from_name: Robert Michel

body:
Salve,

Am Samstag, 28. Februar 2004 18:13 schrieb Jimmy Wales:
> Andrew Lih wrote:
> > One of the most standard outlets for press releases is PR Newswire.  It
> > costs some money to put it on there, but we can investigate the cost and
> > see if it's worth it.
>
> I once paid $1200 for a press release about Nupedia that ended up
> being basically a waste of money.

The wikipeida is a little bit caotic and unpland what article is written next.
I started a try on the German mailinglist to think more about a strategie and
culture for PR, especialy that as many Wikipedianers become skilled and
"multipliers" as possible.

You can`t by PR, a NGO must live PR.

In Germany we hat a TV success on Wednesday and at last two another TV reoprs
about Wikipedia will be followed. In short, good PR is the question of a good
mix in several medias - only TV reprorts are like a flash in the pan  - it
could be only one supporting leg, we (in Germany) need to go one with
something rich in content like an info-flyer. TV is only form image, not for
informations.

Editorial staff will get >> 100 press releases every day and every NGO or
companie will cry "we are the best", "we are special"....
and to buy professional service will not help to win one journalist to be
interrested in the story wikipedia. Mass press releases will serve only
information that all other newspapers will also get, copy&past will not make
his work special.
I agree the beginnig is hard, when nobody knows Wikipedia, why should a
newspaper write about it?

Some short ideas about a good PR mix - do use

-TV
-Radio (weltweit/bundesweit/?berreional/lokal - ?ffendlich - privat)
-daily Newspaper
-weekly Newspaper
-magazin
-expert newspaper
-expert magazin
-book
-study
-reoort (e.g. Minister of Education)
-online-magazin
-webpage
-webportale (Yahoo)
-newsgroups
-internet forum (Heise, Slashdot...)
-placard
-poster
-flyer
-sticker
-T-shirt, Wikipedia-coffee-cup
-personal recommendation
-letter
-info evening
-lecture (at conference,fair)

> Of course, as Wikipedia gets bigger and has name recognition already,
> a press release can be more powerful.
But it also depents on personal realation ships to Journalist and growing PR
skills of every aktive Wikipedianer.

-Try to call Newspapers/TV/Radio-stations personal,
-try to speak with one journalist who would care about the topic Wikipedia
-prepare such a call, with good arguments about Wikipedia
-read the newspapers and look for similar topics and try to get in contact
with these Journalist
-Go in praxis to talk about wikipedia, at your university, in your town....
- reflect your takls
- share bad experiances with other wikipedianers and ideas how to make it
better next time.

This field is quite complex and this is only a short draft of my ideas and
only a quick respond to this topic (excuse my draft-english *g*)

It should be only a "stimulation" to see PR more integrated, more than just a
press release and to start thinking about a PR strategy.

My request for:
Robert Michel wrote:
> -We need good a tutorial "HowTo ask effective for the use of
> pictures with the condition of the GNU-FDL" -well written examples
> for letters to potential contributors -and a culture to celebrate
> every successfuly "acquisition".
is only a part of a common cultur/skills to make good PR. This HowTo has to be
written in the context of a PR strategie.

Some very populare, succsessful NGOs could be examples for PR-work:
e.g. Greenpeace & Amnesty International.

Greetings with a new personal slogan:
"Wikipedia - gemeinsam werden wir besser"
"Wikipedia - together we will become better"

rob

PS: Beside of en,de,ja,hk we should take care about smaller languages projects
to support them in making good PR for their projects.


list: wikitech-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Erik Zachte

subject: [Wikitech-l] Cool project for Perl programmer

body:
Well I actually snagged it some 1.5 year ago already.
It is a 50 Mb TomeRaider file on my Pocket PC :)
Alas not public domain, so I did not publish this.

Compare to en: TomeRaider file, most recent edition (Dec) is 185 Mb (TR uses
internal compression).

The Columbia download was 1 GB, but that was mostly HTML.

Comparing on article per article basis will be different.
Titles and organization of topics will differ.

Erik Zachte


from_name: Edward S. Peschko

subject: [Wikitech-l] enforcing hierarchy on mediawiki, newbie questions

body:
hey all,

I wanted to run my own wiki, and had a couple of questions that I would greatly
appreciate being answered (or getting pointers to the right direction for answers)

I want to make a wiki, but I want to enforce some constraints on it..
First, I want the wiki to be in a generic hierarchy such that the hierarchy
follows certaion administrator-defined rules - ie:

	a) its a hierarchy with three levels
	b) linking between levels is limited to certain places inside the web page.

Ultimately, what I'm looking for is an interface between wiki and CVS - I'd
like the pages to be gathered from mysql and dumped into source control in
corresponding directories (this would fit my application very well).
And, ultimately to go the other way, to take stuff out of CVS and put it
onto the wiki.

I wouldn't mind writing the glue code to do this.. but I'd rather not write
an entire new wiki in order to do it.. ;-(

In other words, I'm hoping that this isn't a wheel that have to reinvent. I'm
really interested in using wiki as a collaboriative tool, but I'm not sure if it
fits the more rigorous model that I have in mind.. If it doesn't, what do
people suggest as alternatives?

Thanks much,

Ed

(
	ps - what's the difference between wiki and its various clones particularly
	phpwiki? Is there a wiki coded in perl?
)


from_name: Karl Eichwalder

subject: [Wikitech-l] Deleting page histories

in_reply_to:
<c1qgt5$if5$1@sea.gmane.org> (timwi@gmx.net's message of "Sat,
	28 Feb 2004 16:50:39 +0000")

body:
Timwi <timwi at gmx.net> writes:

> I am therefore strongly suggesting that someone add a feature whereby a
> sysop can delete a single previous revision, rather than the entire
> history of a page.

You must also delete _all_ revisions derived from the copyright
violation.  Of course, you can preserve parts of the jounger revisions
which are not derived from the questionable parts.

--
                                                         |      ,__o
                                                         |    _-\_<,
http://www.gnu.franken.de/ke/                            |   (*)/'(*)


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: MySQL tables and indexes

references:
<c1quil$dm8$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<951A96A0-6A4C-11D8-A478-000A95DAA284@pobox.com>
	<c1rnak$b0g$1@sea.gmane.org>

body:
On Feb 28, 2004, at 19:46, Timwi wrote:
> Brion Vibber wrote:
>> On Feb 28, 2004, at 12:44, Timwi wrote:
>>> 1) When I load the downloaded SQL dump into MySQL, does it matter if
>>> I have already created the indices for the table, or is this
>>> detrimental?
>> Loading the dump drops any existing table of the same name and
>> creates a new one. It doesn't matter what you've created, it'll be
>> gone.
>
> Have you read the rest of my posting? It's not gone, even if I delete
> the entire database and re-create it.

Yes, I did read the rest of your posting, and it doesn't alter my
response. It doesn't matter what the table you had previous did or
didn't have in the way of indexes, as that table is dropped and no
longer exists. The newly created table comes with indexes, so will have
indexes regardless of what the dropped table did or didn't have.

The dump looks like this, you'll notice that the CREATE TABLE statement
includes the index definitions:

-- MySQL dump 9.10
--
-- Host: localhost    Database: enwiki
-- ------------------------------------------------------
-- Server version       4.0.17-standard-log

--
-- Table structure for table `cur`
--

DROP TABLE IF EXISTS cur;
CREATE TABLE cur (
   cur_id int(8) unsigned NOT NULL auto_increment,
   cur_namespace tinyint(2) unsigned NOT NULL default '0',
   cur_title varchar(255) binary NOT NULL default '',
   cur_text mediumtext NOT NULL,
   cur_comment tinyblob NOT NULL,
   cur_user int(5) unsigned NOT NULL default '0',
   cur_user_text varchar(255) binary NOT NULL default '',
   cur_timestamp varchar(14) binary NOT NULL default '',
   cur_restrictions tinyblob NOT NULL,
   cur_counter bigint(20) unsigned NOT NULL default '0',
   cur_is_redirect tinyint(1) unsigned NOT NULL default '0',
   cur_minor_edit tinyint(1) unsigned NOT NULL default '0',
   cur_is_new tinyint(1) unsigned NOT NULL default '0',
   cur_random double unsigned NOT NULL default '0',
   inverse_timestamp varchar(14) binary NOT NULL default '',
   cur_touched varchar(14) binary NOT NULL default '',
   UNIQUE KEY cur_id (cur_id),
   KEY cur_namespace (cur_namespace),
   KEY cur_title (cur_title),
   KEY cur_timestamp (cur_timestamp),
   KEY cur_random (cur_random),
   KEY name_title_timestamp (cur_namespace,cur_title,inverse_timestamp),
   KEY user_timestamp (cur_user,inverse_timestamp),
   KEY usertext_timestamp (cur_user_text,inverse_timestamp)
) TYPE=InnoDB PACK_KEYS=1;

--
-- Dumping data for table `cur`
--

/*!40000 ALTER TABLE cur DISABLE KEYS */;
LOCK TABLES cur WRITE;
INSERT INTO cur VALUES (1,0,'AaA','#REDIRECT [[A]]\n','Automated
conversion',0,'Conversion
script','20020225154311','',8,1,1,0,0.116338664774167,'79979774845688','
20030404053030'),
[a hojillion lines snipped]

If this doesn't answer your question, I'm sorry.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Timwi

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Cool project for perl programmer

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:

> From these pages, it should be possible to get a list of all their
> article titles.
>
> These could be matched up against Wikipedia article titles.
>
> Then we could ask the hypothetical: suppose Wikipedia just snagged the
> same 55,000 topics as Columbia?  How big would the resulting text be?

I'm taking it!

Just today I've downloaded the en.wikipedia.org database dump. I don't
have a very fast machine, so it took some time to decompress, and it's
still busy importing it into the DB. Does anyone know approximately how
long that takes? (Since it doesn't show any progress meter or anything)

But once that is done, the Perl script will be easy.

Timwi


list: wikien-l

from_name: David Gerard

subject: [WikiEN-l] Trading with the Enemy

body:
On 02/28/04 14:11, Fred Bauder wrote:
>From: "David Speakman" <david at speakman.com>

>>2. Trade requires that the writer gets money or other tangible goods in
>>exchange for services. WP is one way.

> Following our editing the author can then publish for profit now that the
> article is improved. They must follow the GNUFDL rules, that is all.

Also - under US law, allowing the use of a copyright is itself equivalent
to money or tangible goods. (A wrinkle in the SCO v. IBM case, brought to
Groklaw's attention by Linus Torvalds.)

And never mind that the Treas. Dept law is gibberingly batshit insane ...

- d.


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: MediaWiki 1.2.0rc1 release candidate

body:
On Feb 28, 2004, at 19:57, Timwi wrote:
> Brion Vibber wrote:
>> On Feb 28, 2004, at 07:49, Timwi wrote:
>>> Brion Vibber wrote:
>>>> and please report any exciting new problems. If we don't hear about
>>>> your problems, they'll never get fixed!
>>>
>>> Have you fixed the problem with Special:Whatlinkshere?
>> There's nothing wrong with Special:Whatlinkshere. There is corruption
>> in the link tables on Wikipedia, which is visible in
>> Special:Whatlinkshere.
>
> That didn't answer the question on whether it has been fixed (i.e.
> whether re-submitting the pages would update the link tables
> correctly).

Please try it and report back.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Ivo Köthnig

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Faster parsing

references:
<93fCM9PhpVB@erik_moeller> <200402281034.40687.koethnig@web.de>
	<c1qcr8$9oi$1@sea.gmane.org>

body:
> You never specifically need [[heap]]s. A heap is a special way of
> implementing a [[priority queue]] - if you need a priority queue, then
> you can do that by creating an indexed table. Whether the index is
> implemented as a heap should not be your concern (it should be the
> DMBS's). It is well possible that MySQL uses heaps, I don't know.

For sorted lists (index) you will need heaps. Sorting for the largest articles
is one example. I think MySQL would use heaps (or hash-tables) for such
thinks...

--Ivo K?thnig


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Faster parsing

body:
Am Samstag, 28. Februar 2004 16:41 schrieb Timwi:
> I think you are greatly underestimating the powerful optimisations that
> can be done (and are done) in MySQL. Parsing an SQL statement is trivial

Yes parsing ist easy... but transform it to an optimal expression of
relational algebra is not easy... Thus it would be better to use it
directly...

> (in terms of required computational power); I don't know much about
> relational algebra, but it seems that you would somehow have to express
> and then parse statements in that algebra too. If you don't have an

That depends on how you have to write down the expression... But we both
stated parsing is not the problem.

> index, then operations on huge tables are slow no matter what data
> structure you use.

You have to know for what reason you want the index... Most of the special
functions can be switched on, if we just use an index for each of them...


subject: [Wikitech-l] MySQL tables and indexes

body:
Hi,

this isn't strictly on-topic, because it's not specific to Wikipedia,
but you can probably help me with this.

1) When I load the downloaded SQL dump into MySQL, does it matter if I
have already created the indices for the table, or is this detrimental?

2) If the answer to that is "It is detrimental", then: How do I remove
those indexes? Apparently even if I delete the entire database and
re-create it with just the 'cur' table, magically the indexes are still
there.

Thanks,
Timwi


from_name: Rick

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Trading with the Enemy

body:
I am seriously asking what is wrong with what I posted here.  Please explain what I said that angered you, and what is libelous?

RickK

Anthere <anthere8 at yahoo.com> wrote:

Rick a ?crit:
> Where would you suggest? In France, it's illegal to criticize the
> government. In Germany, it's illegal to display Nazi memorabilia. In
> the UK there's the Official Secrets Act to deal with.
>
> RickK

May I *seriously* suggest that you consider avoiding libel and comments
that might anger your peers RickK ?

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

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from_name: Tomasz Wegrzanowski

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Faster parsing

body:
On Sat, Feb 28, 2004 at 08:37:44PM +0100, Ivo K?thnig wrote:
> > You never specifically need [[heap]]s. A heap is a special way of
> > implementing a [[priority queue]] - if you need a priority queue, then
> > you can do that by creating an indexed table. Whether the index is
> > implemented as a heap should not be your concern (it should be the
> > DMBS's). It is well possible that MySQL uses heaps, I don't know.
>
> For sorted lists (index) you will need heaps. Sorting for the largest articles
> is one example. I think MySQL would use heaps (or hash-tables) for such
> thinks...

No, it wouldn't use heaps. MySQL would use B+tree index. It would, if the indexes
were set up right. As they aren't, it has to go through entire database (including
cur_text) to find largest articles, project it so it contains only sizes,
then use generalized merge sort to find the largest articles.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Recent changes

body:
Every time I try to access the Recent changes page, my browser dies, saying the page does not exist.

RickK

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from_name: Ivan Krstic

subject:
Bug tracker (was Re: [Wikitech-l] Re: MediaWiki 1.2.0rc1 release
	candidate)

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:
> Bugzilla unfortunately is also horribly intimidating to use.
[snip]

Take a look at Scarab, http://scarab.tigris.org.

Cheers,
Ivan


from_name: Caroline Ford

subject: [WikiEN-l] Trading with the Enemy

body:
Vicki Rosenzweig wrote:

> At 03:59 PM 2/28/04 -0500, I wrote:
>
>> At 05:43 PM 2/28/04 +0000, Abi wrote:
>>
>>> On Sat, 2004-02-28 at 17:34, Sean Barrett wrote:
>>> > > http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/28/national/28PUBL.html
>>> > >
>>> > > I just assumed that Fred was joking or exaggerating about what this
>>> > > story says.  But he's reporting it accurately.
>>> >
>>> > Nyarly H. Hotep on a rubber raft.  Does anybody have an Iranian
>>> > article I can edit?  I'm willing to stand up and be a test case if
>>> > WikiMedia is willing to be my publisher.
>>>
>>> [[User:Roozbeh]] is editing from Iran, so...
>>
>>
>> So I took a look. The article [[Majlis of Iran]] needed copyediting,
>> so I've done
>> so. I am a US citizen, resident within the United States. (I thought
>> Roozbeh
>> had created it, but the creation was from an IP address which my handy
>> converter can't resolve but that traceroute gets me to a comcast
>> machine on.
>>
>> I'll keep looking.
>
>
> Looking a little further, the article [[Yas-e-no]] was created by
> Roosbeh. The
> edit history now has two additional edits by Roosbeh, and one by me.
>
> Vicki

Vicki - I support you whole-heartedly,

Caroline / Secretlondon


from_name: zero 0000

subject: [WikiEN-l] Concise Print Wikipedia (WARNING)

body:
I haven't really been paying attention, but it seems like the
possibility of a printed snapshot of Wikipedia is under discussion.

I hope you are all very very VERY familiar with the disastrous
experiences of Eric Weisstein when he gave a publisher permission to
print a snapshot of his online mathematics encyclopedia.

See  http://mathworld.wolfram.com/docs/legal.html .

Zero.

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from_name: ciaran

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Unbelieveable 1.1.0

body:
Thank you. This fixed it.

ciaran

Erik Moeller said the following on 2/28/2004 1:53 AM:

> ciaran-
>
>>Try editing the sandbox and then return to the main page. The sandbox
>>link does not update.
>
>
> I got a linkscc-related SQL error message on the first save. The page was
> saved regardless, but the table wasn't updated. I would try setting
>  $wgEnablePersistentLC   = false;
> in LocalSettings.php
>
> Regards
>
> Erik


references:
<c1quil$dm8$1@sea.gmane.org>	<951A96A0-6A4C-11D8-A478-000A95DAA284@pobox.com>
	<c1rnak$b0g$1@sea.gmane.org>

body:
Timwi wrote:
> Have you read the rest of my posting? It's not gone, even if I delete
> the entire database and re-create it.

Are you sure this is the case? I've never noticed this behavior - but I
might have not been paying attention. Double-check that the database
actually gets dropped (see if the MYI/MYD/... files are gone from your
mysql database directory after you drop it).

Cheers,
Ivan


from_name: Nikola Smolenski

subject: [WikiEN-l] Proposal for dealing with reincarnations

body:
On Friday 27 February 2004 16:23, uninvited at nerstrand.net wrote:
> Rookie : A logged in user who has fewer than 10 editing days.  An "editing
> day" is a calendar day when the user makes one or more edits.
>
> Frequently Edited Article : An article in the main encyclopedia namespace
> that has been edited more than 5 times in the last 48 hours.
>
> ==== Policy ====
>
> On the English Wikipedia, neither Rookies nor IP users are permitted to
> edit Frequently Edited Articles.

===== Solution =====

**Create user 1
**Make an edit as user 1
*Tomorrow:
**Create user 2
**Make an edit as user 2
**Make an edit as user 1
*Day after tomorrow:
**Create user 3
...
*After 10 days:
**Fresh flow of non-rookie usernames


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Print edition

body:
Nikola Smolenski wrote:

>On Saturday 28 February 2004 01:57, Ray Saintonge wrote:
>
>>That would be fine, although this project would probably need more
>>restrictive editing rights than the main Wikipedia, if it ever wants to
>>accomplish anything.
>>
>I agree, but also hope that there will also be a policy of not changing
>factual contents of the articles. I see no point in trying to write NPOV if
>editors would just POV it in print.
>
NPOV disputes would probably kill the peper version.  If an article
seems to be heading for that, it might be better to omit it entirely in
the first edition.

>Oh, by the way, it seems that I am the first to notice that a printed
>encyclopedia also needs a preface :)
>
I guess Jimbo will have to do that. :-)

Another item of interest would be a list of contributors (either real
names, Wikipedia names, or something completely different as they each
individually decide) with the name of their home towns.  This latter
touch would illustrate the wide geographical range of people who have
participated.

Someone else mentioned the US/UK spelling issue.  These should stay just
as we now have them except as needed to maintain consistency within an
individual article.  That decision could be explained in the introduction.

Ec


subject: [WikiEN-l] Trading with the Enemy

body:
I believe in chutzpah, so I will suggest the People's Republic of China!
 By latest reports our Chinese contributors have been having free
access.  Imagine!  Our 5th special 2008 Olympic Edition being issued
from Baijing as evidence that there is free speech in China.. :-) :-)

Ec

Rick wrote:

> Where would you suggest?  In France, it's illegal to criticize the
> government.  In Germany, it's illegal to display Nazi memorabilia.  In
> the UK there's the Official Secrets Act to deal with.
>
>
> Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
>
>     Is this a suggestion that the servers should be moved to a free
>     country?
>


subject: [WikiEN-l] Concise Print Wikipedia is a Fork

body:
On Saturday 28 February 2004 12:03, mapellegrini at comcast.net wrote:
> print-ready. B) Weblinks and interlinks have to be removed from our print
> articles, but not from our regular database.

Why would weblinks have to be removed? Well, certainly some of them, but some
should stay (for example: in an article about a book, a link to on-line
edition of the book). Imagine article about Google without having Google's
URL ;)))

> I'm sorry to repeat myself, but I still think my idea is the best. Getting
> a full, printed version of Wikipedia is going to require a LOT of effort.
> IMO, those side projects fall short of it by orders of magnitude. Plus, it
> would mean that users would have to keep track of two seperate Wikipedia
> namespaces - not something that most people are going to do.

I agree, and it probably wouldn't require big changes to the software. Just
the ability to set the access rights to the articles, and (not absolutely
neccesary) automatic announcing on articles' pages about existence of print
versions.


list: wikipedia-l

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Re: Gallery of 53 Main Pages - For quick
	comparison	of general layouts

body:
Michael Snow wrote:

> Erik Zachte wrote:
>
>> For a quick comparison of layouts of all 53 Main Pages have a look at
>>
>> http://eza.gemm.nl/Wikipedia/Gallery/Gallery.htm
>>
>> Complete pages are shown, captured at a virtual 1000*3000 screen
>> resolution,
>> reduced to 40% size.
>> At 40% reduction the text is hardly readable, but it gives a nice
>> comparison
>> of overall layout per wikipedia.
>>
>
> It's nice to see that quite a few languages are getting images on
> their main pages. I wish I knew enough, or any, Romanian, to
> understand how that picture of two frying pans got featured.

I was curious about this too.  They are currently translating the
general Cooking article from the French Wikipedia, and they are using
the picture to illustrate that article.  The picture was not in the
original French article.

> ZH appears to have picked up EN's new layout (or did we get it from
> them?). I particularly enjoy seeing the right-to-left layouts in
> Hebrew and Arabic.

Something of this sort could be used in the new print version to
illustrate the scope of the project.

Ec


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Print edition

body:
On Saturday 28 February 2004 01:57, Ray Saintonge wrote:
> limholt at excite.com wrote:
> >--- On Fri 02/27, David Gerard < fun at thingy.apana.org.au > wrote:
> >>It needs to be a separate branch, taking stuff from the trunk as it
> >>sees fit. Tag it "Wikipedia Concise Print" or something.
> >
> >----
> >Why not make it equivalent to a language Wikipedia? We already have the
> > 'Simple English' Wikipedia. The other language type link on an article
> > could tell you the page had been selected (or moved).
>
> That would be fine, although this project would probably need more
> restrictive editing rights than the main Wikipedia, if it ever wants to
> accomplish anything.

I agree, but also hope that there will also be a policy of not changing
factual contents of the articles. I see no point in trying to write NPOV if
editors would just POV it in print.

Oh, by the way, it seems that I am the first to notice that a printed
encyclopedia also needs a preface :)


body:
zero 0000 wrote:

>I haven't really been paying attention, but it seems like the
>possibility of a printed snapshot of Wikipedia is under discussion.
>
>I hope you are all very very VERY familiar with the disastrous
>experiences of Eric Weisstein when he gave a publisher permission to
>print a snapshot of his online mathematics encyclopedia.
>
>See  http://mathworld.wolfram.com/docs/legal.html .
>
I don't see that as possible unless the contributors have signed away
their copyrights.  In previous discussions about possibly changing from
FDL to something else, there was a strong feeling that getting these
rights from all who had them would be impossible.

Ec


subject: [WikiEN-l] Plautus was kicked off this list

body:
Aluminum.Bavariati at epoptic.org (Aluminum.Bavariati at epoptic.org) [040228 11:42]:

> > He seems to think that somehow Disney is behind all this, among a
> > number of other interesting theories about people using pre-arranged
> > and encrypted signals, etc.
>
> BLU-97 A/B Arnett unclassified JPL chameleon man HAMASMOIS Exon Shell
> MD4 pink noise event security 64 Vauxhall Cross White House government
> counter intelligence Adriatic

DISNEY is IN IT with the SPAMMERS!!!1!!12!!11!!"!

- d.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Print edition

body:
Daniel Mayer (maveric149 at yahoo.com) [040228 15:09]:
> Delirium wrote:

> >I think we need to split out versions somewhere else,
> >because we're looking for concise articles, not full
> >encyclopedia articles.  Simply marking [[World War II]]
> >as "ready for print" doesn't do anything towards
> >getting us a good one-to-two-paragraph summary of
> >World War II.

> Ideal Wikipedia news style would be to have the first section of an article be
> a concise article in its own right. Then the process of creating a concise
> version would be as simple as extracting the first section of each article
> (excluding tables and images).

This is what I try to do with the first para an/or intro of every article I
work on.

(I have my personal style guide on [[User:David Gerard]]. I would most
welcome thoughts on my talk page.)

- d.


subject: [WikiEN-l] No forks! (was: Re: Print edition)

body:
Ray Saintonge (saintonge at telus.net) [040228 20:12]:

> And who is going to have the time to verify that all the chosen articles
> are written in "news style"?  Even if we limit ourselves to a mere
> 10,000 srticles it will be a horrendous task.

Someone will have to for the print version, whether it's a fork or not.

It will likely be done by volunteer editors like me, who find the project
inspiring and want to get involved.

- d.


from_name: John C. Penta

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Trading with the Enemy

body:
Er, he doesn't like people saying unflattering things about France?

(In all seriousness, I'm as confused as Erik. Ant....whaaaaa?)

John
Content-type: multipart/alternative;
 boundary="Boundary_(ID_XqM42wRUYTXdToTQPPZo5g)"

--Boundary_(ID_XqM42wRUYTXdToTQPPZo5g)
Content-type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-transfer-encoding: 8BIT

I am seriously asking what is wrong with what I posted here.  Please explain what I said that angered you, and what is libelous?

RickK

Anthere <anthere8 at yahoo.com> wrote:

Rick a ?crit:
> Where would you suggest? In France, it's illegal to criticize the
> government. In Germany, it's illegal to display Nazi memorabilia. In
> the UK there's the Official Secrets Act to deal with.
>
> RickK

May I *seriously* suggest that you consider avoiding libel and comments
that might anger your peers RickK ?

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

---------------------------------
Do you Yahoo!?
Get better spam protection with Yahoo! Mail

--Boundary_(ID_XqM42wRUYTXdToTQPPZo5g)
Content-type: text/html; charset=us-ascii
Content-transfer-encoding: 8BIT
Content-comments: Conversion error: %NONAME-W-NOMSG, Message number 00000000

I am seriously asking what is wrong with what I posted here.  Please explain what I said that angered you, and what is libelous?

RickK

Anthere <anthere8 at yahoo.com> wrote:

Rick a ?crit:
> Where would you suggest? In France, it's illegal to criticize the
> government. In Germany, it's illegal to display Nazi memorabilia. In
> the UK there's the Official Secrets Act to deal with.
>
> RickK

May I *seriously* suggest that you consider avoiding libel and comments
that might anger your peers RickK ?

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

Do you Yahoo!?

Get better spam protection with Yahoo! Mail

--Boundary_(ID_XqM42wRUYTXdToTQPPZo5g)--
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from_name: Robert Michel

subject: PR-strategy was: Re: [Wikipedia-l] 500,000 milestone is here!

body:
Salve Mark,

Am Samstag, 28. Februar 2004 21:47 schrieb Delirium:
> Robert Michel wrote:
> >You can`t by PR, a NGO must live PR.
                  ^^^ buy ;)
>
> I guess to me it seems like this shouldn't be a major problem---we don't
> need to do PR, because the PR comes to us.

Sorry, but I think you are wrong, you mix up PR (populare image) with
popularity, or quantity.

> If we get to the
> point where we're competing with Britannica in a multi-volume printed
> set, that will get us lots of PR (some of it negative---"they're killing
> off Britannica!"---but all PR is good PR, right?).

Bad news are good news, from the news papers point of view.
Bad PR is just bad PR. Do you remember of the image problem of the German
chemical big group Bayer (BAY) after the Lipobay "problems"?

My starting points for creating a PR-strategy was not popularity for user, and
not finding as many new wikipedianer as possible. They were:
- qualitative growing - becomming experts to be active wikipedianer
- Howto ask effective for the use of pictures with the condition of the
GNU-FDL
- to find donator and heirships

Jimbo agreed with my idea for this HowTo
Am Montag, 23. Februar 2004 12:36 Jimmy Wales wrote:
> Robert Michel wrote:
> > -We need good a tutorial "HowTo ask effective for the use of
> > pictures with the condition of the GNU-FDL" -well written examples
> > for letters to potential contributors -and a culture to celebrate
> > every successfuly "acquisition".
>
> I agree with you with overwhelming enthusiasm.
>
> Will you start writing such a HowTo?

The basis for having a chance to get right to use pictures with the condition
of the GNU-FDL is mainly a good image and the skill to present the wikipedia
project and not popularity.

On wednesday we had in Gemany a TV news report on the major public TV station
with 2.26 millionens viewers - to read the transcript and to see a screenshot
of the moderator in front of the wikipedia logo:
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_TV_coverage_of_Wikipedia
*g*

This TV-report could have been the "door opener" for finding new friends for
the Wikipedia, like the Goethe-Institut http://www.goethe.de/enindex.htm

Another story of success is that on Monday on big weekly magazin (spiegel)
will bring an 2 pages articel about the wikipedia. This magazin has a
circulation of 1,108,083 sold exemplars. During a photo-session for this
article inside one museum in munic, the wikipedianer Elian got the right to
use this pictures from one expedition in Internet-quality for our project:
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bild:Samarkand-mosque2.jpg
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bild:Libyen-oase2.jpg
(I don`t know if these are all or other will follow)

Both should be small examples that with good PR, with an good image it will be
much easier to get pictures rights.

A strategy for getting pictures needs a porposeful PR-strategy.

I don`t want to create a syntetic image
- I want to enhance skills of most of the wikipedianer to be convincing when
they ask for right to use pictures.

> I guess to me it seems like this shouldn't be a major problem---we don't
> need to do PR, because the PR comes to us.
I don`t want to be unfair, but it was you who has started:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Press_coverage
only one online article about 500,000
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Artikel_?ber_Wikipedia
only one TV report, one magazin.

I don`t see self-running PR - That isn`t yet much success for the 500,000
milestone!

And you have overseen my warning:
> PS: Beside of en,de,ja,hk we should take care about smaller languages
> projects to support them in making good PR for their projects.
We need to become more active to support all smaler Wikipedias!

So I hope some people will agree that more action and a PR-strategy would help
more than buying a professional press release. We do have a world wide
network, we can do what no press resease company can do - but don`t do it
anonymous - try to build up personal contacts.

Take action in your region, try to build national/regional PR-teams,
give feedback of your steps to Jimbo and try to get personal contacts to your
regional/local journalists!

Good luck,
rob

PS: I know that the press contacts should be make by confidential wikipedians,
try to do it with a team and do only what you are sure would be positive for
the wikipedia project.


from_name: Anthere

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Trading with the Enemy

body:
Rick a ?crit:
> Where would you suggest?  In France, it's illegal to criticize the
> government.  In Germany, it's illegal to display Nazi memorabilia.  In
> the UK there's the Official Secrets Act to deal with.
>
> RickK

May I *seriously* suggest that you consider avoiding libel and comments
that might anger your peers RickK ?


from_name: Jens Frank

subject: [Wikitech-l] Parser implementation submitted to HEAD

body:
Hi,

a new parser for internal links [[...]] and ''quotes''
has been committed to cvs HEAD.

Using the new parser, image thumbnail captions can
have links via [[Image:bla.jpg|thumb|A big [[bla]] I've photographed]].

The code has broken prefixed links that are used by ar: (Al[[razi]]
kind of links). I'll have to fix this tomorow.

A test page is available at
http://jeluf.mormo.org/testwiki/wiki.phtml?title=London

Regards,

	JeLuF


from_name: Erik Moeller

subject:
[Wikitech-l] PHP5 compatibility (was Re: MediaWiki 1.2.0rc1
	release candidate)

body:
Brion-
> On Feb 28, 2004, at 01:11, Brion Vibber wrote:
>> * No PHP5 compatibility. I know there are a few keyword conflicts
>> which should be easy to fix, but we haven't tested this yet.

> Actually, it seems that these may have been fixed already. I've done a
> quick test with PHP 5.0.0b4 and haven't run into any problems yet. I'd
> appreciate a confirmation on this from anybody who's using PHP 5 more
> regularly or notices that a particular operation does fail.

I briefly tested it with b2 and fixed obvious keyword conflicts. There
might still be a lingering incompatibility here or there, though.

Regards,

Erik


body:
Brion Vibber wrote:

> On Feb 28, 2004, at 12:44, Timwi wrote:
>
>> 1) When I load the downloaded SQL dump into MySQL, does it matter if I
>> have already created the indices for the table, or is this detrimental?
>
> Loading the dump drops any existing table of the same name and creates a
> new one. It doesn't matter what you've created, it'll be gone.

Have you read the rest of my posting? It's not gone, even if I delete
the entire database and re-create it.

Timwi


subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re: Bug tracker (was Re: Re: MediaWiki 1.2.0rc1
	release candidate)

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:

> Bugzilla unfortunately is also horribly intimidating to use. If *I* find
> it intimidating, think what joe random "I'm having a problem, I just
> want to see it fixed" is going to think.

I fully agree that BugZilla has a somewhat steep learning curve *for
non-developers*. However, this has a pleasant side-effect...

Namely: Do we really want Joe Random User to submit bugreports? Just
yesterday there were a few (well, at least one) completely bogus
bugreport(s) on the SourceForge tracker, and it led me to unsubscribe
from the newsgroup that mirrors it.

I really think it would make a *LOT* more sense if we had a central page
on Wikipedia (or Meta-Wikimedia) where Joe Random User can submit a
bugreport, and whoever likes to volunteer should transfer them to
BugZilla if they think it's a genuine bug. I am confident that a large
number of (current and future) developers [will] already know BugZilla
from elsewhere, and even if they don't, learning it for Wikimedia is
useful because then they'll know it for other projects.

Those are my thoughts.
Timwi


body:
Brion Vibber wrote:

> On Feb 28, 2004, at 07:49, Timwi wrote:
>
>> Brion Vibber wrote:
>>
>>> and please report any exciting new problems. If we don't hear about
>>> your problems, they'll never get fixed!
>>
>> Have you fixed the problem with Special:Whatlinkshere?
>
> There's nothing wrong with Special:Whatlinkshere. There is corruption in
> the link tables on Wikipedia, which is visible in Special:Whatlinkshere.

That didn't answer the question on whether it has been fixed (i.e.
whether re-submitting the pages would update the link tables correctly).


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Trading with the Enemy

body:
Delirium a ?crit:
> Anthere wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> Rick a ?crit:
>>
>>> Where would you suggest?  In France, it's illegal to criticize the
>>> government.  In Germany, it's illegal to display Nazi memorabilia.
>>> In the UK there's the Official Secrets Act to deal with.
>>>
>>> RickK
>>
>>
>>
>> May I *seriously* suggest that you consider avoiding libel and
>> comments that might anger your peers RickK ?
>
>
> Well, according to the World Press Freedom Committee's document "Insult
> Laws: A Insult to Press Freedom"
> (http://www.wpfc.org/site/docs/pdf/Publications/Insult%20Laws-An%20Insult%20to%20Press%20Freedom-1996%20booklet.pdf):
>
> "...the primary form of this crime became known as 'insult to the
> president of the republic,' whose classic form was set in the French
> press law of 1881.  It remains the basic press legislation in France
> today.  The 1881 law also carries serious penalties for insulting
> foreign chiefs of state, foreign ministers or ambassadors of friendly
> countries, and official bodies like parliament, the judiciary, and armed
> forces... Similar provisions are on the books in Austria, Germany, the
> Netherlands, Norway, and Spain."
>
> The report goes on to note that the French law was last actually used
> under Charles de Gaulle in the 1960s, when a spectator was arrested for
> crying out "hoo hoo" at him.  More recently the Sun was threatened with
> a lawsuit for insulting Chirac, though this never materialized.
>
> The report also notes that the French law has served as an example for
> many laws in other countries, especially less-developed countries, and
> especially former French colonies, that *are* enforced, and those
> countries defend their law under "well, France has such laws, so why
> shouldn't we?"
>
> So "illegal to criticize" is going too far, but it's not entirely
> without basis either.
>
> -Mark

So...wait a minute here...

If I understand well...

There is a law that says it is illegal to criticize the french governement

That law was used only *once* in 125 years.

It was exactly *44* years ago

And *we* should be considered responsible that freedom of speech is
*not* respected in *other* countries, because other countries took
example on us ?

And *that* would be an argument to claim France does not respect freedom
of speech and should not host Wikipedia ?

And *this* is not meant to be insulting ?

Please, consider this very carefully

http://www.freedomhouse.org/research/freeworld/2003/countryratings/france.htm
http://www.freedomhouse.org/research/freeworld/2003/countryratings/usa.htm

Compare
http://www.freedomhouse.org/research/freeworld/2003/countryratings/israel-israeliadmin.htm

And consider
http://www.amnestyusa.org/waronterror/guantanamo/index.html


body:
Brion Vibber wrote:

> The newly created table comes with indexes

Haha! LOL! I totally didn't realise that. I guess I'm blind. I totally
assumed the table definition would be a straight copy from
CVS/phase3/maintenance/tables.sql.

Thanks a lot, and sorry :)
Timwi


from_name: Jake Nelson

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Trading with the Enemy

body:
Anthere wrote:
> So...wait a minute here...
>
> If I understand well...
>
> There is a law that says it is illegal to criticize the french governement
>
> That law was used only *once* in 125 years.
>
> It was exactly *44* years ago
>
> And *we* should be considered responsible that freedom of speech is
> *not* respected in *other* countries, because other countries took
> example on us ?
>
> And *that* would be an argument to claim France does not respect freedom
> of speech and should not host Wikipedia ?
>
> And *this* is not meant to be insulting ?
>
> Please, consider this very carefully
>
>
http://www.freedomhouse.org/research/freeworld/2003/countryratings/france.ht
m
> http://www.freedomhouse.org/research/freeworld/2003/countryratings/usa.htm
>
> Compare
>
http://www.freedomhouse.org/research/freeworld/2003/countryratings/israel-is
raeliadmin.htm
>
> And consider
> http://www.amnestyusa.org/waronterror/guantanamo/index.html
>
I believe recent discussion (ie, the posts starting this thread) pointed out
that the US is very far from perfect on these matters. Just because people
are pointing out that France has some very nasty laws doesn't somehow make
the US legal code's flaws go away.
And a statement isn't libel if it's true.
Frankly, if you don't want repressive laws on information and free
discourse, you're limited to places like Sealand.

-- Jake


from_name: Timwi

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: enforcing hierarchy on mediawiki, newbie questions

body:
Edward S. Peschko wrote:

> 	ps - what's the difference between wiki and its various clones particularly
> 	phpwiki? Is there a wiki coded in perl?

There are loads of Wiki softwares written in Perl.

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

As for the rest of your posting, I'm afraid I don't really understand
what you're trying to achieve.


body:
Brion Vibber wrote:

> On Feb 28, 2004, at 19:57, Timwi wrote:
>
>> That didn't answer the question on whether it has been fixed (i.e.
>> whether re-submitting the pages would update the link tables correctly).
>
> Please try it and report back.

OK, I've tried it. The bug is *not* fixed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Whatlinkshere&target=Bah%E1%27%ED_Faith
still indicates a double-redirect which doesn't exist.

It also lists many pages several times. Editing those pages doesn't
succeed in updating the links table correctly.

Greetings,
Timwi


from_name: Jaap van Ganswijk

body:
At 2004-02-29 04:22, Edward S. Peschko wrote:
>I wanted to run my own wiki, and had a couple of questions that I would greatly
>appreciate being answered (or getting pointers to the right direction for answers)
>
>I want to make a wiki, but I want to enforce some constraints on it..
>First, I want the wiki to be in a generic hierarchy such that the hierarchy
>follows certaion administrator-defined rules - ie:
>
>        a) its a hierarchy with three levels
>        b) linking between levels is limited to certain places inside the web page.
>
>Ultimately, what I'm looking for is an interface between wiki and CVS - I'd
>like the pages to be gathered from mysql and dumped into source control in
>corresponding directories (this would fit my application very well).
>And, ultimately to go the other way, to take stuff out of CVS and put it
>onto the wiki.
>
>I wouldn't mind writing the glue code to do this.. but I'd rather not write
>an entire new wiki in order to do it.. ;-(
>
>In other words, I'm hoping that this isn't a wheel that have to reinvent. I'm
>really interested in using wiki as a collaboriative tool, but I'm not sure if it
>fits the more rigorous model that I have in mind.. If it doesn't, what do
>people suggest as alternatives?

Why not start with describing your actual problem instead
of a solution that you think will solve your problem? Often
newbie designers think in solutions rather than problems.
First define your problem, then search for the best solution.

But let's suppose your problem and solution analysis was
correctly done:

I don't think a strict hierarchy is possible in an encyclopedia,
because for example cows can be put under: mammals, animals
that butchers slaughter and animals that eat grass. Finding the
one single best hierarchical systems sounds like what
intellectuals in the 19'th century wasted their time on.

The real world is much more complicated and for example pre-computer
library systems worked this way: Each new book got an ever increasing
number and based on that number several indexes (boxes with small
index-cards) were set-up based on book title, author and sometimes
some sort of hierarchical system.

And why would you like to use CVS instead of the mechanism in
Wikipedia itself? I'm sure that the usage of CVS and Wikipedia
differs enough that different systems are called for. The
Wikipedia source code is developed using CVS, so it's not that
the programmers don't know that system.

>ps - what's the difference between wiki and its various clones particularly
>phpwiki?

Interesting question, but probably very complex to answer.

>Is there a wiki coded in perl?

Yes, there is. But why use Perl when you can use PHP?

Greetings,
Jaap


from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject: Development Roadmap (was Re: [Wikitech-l] Re: Faster parsing)

references:
<18DB252E-68A9-11D8-99E6-000A95DAA284@pobox.com>
	<87smgwr36p.fsf@unicorn.bad-people-of-the-future.san-francisco.ca.us>
	<20040227145842.GA18468@wroclaw.taw.pl.eu.org>
	<403F7EE2.8020002@kefk.net>

body:
Agon S. Buchholz wrote:
> I think a roadmap would be a great help for all of us to make
> development and prioritoes more transparent to ourselves and all users.

I think that's right.  Having a consensus goal or direction can help
us to move coherently, while of course the volunteer nature of the
work means that people will do or not do whatever they like.  But lots
of time, people may be perfectly satisfied and interested in any
number of different problems, and if we have a roadmap, they can pick
one that's most sensible.

I'm not the right person to set this roadmap, though.  I'm not close
enough to the software development process.

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: User-agent block list & Netscape 3

body:
Lars Aronsson wrote:
> Hunter Peress wrote:
> > Theres 3 main cases where someone has an old browser:
> >    3)They are in the third world.
>
> The only reason a country is in the third world is because they are
> completely clueless.  Why waste time on that?
>
> Or is there something wrong with this kind of argument? Perhaps it is
> the other way around: The only reason some websites fail to support
> old browsers is because the maintainers are completely clueless.

If I understand Lars remarks here, I agree with him.  Contempt towards
people with older browsers is completely inconsistent with our
mission.  There are of course limits to what we can do, but even so...

Certainly the suggestion that if people are on old computers with old
software, we should not support them, but instead tell them to upgrade
to Linux is a wildly impractical suggestion.

--Jimbo


from_name: Daniel P.B.Smith

body:
> I haven't really been paying attention, but it seems like the
> possibility of a printed snapshot of Wikipedia is under discussion.
>
> I hope you are all very very VERY familiar with the disastrous
> experiences of Eric Weisstein when he gave a publisher permission to
> print a snapshot of his online mathematics encyclopedia.
>
> See  http://mathworld.wolfram.com/docs/legal.html .

And, for a nice concise version of the story:

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

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


body:
Ray Saintonge wrote:
> >>So long as I'm still breathing I will strenuously fight against any
> >>Wikimedia-sponsored fork.
> >>
> >Me, too, so let's not sweat about that part too much.
> >
> I suppose this begs the question, "When is a fork a fork?"  Many of
> Wikipedia's sister projects have some characteristics of a fork, but
> they all come under the same umbrella.

Yes, you're absolutely right.

I think what Mav is against, and what I'm against, is that we should
copy a ton of articles out of Wikipedia proper and into another space
(of whatever kind) and then edit edit edit those, while having the
regular versions go off in their own direction.  That seems like a lot
of wasted effort.

Pointers to "good enough" versions is going to be helpful, and then of
course once we have a "manuscript", the publisher will probably want
to copyedit it one last time, and may need to make some slight
modifications in order to fit some technical print requirements.

--Jimbo


body:
This is an excellent cautionary tale.  Rest assured, I approach all
contracts with extreme paranoia born of many, ahem, interesting
experiences as a small business dealing regularly with very big name
Internet companies.

zero 0000 wrote:

>
> I haven't really been paying attention, but it seems like the
> possibility of a printed snapshot of Wikipedia is under discussion.
>
> I hope you are all very very VERY familiar with the disastrous
> experiences of Eric Weisstein when he gave a publisher permission to
> print a snapshot of his online mathematics encyclopedia.
>
> See  http://mathworld.wolfram.com/docs/legal.html .
>
> Zero.
>
> __________________________________
> Do you Yahoo!?
> Get better spam protection with Yahoo! Mail.
> http://antispam.yahoo.com/tools
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


subject: [WikiEN-l] [plautus@shaw.ca: signal-happy clown]

body:
I'm going to stop forwarding these soon, but some are just too
funny.

----- Forwarded message from Plautus Satire <plautus at shaw.ca> -----

From: Plautus Satire <plautus at shaw.ca>
Date: Sat, 28 Feb 2004 23:01:26 +0000
To: jwales at bomis.com
Subject: signal-happy clown

Ed Poor a signal-happy clown, my friend. He says the vote is nine but he
means the index is 201.

I understand without the cheatsheet I can not break your one-time pad cypher,
unless I search through the archives of the email list and the page histories
of wikipedia.

I can make reasonable inferences from my own case, which, combined with the
cases of others, might provide an accurate approximation of the cheatsheet.

Are you convinced yet?

Better get a new back channel now, the loudmouth Ed Poor blew this one.

----- End forwarded message -----


subject: [WikiEN-l] [plautus@shaw.ca: Magen David Adom and thee]

body:
I'm not exactly sure what the meaning of this is.  I am neither a
supporter nor detractor from Magen David Adom.  I barely even knew the
name before this.  I'm not sure why he thinks that I "expect people to
believe" a story that I've never heard before, much less written
about.

----- Forwarded message from Plautus Satire <plautus at shaw.ca> -----

From: Plautus Satire <plautus at shaw.ca>
Date: Sun, 29 Feb 2004 03:55:42 +0000
To: jwales at bomis.com
Subject: Magen David Adom and thee

Why are you such a strong supporter of Magen David Adom?

You do realize that gentleman who had his head blown off was framed, do you
not? Can you honestly expect people to believe this story that another
customer who happened to have a cocked, loaded pistol saved the day by firing
seven or eight rounds into the head and neck of another nearby shopper?

Apparently you can. You've managed to convince the wikisuckers that wikipedia
is an open project. Convincing the world to believe any other nonsense is
trivial by comparison to that feat.

----- End forwarded message -----


from_name: Nick Pisarro

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Regarding MediaWiki:All_messages

body:
Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l at Wikipedia.org> writes:
>It seems that the title of [[MediaWiki:All messages]] is misleading,
>because it actually displays only the messages used by the software, not
>those inserted by users. (And, quite frankly, I don't think it should;
>[[Wikipedia:MediaWiki custom messages]] is already a huge mess, and
>desperately needs splitting up.)
>
>A Special page would either
>(1) have a hardcoded list of messages to display (which would then need
>     to be updated whenever a new message is introduced into the
>     software; admittedly, this would be easier than updating
>     [[MediaWiki:All messages]]; or
>(2) display *everything* in the MediaWiki namespace, which (as described
>     above) would be horrendous.

Actually, I was thinking you would basically port the alogrithm used in
'InitialiseMessages.inc' to contruct 'All_messages', which is to walk
'$wgAllMessagesEn' and/or the appropriate language array, and catch the
array value and the current database value.

So, only values in the language array would be shown.

Nick Pisarro


from_name: Michael Snow

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Columbia and Copyright

body:
Martin Harper wrote:

>>Auppose [the Wikipedia print edition] snagged the
>>same 55,000 topics as Columbia?  How big would the resulting
>>text be?
>>
>>
>Wouldn't selecting the exact same 55,000 topics as Colombia be a possible
>copyright infringement? Choosing an appropriate selection of topics for a
>concise encyclopedia is a creative act...
>
It would indeed. In fact, it's probably one of the better openings we
could provide for our natural rivals to sue us. Encyclopedia topic
selection is definitely copyrightable. And given this kind of opening,
if Columbia really wanted to take Wikipedia down, they could also
recruit other parties with copyright claims and front the cost of the
litigation. (For example, the various copyright owners of the images we
included, if we haven't screened those properly.)

I doubt choosing the exact same topics as Columbia is realistic,
however. We have different naming conventions, and therefore quite a few
of the topics would not coincide exactly.

--Michael Snow
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from_name: Dan Miller

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: remove NPOV disputes?

body:
> NPOV disputes would probably kill the peper version.
>  If an article
> seems to be heading for that, it might be better to
> omit it entirely in
> the first edition.

It's going to look kind of weird when we produce a
first edition containing no mention of Israel ;)

Meelar

=====
Kiss Me I'm Irish!

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Get better spam protection with Yahoo! Mail.
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subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Trading with the Enemy

body:
Delirium wrote:
>  More recently the Sun was threatened with a lawsuit for insulting
> Chirac, though this never materialized.

In the interests of corrected a misperception which I inadvertantly
fell into the other day, is it actually true that the Sun was
"threatened with" such a lawsuit?  Or is it merely that observers
(at the Guardian, for example) noted that such was a theoretical
possibility?

http://media.guardian.co.uk/presspublishing/story/0,7495,900093,00.html

--Jimbo


from_name: Geoff Burling

body:
On Sat, 28 Feb 2004, zero 0000 wrote:
>
> I haven't really been paying attention, but it seems like the
> possibility of a printed snapshot of Wikipedia is under discussion.
>
> I hope you are all very very VERY familiar with the disastrous
> experiences of Eric Weisstein when he gave a publisher permission to
> print a snapshot of his online mathematics encyclopedia.
>
> See  http://mathworld.wolfram.com/docs/legal.html .
>
My understanding of this case was that Weisstein thought he was selling
the rights to only _ONE_ version of his online mathematics encyclopedia,
when the lawyers at Chemical Rubber actually snuck language into his
contract that enabled them to claim _ALL_ of his encyclopedia.

I assume that Jimbo, being a somewhat successful businessman, usually
has any contract he considers signing reviewed first by a lawyer. In this
case, I hope he picks a lawyer familiar with publishing law.

Twenty years ago, when I was considering a career in writing, I had the
impression that publishers have an ethical standard higher than the music
industry (where an artist can sell a million copies of an album, & still
make less money than had she/he worked at McDonald's). I am no longer so
sure of that impression.

Geoff


from_name: Charles Matthews

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Trading with the Enemy

body:
>I am seriously asking what is wrong with what I posted here.  Please
explain what I said that angered you, and what is libelous?

RickK

If RickK knows what he is talking about more than 50% of the time, I'm a
Dutchman.  I just hope the trade in cheap cracks continues to be one-way and
West-to-East across the Atlantic.

Charles


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Trading with the Enemy

body:
Jake Nelson wrote:

>I believe recent discussion (ie, the posts starting this thread) pointed out
>that the US is very far from perfect on these matters. Just because people
>are pointing out that France has some very nasty laws doesn't somehow make
>the US legal code's flaws go away.
>And a statement isn't libel if it's true.
>Frankly, if you don't want repressive laws on information and free
>discourse, you're limited to places like Sealand.
>
The problem is not just the flaws in the U.S. system, but that the
United States actively promotes itself as the archetype of democratic
virtue.  Those of us who are outside of the United States do not see the
President of the United States as the leader of the "free world"; we see
him only as the leader of those countries in the free world where the
majority voted for him.

Citizens of other countries resent the dictatorship of a foreign tyrant
far more than that of a home-grown tyrant.

A little humility goes a long way.

Ec


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Trading with the Enemy

body:
From: "Delirium"

 >More recently the Sun was threatened with
> a lawsuit for insulting Chirac, though this never materialized.

You might want to fact-check that.

Charles


subject: [WikiEN-l] Print edition: unevenness of coverage

body:
I believe the print edition will indeed require "a ton of editing." But
there is a far more serious issue I believe is lurking in the wings:
unevenness of coverage.

For example, take a look at the article on "medicine." On close
inspection, it is mainly an organization scheme with a list of links,
which in many cases are themselves are lists of links, and so forth.
Within this tree, quite a lot of the entries are unlinked. In the print
edition, can we leave out an article on "medicine?" Can the article on
medicine refer to "thoracic surgery" when there's no article on
thoracic surgery? Is it acceptable to have articles on general surgery,
neurosurgery, otolaryngology, orthopedic surgery, poastic surgery, and
urology, but not on cardiovascular surgery, maxillofacial surgery,
pedicatric surgery, thoracic surgery, and vascular surgery?

Who's going to write all the missing articles?

A weak point of Wikipedia is that people write about what they are
interested in, so given several topics of apparently comparable
importance, the length, depth, and quality of the articles may differ
widely. This largely escapes notice in the web edition, but will become
much more apparent in a print edition.

Actually, the medicine example isn't a good one because most of the
articles that _are_ there--that is, specifically those that are linked
to by the Medicine page or the tree of links it points to--are not very
good. Which, of course, raises another question...

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


from_name: Magnus Manske

body:
Jens Frank wrote:
> Hi,
>
> a new parser for internal links [[...]] and ''quotes''
> has been committed to cvs HEAD.

Cool, but it appears to have killed the category feature I revived in
HEAD a few days ago. I'll try to fix that today.

Magnus


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Print edition: unevenness of coverage

body:
Timwi wrote:

> Daniel P.B.Smith wrote:
>
>> A weak point of Wikipedia is that people write about what they are
>> interested in, so given several topics of apparently comparable
>> importance, the length, depth, and quality of the articles may differ
>> widely.
>
> This is true. This is called "Systematic bias":
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Replies_to_common_objections#Systematic_bias
>
>
>> This largely escapes notice in the web edition, but will become much
>> more apparent in a print edition.
>
> Is that really so bad, though? I'm sure most people will understand. :)

To get the language right, it is a "systemic" bias rather than a
"systematic" one.  "Systematic" would imply a wilfull application of
bias in an organized way.  No Wikipedially aware person is suggesting that.

The quality of articles is extremely variable.  Many articles are
clearly incomplete, and I blame myself for that as much as anybody else.
 In the electronic medium we can afford to leave something undone, and
leave it for someone else to complete, or maybe come back to finish it
next year.  If you do that in a print edition it will magnify the
amateurishness of the effort.  We are all here as amateurs, but we also
all want the print edition to be a source of pride in several different
ways.

Using the "Medicine" topic to illustrate this was very good.  We would
do irreperable harm to the credibility of Wikipedia if we rushed into
the creation of medical specialty articles just for the sake of making
sure that we had something on them.

We can't expect the outsider who has just picked up a copy of the print
edition to understand what has led to the article selection.  From his
perspective, it's not his problem.

Ec


from_name: cprompt

subject: [WikiEN-l] Proposal for dealing with reincarnations

body:
On Fri, 2004-02-27 at 10:23, uninvited at nerstrand.net wrote:
>
> On the English Wikipedia, neither Rookies nor IP users are permitted to edit Frequently Edited Articles.

Well, catch me if I'm wrong, but I thought that editing frequently
edited articles weren't the problem. People keep their eye on them, and
find it easy to revert. It's when "rookies" make new articles or edit
the "Least Frequently Edited" articles that they slip under the radar.
> === PART TWO ===
>
> To aid in enforcement of hard bans, Wikipedians may list any user on [[Wikipedia:Petitions for users of concern]], thus starting a petition.  Criteria for listing a user are: controversial edits and a belief that the user may have been banned previously.  These are subjective criteria and Wikipedians are to use their best judgment.  When there are eight or more Wikipedians in support of the petition (regardless of how many may be opposed), the user must demonstrate their real-world identity to the Wikipedia Bureaucracy within 10 days; if they do not do so, their editing privileges are suspended until they do.
I'll share my real identity with Wikipedia as soon as I'm on the payroll.


from_name: Ivo Köthnig

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Faster parsing

body:
Am Samstag, 28. Februar 2004 20:47 schrieb Tomasz Wegrzanowski:
> On Sat, Feb 28, 2004 at 08:37:44PM +0100, Ivo K?thnig wrote:
> > > You never specifically need [[heap]]s. A heap is a special way of
> > > implementing a [[priority queue]] - if you need a priority queue, then
> > > you can do that by creating an indexed table. Whether the index is
> > > implemented as a heap should not be your concern (it should be the
> > > DMBS's). It is well possible that MySQL uses heaps, I don't know.
> >
> > For sorted lists (index) you will need heaps. Sorting for the largest
> > articles is one example. I think MySQL would use heaps (or hash-tables)
> > for such thinks...
>
> No, it wouldn't use heaps. MySQL would use B+tree index.

I think a B+tree is nothing else than a special heap...

> indexes were set up right. As they aren't, it has to go through entire
> database (including cur_text) to find largest articles, project it so it
> contains only sizes, then use generalized merge sort to find the largest
> articles.

Yes, so we should have an index for that. It should be fastet to have an
O(logn)-Operation more for each edit instead of a O(n*logn)-Search each time
a user want the largest articles... (n = Number of articles)

--Ivo K?thnig


subject: [WikiEN-l] Concise Print Wikipedia is a Fork

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:

>Ray Saintonge wrote:
>
>>>>So long as I'm still breathing I will strenuously fight against any
>>>>Wikimedia-sponsored fork.
>>>>
>>>Me, too, so let's not sweat about that part too much.
>>>
>>I suppose this begs the question, "When is a fork a fork?"  Many of
>>Wikipedia's sister projects have some characteristics of a fork, but
>>they all come under the same umbrella.
>>
>
>Yes, you're absolutely right.
>
>I think what Mav is against, and what I'm against, is that we should
>copy a ton of articles out of Wikipedia proper and into another space
>(of whatever kind) and then edit edit edit those, while having the
>regular versions go off in their own direction.  That seems like a lot
>of wasted effort.
>
>Pointers to "good enough" versions is going to be helpful, and then of
>course once we have a "manuscript", the publisher will probably want
>to copyedit it one last time, and may need to make some slight
>modifications in order to fit some technical print requirements.
>
In some respects  I feel that I have ended up in a role reversal here.
 I have clearly expressed myself as a committed inclusionist on
Wikipedia, but find myself arguing from the opposite side in relation to
the print edition, or at least the first printed edition.  Some of the
issues that are germane to the first edition may fade away for future
editions.

To me the key to the success of this venture will be the establishment
of realistic production minded goals.  It's about what works.  It's
about saying there is no time to debate some esoteric point anymore.
It's about being cautious around adopting untested software based
solutions without even knowing how some of our very good but otherwise
technically challenged contributors will confront any learning curve
that such software implies.  (We still have many contributors who feel
that all html markup should be banned.)  It's about making tough,
accurate time-constrained decisions based on a realistic acceptance of
all our limitations.

Philosophically, it doesn't much matter to me whether or not this is
accomplished by way of a fork.  The question, "Does it work?" is more
significant here.

There is the old saw that "there is never a second chance to make a
first impression."  One of the most unrelenting arguments about a
project such as Wikipedia is that you can never rely on it for accurate
information.  Those are the people that you want proven wrong!  Making
the first edition as big as possible is a high risk strategy which, if
it fails, could have a devastating impact  on any project of this kind
by anybody in the future.  This should explain my own strong feelings
that a first edition would be better to have more modest goals in which
size rather than accuracy is sacrificed.

I hope that this didn't sound too much like a rant. :-)
Ec


from_name: Rick

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Trading with the Enemy

body:
Look.  Somebody made a crack that the United States is "undemocratic".  I responded with a completely truthful post.  There is absolutely nothing in what I said that was libelous, nor even incorrect.  It's common practice on Wikipedia to make attacks on the United States, but it's unacceptable when Americans (yes, that's the term) respond with anything other than a cowering "yes, we're evil."

RickK

Charles Matthews <charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:
>I am seriously asking what is wrong with what I posted here. Please
explain what I said that angered you, and what is libelous?

RickK

If RickK knows what he is talking about more than 50% of the time, I'm a
Dutchman. I just hope the trade in cheap cracks continues to be one-way and
West-to-East across the Atlantic.

Charles

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

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from_name: Brion Vibber

body:
On Feb 29, 2004, at 07:20, Jimmy Wales wrote:
> Lars Aronsson wrote:
>> Hunter Peress wrote:
>>> Theres 3 main cases where someone has an old browser:
>>>    3)They are in the third world.
>>
>> The only reason a country is in the third world is because they are
>> completely clueless.  Why waste time on that?
>>
>> Or is there something wrong with this kind of argument? Perhaps it is
>> the other way around: The only reason some websites fail to support
>> old browsers is because the maintainers are completely clueless.
>
> If I understand Lars remarks here, I agree with him.  Contempt towards
> people with older browsers is completely inconsistent with our
> mission.  There are of course limits to what we can do, but even so...

FWIW, our actual practice has been to try to avoid *outright breaking*
older browsers, although we don't go to great lengths to accommodate
their every quirk.

So, Netscape 4.x no longer crashes when visiting
http://en.wikipedia.org/, but it doesn't look as pretty as we might
like.

Browsers that break edits over 32k aren't blocked from editing, but we
do have a warning on long pages.

Browsers that break non-ASCII characters during editing aren't blocked
from editing, they just annoy us greatly. :)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Bug tracker

body:
On Feb 29, 2004, at 11:26, Evan Prodromou wrote:
>>>>>> "BV" == Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> writes:
>
>     Me> It'd actually be cooler to use meta.w.o to track bugs.
>
>     BV> Tracking bugs on wiki pages is terribly difficult too,
>     BV> unfortunately; that's why we started using the
>     BV> tracker. Reports get left, then we ask for more information,
>     BV> and the original poster never comes back to check.
>
> I wonder if the advantages we get out of wiki for producing other
> content would come into play here. A report gets left, and then
> somebody else cleans up the report into a preferred format. Someone
> else gives more specific information, and someone else assigns the bug
> to a person ("Assigned to: [[User:Evan]]").

Like I said, we *could* but in practice *that did not happen in 2002*.
If someone would like to commit to being Keeper of the WikiBugs and
herd the necessary cats, then I'm all in favor of giving it a try.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Tomasz Wegrzanowski

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Faster parsing

body:
On Sun, Feb 29, 2004 at 12:53:46PM +0100, Ivo K?thnig wrote:
> Am Samstag, 28. Februar 2004 20:47 schrieb Tomasz Wegrzanowski:
> > > For sorted lists (index) you will need heaps. Sorting for the largest
> > > articles is one example. I think MySQL would use heaps (or hash-tables)
> > > for such thinks...
> >
> > No, it wouldn't use heaps. MySQL would use B+tree index.
>
> I think a B+tree is nothing else than a special heap...

If you think "heap" as in "priority queue", then no.

> > indexes were set up right. As they aren't, it has to go through entire
> > database (including cur_text) to find largest articles, project it so it
> > contains only sizes, then use generalized merge sort to find the largest
> > articles.
>
> Yes, so we should have an index for that. It should be fastet to have an
> O(logn)-Operation more for each edit instead of a O(n*logn)-Search each time
> a user want the largest articles... (n = Number of articles)

Don't think O(). n on Wikipedia is known. By separating cur_text from the rest
of cur we can make all searches order of magnitude faster - without changing O().


from_name: Jens Frank

body:
On Sun, Feb 29, 2004 at 12:17:42PM +0100, Magnus Manske wrote:
>
>
> Jens Frank wrote:
> >Hi,
> >
> >a new parser for internal links [[...]] and ''quotes''
> >has been committed to cvs HEAD.
>
> Cool, but it appears to have killed the category feature I revived in
> HEAD a few days ago. I'll try to fix that today.

How can I test this feature? What does it do?

	Regards,

		JeLuF


subject: [WikiEN-l] Concise Print Wikipedia (WARNING)

body:
Geoff Burling wrote:

>On Sat, 28 Feb 2004, zero 0000 wrote:
>
>>I hope you are all very very VERY familiar with the disastrous
>>experiences of Eric Weisstein when he gave a publisher permission to
>>print a snapshot of his online mathematics encyclopedia.
>>
>My understanding of this case was that Weisstein thought he was selling
>the rights to only _ONE_ version of his online mathematics encyclopedia,
>when the lawyers at Chemical Rubber actually snuck language into his
>contract that enabled them to claim _ALL_ of his encyclopedia.
>
I only briefly reviewed Weisstein's "short" summary, but did note that
much of what had been contributed to the MathWorld website was by
volunteers.  How could he possibly speak for them?

>I assume that Jimbo, being a somewhat successful businessman, usually
>has any contract he considers signing reviewed first by a lawyer. In this
>case, I hope he picks a lawyer familiar with publishing law.
>
Jimbo does not own the copyrights so he does not have the authority to
sign them away.  I'm sure that any attempt by the publisher to usurp
those rights would be met by new forks from several other members who
already have downloaded the database into their own machines, some of
them outside of the United States. Many Wikipedians already have
concerns about copyright laws, so the publisher's lawyers could be kept
very busy.

>Twenty years ago, when I was considering a career in writing, I had the
>impression that publishers have an ethical standard higher than the music
>industry (where an artist can sell a million copies of an album, & still
>make less money than had she/he worked at McDonald's). I am no longer so
>sure of that impression.
>
Riiight!  And many musicians still believe that the recording companies'
campaigns against MP3's are to protect the rights of the artists. :-)

Ec


subject: [Wikitech-l] tool bar

body:
On Feb 29, 2004, at 13:45, Anthere wrote:
> Please, as it was discussed in length, could someone make the tool bar
> feature disabled by default.

The whole point is to be on by default for newcomers.

> This feature is broken. It does not work on many browsers. It should
> not be "on" per default for a newcomer. It is very disturbing.

What's broken about it specifically that wasn't already addressed?

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [WikiEN-l] Print version skepticism, negativism...

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:

>I'm hopeful for now that we can produce this thing without needing to
>do massive rewrites of 50,000 articles.  I'm hopeful that we can meet
>the size constraints mostly by selectivity of which articles to
>include.
>
>
For articles which are too extensive for this, why not add a link on
[[Stuff]] to [[Stuff {Concise}]]? The script to compile all the articles
in the end could lok for this automagically, and include the Concise
version instead of the "real" article.

Magnus


subject: [WikiEN-l] Columbia and Copyright

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:

>Or, we might learn that the entire approach is hopeless, that all of
>our articles are so much bigger than theirs that we absolutely must do
>a ton of editing.
>
>
If all fails, try Wikipedia ;-)

Magnus


from_name: Evan Prodromou

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Bug tracker

body:
>>>>> "BV" == Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> writes:

    Me> It'd actually be cooler to use meta.w.o to track bugs.

    BV> Tracking bugs on wiki pages is terribly difficult too,
    BV> unfortunately; that's why we started using the
    BV> tracker. Reports get left, then we ask for more information,
    BV> and the original poster never comes back to check.

I wonder if the advantages we get out of wiki for producing other
content would come into play here. A report gets left, and then
somebody else cleans up the report into a preferred format. Someone
else gives more specific information, and someone else assigns the bug
to a person ("Assigned to: [[User:Evan]]").

Bugs that get reported and not followed up on fall to the bottom of
the stack, or go on [[m:Unverified bug reports]] or something.

The thing is that we deal with most problems with Wikipedia (and the
other wikis) on-wiki, but we try to separate one part of it --
software problems -- elsewhere. And, y'know, the place we chose to do
that is far off-site, and it's slow and has a crummy interface.

~ESP

--
Evan Prodromou <evan at wikitravel.org>
Wikitravel - http://www.wikitravel.org/
The free, complete, up-to-date and reliable world-wide travel guide


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Print edition

body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:

>Delirium wrote:
>
>
>>I think we need to split out versions somewhere else,
>>because we're looking for concise articles, not full
>>encyclopedia articles.  Simply marking [[World War II]]
>>as "ready for print" doesn't do anything towards
>>getting us a good one-to-two-paragraph summary of
>>World War II.
>>
>>
>
>Ideal Wikipedia news style would be to have the first section of an article be
>a concise article in its own right. Then the process of creating a concise
>version would be as simple as extracting the first section of each article
>(excluding tables and images).
>
>
How about marking the end of the introduction with an (invisible)
variable, like "{{ENDINTRO}}" or "{{BEGINDETAILS}}"? The "collection
script" could then cut the article off there automagically.

Magnus


from_name: Robert Michel

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Re: New "GNU Free Media Licence"? - was: What would
	Richard Stallman say?

references:
<E1AuAuo-0001oK-1j@fencepost.gnu.org>
	<200402232154.51816.news@RobertMichel.de>
	<E1Avgj7-0006Vm-0P@fencepost.gnu.org>

body:
Salve,

Am Dienstag, 24. Februar 2004 18:52 schrieb Richard Stallman:
> I don't think that the question of a "license for images" is a
> well-posed question.
Maybe - frankly  - I just hoped someone would reply: "not again Rob, see
http://.... we have discussed it hardly and came to this good
conclusion...."  ;)

> The ethical requirements depend more on the
> purpose of the work (entertainment or education, say) than on the
> medium (image or text, say).  Images in textbooks should be free,
> including the freedom to publish modified versions, and the GFDL is a
> good license to use.

Agree: The is very good for texts, this is out of the question.
Disagree: But IMHO the GFDL give not proper instructions how a user of a
picture with GFDL must store the information about this picture. E.g. I have
seen many printed books with a list of picture sources at the end, but
without the information which of these pictures came from which source - that
would be not in the spirit of GNU.

> Images meant for entertainment are a different issue, and I would
> probably recommend using one of the Creative Commons licenses for
> them.

This view entertainment/education (black/white) is a bit naive. There are also
economic interrests of some (big) player in the field of education. One of
the manipulator in the discussion in Europe about "intellectual property
rights" are publishing companies like Bertelsmann. They expect that the
education market will be one or that market with the strongest economic
growth next years - worldwide.

So for some people is science and education just a trading goods like others.
Some manipulators tries to get new laws pefect to maximise the profit with
the goods science/education. This is the reason why I?m against (still) "fair
use" material inside of the wikipedia.

I would prefer license like GFDL for everythink, but for pictures where a
right owner (e.g. institutes) has a higher commercial interrest Creative
Commons licenses without the right for commercial use could be a working
compromise for both interrests.

Frankly, I?m not happy with the Creative Commons licenses - I fear non
commercial use could make pictures unusable for schools/universities if not
the teacher work honorary. Is this fear reasonable?

-What exactly is the restriction of non-commercial?
-When would a commercial use begin?
-Is it sure that the devinition of non-commercial/commercial is not too weak
and will be changed it`s wight by changed circumstance and law, especially
introducing "intellectual property rights"?

> There is no difficulty in including images in a GFDL-covered work.  It
> isn't necessary to mention images specifically in the license because
> the same conditions apply to text, images, and whatever else the work
> may contain.

Full agree, the Wikipedia should go on to use GFDL for pictures, too. My
discussion is not for immediately changes, it is focused on a long term - I
hold this mail 6 days in my in my draft folder and I?m sorry that I haven`t
found much more clarity on this topic.

Because I have doubts about the Creative Commons licenses we should go on with
Richards idea of "free use for educational purpose" - for a more restrictive
license for the case that we can`t motivate a right owner to publish a
picture with GFDL. But isn`t education too weak that even a "Wheel of
Fortune" TV-show would claim this show would be an educational one?

rob

PS: Does somebody have thoughts about the EUs "intellectual property rights"
directives and ideas to raise a statement in the name of the Wikipedia
foundation against it?


subject: [Wikitech-l] enforcing hierarchy on mediawiki, newbie questions

body:
>>>>> "ESP" == Edward S Peschko <esp5 at pge.com> writes:

    ESP> I want to make a wiki, but I want to enforce some constraints
    ESP> on it..  First, I want the wiki to be in a generic hierarchy
    ESP> such that the hierarchy follows certaion
    ESP> administrator-defined rules - ie:

Hey, we have the same initials. Heh. I think I used to be
esp-something at pge.com, too.

Anyways, I think the traditional wiki response to this is that you let
your user community enforce the site architecture, rather than trying
to force that into the underlying software.

Stuff that comes in that doesn't fit in the hierarchy gets moved
around to the right places by people who care about the hierarchy. As
new users become more accustomed to the organizational norms on the
wiki, they add stuff in the right place in the first place.

You might want to read up more on wiki theory at MeatBall wiki,
Community Wiki, or at Ward's Wiki:

          http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?MeatballWiki
          http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/community
          http://c2.com/cgi/wiki

    ESP> ( ps - what's the difference between wiki and its various
    ESP> clones particularly phpwiki? Is there a wiki coded in perl?
    ESP> )

Wiki is a technique, not a piece of software. The name is also
sometimes applied to a Web site using the wiki technique ("This is a
wiki about...") and also sometimes applied to Ward's Wiki, which was
the first wiki.

This list is probably not the best place to compare and contrast
different Wiki engines. There's a list of engines here:

         http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiEngines

MediaWiki -- the wiki engine developed for Wikipedia -- is used for
most (all?) Wikimedia projects as well as others, which see:

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

Its feature set is generally considered very, very good for creating
content-over-community sites:

      http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?ContentOverCommunity

...particularly in the way that discussion pages are separated from
content pages.

Good luck.

~ESP

--
Evan Prodromou <evan at wikitravel.org>
Wikitravel - http://www.wikitravel.org/
The free, complete, up-to-date and reliable world-wide travel guide


from_name: Erik Zachte

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Polish Wikipedia relatively most succesful,
	German second

body:
Of course there are a myriad ways to measure succes of each Wikipedia.

For what it's worth I tried to establish the ratio of active contributors
per million internet users that speak that language.

So per language the figure shows that one of x thousand native speakers with
internet access contributed to Wikipedia in that language

Polish	22
German	31
Dutch		39
Hebrew	40
Danish	44
Swedish	49
Catalan	49
French	49
Finnish	51
English	53
Norwegian	55
Hungarian	94
Romanian	109
Slovenian	117
Italian	166
Japanese	168
Czech		216
Spanish	236
Vietnamese	367
Greek		386
Portugues	431
Russian	638
Chinese	687
Turkish	725
Arabic	870
Malay		967
Korean	2920

For contributors I used wikistats Feb 26 (counts registered users > 10
edits)

For internet users per language I used figures from Global Reach (2003)

http://global-reach.biz/globstats/index.php3

Of course I don't know how exact these figures are,
but I assume they did some homework.

Note : the GR figures list >native< speakers, so actually languages with
international appeal would show lower participation ratios (higher numbers
in the table) if all web users that might be inclined to use that language
were taken into account.

E.g. GR mentions India specifically as a country where the web language is
English and not Hindi.

Erik Zachte


from_name: Delirium

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Trading with the Enemy

body:
Charles Matthews wrote:

>I didn't say anything there was libelous, or incorrect.  My word was
>'cheap'.  I'm in the UK, we have an Official Secrets Act.  Anthere disputes
>your claim on the 'illegality' of criticising the French government (we have
>had another ill-informed post on that).  I'll leave aside what you said on
>Germany, for reasons well known in Usenet discussions.
>
>These are _not_ the knock-down arguments you seem to think they are.  They
>seem more like a blind need to hit back with anything at hand.
>
>I have had the advantage of having worked in the USA for a year.  Can I just
>make one point?  Wikipedia is not, actually, about American national
>identity.
>
>
I don't care all that much one way or the other, personally, but I think
the main point was that if we're going to suggest that the servers need
to be moved out of the US because of a theoretical possibility of legal
troubles over copyediting Iranian posts, then we need to be concerned
about all sorts of other theoretical possibilities in other countries,
including Official Secrets Acts, laws about insulting presidents, and so on.

In reality, we probably don't need to worry about any of these.

-Mark


from_name: David Friedland

subject:
[WikiEN-l]
	Re: [plautus-Kn++NELU6BMVnaY5ffxtWuY7M/1xyH2gwGhcVh78ZPs@public.gmane.org

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:
> I'm going to stop forwarding these soon, but some are just too
> funny.
>
> ----- Forwarded message from Plautus Satire <plautus at shaw.ca> -----
>
> From: Plautus Satire <plautus at shaw.ca>
> Date: Sat, 28 Feb 2004 23:01:26 +0000
> To: jwales at bomis.com
> Subject: signal-happy clown
>
> Ed Poor a signal-happy clown, my friend. He says the vote is nine but he
> means the index is 201.
>
> I understand without the cheatsheet I can not break your one-time pad cypher,
> unless I search through the archives of the email list and the page histories
> of wikipedia.
>
> I can make reasonable inferences from my own case, which, combined with the
> cases of others, might provide an accurate approximation of the cheatsheet.
>
> Are you convinced yet?
>
> Better get a new back channel now, the loudmouth Ed Poor blew this one.
>
>
> ----- End forwarded message -----

I'm not trained in psychoanalysis in any way whatsoever, but this guy is
either a paranoid psychotic or doing a very good impression of one. I've
probably been watching too many ER reruns because my first thought was
to ask if you had "paged psych".

- David


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: tool bar

body:
On Feb 29, 2004, at 14:32, Anthere wrote:
> Brion Vibber a ?crit:
>> On Feb 29, 2004, at 13:45, Anthere wrote:
>>> Please, as it was discussed in length, could someone make the tool
>>> bar feature disabled by default.
>> The whole point is to be on by default for newcomers.
>
> But if it is on by default, and does not work for all, it will be
> *more disturbing* than beneficial to many users.

We all agree 100% on this! That's why it's supposed to disable itself
where it doesn't work. We bullied Erik into adding code to that
SPECIFICALLY SO THAT IT WOULD NOT BREAK ON BROWSERS WHERE IT WOULD
BREAK. Which brings us to:

>>> This feature is broken. It does not work on many browsers. It should
>>> not be "on" per default for a newcomer. It is very disturbing.
>> What's broken about it specifically that wasn't already addressed?
>
> ?!?!?
>
> Look Brian...this was explained in length in numerous emails to that
> mailing list when the feature was discussed.
>
> Some french people made a report of the browsers on which it is not
> working. It is here
> http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/
> Wikip%E9dia%3ABarre_d%27outils_d%27%E9dition
[snip]

Here's the results of my testing just now:

Win/IE 6.0:
Works correctly in inline mode.

Mac/IE 5.2:
Works correctly in infobox mode.

Konqueror 3.1.4:
Works correctly in infobox mode.

Konqueror 3.2.0:
Works correctly in infobox mode.

Win/Opera 7.23:
Works correctly in infobox mode. When a button is clicked the browser
does some sort of relayout which is distracting, but not as much as
Opera 6.03. The edit box contents are not disturbed nor scrolled, but
focus is lost. Minor usability issue.

Mac/Opera 6.03:
Infobox mode seems to work but the screen scrolls up and down. Really
really annoying.

Mozilla 1.2, Mozilla 1.6, Mozilla Firefox 0.8:
Inline mode doesn't quite work: scrolls edit box to top. This is a
serious usability problem. Erik was asked to use infobox mode for
Mozilla because of this, but apparently never applied the fix. This
should never have gotten out the door; I seem to remember Erik agreeing
to fix this and am very surprised that it's not fixed as promised.

Safari 1.2:
The "#" click incorrectly sends us to the bottom of the page; this is a
serious usability problem.
Otherwise seems to work correctly in infobox mode.

Netscape 4.77:
Just doesn't work. No infobox, no inline.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Fantasy

subject: [WikiEN-l] Mailing list postings that should be read by everyone

body:
Hi all,

I just have to say, that I would love to follow all en-discussions, but
I (and many others) are working in many other languages as well and can
therefore not follow everything going on here.

But: I (or we) would nevertheless like to know what "important" is going
on here. We want to be part of Wikipedia en.

So, please, help me/us by adding important postings to this page:

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

It's just an Idea, but I think it's worth trying,
Fantasy :-)


body:
On Sun, Feb 29, 2004 at 02:47:14PM +0100, Erik Zachte wrote:
> Of course there are a myriad ways to measure succes of each Wikipedia.
>
> For what it's worth I tried to establish the ratio of active contributors
> per million internet users that speak that language.

They quote Polish data from 2001. Most other data is 2003 or 2002.


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: tool bar

body:
On Feb 29, 2004, at 15:34, Erik Moeller wrote:
> Brion-
>> Mozilla 1.2, Mozilla 1.6, Mozilla Firefox 0.8:
>> Inline mode doesn't quite work: scrolls edit box to top.
>
> This is a Mozilla bug:

Yes, and we have to work around it.

> http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=231389
> It appears in all toolbars of this type. I prefer having this variant
> to
> the infobox variant -- once you press a cursor key you're back where
> you
> were before, so you can use the toolbar reasonably productively.

Well, you're apparently at odds with the people who USE the wiki. I
haven't heard a single consenting voice that says "yes! we should use
the seriously broken mode, because someday Mozilla will work right with
it and someday everyone using Mozilla will upgrade to that version!"

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Trading with the Enemy

body:
Anthere wrote:

> I spent a good while looking for a reference that would support the
> claim the government threatened the sun of the 45000 euros fine.
>
> In french, the number of references I found is laughable. In short,
> the topic is not mentionned but by a couple of blog and forum. French
> just do not know of that law, which is a good measure of how refrained
> in their freedom of speech they feel.
> Also, some discussions mentionning the law and the fine, indicated
> that some people thought The Sun attack was a two level construction
> First : insulting the president very badly
> Second : spreading the word this is illegal to do so, hence that no
> freedom of speech is allowed in France.

That sounds likely, in light of some further reading.  It seems that the
Sun were both trying to insult the President, and also trying to get
themselves sued for it, which would've been very good for their public
relations most likely.  In fact, after they didn't get sued for the
"Chirac is a worm" one, they tried an even more outrageous story in
which they caricatured Chirac as Saddam Hussein's prostitute, and their
accompanying text seems similarly goading: "Last month we accused Chirac
of behaving like a worm. Today we say to the people of France: we did
not go far enough. Your president is not just a worm. He has behaved
like a Paris harlot."
(http://media.guardian.co.uk/iraqandthemedia/story/0,12823,918987,00.html).

Which all makes it somewhat odd that the law still exists.  If it's not
going to be enforced even in such egregious cases as this, why not just
repeal it?

-Mark


body:
Thoamsz wrote:

> They quote Polish data from 2001. Most other data is 2003 or 2002.

Yes, the Global Reach data are not really homogeneous.
I wrongly assumed all data in the first column were from 2003.

But it does not affect the overall picture that much.
Even when we take the 2004 forecast of 9 million Polish internet users
instead of the 2001 figure of 6.9 milllion,
the pl: ratio is 1 contributor per 29 thousand, which still makes pl: first
on the list.

Again, I'm not sure how reliable the GR figures are.
Surely a forecast is less dependable when based on older figures.

Erik Zachte


from_name: Ivan Krstic

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Bug tracker

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:
> If someone would like to commit to being Keeper of the WikiBugs and herd
> the necessary cats, then I'm all in favor of giving it a try.

I might be willing to take this on; I'd just like a sound understanding
of what cats you're specifically referring to herding. Other than the
keeptrack-assign-verify-close process, what else do you feel would need
to be done?

Cheers,
Ivan