from_name: Ting Chen

body:
Hello People,

thanks for everyone who have offered help, who have helped and who have
given advise. This was the second time that we experienced such an attack,
and the attack took place as most of our sysops (located at UTC+8h) are
offline. I think we are also learning how to handle such things. And your
advices are very valuable for us. It's a pleasure and it's very moving to
get so much helps from so different places arround the world so fast. Thanks
anyway, this is a great community and I believe I can speak for all chinese
wikipedians that we are happy to be a member of it.

I want yet say one thing. My own oppinion about the deleteBot. I personally
don't like this ideal, because such a tool, powerful it is, could also used
to do great devastation, and one cannot expect that such lots of people
would be careful for all their live. So please let it unused and we would
contact the developers properly next time.

Wing.

--
"Sie haben neue Mails!" - Die GMX Toolbar informiert Sie beim Surfen!
Jetzt aktivieren unter http://www.gmx.net/info


list: wikien-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: N.T. Riche

subject: [WikiEN-l] Theresa Knott Vs. Mr. Natural Health

body:
I suggest that both users join the Irc channel to resolve their differences.

"N.T. Riche" <vonriche at yahoo.com> wrote:These two users are at it again with this on-going edit war on Alt. Medicine. Now i have seen the page and the main dispute is over Osteopathy (a subject i know nothing about but i will investigate it). Franky in your defense ms. knott it does sound poved...but I'd say it just needs to be re-worded not removed completely. Now I have seen Knott commit Ad hominem on users such as lir and Dr. Dan, but John (MNH) has also done the same with that "I'm a Nazi from New York" attack on Robert, (I took insult to also myself because I'm Gypsy in ancestry). My suggestion for both of you is to avoid each other, and have a neutral observer re-word the Osteopathy part of the article. Now I'd suggest Arbitration but the committee usually favors the sysop.

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from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject:
[WikiEN-l] [KINGDOMOFMARDUK@aol.com: re. the by the Wikimedia
	regd.	principality seborga]

body:
I had the privlege of having visited the principality on its National
Day in 1999 when dignitaries from the nearby Principality of Monaco were
in attendance.

This would suggest that there has been a coup d'?tat.  I will look into
the matter, and report in the next few days. :-)

Ec

Jimmy Wales wrote:

>I found this entertaining; I hope you all will as well.
>
>I think that our entry on Seborga *does* need updating, because in its
>present state, it's entirely unclear as to what the inhabitants of
>Seborga actually think.  Is the independence claim meant to be
>serious?  Or is it a tourist-attracting joke?  Or what?
>
>I did a bit of research on HM King of Marduk I, and suffice to say that
>I think we should be skeptical of his claims.  :-)
>
>----- Forwarded message from KINGDOMOFMARDUK at aol.com -----
>
>From: KINGDOMOFMARDUK at aol.com
>Date: Thu, 20 May 2004 08:02:22 EDT
>To: jwales at bomis.com
>Subject: re. the by the Wikimedia regd. principality seborga
>
>email dtd. 20. May 2004 - official notification to the
>Wikimedia Foundation Inc.
>3911 Harrisburg St.NE
>St. Petersburg FL 33703 USA
>we inform you that the principality of Seborga, is since 22. April  2004
>official of the sovereign absolute Monarchystate - Kingdom of Marduk  - on basic
>the international law, irrevocable occupied the fact is by the  United Nations
>in N.Y. since 29th April 2004 official UN confirmed  regd. The Situation is
>since 22. April that the former principality  of Seborga is juridical not more
>existence, all rights by the King and  Head of State - HM King Marduk I.,
>further the former currency of Seborga  the Luigino is not more present, the new
>currency is the Barcillon, and  one Baricollon have a value of 100 Cesares -
>this fact is by the IMF, ECB  and the US Centralbank regd.. further the former
>representative of  Seborga have not more a juridical competence, whe you would
>more  information, give you for our information your fax no: ...........  and
>we send you different informations.Please change your seborga  information page.
>Best regards
>HM King Marduk I.
>
>
>>kingdomofmarduk at aol.com<
>>
>>
>
>----- End forwarded message -----
>


from_name: Rick

subject:
[WikiEN-l] [KINGDOMOFMARDUK@aol.com: re. the by the Wikimedia
	regd. principality seborga]

body:
The King can't even post from a website with the nation's own domain?

RickK

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subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: help me

body:
I don't think anybody's said that.  However, details of how to write a program or debug one, or articles on individual subroutines and variables should probably be better at Wikibooks.

RickK

Timwi <timwi at gmx.net> wrote:
Additionally, I'm completely baffled by the apparent sentiment that
programming-related topics are not encyclopedic?! Why should a
well-known often-used subroutine that is essential to three-dimensional
graphics -- one of many hot topics in modern technology! -- not have an
article?!

Flabbergasted,
Timwi

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from_name: phil hunt

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: help me

body:
On Wed, 19 May 2004 23:57:18 -0500, Sheldon Rampton <sheldon.rampton at verizon.net> wrote:
>
>The difference between [[XFree86]] and [[XFree86 logfile]] is that
>[[XFree86]] really *is* an "encyclopedia" article. It begins with a
>lead paragraph that explains, even to a relative novice, what XFree86
>is: "an open source implementation of the X Window System.." By
>contrast, [[XFree86 logfile]] begins as follows:
>
>>When XFree86 starts, it creates a logfile which contains information
>>about what happened when XFree86 started. It contains information
>>about what modules were loaded, which color depth that is used etc.
>>The file is especially useful when something goes awry, as reading
>>it can help you find exactly what went wrong.
>
>This reads like a technical manual, not an encyclopedia. As a lead
>paragraph, it leaves something to be desired.

I've added a new lead sentence, which I think is an improvement.

--
"It's easier to find people online who openly support the KKK than
people who openly support the RIAA" -- comment on Wikipedia
(Email: zen19725 at zen dot co dot uk)


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Gabriel Wicke

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Help! Vandalism in Chinese Wikipedia

body:
On Fri, 2004-05-21 at 01:33 +0800, ZH Wikipedia wrote:
> We are suffering from vandalism again, and we need help now.

Please join #mediawiki on irc.freenode.net, we can't do anything without
information on this.

Gabriel Wicke


from_name: The Cunctator

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Prepare for a lot of newbies ...

body:
On 5/20/04 6:19 PM, "Timwi" <timwi at gmx.net> wrote:

> Bryan Derksen wrote:
>
>> Fortunately, there is some built-in quality control here; the link
>> provided is broken (http://www.en.wikipedia.org/)
>
> I really don't get why the media never get our URL right. Most of the
> time I see www.wikipedia.com or www.wikipedia.org. Admittedly, they
> forward to en.wikipedia.org, so for English-language media that's fine,
> but they should really be linking to the proper language directly.
> Especially non-English ones should...
>
They never get the URL right because of the non-standard practice of
redirecting www.wikipedia.org to en.wikipedia.org. It's confusing.


from_name: Timwi

subject: [WikiEN-l] Error message when site is down

body:
Hi,

when the site is down we currently get this error message:

	Sorry! The wiki is experiencing some technical difficulties,
	and cannot contact the database server.

In the interest of user interface design, please could someone change
this to

	Wikipedia is currently experiencing technical difficulties.
	Please try again later. We apologise for the inconvenience.

Thanks!
Timwi


list: wikitech-l

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Anonymous proxy attack on zh

body:
Ashar Voultoiz wrote:

> A possible solution is that your ISP directly forward such abuse
> requests to a mailling list

Most reporters want to remain anonymous.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Database performance (was: Atomz Search?)

body:
Catherine Munro wrote:

> it's the fact that we don't have anyone who is really expert at
> optimizing MySQL database searches.

I cannot claim to know much (or even anything) about the MySQL full-text
search, but as for the entire rest of the database at least, I have
suggested numerous improvements in the past that according to my own
experience (which is quite a bit, but of course it's up to you whether
to trust it or not) will greatly improve the database performance. None
of these suggestions have ever been implemented yet. (Please don't see
this as criticism; it's just stating a fact.)

One of my suggestions was a completely new database schema.
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experimental_new_database_schema
Notice that this proposal is very old (July 2003), which is why it
doesn't take into account any of the new features (MediaWiki and
Template namespaces, Categories, etc.)

When it became obvious that these changes would be rather involved to
make, I suggested to morph the database schema slowly into a new one
(preferably that one), and the first step I believe would be to get rid
of the distinction between "cur" (current revisions) and "old"
(non-current revisions) and instead have a table "pages" (with data
pertaining to each article independent of revisions) and "revisions"
(with all the revisions and their meta-data, current and old).

When I made that suggestion, Brion pointed me at this:
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proposed_Database_Schema_Changes
I don't know if he came up with it because of my suggestion, or if he
had written it before.

Timwi


body:
Bryan Derksen wrote:

> Fortunately, there is some built-in quality control here; the link
> provided is broken (http://www.en.wikipedia.org/)

I really don't get why the media never get our URL right. Most of the
time I see www.wikipedia.com or www.wikipedia.org. Admittedly, they
forward to en.wikipedia.org, so for English-language media that's fine,
but they should really be linking to the proper language directly.
Especially non-English ones should...

Timwi


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: help me

body:
Fred Bauder wrote:

> On the surface (I am no programmer, but many who read this list are) your
> arguement is persuasive, but so is the arguement of your opponents who take
> the position that the level of detail you are going into is inappropriate
> for an ecyclopedia.

I haven't read the articles in question (yet), but I can't believe the
depth of an article is an argument for deleting it! Geez! Where are we
going with that?! If someone thought there was too much in it, they
could have trimmed it down, but even that I would condemn, as this would
contradict our own [[Wikipedia:Replies]] where we are explicitly stating
that we are not only trying to grow in breadth but also in depth. It
even states that if at some point in the future we might have an article
on all possible encyclopedic subjects, we won't even have anything else
to improve on than the depth!

Additionally, I'm completely baffled by the apparent sentiment that
programming-related topics are not encyclopedic?! Why should a
well-known often-used subroutine that is essential to three-dimensional
graphics -- one of many hot topics in modern technology! -- not have an
article?!

Flabbergasted,
Timwi


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: help me

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:

> plenty of
> articles about obscure subjects have become featured articles.

One article I wrote was rejected from being featured solely on the
grounds of covering too obscure a topic.

Should I nominate it again?

Timwi


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: help me

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:

> All articles are borderline in terms of the descriptive/instructive
> distinction.

I do not believe a topic is in itself descriptive or instructive, unless
it is explicitly a "how to" topic. None of the topics mentioned in the
posting that started this thread are. Of course, articles on subroutines
can be written in a "how to" (i.e. instructive) way, but they needn't
necessarily be, and as such, they should be rewritten in preference to
being deleted.

Timwi


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: help me

body:
N.T. Riche wrote:

> (Now here come part two: the VFD page is terrible, it is so long, a user
> can't vote on any of the articles they feel pertains to them. I am
> begging one of the syosps that is most likely reading this PLEASE fix
> it. Thank You)

I am actually pretty disappointed that the current design, which very
quickly proved useless, has stayed for this long.  It has certainly
driven me away from Votes for deletion.  I believe it should be changed
quickly without much discussion; we can still discuss it to no end, but
in the meantime, I would prefer to have something else, and it is really
trivial to come up with something that is better than the current design.

Timwi


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] Blocking evil bandwidth thieves

body:
On Tomk32's request I've blocked www.themensuche.de (217.172.181.98)
from access to our servers. It was "hosting" German Wikipedia pages by
sending every request on to de.wikipedia.org and slurping the content,
but using it solely for the purpose of bringing in search hits. The text
is never displayed; instead every hit uses a JavaScript redirect through
an intermediary or two to amazon.de.

Pages looked like this:

<title>Der J?ger aus Kurpfalz</title>

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/daten/lay.css">

Friedrich Wilhelm Utsch Friedrich Wilhelm Utsch wurde
[actual content from wiki snipped for brevity]

HOME |
INDEX |
MAIL

SUCHE
BEI GOOGLE | SUCHE BEI MSN

History:

Copyright (c)  2004
<D-E.W-I-K-I-P-E-D-I-A.O-R-G></wiki/Der_J?ger_aus_Kurpfalz>

Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2
or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation.
A copy of the license is included in the section entitled

"GNU Free Documentation License".

Where the script brought up at the top contains only:
top.location.replace('http://www.steine.de/partnersys/index.html?swi=' +
what)

which if you go there, sends you on to the amazon.de search page. This
script is executed automatically before any content is shown (and the
markup is invalid and nothing at all shows in some browsers even if JS
is disabled). There is no way to read Wikipedia content at that site
short of turning off JavaScript and using 'view source'.

This is not even *vaguely* legitimate. I've cut them off in the IP
firewall on coronelli and browne, so they're no longer able to steal
bandwidth on every page hit just to promote their referrer links.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: ZH Wikipedia

body: We are suffering from vandalism again, and we need help now.


from_name: Lee Pilich

subject: [WikiEN-l] Wik2 arbitration case

body:
Dear all,

Seeing as it was such a high-profile case, I thought I'd let you know about
the state the Wik arbitration is in.

The case is not fully closed: there are still matters (concerning Cantus as
much as Wik) under consideration. However, quite a few points received
majority support from the arbitrators, so these can be considered finished
with. These decided points can be found at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_arbitration/Wik2/Decided

Among other things, a number of shortish bans have been decided upon (seven
days for Wik, one day each for Nico and Cantus). However, at time of
writing, these have not been implemented by me or anybody else. I would
rather a non-arbitrator sysop implements them than one of the committee. I
think there are a number of advantages to this, which I won't bore you with
here (I'll explain if pressed). If anybody wants to implement those bans,
go ahead - please note that you have done so in the relevant bit of
[[Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/Wik2/Decided]]. I would just note,
however, that Wik's recent edit to his user page may be taken as a sign
that he is leaving the Wikipedia, so a block there may be superfluous to
requirements.

On a personal note: this hasn't been an easy case to handle. It involved a
lot of articles, and a lot of edits. Obviously, there were mixed feelings
about the case among the community as a whole: Wik has a number of
supporters who I have a great deal of respect for, as well as a number of
detractors who I also respect, and I don't think any of their views are
unreasonable. Wik himself obviously makes valuable edits, but that had to
be weighed against the distress that he was causing good users. So it was
tricky. Thanks to you all for being so patient and so on.

All the best
Lee


from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject: [Wikitech-l] Wikipedia on DVD

body:
By sheer chance, I was spending a bit of time this morning studying
charities that provide computers to Africa.  According to a few
different sources, the number of computers in Africa is 3-5 per 1000
people.

It is beyond the scope of our operation to get involved in trying to
provide computers, but when computers are provided, we can help to
make them instantly useful by helping to make sure that Wikipedia is
distributed with them.  So I'm contacting a few charities to see what
their experience suggests would be best.

In the meantime, I am thinking that ease-of-use for people who are not
technically savvy will be critical.  What would be nice would be a
CD-ROM (DVD-ROMs are surely more rare for this target market)
distribution that is (a) easily runnable in windows, with an
autorun.bat or whatever you call it in windows (b) easily runnable in
Linux (should be easy to do) and possibly (c) bootable by itself,
i.e. the CD-ROM could as well be a bootable tiny linux distro for the
sole purpose of providing a Wikipedia "kiosk" for a library or other
public access point.

I feel confident that if we develop an ISO to do these things, it will
be easy to raise money to press 10,000 copies (or more!) to distribute
to these organizations with proper contacts and infrastructure in
Africa to ensure that they are put to good use.

--Jimbo


body:
Brion Vibber wrote:
> This is not even *vaguely* legitimate. I've cut them off in the IP
> firewall on coronelli and browne, so they're no longer able to steal
> bandwidth on every page hit just to promote their referrer links.

Bravo!

As is well known, I advocate taking a fairly relaxed approach to
"bandwidth thieves" who are framing our content, etc.  I don't think
it's good, but I think the better approach is usually going to be to
contact them first and ask them to stop it, and try to get them on
board with a technologically better (and more friendly to our
pocketbook) method of reuse!

But as Brion says, this particular case is not even *vaguely*
legitimate.

Good call.

--Jimbo


subject: [WikiEN-l] How to make a recipe NPOV

body:
Peter Jaros wrote:
> Recipes are tricky.  If you provide a recipe for chocolate cake as a
> "chocolate cake" recipe, that's POV: you're asserting that *this* is
> chocolate cake.  If you include "Le Grand Pain's famous chocolate cake
> recipe", that's the only one of *those*.  It's all in the presentation.

I think that's right, it's all in the presentation.

I find the argument that recipes are inherently POV to be
unconvincing.  It's easy enough to "go meta" with a suitable phrasing.

"Here is a traditional recipe for Key Lime Pie.  This version is from
_Traditional Recipes of Florida_, which quotes it from a newspaper
article first published in 1857.  Many variants on the traditional
recipe exist, including those which use ordinary limes (instead of Key
limes) and those which substitute sweetened whipped cream on top for
egg white."

<and then we include the recipe cited>

If the variants are interesting or historically important, they could
be fully included.

I think such a recipe would really improve this article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_lime_pie

Please don't use my text above, it is sheer fantasy designed to
illustrate how I think a recipe can be properly included.

--Jimbo


subject:
[WikiEN-l] Re: Historian: origin of apparent "policy" re recipes
	and how-tos?

body:
It's rude to quote a huge block of text and just say "me, too" but I'm
going to do it anyway.  Anthere says that she deeply agrees with Ray
here... well, me too.

Anthere wrote:
> Ray Saintonge a ?crit:
> >Delirium wrote:
> >
> >>Ray Saintonge wrote:
> >>
> >>>I have no objection to documenting ALL the ways to put in a light
> >>>bulb. (There are more than one ways.)  Just because the first person
> >>>to post on the subject has only presented one way of doing something
> >>>does not in itself make that contribution POV.  If it is the only POV
> >>>it is necessarily neutral.  If there are other POVs, the solution
> >>>begins with others presenting them, not with censoring the one that's
> >>>already there.
> >>
> >>
> >>I see this as more a place for a Wikibook recipes book.  An article
> >>that consists of 15 pages listing all the variations on chocolate cake
> >>is ridiculous for an encyclopedia.  An encyclopedia isn't the place to
> >>get detailed how-to instructions, but to get conceptual information.
> >>This is why the article on, say [[C programming language]] describes
> >>the language, rather than being an intro to programming in C
> >>tutorial---if you want a detailed intro to C, that's what an "intro to
> >>programming in C" wikibook would be for.
> >>
> >>I don't even see why this is an argument---it's so completely
> >>ridiculous to have recipes in an encyclopedia, barring some famous
> >>ones, that I'm baffled people are actually seriously defending the idea.
> >
> >
> >What happens in Wikibooks is a different matter.  My involvement there
> >has been so minimal that it would be inappropriate for me to comment
> >about what they should or should not accept.  It is an autonomous
> >project, and it is not up to the rest of us to dictate their rules.
> >
> >This is about whether recipes (and other forms of practical knowledge)
> >belong in Wikipedia.  An encyclopedia covers all sorts of knowledge, not
> >just those forms that a self-appointed elite would allow.  Is there
> >really a 15 page article of chocolate cake variations in Wikipedia? I
> >doubt it.  This is nothing more than a straw-man argument created for
> >the sole purpose of making an opposing argument look ridiculous.  (I
> >don't know enough about C-language to be able to say anything about that.)
> >
> >I'm baffled by people who want to exclude such material.  I agree that
> >the mainstream English-language encyclopedias like Britannica have
> >traditionally omitted this kind of material, but we are not them, and we
> >have no need to restrict ourselves to the academic trappings that they
> >chose to adopt for their own purposes.
> >
> >To take the matter even further afield (I've been reading Ivan Illich)
> >we are dealing with an attitude that reflects something that is wrong
> >with education in general, and universities in particular.  Wikipedia is
> >bound to appeal to a community of autodidacts with an incredible variety
> >of backgrounds.  No sphere of knowledge is so inferior that it needs be
> >ignored.  Education has become a process of buying into "The System", of
> >paying one's dues thereto, and receiving accreditation to elite circles.
> >For the less capable it is intended to insure compliance.  The freeing
> >of knowledge thus applies to ALL aspects of knowledge.
> >
> >The eventual third-world barely literate reader of our encyclopedia is
> >not going to open it to read about how the rich and powerful got there,
> >or about their complex science for launching astronauts, or about the
> >strutting gliterati gazing into the navel of their own foolishness.
> >These only add acuity to their poverty.  For them, simple techniques to
> >enable them to bring a few of those things in their lives that we take
> >for granted will be greatly appreciated.
> >
> >Ec
>
> I *deeply* agree with this.
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


subject: [WikiEN-l] More on recipes

body:
Fennec Foxen wrote:
> [[WP:NOT|Wikipedia articles are not]] recipes. They might conceivably
> contain recipes, or they might be about recipes (random thought- we
> have an article anywhere about that Neiman-Marcus or however you spell
> it cookie recipe story that you hear all over? :). However, I would
> think that a brief description of the content of a dish would usually
> be more encyclopedic-feeling than a recipe. And yes, the mood is one
> of the issues.

3 points, one a direct response to your point, and 2 others that
I wanted to say more generally.

1.  It is of course true that Wikipedia articles are not recipes.
Wikipedia articles are not mathematical equations, either.  But
Wikipedia articles can _contain_ mathematical equations, and similary
Wikipedia articles can _contain_ recipes.

2.  Recipes are not "inherently NPOV" any more than any other kind of
knowledge.  Wikipedia need not _advocate_ for one particular way of
cooking Key Lime Pie, in order to _describe_ the traditional recipe
and variants, with the description being in the detailed format of a
recipe.

3.  Concerns about whether we have to include 50 recipes for something
as mundane as Chocolate cake are valid concerns, but they are in
principle no different from concerns in other articles as to how much
detail to include, and the same sorts of external considerations can
come into play just as well here.

4.  It is of course possible for an article which includes a recipe to
be POV.  If someone wrote: "This is the only proper way to make chili;
all other ways are abominations not deserving of the name" then we
would of course edit that bit out.  We'd look for some intrinsic
"hook" by which to choose which recipe to choose, i.e. "oldest known",
or "first published", or "a typical example" or "published by noted
chef thus-and-so" or any of a thousand other possibilities.

So it isn't that the concerns peopel are raising aren't valid at all,
it's just that I don't find them automatically compelling.

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Webby awards

body:
The Webby awards are generally considered to be prestigious, and major
web sites and companies appear to take them seriously.  In the past,
there was a big awards ceremony in San Francisco, etc.

But now it seems that the Webby organization may have fallen on hard
financial times, because they no longer put on a ceremony, and -- get
this part -- the statue is no longer given freely, but the winners
are eligible to buy them, as well as to buy "frame ready" certificates
for members of the team.

The price for the statue is $350, the price for the certificate is
$35.  I will not be spending any donor money on this, and since I'm
not actually expecting to ever have a regular job with a regular
office where I need to illustrate to customers how impressive I am,
I'm doubtful as to whether I will personally want one of these.

But it occurred to me that these things might be valuable to some
contributors, and apparently I can order them for anyone who wants
them.  If you work in the Internet industry, especially at a big
company, then having a Webby trophy or certificate for your office
might be nice.  It would be a good way for a freelance web designer
with a small office to decorate the office and show clients that you
have experience with something great.

So I thought I'd just mention it here, in case there's interest.

Contact me.  I won't order one for anyone who has been banned or
anything like that, unless they want to donate double to the
foundation.  ;-)

--Jimbo


from_name: KNOTT, T

body:
Plato that's the second time you said you've seen me commit attacks on lir and irismeister. I honestly don't know what you are talking about. Please point me to these attacks. (irismeister has made hundreds of attacks on me, lir called me scum, and a fucking bitch, but I didn't call her anything as far as I can recall)

As for staying away from one another, I refuse to allow MNH to remove all negative comments on AM.He is POV pushing. We have a NPOV policy and I will enforce it to the best of my abilities.  I will not allow the quality of an article to go down just because MNH is the sensitive type who takes every disagreement as an attack. Moving an infobox from one place to another in order to improve the look of an article is not an attack. I only have thee AM pages on my watchlist. AM itself, Iridology, and reflexology. If MNH wants to avoid those articles that's fine by me.

Theresa

-----Original Message-----
From: N.T. Riche [mailto:vonriche at yahoo.com]
Sent: 20 May 2004 19:20
To: wikien-l at Wikipedia.org
Subject: [WikiEN-l] Theresa Knott Vs. Mr. Natural Health

These two users are at it again with this on-going edit war on Alt. Medicine. Now i have seen the page and the main dispute is over Osteopathy (a subject i know nothing about but i will investigate it). Franky in your defense ms. knott it does sound poved...but I'd say it just needs to be re-worded not removed completely. Now I have seen Knott commit Ad hominem on users such as lir and Dr. Dan, but John (MNH) has also done the same with that "I'm a Nazi from New York" attack on Robert, (I took insult to also myself because I'm Gypsy in ancestry). My suggestion for both of you is to avoid each other, and have a neutral observer re-word the Osteopathy part of the article. Now I'd suggest Arbitration but the committee usually favors the sysop.
  _____

Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Domains - Claim yours for only $14.70/year <http://us.rd.yahoo.com/evt=23613/*http:/smallbusiness.promotions.yahoo.com/offer>
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subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: help me

references:
<20040519193943.GF14895@joey.bomis.com> <99EkZ4YSpVB@erik_moeller>
	<c8jc7u$e71$1@sea.gmane.org>

body:
Timwi wrote:

> Erik Moeller wrote:
>
>> All articles are borderline in terms of the descriptive/instructive
>> distinction.
>
> I do not believe a topic is in itself descriptive or instructive,
> unless it is explicitly a "how to" topic. None of the topics mentioned
> in the posting that started this thread are. Of course, articles on
> subroutines can be written in a "how to" (i.e. instructive) way, but
> they needn't necessarily be, and as such, they should be rewritten in
> preference to being deleted.

I don't even attach much validity to the descriptive/instructive
distinction.  A "how to" topic needs to be treated like any other.
Chocolate cakes and subroutines should not be treated any differently.
When the debate is put in terms of delete or include with no middle
options improvement becomes impossible.

Ec


from_name: Tim Starling

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Attack against chinese wiki

body:
Ting Chen wrote:
> Hello People,
>
> thanks for everyone who have offered help, who have helped and who have
> given advise. This was the second time that we experienced such an attack,
> and the attack took place as most of our sysops (located at UTC+8h) are
> offline. I think we are also learning how to handle such things. And your
> advices are very valuable for us. It's a pleasure and it's very moving to
> get so much helps from so different places arround the world so fast. Thanks
> anyway, this is a great community and I believe I can speak for all chinese
> wikipedians that we are happy to be a member of it.
>
> I want yet say one thing. My own oppinion about the deleteBot. I personally
> don't like this ideal, because such a tool, powerful it is, could also used
> to do great devastation, and one cannot expect that such lots of people
> would be careful for all their live. So please let it unused and we would
> contact the developers properly next time.

I think I'll be using the deletion bot next time, despite the fact that
I have write access to the database. Doing large-scale write queries on
the cur table is scary. With the bot, everything is automatically backed
up in the archive table, and so there's very little chance of permanent
data loss.

-- Tim Starling


from_name: Thomas R. Koll

body:
On Thu, May 20, 2004 at 11:49:26PM -0700, Brion Vibber wrote:
> On Tomk32's request I've blocked www.themensuche.de (217.172.181.98)
> from access to our servers. It was "hosting" German Wikipedia pages by
> sending every request on to de.wikipedia.org and slurping the content,
> but using it solely for the purpose of bringing in search hits. The text
> is never displayed; instead every hit uses a JavaScript redirect through
> an intermediary or two to amazon.de.

I wrote mails to three other sites obviously running proxies without cache
(and have more than 500MB traffic per month).
There might be a few others, surely not as evil as themensuche.de but
it still costs a lot of traffic which could be avoided by using the
database dumps instead.
Is anybody up for hunting and contacting them? We would need more stats
because the webalizer stats by kbyte only show the TOP10.
Also many hits/files but only a few visits is a good indicator.

> which if you go there, sends you on to the amazon.de search page. This
> script is executed automatically before any content is shown (and the
> markup is invalid and nothing at all shows in some browsers even if JS
> is disabled). There is no way to read Wikipedia content at that site
> short of turning off JavaScript and using 'view source'.

There are plugins for firefox for turning off css too.

--
== Weblinks ==
* http://www.tomk32.de - just a geek trying to change the world
* http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benutzer:TomK32 - Free Knowledge
* http://tinyurl.com/27c88 - WikiReader Internet: bald im Druck
* http://tomk32.bookcrossing.com - Free Books


from_name: Fennec Foxen

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Webby awards

body:
On Fri, 21 May 2004 07:09:23 -0700, Jimmy Wales <jwales at bomis.com> wrote:
> But it occurred to me that these things might be valuable to some
> contributors, and apparently I can order them for anyone who wants
> them.
What's the timeframe on these orders? I don't suppose there's any
chance of us ordering them, say, several years from now when some of
us, actually have money (and by "some of us", I mean me)- heh, maybe
we'll win it again by then :) But even disregarding several years from
now, do you have any idea of the approximate deadline?


from_name: Stan Shebs

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: WikiEN-l Digest, Vol 10, Issue 58

body:
John Knouse wrote:

>I find this whole recipe argument kind of odd.  What's wrong
>with sample recipes?  Someone can, for instance, read the
>article about tapioca and not get a very complete
>understanding of it.  But a recipe that the reader can make
>can provide a far more complete understanding of tapioca.
>
>
I think it's because despite their textual appearance, recipes are
a lot more like images than articles. For instance, most people also
don't like articles consisting only of an image, and the level of
editing allowed for each is severely constrained; people would
object to me rearranging image contents with a photo editor as much
as if I tripled the salt in a recipe because I like everything salty.
In fact, Auntie Bea's recipe very nearly needs to be handled as a
source document, in that doing much more than spelling fixes amounts
to changing it into something that is no longer her recipe.

>Here's a possibility:  have a Wikibooks cookbook that all
>the food articles can link to (that is, pointing to specific
>recipes).
>
The Wikibook seems like a good idea in general. Joy of Cooking
notwithstanding, not everybody wants to wade through the history
of chocolate cake before finding out how many eggs are needed. :-)

Stan


subject: [Wikitech-l] [Fwd: [Wikipedia-l] MediaWiki 1.3]

body:
Tim forgot to actually announce this.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [Wikipedia-l] MediaWiki 1.3
Date: Sat, 22 May 2004 00:38:31 +1000
From: Tim Starling <t.starling at physics.unimelb.edu.au>
Reply-To: wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
To: <foundation-l at Wikimedia.org>, <wikipedia-l at Wikipedia.org>

We're going to be upgrading the software on the live site to the current
development version, over the next 24 hours or so. However, we won't be
releasing a tarball just yet. Before we do that, we want to obtain
translations for the new interface text, and also to fix a few
user-friendliness issues with the installer. We'll probably upgrade the
smaller wikis first, and do the English Wikipedia fairly late in the peace.
There might be short periods of downtime during this process.

A list of new features is at
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_roadmap

-- Tim Starling

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


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: more on recipes

body:
dpbsmith at verizon.net wrote:
> 1) [Cue Homer Simpson voice] Mmmmmmmmm... key... lime... pie!

Ec wrote:
>Chocolate cakes and subroutines should not be treated any differently.

Well, o.k....

Mmmmmmm.... sub.... routines!

Sorry, but it is Friday.  :-)

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia and Wiktionary

body:
Wikimedia PR wrote:
> <jwales> I would support something along those lines.
> <jwales> Will you run this by wikipedia-l and wikitech-l?
> <jwales> I'll make noises of joy.

Yee-haw!

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikimedia Commons

body:
I just wanted to say that I really strongly support the central
ideas put forward by Erik here:
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Commons

I can't say if I agree with every single detail of his proposed
implementation, because I'm not really qualified to judge all of it.

But the central ideas, as proposed here:
http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2004-March/014826.html
are valid and important.

I especially like the requirement of NO fair use materials on the
commons proper.  Fair use is often problematic and complex, and so I
really want to encourage the creation of free alternatives even to
fair use.  (Even though, at the same time, I strongly support the
concept of fair use and would like to see it expanded and strengthened
and clarified legally.)

I think it would be very nice to be able to have portfolios of images
of specific topics, even when we only use 1 or 2 of the images in a
particular article on a particular wikipedia.  For example, we might
quickly end up with 50 different pictures of the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

One thing that I strongly recommend is that we get started on the
right foot from the beginning on this site, *requiring* a certain
level of documentation: what is this?  where did it come from? what
license(s) is it under?  who is the creator? when was it created?

Part of the idea here is to create a central core of material that we
*and* those who license our content can feel comfortable using.

(Toward that end, we should have a mechanism to store, but not display
by default, high resolution images.)

--Jimbo

p.s. I do not like the use of the word 'altruism' in his proposal, but
that's just something he said on the side, not central to what he's
talking about.  I wouldn't mention it, except that it's a
philosophical peeve of mine.  :-)


from_name: dpbsmith at verizon.net

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: more on recipes

body:
1) [Cue Homer Simpson voice] Mmmmmmmmm... key... lime... pie!

2) It's really worth searching out a short story by John Collier entitled
"The Touch of Nutmeg Makes It." Most likely source is an omnibus volume of
his stories entitled "Fancies and Goodnights" which is (shamefully) out of
print, but (fortunately) available in many libraries. And second-hand
bookstores. (And if anyone buys it and doesn't like it, you may send it to me
and I will pay you whatever you paid for it. I already have a copy, but I can
always use extras to give away...) I won't divulge details except to say that
a) it's a really, really good story, and b) relevant to the topic at hand.


from_name: John Knouse

body:
I find this whole recipe argument kind of odd.  What's wrong
with sample recipes?  Someone can, for instance, read the
article about tapioca and not get a very complete
understanding of it.  But a recipe that the reader can make
can provide a far more complete understanding of tapioca.

Here's a possibility:  have a Wikibooks cookbook that all
the food articles can link to (that is, pointing to specific
recipes).

--
John Knouse
jaknouse at frognet.net
www.jaknouse.athens.oh.us
+1.740.589.4575
PO Box 1196, Athens, OH 45701-1196


from_name: Ashar Voultoiz

subject: [Wikitech-l] FASD project: online survey

body:
Hello,

I am forwading here an online survey for open source developper, I think
some people in this list could be interested in helping this student ;)

Ashar Voultoiz
[[w:fr:Utilisateur:Hashar]]

-----8<-------------------8<-----------------8<-------------------------
This is a forwarded message from benno.luthiger_AT_id.eithz.ch :

Dear Open Source developer

I am doing a research project on "Fun and Software Development" in which
I kindly invite you to participate.
You will find the online survey under http://fasd.ethz.ch/qsf/. The
questionnaire consists of 53 questions and you will need about 15
minutes to complete it.

With the FASD project (Fun and Software Development) we want to define
the motivational significance of fun when software developers decide to
engage in Open Source projects. What is special about our research
project is that a similar survey is planned with software developers in
commercial firms. This procedure allows the immediate comparison between
the involved individuals and the conditions of production of these two
development models. Thus we hope to obtain substantial new insights to
the phenomenon of Open Source Development.

With many thanks for your participation,
Benno Luthiger

PS:
The results of the survey will be published under
http://www.isu.unizh.ch/fuehrung/blprojects/FASD/.
We have set up the mailing list fasd at webboard.ethz.ch for this study.
Please see http://fasd.ethz.ch/qsf/mailinglist_en.html for registration
to this mailing list.

_______________________________________________________________________

Benno Luthiger
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich
8092 Zurich

Mail: benno.luthiger(at)id.ethz.ch
_______________________________________________________________________


from_name: Magnus Manske

subject: [Wikitech-l] Wikipedia on DVD

body:
I just uploaded a DVD ISO image (bzip2, ca. 1GB; ~1.3BG uncompressed) to
the wikipedia server. It contains a snapshot of the German wikipedia,
including images, for offline browsing under Window$. It can be found at
    http://download.wikimedia.org/wp_de_2004_05.iso.bz2

It comes with a self-written installer (hereby under GPL, will upload
source soon) for the webserver software. You can choose if you want to
copy the database and/or the images to the hard drive as well, or leave
them on DVD. For the fulltext search to work, I highly recommend to copy
the database to HDD.

Get it to work:
1. Decrompress the ISO image
2. Burn the ISO image to DVD
3. Run the Installer
4. Go to the installation directory and run "start.bat" (twice if it
doesn't show the homepage right away)
5. To shut down the local web server, run "stop.bat"

As the pages are generated on-the-fly from a sqlite database, and that
generation is done by a relatively new C++ software, many little bugs
are to be expected. Math display doesn't work at all.

Note that when copying the database to HDD, one can actually edit,
preview and save pages!

I consider this more a proof-of-principle rather than a product
distributable on a large scale, but I strongly believe it is an
important step in the right direction.

Some things I'd suggest for further development:
* Auto-update to current online version via internet
* Sumbitting offline edits to the online version
* Another web server that runs directly from CD/DVD (no need for
installation)
* Linux and Mac software, running on the same data

BTW: Does anyone know a filesystem compression software that runs under
Windows and doesn't require manual installation? If we could reduce
database/image size by 50%, it would all fit on a CD again (for now).

I'll be on vacation for two weeks, starting tomorrow, so I might not
answer to all suggestions/criticism right away.

Magnus

P.S.: An alternative would probably be a static HTML dump and
HouseSpider (
http://freshmeat.net/projects/housespider/?branch_id=28546&release_id=161379
), but it requires Java.


from_name: Delirium

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia and Wiktionary

body:
Wikimedia PR wrote:

> I have been talking about this since quite a while (although without
> any concrete proposal)... using Wikipedia's popularity to benefit
> Wiktionary.
> Jimbo Wales showed up in IRC and I took the opportunity to talk with
> him about it. I had already discussed it on the IRC channel.

[chat snipped]

I would support something along the line of interwiki links in the
header, but to wiktionary, for article titles that are also words with
definitions.  I don't think we should liberally spread through links to
Wiktionary in running text though.  In the worst case that would result
in every single word in Wikipedia being hyperlinked to its definition,
which would be a bit strange.  Even if only "unusual" words were
hyperlinked, it'd have a negative stylistic effect in highlighting the
"big words".  It'd also have a subtle hint of "this is a word you might
not know", and given the wide variation in vocabularies it'd be hard to
come up with some reasonable set of such words---much better is to
assume everyone knows all words, and let them use a dictionary (such as
Wiktionary, or some other online dictionary, or one of their desk) on
their own if they don't.

-Mark


from_name: Austin Hair

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia and Wiktionary

body:
> I would support something along the line of interwiki links in the
> header, but to wiktionary, for article titles that are also words with
> definitions.  I don't think we should liberally spread through links to
> Wiktionary in running text though.  In the worst case that would result
> in every single word in Wikipedia being hyperlinked to its definition,
> which would be a bit strange.  Even if only "unusual" words were
> hyperlinked, it'd have a negative stylistic effect in highlighting the
> "big words".  It'd also have a subtle hint of "this is a word you might
> not know", and given the wide variation in vocabularies it'd be hard to
> come up with some reasonable set of such words---much better is to
> assume everyone knows all words, and let them use a dictionary (such as
> Wiktionary, or some other online dictionary, or one of their desk) on
> their own if they don't.

I agree.  Wikipedia is not everything2, and I'd prefer to keep
wikilinking analogous to the use of small caps in print encyclopedias
(that is, as a pointer to an article of interest in the same topic).

I like being able to look up words conveniently, but that's a feature
I'd rather have in my desktop environment.  (In my case, this means
highlighting a word and hitting command-=)  Cluttering a page up with
hyperlinks would be confusing at best and counterproductive at worst,
even if Wiktionary links are stylistically differentiated (with a
different color, perhaps).

> -Mark

--
A. D. Hair <austin at austinhair.org>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Callidus
http://www.austinhair.org/
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from_name: N.T. Riche

body:
Could you please point me to some of these attacks (by iris only because I'm aware of Lir's).

The real reason Knott I agreed with MNH is because I'm being pressured into it by Iris and Lir (although lir is not editing anymore he contacts me a lot on aim).

Yes I am aware that MNH is a Pov pusher BUT A.M. needs to merely be re-worded not to have large sections removed.

Please join the irc channal, i know your bedtime may be different from mine but im from vegas anyway and im usually up at 3 am PST, which is 11 am your time.

"KNOTT, T" <tknott at qcl.org.uk> wrote:

v\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);}o\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);}w\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);}.shape {behavior:url(#default#VML);}
Plato that?s the second time you said you?ve seen me commit attacks on lir and irismeister. I honestly don?t know what you are talking about. Please point me to these attacks. (irismeister has made hundreds of attacks on me, lir called me scum, and a fucking bitch, but I didn?t call her anything as far as I can recall)

As for staying away from one another, I refuse to allow MNH to remove all negative comments on AM.He is POV pushing. We have a NPOV policy and I will enforce it to the best of my abilities.  I will not allow the quality of an article to go down just because MNH is the sensitive type who takes every disagreement as an attack. Moving an infobox from one place to another in order to improve the look of an article is not an attack. I only have thee AM pages on my watchlist. AM itself, Iridology, and reflexology. If MNH wants to avoid those articles that?s fine by me.

Theresa

---------------------------------
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Domains - Claim yours for only $14.70/year
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subject: [WikiEN-l] More on recipes

body:
jheiskan at welho.com wrote:
> Look, you are being much too kind.

Well, that's my job.  :-)

Almost always when people raise concerns of various kinds, even if I
don't agree with them, or even if consensus goes against them for the
most part, usually there is a certain validity to what they are
getting at.

I find that by embracing the good in what someone is saying, and
trying to find a way to accomodate as many people as possible, we get
a lot more done.

--Jimbo


from_name: John Dehlin

subject: [Wikitech-l] Videos in Wikipedia?

body:
Please forgive if this is the incorrect list to post my question.  Also,
I am not currently a member of this list, so will require a direct
reply.

Basically, I'm curious to know if Wikipedia currently supports, or has
plans to support video files in the future.

I am thinking about doing PhD work on "online biographical video
learning objects"...and wondered if this maps at all w/ Wikipedia (past,
present or future).

Also, please feel free to educate me on how I could have found this
information out without spamming everyone.

Thanks!

John

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from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] Videos in Wikipedia?

body:
John Dehlin wrote:
> Please forgive if this is the incorrect list to post my question.  Also,
> I am not currently a member of this list, so will require a direct reply.
>
> Basically, I?m curious to know if Wikipedia currently supports, or has
> plans to support video files in the future.

It's possible to upload short video files to the wiki and link to them,
but we don't have support for inline (embedded) video, and we've got a
strict upload size limit.

For some discussion on possibilities, see:
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_policy

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Marcos Cramer

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Problem with Toki Pona links

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body:
On Fri, May 21, 2004 at 05:56:31AM -0700, Jimmy Wales wrote:
> As is well known, I advocate taking a fairly relaxed approach to
> "bandwidth thieves" who are framing our content, etc.  I don't think
> it's good, but I think the better approach is usually going to be to
> contact them first and ask them to stop it, and try to get them on
> board with a technologically better (and more friendly to our
> pocketbook) method of reuse!
>
> But as Brion says, this particular case is not even *vaguely*
> legitimate.

We haven't done much investigations yet, but as it seems the
website is in some connection to de:Benuzter:Herbye who sometimes
adds hidden (using divs) links to pages like steine.de which all
belong to Merkel Internet Service.
themensuche.de has a different Admin-C but uses steine.de as an
intermediary.

the admin of themensuche.de seems to have reacted and deactived his
evil script, but I didn't get an answer to my mail from them yet.

ciao, tom
--
== Weblinks ==
* http://www.tomk32.de - just a geek trying to change the world
* http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benutzer:TomK32 - Free Knowledge
* http://tinyurl.com/27c88 - WikiReader Internet: bald im Druck
* http://tomk32.bookcrossing.com - Free Books


subject: [Wikitech-l] Wikipedia on DVD

body:
I think the "bundling" would be great - after all, that was one of the
ideas at the very beginning, even back at Nupedia...

I am uncertain, however, if we can get it to ship on CD. 1.3GB for the
German wikipedia alone is a lot. We could
* convert all images to their thumbnail size (remove the "original")
* avoid images altogether (even so, the sqlite db is still 400MB)
* use compression (which will work fo text, but might require writing
our own "wiki-browser")

The infrastructure (Windows autorun, Linux version, bootable) should be
much less of a problem.

Magnus

Jimmy Wales wrote:

>By sheer chance, I was spending a bit of time this morning studying
>charities that provide computers to Africa.  According to a few
>different sources, the number of computers in Africa is 3-5 per 1000
>people.
>
>It is beyond the scope of our operation to get involved in trying to
>provide computers, but when computers are provided, we can help to
>make them instantly useful by helping to make sure that Wikipedia is
>distributed with them.  So I'm contacting a few charities to see what
>their experience suggests would be best.
>
>In the meantime, I am thinking that ease-of-use for people who are not
>technically savvy will be critical.  What would be nice would be a
>CD-ROM (DVD-ROMs are surely more rare for this target market)
>distribution that is (a) easily runnable in windows, with an
>autorun.bat or whatever you call it in windows (b) easily runnable in
>Linux (should be easy to do) and possibly (c) bootable by itself,
>i.e. the CD-ROM could as well be a bootable tiny linux distro for the
>sole purpose of providing a Wikipedia "kiosk" for a library or other
>public access point.
>
>I feel confident that if we develop an ISO to do these things, it will
>be easy to raise money to press 10,000 copies (or more!) to distribute
>to these organizations with proper contacts and infrastructure in
>Africa to ensure that they are put to good use.
>
>--Jimbo
>_______________________________________________
>Wikitech-l mailing list
>Wikitech-l at Wikipedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>
>


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia and Wiktionary

body:
Delirium wrote:

> Wikimedia PR wrote:
>
>> I have been talking about this since quite a while (although without
>> any concrete proposal)... using Wikipedia's popularity to benefit
>> Wiktionary.
>> Jimbo Wales showed up in IRC and I took the opportunity to talk with
>> him about it. I had already discussed it on the IRC channel.
>
> [chat snipped]
>
> I would support something along the line of interwiki links in the
> header, but to wiktionary, for article titles that are also words with
> definitions.  I don't think we should liberally spread through links
> to Wiktionary in running text though.  In the worst case that would
> result in every single word in Wikipedia being hyperlinked to its
> definition, which would be a bit strange.  Even if only "unusual"
> words were hyperlinked, it'd have a negative stylistic effect in
> highlighting the "big words".  It'd also have a subtle hint of "this
> is a word you might not know", and given the wide variation in
> vocabularies it'd be hard to come up with some reasonable set of such
> words---much better is to assume everyone knows all words, and let
> them use a dictionary (such as Wiktionary, or some other online
> dictionary, or one of their desk) on their own if they don't.

I agree that it would be futile to try to guess what words the reader
does not know, (not to mention somewhat paternalistic).  A person who is
not a native speaker of English would want to seek the meanings of more
words than a native speaker.

Perhaps a question at the side with "Click here if there is a word you
want to look up in Wiktionary".  Clicking would open a question mark
cursor that could be positioned over the problem word and clicked.

Wiktionary is not yet full enough to adequately deal with this, but
perhaps in another year it could be a nice feature.  By that time it may
become feasible to ensure that every word in the other sister projects
has a definition in Wiktionary.

Ec


subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Re: I want to start a new language... with	the
	code"eg" please.

body:
Ralesk Ne'vennoyx wrote:

>> Klingon does have quite a big amount of written stuff already.
>>
>> However, wikipedia is an enciclopedia, so the question is not whether
>> the language can be written, but whether people would actually write
>> enough *encyclopedic content*.
>>
>> A possibility would be to require showing some real activity, eg
>> requiring having some 200 or 400 articles before fully accepting a
>> conlang.
>
> And where would they write all that?  And why don?t we pose such a
> criterium against all those tiny languages too (not being
> anti-languages, here, I hope you see my sarcasm)
>
>> I don't see anything "embarassing" with klingon; but the fact is people
>> that use klingon do it for fun, not to communicate knowledge, much less
>> to build a repository of human knowledge like an encyclopedia.
>
> But some of them want to, that?s exactly why they are or have been
> asking for a wikispace here. (duh!)

My personal attitude to a Klingon language encyclopedia is a benign
"Whatever..."   I don't worry about it enough to care about how many
articles they have.  It does seem sometimes that those who object to
that project best express the Klingon characteristics in their own
personalities.

The argument is often expressed about this, and about a number of other
issues, that dealing with these would bring embarassment on Wikipedia.
Well they might inspire the occasional giggle, but that's still far
removed from embarassment.

Innovators don't worry about embarassment.  If they did nothing would
ever move forward.

Ec


list: wiktionary-l

from_name: Erik Zachte

subject: [Wiktionary-l] Stats

body:
International stats are now also available for Wiktionary.

http://www.wikipedia.org/wikistats/wiktionary/EN/Sitemap.htm

Erik Zachte


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia and Wiktionary

body:
Ray Saintonge wrote:

> Perhaps a question at the side with "Click here if there is a word you
> want to look up in Wiktionary".  Clicking would open a question mark
> cursor that could be positioned over the problem word and clicked.

That sounds like a great idea to me, if there's a reasonable way to
implement something like that (Javascript?).

-Mark


list: foundation-l

subject: [Foundation-l] Re: [Wikipedia-l] MediaWiki 1.3

body:
Andre Engels wrote:
>>A list of new features is at
>>http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_roadmap
>
> The status of categories is not clear on this page - is it not included,
> or is it included but are you (meaning the developers) still working on
> improving it?

Categories are functional, but there are improvements yet to be made.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


list: wikimedia-l


body:
Ralesk Ne'vennoyx wrote:
> PS: it seems the mail server is crapping itself yet again and is sending
> out months old stuff now.

Nope. The mailing list adminstrators haven't been keeping up with this
list; I went through and released the (non-spam) messages that have been
held for moderation over the last two months.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Ralesk Ne'vennoyx

body:
>Klingon does have quite a big amount of written stuff already.
>
>However, wikipedia is an enciclopedia, so the question is not whether
>the language can be written, but whether people would actually write
>enough *encyclopedic content*.
>
>A possibility would be to require showing some real activity, eg
>requiring having some 200 or 400 articles before fully accepting a
>conlang.
>
>
And where would they write all that?  And why don?t we pose such a
criterium against all those tiny languages too (not being
anti-languages, here, I hope you see my sarcasm)

>I don't see anything "embarassing" with klingon; but the fact is people
>that use klingon do it for fun, not to communicate knowledge, much less
>to build a repository of human knowledge like an encyclopedia.
>
>
>
But some of them want to, that?s exactly why they are or have been
asking for a wikispace here. (duh!)

PS: it seems the mail server is crapping itself yet again and is sending
out months old stuff now.


from_name: Andre Engels

body:
"Tim Starling" <t.starling at physics.unimelb.edu.au> schrieb:
> We're going to be upgrading the software on the live site to the current
> development version, over the next 24 hours or so. However, we won't be
> releasing a tarball just yet. Before we do that, we want to obtain
> translations for the new interface text, and also to fix a few
> user-friendliness issues with the installer. We'll probably upgrade the
> smaller wikis first, and do the English Wikipedia fairly late in the peace.
> There might be short periods of downtime during this process.
>
> A list of new features is at
> http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_roadmap

The status of categories is not clear on this page - is it not included,
or is it included but are you (meaning the developers) still working on
improving it?

Andre Engels


subject: [Wikipedia-l] MediaWiki 1.3


from_name: Tim Starling

subject: [Foundation-l] MediaWiki 1.3

body:
We're going to be upgrading the software on the live site to the current
development version, over the next 24 hours or so. However, we won't be
releasing a tarball just yet. Before we do that, we want to obtain
translations for the new interface text, and also to fix a few
user-friendliness issues with the installer. We'll probably upgrade the
smaller wikis first, and do the English Wikipedia fairly late in the peace.
There might be short periods of downtime during this process.

A list of new features is at
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_roadmap

-- Tim Starling


subject: [Foundation-l] MediaWiki 1.3


subject: [Wikipedia-l] MediaWiki 1.3


from_name: jheiskan at welho.com

subject: [WikiEN-l] More on recipes

body:
Lainaus Jimmy Wales <jwales at bomis.com>:

> Fennec Foxen wrote:
> > [[WP:NOT|Wikipedia articles are not]] recipes. They might conceivably
> > contain recipes, or they might be about recipes (random thought- we
> > have an article anywhere about that Neiman-Marcus or however you spell
> > it cookie recipe story that you hear all over? :). However, I would
> > think that a brief description of the content of a dish would usually
> > be more encyclopedic-feeling than a recipe. And yes, the mood is one
> > of the issues.
>
> 3 points, one a direct response to your point, and 2 others that
> I wanted to say more generally.
>
> 1.  It is of course true that Wikipedia articles are not recipes.
> Wikipedia articles are not mathematical equations, either.  But
> Wikipedia articles can _contain_ mathematical equations, and similary
> Wikipedia articles can _contain_ recipes.
>
> 2.  Recipes are not "inherently NPOV" any more than any other kind of
> knowledge.  Wikipedia need not _advocate_ for one particular way of
> cooking Key Lime Pie, in order to _describe_ the traditional recipe
> and variants, with the description being in the detailed format of a
> recipe.
>
> 3.  Concerns about whether we have to include 50 recipes for something
> as mundane as Chocolate cake are valid concerns, but they are in
> principle no different from concerns in other articles as to how much
> detail to include, and the same sorts of external considerations can
> come into play just as well here.
>
> 4.  It is of course possible for an article which includes a recipe to
> be POV.  If someone wrote: "This is the only proper way to make chili;
> all other ways are abominations not deserving of the name" then we
> would of course edit that bit out.  We'd look for some intrinsic
> "hook" by which to choose which recipe to choose, i.e. "oldest known",
> or "first published", or "a typical example" or "published by noted
> chef thus-and-so" or any of a thousand other possibilities.
>
> So it isn't that the concerns peopel are raising aren't valid at all,
> it's just that I don't find them automatically compelling.
>
> --Jimbo

Look, you are being much too kind. The concerns "peopel" are raising just
*aren't* valid, (and the qualification "at all" is *not* hyperbole).

If you want a reason for dismissing them out of hand, you only need to look at
the numerous maths, physics and logics etc. articles that are little more then
recipes.

Or, just to be consistent, I challenge any one to justify [[stupid sort]].

--
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen


subject: [Wikitech-l] issues with the new software

body:
These have probably been noticed by somebody, but in case not, there's a
few issues I've immediately noticed upon the upgrade:

1) The inline linking to other wikis on meta: no longer works, so
instead of [[en:blah]] showing up as a link to
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/blah, it shows up at the top of the page as the
"English" link amongst the interwiki links.

2) The "retreived from" printed-version footer is generated for all
pages, not just printed versions.

That's it for now I think. =]

-Mark


body:
Err, ignore that.  Apparently I just caught it at a bad time.

-Mark


from_name: John Pozniak

subject: [Wikitech-l] Strange things are going on at wikibooks

body:
I'm going to assume wikibooks is one of the smaller
projects that's been updated to 1.3.  Well, some
strange things started happening there tonight,
mainly, the project namespace has moved from
wikibooks: to wikipedia:.  Interwiki links don't seem
to be working, and a few other minor problems.  I put
some I've noticed at
http://wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Staff_lounge

Thanks in advance for looking into this,

John Pozniak (gentgeen)


subject: [Wikipedia-l] MediaWiki 1.3

body:
Kurt Jansson wrote:

>
>> Special:Import: available only to sysops, this special page gives
>> users the ability to import full histories into a wiki, using the XML
>> output by Special:Export.
>
>
> I don't have much knowledge about XML, but I guess it would be very
> easy to manipulate the edit history of an article before importing it.
> We trust our users and especially our admins, but we can only do so
> because everything they do is logged somewhere. Will the imports be
> logged, too? Will there be a notice like "article imported by
> [[User:blah]]" in the edit history?

Special:Import is not complete and has been disabled until such time as
it is complete.

There will be a number of ways it can be used (not yet implemented):
* Full administrator's import. Do whatever you want, since you've got
the keys and can insert things manually via SQL, but it's more convenient.
* 'sysop' import from authorized sources only (ie, direct import from
one Wikimedia wiki's export to another), with logging and marking of all
imported revisions with a comment notice, and perhaps limited to
last-revision-only
* etc.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


body:
John Pozniak wrote:

>I'm going to assume wikibooks is one of the smaller
>projects that's been updated to 1.3.  Well, some
>strange things started happening there tonight,
>mainly, the project namespace has moved from
>wikibooks: to wikipedia:.  Interwiki links don't seem
>to be working, and a few other minor problems.  I put
>some I've noticed at
>http://wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Staff_lounge
>
>Thanks in advance for looking into this,
>
>

This should now be fixed.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Pablo Saratxaga

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia and Wiktionary

body:
Kaixo!

On Thu, May 06, 2004 at 01:33:55PM -0700, Wikimedia PR wrote:

> <Hemanshu> I was wondering if Wikipedia should incorporate links
> to Wiktionary in articles?

We use something like that in the Walloon wikipedia;
we have a pseudo-namespace "Mot?:" for dictionnary entries;
and whenever we use a word in an article that may not be very
known (Walloon is a small language with no official support, in
fact there didn't existed any language-wide dictionary until now, so
putting definitions is more needed than with other languages, like
English or French, where anybody is supposed to have a good dictionnary
on his shelf).

So it goes like this (from [[wa:Cl? d' est?]]):

? On cl? d' est?, c' est on [[Mot?:sonnant|sonnant]]
  [[cl? (del pea)|cl?]] ?

"sonnant" means "bleeding", and doesn't deserve an encyclopedic entry;
but as some people may not understand it first time, a dictionnary entry
link is usefull.

Note we don't use wictionnary but a pseudo-namespace on wikipedia;
first because we started with it previous to the start of the
wictionnnary project; and also for easyness; if a simple inline
link can't be done (like in the example above), then it is useless.
Now, if http://wa.wiktionary.org/wiki/sonnant could be made
linkable as [[Mot?:sonnant]] from wa.wikipedia.org; then it would
be nice and we could ask to migrate the dictionnary section
(note however that wiktionary would be more useful case sensitive,
eg: http://wa.wiktionary.org/wiki/M?tche and
http://wa.wiktionary.org/wiki/m?tche are not the same).

--
Ki ?a vos v?ye b?n,
Pablo Saratxaga

http://chanae.walon.org/pablo/		PGP Key available, key ID: 0xD9B85466
[you can write me in Walloon, Spanish, French, English, Catalan or Esperanto]
[min povas skribi en valona, esperanta, angla aux latinidaj lingvoj]
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from_name: fabiform

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia and Wiktionary

body:
--- Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
> Ray Saintonge wrote:
>
> > Perhaps a question at the side with "Click here if there is a word you
> > want to look up in Wiktionary".  Clicking would open a question mark
> > cursor that could be positioned over the problem word and clicked.
>
> That sounds like a great idea to me, if there's a reasonable way to
> implement something like that (Javascript?).

That sounds cute, but how would it deal with the fact the inline word might be
"examples" when the word you'd want to look up in wiktionary would be
"example", etc.

If you really want to encourage wikipedians to use wiktionary, how about simply
adding a wiktionary search box next to/under the wikipedia one?

Fabi.

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Domains ? Claim yours for only $14.70/year
http://smallbusiness.promotions.yahoo.com/offer


from_name: Fennec Foxen

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia and Wiktionary

body:
On Fri, 21 May 2004 17:49:49 -0700, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
> > Perhaps a question at the side with "Click here if there is a word you
> > want to look up in Wiktionary".  Clicking would open a question mark
> > cursor that could be positioned over the problem word and clicked.
> That sounds like a great idea to me, if there's a reasonable way to
> implement something like that (Javascript?).

That specific implementation sounds iffy. If I were to go about doing
this (in any web page) I think the following procedure would be
needed:
* have the link set some sort of Java-script variable (wiktClick=true)
and perhaps adjust the stylesheet so the cursor would become a Help
cursor
* set the word in its own private <span> or something with an
onMouseClick event which calls a function with its self as an argument
which would load up the relevant page if clicked when wiktClick was
on.

The problem would be that, from what I know of JavaScript in HTML, you
would need an event handler for EVERY SINGLE WORD. This could easily
quadruple the size of the HTML pages. So I don' t think this
implementation would work per se.

What might be better is some sort of new syntax. Perhaps something like:
<<fancyword>>
Then you could have a link which could toggle hilighting for these
words and a JavaScript handler for sending people to Wiktionary when
it was toggled.


body:
"Ulrich Fuchs" <mail at ulrich-fuchs.de> schrieb:

> Well actually, unless the supercategories don't display the articles of there
> subcategories they are pretty useless. Eg
> http://test.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Canine should display [[Poodle]]
> somewhere, since Poodle is in the Dog category. Actually, this functionality
> is what we need the categories for ("show me all actors", "show me all
> artists", "show me all persons"). Without that working, I wouldn't call the
> category feature "functional".

I disagree. It is not functioning the way you want it, but:
* It _is_ functioning - it is only the sub-categorization that is not
* I don't even know whether I _want_ it to function the way you say.
  Non-transparent subcategories provide a way to subdivide categories
  that are getting unwieldily large. Weighing this against the possibility
  of having a single category page that refers to all titles, I am not
  sure yet which I find the greater advantage.

As another issue, the text 'category' for referring to a category, is
it the same on other languages, is it coupled to the name of the
category-namespace or is it separately defineable?

Andre Engels


from_name: Ulrich Fuchs

body:
Am Samstag, 22. Mai 2004 03:01 schrieb Brion Vibber:
> Andre Engels wrote:
> >>A list of new features is at
> >>http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_roadmap
> >
> > The status of categories is not clear on this page - is it not included,
> > or is it included but are you (meaning the developers) still working on
> > improving it?
>
> Categories are functional, but there are improvements yet to be made.
>

Well actually, unless the supercategories don't display the articles of there
subcategories they are pretty useless. Eg
http://test.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Canine should display [[Poodle]]
somewhere, since Poodle is in the Dog category. Actually, this functionality
is what we need the categories for ("show me all actors", "show me all
artists", "show me all persons"). Without that working, I wouldn't call the
category feature "functional".

Uli


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia and Wiktionary

body:
fabiform wrote:

>--- Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
>
>
>>Ray Saintonge wrote:
>>
>>
>>>Perhaps a question at the side with "Click here if there is a word you
>>>want to look up in Wiktionary".  Clicking would open a question mark
>>>cursor that could be positioned over the problem word and clicked.
>>>
>>>
>>That sounds like a great idea to me, if there's a reasonable way to
>>implement something like that (Javascript?).
>>
>>
>That sounds cute, but how would it deal with the fact the inline word might be
>"examples" when the word you'd want to look up in wiktionary would be
>"example", etc.
>
If you wanted something to link to an example rather than the word
"example" you might need some kind of special treatment.  I think,
though, that words like that are a very small subset of the overall
vocabulary.

>If you really want to encourage wikipedians to use wiktionary, how about simply
>adding a wiktionary search box next to/under the wikipedia one?
>
>
That too would be a welcome alternative.  However, it does depend on our
own search engine being functional again.  I really miss it. :'(

Ec


subject: [Wikipedia-l] MediaWiki 1.3

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:

> Kurt Jansson wrote:
>
>> Special:Import: available only to sysops, this special page gives
>> users the ability to import full histories into a wiki, using the XML
>> output by Special:Export.
>>
>> I don't have much knowledge about XML, but I guess it would be very
>> easy to manipulate the edit history of an article before importing
>> it. We trust our users and especially our admins, but we can only do
>> so because everything they do is logged somewhere. Will the imports
>> be logged, too? Will there be a notice like "article imported by
>> [[User:blah]]" in the edit history?
>
This all could be useful at Wikisource where it might be necessary to
review copyright issues.  We have had one situation where an Canadian
sourced article that was used with permission of fr:wikipedia.  The
person who got the permission did not appear to have discussed GFDL, and
the apparent permission did not mention the possible transfer to another
project.  The transferor became the contributor from a Wikisource
perspective.  The article was eventually deleted as a copyvio, but it
underlines the kind of difficulty that can arise when files are transferred.

I don't object to this being done by a sysop, but would this mean a
sysop at the source or target project?

> Special:Import is not complete and has been disabled until such time
> as it is complete.

All in good time.

> There will be a number of ways it can be used (not yet implemented):
> * Full administrator's import. Do whatever you want, since you've got
> the keys and can insert things manually via SQL, but it's more
> convenient.
> * 'sysop' import from authorized sources only (ie, direct import from
> one Wikimedia wiki's export to another), with logging and marking of
> all imported revisions with a comment notice, and perhaps limited to
> last-revision-only.

Sometimes that full record of past versions may be needed.

Ec


subject: [Wikitech-l] Wikipedia on DVD

body:
Nikola Smolenski wrote:

>On Friday 21 May 2004 14:44, Jimmy Wales wrote:
>
>
>>By sheer chance, I was spending a bit of time this morning studying
>>charities that provide computers to Africa.  According to a few
>>different sources, the number of computers in Africa is 3-5 per 1000
>>people.
>>
>>It is beyond the scope of our operation to get involved in trying to
>>provide computers, but when computers are provided, we can help to
>>make them instantly useful by helping to make sure that Wikipedia is
>>distributed with them.  So I'm contacting a few charities to see what
>>their experience suggests would be best.
>>
>>
>
>If it is for Africa, make sure to include French and Arabic Wikipedias
>alongside English.
>
Which pedia should depend on which countries are receiving this.  There
are also a few Portuguese speaking countries in Africa.

Ec


body:
Peter Jaros wrote:

> On May 21, 2004, at 1:20 PM, John Knouse wrote:
>
>> I find this whole recipe argument kind of odd.  What's wrong
>> with sample recipes?  Someone can, for instance, read the
>> article about tapioca and not get a very complete
>> understanding of it.  But a recipe that the reader can make
>> can provide a far more complete understanding of tapioca.
>
>
> I'll agree with that.  But an article shouldn't assert that this is
> *the* way to make tapioca pudding.  The recipe should be exemplary
> of most recipes.  (I don't think I used that correctly, but I hope
> the meaning gets across...)

No problem about the word, I knew what you meant.  I would use "be an
example of", or "be typical of" which would suggest that it is just one
example out of many possible ones.  "Exemplary" has the further
connotation that it exhibits the best characteristics, and I guess that
it is something to strive for in the circumstances.

I think that this all became an argument because some people objected to
having any recipes at all.  I too would object if someone insisted on
having 50 minor variant recipes for the same thing.  Deleting something
should be the last option, and not the first.

Ec


from_name: Kurt Jansson

subject: [Wikipedia-l] MediaWiki 1.3

body:
Tim Starling schrieb:

> A list of new features is at
> http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_roadmap

and there I read:

> Special:Import: available only to sysops, this special page gives users the ability to import full histories into a wiki, using the XML output by Special:Export.

I don't have much knowledge about XML, but I guess it would be very easy
to manipulate the edit history of an article before importing it. We
trust our users and especially our admins, but we can only do so because
everything they do is logged somewhere. Will the imports be logged, too?
Will there be a notice like "article imported by [[User:blah]]" in the
edit history?

Kurt

--
  http://leihnetzwerk.de -- Teile B?cher, Videos und CDs mit anderen!
  http://wikipedia.de    -- Arbeite mit bei der freien Enzyklop?die!
  Kurt Jansson, Wiener Str. 7, 10999 Berlin, http://jansson.de


subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Question concerning Planning Jimmys Trip to Europe /
	Prix Ars Electronica

body:
I just looked over Jimmys time table for his trip to Europe on
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Jimbo_Wales

On June 23 I find a meeting with Fantasy. However, please keep in mind that on
June 23 there will be (as far as I know) the Gala for the Prix Ars
Electronica in New York:

http://www.sap.com/company/events/prixarselectronica.asp

So, the question is: Is anything arranged concerning that Gala? Did anybody
contacted the organisators already??? Have the organisators contacted us? Who
of us is going to go there if Jimmy is in Europe?

Please keep in mind that among the people who already won the Prix Ars
Electronica are people like Linus Thorvalds, and that there is a price money
of 10.000 ? for us. So somebody really should show up there! It would be very
embarrassing if they call up Wikipedia and nobody is there!

Uli


from_name: Peter Jaros

body:
On May 21, 2004, at 1:20 PM, John Knouse wrote:

> I find this whole recipe argument kind of odd.  What's wrong
> with sample recipes?  Someone can, for instance, read the
> article about tapioca and not get a very complete
> understanding of it.  But a recipe that the reader can make
> can provide a far more complete understanding of tapioca.

I'll agree with that.  But an article shouldn't assert that this is
*the* way to make tapioca pudding.  The recipe should be exemplary
of most recipes.  (I don't think I used that correctly, but I hope
the meaning gets across...)

Peter

                            -- ---<>--- --
                  A house without walls cannot fall.
     Help build the world's largest encyclopedia at Wikipedia.org
                            -- ---<>--- --


from_name: Nikola Smolenski

subject: [Wikitech-l] Wikipedia on DVD

body:
On Friday 21 May 2004 14:44, Jimmy Wales wrote:
> By sheer chance, I was spending a bit of time this morning studying
> charities that provide computers to Africa.  According to a few
> different sources, the number of computers in Africa is 3-5 per 1000
> people.
>
> It is beyond the scope of our operation to get involved in trying to
> provide computers, but when computers are provided, we can help to
> make them instantly useful by helping to make sure that Wikipedia is
> distributed with them.  So I'm contacting a few charities to see what
> their experience suggests would be best.

If it is for Africa, make sure to include French and Arabic Wikipedias
alongside English.


subject: [WikiEN-l] More on recipes

body:
Delirium wrote:

> Peter Jaros wrote:
>
>> I think chocolate cake is a broad enough topic to have sections, or
>> perhaps separate articles, about different kinds of chocolate cake,
>> each of which can be illustrated by an appropriate example recipe.
>> Presumably, any food topic this broad will be similarly divisible.
>
> Where there are identifiable distinct types that are commonly made,
> that makes sense.  In many cases though, you can vary almost any of
> the ingredients, which results in an exponential number of possible
> recipes.  It'd make more sense (to me) to describe it in a prose style
> instead of a recipe style, saying things like "in some areas walnuts
> or chestnuts are commonly added on top", or "a number of other
> ingredients, including orange peel, nutmeg, coffee grinds, ... are
> sometimes added" (examples made up on the spot).

Coffee grounds????  Uggh!

Ec


from_name: Delirium

subject: [WikiEN-l] More on recipes

body:
Peter Jaros wrote:

> I think chocolate cake is a broad enough topic to have sections, or
> perhaps separate articles, about different kinds of chocolate cake,
> each of which can be illustrated by an appropriate example recipe.
> Presumably, any food topic this broad will be similarly divisible.

Where there are identifiable distinct types that are commonly made, that
makes sense.  In many cases though, you can vary almost any of the
ingredients, which results in an exponential number of possible
recipes.  It'd make more sense (to me) to describe it in a prose style
instead of a recipe style, saying things like "in some areas walnuts or
chestnuts are commonly added on top", or "a number of other ingredients,
including orange peel, nutmeg, coffee grinds, ... are sometimes added"
(examples made up on the spot).

-Mark


from_name: David Gerard

subject: [WikiEN-l] How to properly use articles from an outside GFDL source?

body:
I want to do some Wikipedia articles based on Disinfopedia articles.
They're GFDL. But what is the proper way to carry over authorship
information? Cut'n'paste the Disinfopedia page history (they use
MediaWiki too) to the Talk page? Acknowledgement link at the bottom
of the page, as we use for FOLDOC or Jargon File-based articles?

(What I'm attempting to do is fill in some of the links on
[[Alexis de Tocqueville Institution]]. The Disinfopedia article on
them is in ==External links==; what I want to do is import some of
the articles linked to from their article on the AdTI.)

- d.