by referencing pages
 within the same site by name (e.g., *Page Name*). If a page with the given
 name doesn't already exist, a create link shows up next to the name upon
 save; clicking on this creates the new page (see Figure 1). CoWeb shares
 Wiki's democratic philosophy of equal power to all users. Though our usage
 is mostly set in classes, where there is someone in charge (the instructor),
 we find little reason to give more interface power to the instructor than to
 the students. The instructor naturally has social power that does not need
 to be reinforced by the interface. As one professor commented: "I just like
 the interaction that it enables. It's basically a whiteboard that everyone
 can write on. Protections are always kind of a pain." "

----

M. Guzdial: Collaborative websites to support an authoring community on the
 Web. Unpublished, submitted to the Journal of the Learning Sciences 1998/1999.
 (the website this is on has not been updated since 1999, so I do not know
 whether it has actually been accepted/published).

(no specific quote, but this is again about CoWeb, which is indeed just a Wiki
externally)

----

L. Spoon, M. Guzdial: MuSwikis: A Graphical Collaboration System. Proceedings
 CSCL 1999, Palo Alto, CA.

(The PDF gave 'file not found')

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Papers not really 'about' Wiki, but still mentioning it extensively or in
passim:

Dwight Wilson: Teaching XP: A Case Study. XP Universe Conference, Raleigh, NC,
 July 2001.

(Quote)
"It is important to understand that there are several environmental
 differences between an industry team using XP and using it for a
 University course. One of the most significant, mentioned in the previous
 section, is that much less time is spent together as a group. Indeed there
 was not much adequate time to discuss user stories, particularly during the
 first part of the semester when most of the class time was used presenting
 and discussing the XP practices.
 This problems was partially solved by creating a user-story Wiki. The Wiki
 allowed students to enter stories, edit existing stories, make comments,
 sign up for stories, and mark stories as completed."

----

Mark Guzdial: Using Squeak for Teaching User Interface Software. Technical
 Report #00-17. GVU Center, Atlanta, Georgia, 2000.

(Quote)
"One of the tools that we use in _Objects and Design_ is the _CoWeb_
 (Collaborative Website), aslo known as _Swiki_, since it's a Squeak
 interpretation of Ward Cunningham's WikiWiki Web. The CoWeb is perhaps
 the simplest possible collaboration tool: Every page is editable by anyone
 (via an edit link on the page), and anyone can easily create new pages and
 links between pages. By typing *A New Page* on any page, a new page is created
 and linked in with the name A New Page. Surprisingly, such a structure does
 _not_ lead to anarchy. Instead, it is now in use by some 120 groups at Georgia
 Tech, across ten servers, and is being adopted by other schools around the
 world.
 We use the CoWeb in several ways in _Objects and Design_.
 (...)"

----

Toshiyuki Takeda, Daniel Suthers: Online Workspaces for Annotation and
 Discussion of Documents. WWW2002: The Eleventh International World Wide
 Web Conference, Honolulu, 2002.

"Many of the systems described above support only annotations to web pages,
 whereas Pink supports not only web page annotation but also embedded
 annotation to documents, such as WikiWiki documents, created within the
 system."

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Furthermore, I found a mention of:

B. Leuf, W. Cunningham: The Wiki Way: Collaboration and Sharing on the
 Internet. Addison Wesley, 2001.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Regarding Wikipedia, I did not find any articles yet, but it did get a good
mention in a presentation by Finn ?rup Nielsen of the TU Denmark (who has
a Wikipedia login under the nick Fnielsen), see
http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/cachedpage/536544/10

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Andre Engels


from_name: Brion Vibber

body:
On ven, 2003-01-10 at 08:54, Anthere wrote:
> Meanwhile, please don't switch the fr.wiki to UTF 8 before we all know what it will imply in terms of usability.

My position continues to be that we should not switch the big Latin-1
wikis to UTF-8 until we have automatic conversion to handle common
broken browsers.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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body:
On ven, 2003-01-10 at 11:45, Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 10, 2003 at 11:22:43AM -0800, Brion Vibber wrote:
> > My position continues to be that we should not switch the big Latin-1
> > wikis to UTF-8 until we have automatic conversion to handle common
> > broken browsers.
>
> All common browsers support UTF-8, so what do you mean by
> "common broken browsers" ?

Oh, how I wish that were true. *Current* versions of the most common
browsers support UTF-8, but older versions which are still used by
actual, real, Wikipedia contributors whose complaints reach my ears and
whose broken edits reach my eyes, are in fact broken.

"Common broken browsers" are the ones commonly turning up as broken. See
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta.wikipedia.org_technical_issues

This hits real people, including heavy contributors like Anthere; as for
myself, I can't edit UTF-8 pages on the Macs in my university's computer
lab without breaking the content, because they have only an old IE 5.0
and Netscape 4.x.

> Autodetection won't work (all popular browsers, and most of less
> popular ones, support UTF-8, and we don't want to break any of them,
> list of broken browsers doesn't exist).

Checking the 'Accept-charset' header plus a blacklist of known bad
user-agents should do well enough.

> There should be a link
> "my browser is completely broken" which would set a cookie and
> software, seeing that cookie, would convert page to "safer" version.

Better to do the safer thing by default when we know we're going to need
it.

> But what would that "safer" version be ?
> * ISO-8859-1 + &codes;

Ugly, but workable in most cases. (Or another base charset could be used
for some languages.) Automatic conversion of input &codes; to UTF-8
storage internally would additionally help with searching.

> * ISO-8859-1 + `?' marks
> * ISO-8859-1 + rendered PNGs (do these browsers support PNG ?)

That would be useless for editing, which is the problem. A browser that
won't _display_ UTF-8 text (whether able to show all the glyphs or not)
is damn near impossible to find. (Some shitty text browsers may manage
it.)

> I don't think we should support editing that way.

What would you prefer? That we tell Anthere to take a hike and buy a new
computer? That I petition my uni to upgrade hundreds of machines in
their labs? That we ignore similar conditions across the world where
people have old machines or machines they cannot control and tell them,
hey, fuck off, Wikipedia's not for you you whiny bitch?

*I don't think so.*

We should make at least a good-faith effort to make our site usable. I
don't mind so much of joe's buggy browser overlaps something in the
header from time to time or has an ugly border look, but if it's
damaging the content of our site because of bad interactions with
editing, than that hurts the very core of what a wiki is about.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [Wikitech-l] UTF

body:
On Fri, Jan 10, 2003 at 06:29:06AM +0100, youandme at poczta.fm wrote:
> So I can understand their willing to write Lech Walesa
> without our diactrics if that's the way they consider as already
> traditional in English language.
> However, let anglophones speak for themselves.

English Wikipedia, more than any other, is also used a lot by
people whose native language is not English.

> For sure you can write articles in English without our diactrics
> as I can. There are more painful things in this world.

But we can fix that one, and not the others.

> Writing in any language is writing in this specific language
> respecting _it's_ rules, even if the lack of diactrics is a rule.

No. Its rules must be obeyed only for words of that language.
For words from other languages, like names of people, places etc.
rules of source language must be obeyed.

> Instead of rather writing in the language overriden by some
> extra syntax. Giving a correct spelling once in parentheses
> is what IMO is sufficient.

Without UTF-8 you can't even do that.

> > > Both of us are happy because we've got the knowledge
> > > how to make our computers and our browsers deal with UTF-8.
> >
> > I haven't configured anything. It can deal with it out of the box.
>
> Same as me - I use IE 6.0. But I tried to use 5.0 and... failed.
> And IE 5.0 is not an extinct one!

Wikipedia logs show that there are people using MSIE 5.0 and editing,
so I don't know what's the problem again.

> > They are losing lot of knowledge
> > now - after reading description of "Wroclaw" on English Wikipedia they
> > won't be able to find it on map
>
> For sure they are more intelligent than you suggest!

If you strip diactrics, names of many places suddenly become the same.
So instead of one place with that name, you may have 5.
Now they will probably choose least diactricized of them,
being usually wrong.

> > or in search engine.
>
> One could say: that's the problem of the search engines, not our!

Try searching for 'Lech Walesa' on Polish Wikipedia.

Search engine is not supposed to accept broken spelling.
If it was, you couldn't search for a word that genuinely has no
diactrics, if some with the same base betters has (zadanie vs.,
ehm, "zadanie").

> > They are losing
> > linguistic knowledge, because you can't write that without UTF-8.
>
> Yes, they lose that but at _present_ that's not so important.
> Many of them don't care about it in daily life: you see how most
> of the users of English Wikipedia are happy with what they've got?

Polls "Are you happy wih English Wikipedia ?" were never done so far.
Most people I know seem to have one problem or another with it.

> Why to make they happier?
> Of course, once the English Wikipedia gain more non-anglophone
> users it will gain more insight in those things as well.

It already has a lot of non-anglophone users.

> WIkipedia is aimed to last more that 2 years. So the problem will
> be solved somehow sooner or better. But I understand
> that you can't wait...

You have to switch to UTF-8 at some point. The sooner the better.


from_name: Henk van Lingen

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Digits/Letters search

body:
Hi,

I'm new to Wikipedia (great project :-)) and faced the following
problem:

Searching on 'D66' (a dutch political party) gives an error. First
I thought it's because of the 3 chars (the error suggest so) but
searching for 'CDA' (another party) worked. Some looking around
learned me this is probably a MySQL thing. But the MySQL docs
say text searching is possible with both letters and digits.
And indeed '666' works.

Are combi's wrong?

Regards,
--
+----------------------------------------------------------------------+
|  (o-  Henk van Lingen                     http://henk.vanlingen.net/ |
|  /\   Utrecht                                                        |
| v_/_                                                                 |
+----------------- http://www.juistnu.nl/juistnu-a.html -------------- +