from_name: Jeffrey V. Merkey

subject: [Foundation-l] board candidacies

references:
<44DC5C85.7030405@wikia.com>	<NMENLBGDKAFGBDHEPOBNKEKPDCAA.erikzachte@infodisiac.com>	<44DCD134.5030800@yahoo.com>	<38a7bf7c0608111207j5f37fd52h6847e3e2d87a196f@mail.gmail.com>	<44DCE1B4.5020101@wikia.com>	<44DCE4DC.5070309@wikia.com>	<38a7bf7c0608111333i2e002033sba9c53ad136c1736@mail.gmail.com>	<ebivm4$lf4$1@sea.gmane.org>	<44E297BC.2020300@verizon.net>	<44E33F21.9030204@wikia.com>
	<44E34D6E.20403@wolfmountaingroup.com>
	<44E40E93.7060105@verizon.net>

body:
Michael R. Irwin wrote:

(snip)

>My empirical observations were personal and not based upon glib
>dismissal of alleged hearsay from apparently distrusted sources.
>
>Perhaps you should check privately with Anthere.  As I recall she was
>participating frequently on the applicable list and stood for election
>in the formation of the first Board.   Did Jimbo really stack the Board
>or merely state publicly he was going to and proceed to write it
>unilaterally (perhaps with some assistance from nonexistent cabals or
>personal advisors) into the original foundation charter?
>
>A fact is an insult to nobody unless they perceive it so.   If the
>allegedly stacked Board Members or appointed trustees do not feel the
>Board was stacked; perhaps they should feel insulted that Jimbo
>announced on the mailing publicly that he felt it was comfortably
>designed to be stacked.
>
>If you wish the specific URLs and you wish me to do your research for
>you then drop me a data request at my Wikiversity talk page.   My time
>kibitzing here is almost over.   We have active URLs with fine print
>defining another prototyping period.   Fun stuff.   Let's all do some
>work and then cancel again for lack of discouraged participation.
>
>Sincerely,
>Michael R. Irwin
>_______________________________________________
>foundation-l mailing list
>foundation-l at wikimedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>
>
>
I go through these types of scenarios everytime I get involved in a
group of folks and we either convert an LLC into a C Corp, or take an
investment round and go through a cram down on stock dilution with
Preffered Series A, B, etc. shares being issued to the investors with
super-voting rights and the ability to take all the money off the table
in any deal and render common stock worthless. I also am the presiding
elder of a Corporation Sole which operates a lot like the Wikimedia
Foundation. I have a board of three members in the Utah NAC and even
though I am the Presiding Elder (Chairman) the other two members can
vote me out anytime they want -- it never happens this way because all
the assets are in my name and most of the church property are "Native
American Antiquities" and belong to my clan, not the church.

The one thing I see missing that will uncap the bottle on limitless
funding into Wikimedia is the current Board structure and the way it is
setup. Even if Mr. Wales adds Board seats and allows them the voting
power to restructure the organization, they are not going to oust him
due to his inherent value and the loyalty of the community and his
investors. People who donate and give money are investing in Jimbo and
his vision, not the Wikimedia Board, just like investors that have
routinely invested in my companies are not investing in my company, they
are investing in me. I think there is little risk to Mr. Wales adding
more board seats. I do some some changes possibly being made to other
members by, let's say, large outside funders, but I don't see Mr. Wales
being affected, he's currently a necessary element to the organization
to function, and has the total loyalty of most of these people, a good
statementon his leadership.

I say he should add some seats and let natural selection take its course
-- whever he is this community would follow, so there is little value to
Wikimedia without him. This is a natural part of developing business
maturity in managing large enterprises. I learned this long ago about
myself and my own worth and creative power when I realized the grass was
always greener -- around me ... I think the same it true here.

Jeff


list: wikimedia-l

source: pipermail-mbox

subject: [Foundation-l] board candidacies


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Jay R. Ashworth

subject: [Wikitech-l] Formalizing Wikitext (was: Dajoo)

body:
On Thu, Aug 17, 2006 at 12:21:13AM -0400, Eric Astor wrote:
> Let's see here. Please consider this an incomplete, unreliable list, meant
> solely as an indication of the basic problems encountered when attempting to
> formalize MediaWiki's wikitext... And I'm no expert on parsing, except in
> that I've spent a large part of the summer constructing parsers for
> essentially unparseable languages. Basic point, though, is that MediaWiki
> wikitext is INCREDIBLY context-sensitive.
>
> Single case that shows something interesting:
> '''hi''hello'''hi'''hello''hi'''
>
> Try running it through MediaWiki, and what do you get?
> hihellohihellohi
>
> In other words, you've discovered that the current syntax supports improper
> nesting of markup, in a rather unique fashion. I don't know of any way to
> duplicate this in any significantly formal system, although I believe a
> multiple-pass parser *might* be capable of handling it. In fact, some sort
> of multiple-pass parser (the MediaWiki parser) obviously can.

I suspect that the "proper" parsing of that particular combination is
undefined, and therefore you cna do anything you like.

That's one of the points I was suggesting.

> Also, templates need to be transcluded before most of the parsing can take
> place, since in the current system, the text may leave some
> syntactically-significant constructs incomplete, finishing them in the
> transclusion stage...

And of course, there's extensions, but I gather they're responsible for
calling the parser themselves, which seemed to make sense.

> In summary, for most definitions of formal, it is impossible to write formal
> grammars for most significant subsets of current MediaWiki syntax. I had
> significant success with a regex-based grammar specification (using Martel),
> backed by a VERY general backend capable of back-tracking and other clever
> tricks (mxTextTools) - but the recursive structure is virtually impossible
> to handle in a regex-based framework.
>
> - Eric Astor
>
> P.S. As indicated above, I honestly feel that the difficulties aren't
> insurmountable - if you're willing to build an appropriate parsing
> framework, which will be semi-formal at best.
>
> P.P.S. When possible, in my *copious* free time (</sarcasm>), I'm hoping to
> take another frontend to mxTextTools (SimpleParse, to be specific), modify
> it sufficiently to support all the necessary features, and then build
> something capable of parsing the current MediaWiki syntax (although I might
> have to drop support for improper nesting). I've no idea if or when this
> might happen, but I'm considering it a long-term goal if the current
> situation doesn't improve.

I don't know that I think that the spec has to be something you can
feed to Bison, certainly.  But it has to be unambiguously parseable,
with as many corner cases defined as you can manage, at least by
humans, before it's worth trying anything more complicated.

And it's going to *have* to be done sooner or later.  I haven't ever
even looked at the parser code, and just from people talking about, I
can tell that there will come a time when it's just too tense to work
on anymore.

Hopefully it will get replaced before then.

On Wed, Aug 16, 2006 at 11:26:22PM -0400, Ivan Krsti?? wrote:
> Jay R. Ashworth wrote:
> > I don't know how useful it will be to have wikitext specified strictly,
> > and I don't think we'll be able to tell until we see how far off we
> > are, and what might need to be tweaked.
>
> This was discussed at hacking days. Brion's pronouncement is that the
> current syntax will admit essentially no backwards-incompatible changes.

My point was more based on taking advantage on the
implementation-defined and -dependent portions of the current 'spec';
things like specifying binding and precedence rules concerning things
like Eric' first example, above.

It's unfortunate that formalization went on the table so late, but it
gets done for a reason, and, being an outgrowth of an engineering
construct, if you need it, and you don't do it, then you Just Can't do
whatever it was that made you decided you needed it.

Wasn't someone from SoC working on this?

Did we ever get a final status report from the SoC work?  (It's done
now, isn't it?)

And let's be quite clear: *brion* (and Tim) will admit no
backwards-imcompatible changes, not the syntax.  The syntax is an
inanimate non-object.

(I'm not trying to be combative, there, just honest.)

Cheers,
-- jra

Cheers,
-- jra
--
Jay R. Ashworth                                                jra at baylink.com
Designer                          Baylink                             RFC 2100
Ashworth & Associates        The Things I Think                        '87 e24
St Petersburg FL USA      http://baylink.pitas.com             +1 727 647 1274

	The Internet: We paved paradise, and put up a snarking lot.


subject: [Wikitech-l] Dajoo: a Java-based offline editor/viewer

body:
On Thu, Aug 17, 2006 at 12:23:57AM -0400, Simetrical wrote:
> On 8/17/06, Eric Astor <eastor1 at swarthmore.edu> wrote:
> > [snip]
>
> XML, anyone?  ;)

It wouldn't help.  The problems are semantic, not syntactical.

I think.  :-)

Cheers,
-- jr 'IE: no, no, no, no, no!' a
--
Jay R. Ashworth                                                jra at baylink.com
Designer                          Baylink                             RFC 2100
Ashworth & Associates        The Things I Think                        '87 e24
St Petersburg FL USA      http://baylink.pitas.com             +1 727 647 1274

	The Internet: We paved paradise, and put up a snarking lot.


list: foundation-l

from_name: Michael R. Irwin

subject: [Foundation-l] Wikiversity

body:
Amgine wrote:

>
> On 16-Aug-06, at 12:00 PM, Cormac Lawler wrote:
>
>> So, if there's a conclusion to this mail, it would be: I'm not arguing
>> for a simple dismissal about all we know and have learned about NPOV.
>> I'm simply saying that it will not _always_ be a useful policy to
>> impose throughout the process of learning. I'm yearning for a better
>> concept - or perhaps we simply have to invest NPOV with new meaning in
>> order to tailor it to Wikiversity's particular identity.
>
>
> As you're aware, I'm extremely bothered by this approach to defining
> Wikiversity. It seems to me to say "let's not put any strictures on
> Wikiversity, no requirements or expectations, but let it grow
> organically." This sound nifty in theory, but results in nothing
> because there are no expectations, no hurdles, nothing to accomplish.
> You can't even measure if it has accomplished this nothingness.

There is currently policy discussion underway at Wikiversity easily
available from links on the main page.   The progress is easily
measurable in bytes if you care to count.    I suppose the count could
be compared to the early byte counts regarding policy and procedure at
en.wikipedia if we have any wizard programmers interested.   Wikipedia
did not evolve useful or detailed policy overnight, it took some serious
effort and participation.

There are six specific policies currently collecting
votes/opinion/comments.   One is an appropriate wrapper policy on "NPOV"
attempting to explain that we will use NPOV and properly labeled POV and
attempt to adhere to high moral and ethical standards in avoiding any
attempt to deceive or deceptively influence the wikiversity participant
and readers.

Ironically,  I personally oppose the title.   I favor sticking with the
current definition of NPOV which has evolved and stabilized at Wikipedia
to avoid confusion for experienced Wikimedians and simply title other
specific policies appropriately.

>
> Wikversity should have goals. They should be measurable. The project
> needs to meet the minimum standards of the Wikimedia Foundation;
> fundamental in this is a commitment to avoiding support of any one
> POV, to be verifiable (where this is an option) and to be free.

For this to be possible the Foundation must define its specific minimum
standards.

We are clearly striving to meet the Foundation's minimum specific
pitch.   Paraphrased personally as:  Help provide all free human
knowledge freely to all humans who wish it.

Only NPOV is too restrictive.    In studying engineering thermodynamics
it is useful and necessary to be exposed to fake dilemmas provided
widely and free of charge regarding closed systems so that you clearly
understand that you as the engineer are responsible for defining the
closed system surfaces and all flows of conserved quantities so no
errors creep into calculations of complex systems found in the real
world.   This simple example go like this:   A seed is a certain
complexty, it grows a tree of certain complexity, the tree grows a seed
of same complexity.   A tree/seed is a closed system.   So entropy
cannot always increase in the closed tree system therefor thermodynamics
is all wrong, a miracle is required and engineers who believe in
thermdynamics rather than God creating miracles as required are all
wrong or congenital idiots.     The spoiler is:  ......  place your
virtual sphere around the tree/seeds system and track the nutrients,
water, but most of all heat and light transfers.     Sunlight in, heat
out, entropy as defined by thermodynics increases.  Life and the future
of engineering profession expensively under study is save for all future
engineers ... true believers, agnostics, and atheists alike.    That is
actual propaganda that was aimed at my freshmen engineering dorm and
many hours of study time and a few friendships would have been saved had
we been able to quickly resolve the fake definitions and dilemmas.
Maybe it belongs in an historical treatment of engineering fundamentals.

Other examples are available in other disciplines of study.   It is
difficult for me to understand how one would truly study Christiananity
via NPOV.   You either reach the point of understanding Christ's answer
to the politicians inquiring about the really real answers to life, the
universe, and everything paraphrased (rather than the existing 6 or 7
hundred commandments) concisely as:

1. Love God completely with all your heart.
2. Love others as you love yourself.

and begin to see how to integrate your other knowledge and worldviews
with ever more complex integrations of these two rules or you do not
truly understand "Christianity".

How could an atheist "NPOV" the two rules above to effectively teach
Christianity to others?   We would be quibbling about shifting words,
language, historical shading, cultural biases, etc. until the cows come
home.

To an atheist "God" is a non sequitor or zero.

1. Love nothing with all your heart.
2. Love your neighbors as you love yourself.

Instead of an expanding set of useful self consistent beliefs/equations
provided by the historical genius/messiah Jesus Christ or the Son of God
himself (God himself if you purchase the trinity theory) you get a
shrinking personal universe of:  Love nothing, not even yourself.

To an agnostic a big unknown.

1.  Love big X with all your heart.
2.  Love your neighbors as yourself.

That is not great as anyone can provide by providing their own X.
Exclusionary treehuggers vs. allout free loggers.  I love trees therfore
no tree can be cut.  I love money so all trees must be cut.

How about a fuzzy "science" or "discipline" like medicine or human
biology?   How is this NPOVed only in the face of conflicting experts
and more research required?

Computer science or software engineering.   How do we apply NPOV to
expert opinion (AFAIK software is ultimately all opinion)?   Nobody ever
has the same total datasets or expertise and when you get into details
or measuring reliability there is alway variance in the details or some
measurable error.

>
> Throwing crap at a wall until some of it sticks means you deal with a
> lot of crap. Let's be a bit more discerning than that, please.
>
Actually very few of our other participants actually simply throw crap
at the wall.   I guess I am a bit unique in that regard.  One of the
policies up for vote and doing fairly well if I recall correctly  (3/3
for) is "Edit boldly."  I always personally add   "....  serene in the
knowledge that another wiklar (one contraction among many proposed I
will leave you in suspense regarding who devised it from "wiki scholar")
will correct any errors identified boldly.   This is pretty clearly a
cheap trick based upon past successful en.wikipedia tactics to get some
material started  (crap tossed) to encourage additional participation
via further bold editing.

As far as I know nobody has proposed mandating nothing but bold
editing.    You or anyone are welcome to provide only "brilliant prose"
and "no crap".   This might appear to invite ownership issues but I have
a draft "Fork and tailor productively when appropriate" that I have
requested admin assistance in relocating to the new wiki linked to from
the policy discussion page to resolve many of the edit wars or cycling
that seem to result from excessive attachment to one's own crap or
brilliant prose.   I am hopeful this will allow us to separate warring
factions occasionally without running off the minority factions or
alleged social misfits.    I would like to proudly point out here how we
are addressing the measureable goal of "serving all free information to
all people".     Last time I was at Wikipedia they were not meeting this
Foundation goal as they were running off highly POV people, often before
we could acquire their specific POV information for effective NPOVing.
Certainly they were failing to help the misfit driven off to effectively
utilize or understand the NPOV material they allegedly kept trying to
bias to unwanted allegedly POV information.

By simply encouraging separation and effective development of well
labeled and convincing POV or controversial multiple versions of
provably NPOV (by simple majority vote of those interested and timely
possibly)  I hope to achieve a portion of the Foundation's stated and
measurable (Alexi counts hits ...) goal of all free human information to
all freely.

Last but not least, quizzes and problem set solutions have certainly
been discussed.   I am a bit quirky that way.  I probably will not do
much measurable work until another engineering student or engineering
professional shows up interested in the same topics as I.   I think some
of the preliminary history classes already have some quizzes available
but I could be mistaken.   I have wandered around quite a bit looking
for signs of life but found little while the project was in limbo.
Maybe it will be a bit better for our second or third six month trial
period, maybe not.

In closing I will point out that it might be better to discuss
Wikiversity Policy on the Wikiversity-L list setup for that purpose or
within the now evolving active community at en.wikiversity.org or other
active language of choice.

regards,
Mirwin


subject: [Foundation-l] Wikiversity


subject: [Foundation-l] Unsubscribe Mirwin Please

body:
Hi All,

Could someone please tell me how to unsubscribe from this  Foundation-L
mailing list?   I need a link to the automated description form or
action from a list admin.   Either is very useful and will make me much
happier than usual.

My apologies but I could not find the proper form at:
http://mail.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo

Curiously I also cannot seem to get subscribed to Wikiversity-L but I
shall take that up with Cormac or the other guy (there is one and he is
active at Wikiversity but I simply cannot remember his handle at the
moment).

A private email to mirwin account at wikiversity is also useful and
acceptable if we wish to avoid further cluttering this list with trivia.

Thanks,
mirwin


from_name: Simetrical

body:
In any case, Eric, have you thought of any ideas to simplify the
syntax while maintaining reverse-compatibility (except perhaps in
highly unlikely corner cases)?  For instance, what if "==Text"
translated to "
Text
", while "==Text==" still did as well?
That would eliminate the need for unlimited lookahead for headings,
reducing it to one-character lookahead for the first five levels and
zero-character for the sixth.  In fact, it would probably cause little
breakage if the same were done with opening wikilinks, template calls,
and so on.  Any other thoughts?

The context-sensitivity of apostrophes probably isn't avoidable, unfortunately.

On 8/17/06, Jay R. Ashworth <jra at baylink.com> wrote:
> It wouldn't help.  The problems are semantic, not syntactical.
>
> I think.  :-)

Nope, we're talking 100% syntax.  '''hi''hello'''hi'''hello''hi'''
isn't ambiguous if it's stored as
hihellohihellohi to begin with, and
neither do you need unlimited lookahead to know that
 is a header
tag and not a literal string.  Every problem Eric is having would be
eliminated if we switched to XML for internal storage, because all
Eric is doing is trying to write a formal grammar ? and a formal XML
grammar is part of the official XML specification.


body:
On 8/17/06, Jay R. Ashworth <jra at baylink.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 17, 2006 at 12:21:13AM -0400, Eric Astor wrote:
> > Single case that shows something interesting:
> > '''hi''hello'''hi'''hello''hi'''
> >
> > Try running it through MediaWiki, and what do you get?
> > hihellohihellohi
>
> I suspect that the "proper" parsing of that particular combination is
> undefined, and therefore you cna do anything you like.

Actually, the proper parsing of that particular combination is defined
perfectly well.  The problem is that HTML doesn't allow overlapping
tags.  If it did allow them, you would get a straight substitution:

'''hi''hello'''hi'''hello''hi''' ->
hihellohihellohi

Each ''' becomes </?b>, each '' becomes </?i>.  That's definitely
defined behavior.  But to make it valid HTML, you need to close the
 before the , then reopen it after the , and so on.  So this
isn't something that can be worked around.

> Wasn't someone from SoC working on this?
>
> Did we ever get a final status report from the SoC work?  (It's done
> now, isn't it?)

There were two SoC projects, one to have embeddable media and one to
have a forum-like talk page instead of our current wiki thing.  The
former I don't know what happened to, the latter we have prototype
code and a largely completed design for (and I believe the author of
that project has agreed to try to see it through).  The deadline is in
a few days, I think, unless it's already past.


from_name: Sabine Cretella

subject: [Wikitech-l] Apple's Wiki Server brings WYSIWYG to wiki

body:
> So if it substitutes letters which are not pronounced, what are those
> unpronounced letters in 'o and 'a? My guess is that they are a special
> exception which are always written 'o and 'a perhaps historically having
> had an official letter. If this is the case we could say the rule is:
>
lo + la + le (plural form) d''e also exists
> A double apostrophe occurs when contraction is made with the definite
> articles, these being always written with an apostrophe.
>
> So my further questions:
> a) Is there a "full spelling" for 'o and 'a?
>
it is not used - you only find it in veeeery old texts. nowadays they
only use 'o, 'a and in plural form 'e
> b) Are there any words besides 'o and 'a which take an apostrophe even
> when not part of a contraction?
>
yes - 'nfrumma,

'mbrugli?

also there it substitutes a letter - in all cases the substituted letter
is a vowel (as much as I have in mind now

and there's the article ll' used in front of a vowel

sorry, but things come in mind while writing and imagining sentences -
consider that I know some grammar rules, but I don't know all of them -
my Neapolitan comes from everyday use when talking with people in this
region. The few rules I know help me to write as correctly as possible
and according to Carmine who proofreads my texts they are quite well and
getting always better - during the last ones there were only some really
minor changes. If we need further, more exact information I need to find
out where I can get a grammar book - it is impossible to find it here
where I live (that might seem strange, but it is like that).

Best, Sabine
Chiacchiera con i tuoi amici in tempo reale!
 http://it.yahoo.com/mail_it/foot/*http://it.messenger.yahoo.com


body:
On Thu, Aug 17, 2006 at 01:56:29AM -0400, Simetrical wrote:
> On 8/17/06, Jay R. Ashworth <jra at baylink.com> wrote:
> > It wouldn't help.  The problems are semantic, not syntactical.
> >
> > I think.  :-)
>
> Nope, we're talking 100% syntax.  '''hi''hello'''hi'''hello''hi'''
> isn't ambiguous if it's stored as
> hihellohihellohi to begin with, and

Well that's fine... but *getting from Eric's example to yours* is a
problem of semantics: what did the user *mean*.  Without disambiguating
rules, there may be no way to tell.

Please make the following sentence gramatically correct, solely by
adding punctuation:

>     John where Nancy had had had had had had had had had had had a
>     better effect.

Semantics.

> neither do you need unlimited lookahead to know that
 is a header
> tag and not a literal string.  Every problem Eric is having would be
> eliminated if we switched to XML for internal storage, because all
> Eric is doing is trying to write a formal grammar ??? and a formal XML
> grammar is part of the official XML specification.

Fine, but a) those are not the only problems he's having, and b) No
[[Flag Day]]s.

Cheers,
-- jra
--
Jay R. Ashworth                                                jra at baylink.com
Designer                          Baylink                             RFC 2100
Ashworth & Associates        The Things I Think                        '87 e24
St Petersburg FL USA      http://baylink.pitas.com             +1 727 647 1274

	The Internet: We paved paradise, and put up a snarking lot.


body:
On Thu, Aug 17, 2006 at 02:03:07AM -0400, Simetrical wrote:
> On 8/17/06, Jay R. Ashworth <jra at baylink.com> wrote:
> > On Thu, Aug 17, 2006 at 12:21:13AM -0400, Eric Astor wrote:
> > > Single case that shows something interesting:
> > > '''hi''hello'''hi'''hello''hi'''
> > >
> > > Try running it through MediaWiki, and what do you get?
> > > hihellohihellohi
> >
> > I suspect that the "proper" parsing of that particular combination is
> > undefined, and therefore you cna do anything you like.
>
> Actually, the proper parsing of that particular combination is defined
> perfectly well.  The problem is that HTML doesn't allow overlapping
> tags.  If it did allow them, you would get a straight substitution:
>
> '''hi''hello'''hi'''hello''hi''' ->
> hihellohihellohi
>
> Each ''' becomes </?b>, each '' becomes </?i>.  That's definitely
> defined behavior.  But to make it valid HTML, you need to close the
>  before the , then reopen it after the , and so on.  So this
> isn't something that can be worked around.

Sorry; I missed that he had not included the canonical example of this
problem, which is that if you get ''''', there can be constructions
wherein it's not possible to determine whether you're ending a bold and
starting an italic, or the reverse, without context.

> > Wasn't someone from SoC working on this?
> >
> > Did we ever get a final status report from the SoC work?  (It's done
> > now, isn't it?)
>
> There were two SoC projects, one to have embeddable media and one to
> have a forum-like talk page instead of our current wiki thing.  The
> former I don't know what happened to, the latter we have prototype
> code and a largely completed design for (and I believe the author of
> that project has agreed to try to see it through).  The deadline is in
> a few days, I think, unless it's already past.

Ah.  I had missed the first one, and am interested to see how the
second one works out.

Cheer,s
-- jra
--
Jay R. Ashworth                                                jra at baylink.com
Designer                          Baylink                             RFC 2100
Ashworth & Associates        The Things I Think                        '87 e24
St Petersburg FL USA      http://baylink.pitas.com             +1 727 647 1274

	The Internet: We paved paradise, and put up a snarking lot.


subject:
[Wikitech-l] Neapolitan double apostrophe (was Apple's Wiki
	Server brings WYSIWYG to wiki)

body:
On Thu, Aug 17, 2006 at 08:25:03AM +0200, Steve Bennett wrote:
> On 8/17/06, Andrew Dunbar <hippytrail at gmail.com> wrote:
> > No problem. Linguists create grammars by interviewing people who speak
> > them and it apparently works best if these informants can't analyse their
> > language grammatically. We're going very well so far! (-:
>
> Hence the quote "Believing everything an informant says in his
> language, and nothing he says about it."
>
> I had another thought, would it be possible to hack the nap parser
> such that a small set of magic words like d''a etc are parsed
> differently? If there's only a small number of special cases and
> they're not ambiguous (ie, no one would ever really want a d followed
> immediately be an a in italics...), then that might work? Or with
> javascript :)

IIRC, Steve, wasn't a large part of the problem that the parser would
puke and die when presented with a *link* to such a page?

Cheers,
-- jra
--
Jay R. Ashworth                                                jra at baylink.com
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	The Internet: We paved paradise, and put up a snarking lot.


from_name: Anthere

subject: [Foundation-l] bylaws (second call)

body:
Lars Aronsson wrote:
> Brad Patrick wrote:
>
>
>>- With such a diluted definition of 'member' what is the real
>>  point of being a 'member'?
>
>
> There was a decision point back in 2002 or so, where Wikipedia was
> still more or less Jimbo's private property, and the question was
> where to put it.  Many Germans and other Europeans wanted a
> membership association, but Jimbo went for a foundation.  Later
> (in 2004) the German national chapter was structured exactly like
> the membership association (Verein) that they had wanted also for
> the international body.  There is a fundamental difference between
> the two kinds of organization, but I think this was more clear to
> the Germans than it was to Jimbo or most Americans.
>
> (This seems to be a European/American cultural divide.  When I
> look at an article such as the [[New England Anime Society]] the
> *first* question I ask is *how many members* do they have?  And
> this is not answered.  This is like not knowing the annual
> turnover for a business or the population of a city.  Is it
> thousands or millions?)
>
> However, one fundamental requirement for a membership association
> was also missing.  The word "Verein" means union, a get-together
> of equals.  The corresponding verb "sich vereinen" means "to
> unite", to team up.  And there simply was nobody who equalled
> Jimbo.  The German Wikipedians could get together as equals to
> form their national chapter.  Their elected board was only
> slightly more into Wikipedia than the rest.  There was nobody
> there with the God-like status of Jimbo.
>
> I think the only way Wikipedia could have been turned into a real
> membership association is if a global "chapter" of wikipedians had
> been formed in 2002, without Jimbo, and then started to negotiate
> with Jimbo about the future rights to domain names and servers.
> As we all know, this didn't happen.
>
> This leaves Jimbo with the decision, and it is a fact that his
> position is more like that of Bill Gates, Andrew Carnegie, or
> Alfred Nobel.  One day he finds himself in possession of something
> that should live on after him, and there really is little point in
> his family to inherit it.  What do you do in such a situation?
> You start a foundation.  Its bylaws is your last will. If a board
> member needs to leave, the rest of the board must find a new board
> member.  Many newspapers are owned by foundations, so it makes
> sense for a web media venture as well.
>
> The fact that two out of five board members should be elected by
> the community is merely a curious detail of the Wikimedia
> Foundation.  This is not expected from a foundation.  Foundations
> are used for purposes where democracy is not an issue. And in fact
> the Wikimedia Foundation works perfectly alright without
> democracy, as does the Nobel Foundation.  The former only needs to
> keep the servers running.  The latter only needs to find the best
> scientists.  Both tasks can be accomplished with a handful of
> administrators and a network of experts.  These small tasks are
> independent of the whole body of article-editing or science that
> they serve.
>
>
>>Is it political so members have control of the organization in
>>some way? Philosophical, in that we have 'card carrying' members
>>to prove allegiance to something?
>
>
> The German chapter fills both roles, as far as I can see.

I thought your summary of the past very accurate and clear.

Just a couple of comments regarding your last big paragraph.
Your premise that the two members be elected from the community is a
curious detail, because WMF is a Foundation and elected members are not
expected in a Foundation, is incorrect.

The WMF is not really a Foundation, but by name. It is in reality nearer
to be an association.

The second point is that the goal of the WMF support goes far beyond
from merely keeping the servers running.

ant


subject: [Foundation-l] bylaws (second call)


from_name: Andre Engels

subject: [Foundation-l] [WikiEN-l] Are TV screencaps reputable sources?

body:
2006/8/16, Luiz Augusto <lugusto at gmail.com>:
> According to Wikipedia, Fair use is "limited use of copyrighted material
> without requiring permission from the rights holders, such as use for
> scholarship or review." Brazilian copyright law have only a few subjects
> that authorizes utilization of copyrighted works with no previous permission
> request (you can try a Google translation from [1], in the section "Cap?tulo
> IV Das Limita??es aos Direitos Autorais", "Art. 33" and "Art. 41" to read
> more about it)

So? 'A few subjects' is something else than 'nothing related'.

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


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Ruud Koot

subject: [Wikipedia-l] copyright status of russian stamps

body:
According to [1] stamps from Ukraine are in the public domain. This
would follow from the following two clauses from respectively the
Ukrainian Copyright Law [2] and Postal Law [3]:

> (d) State symbols of Ukraine, government awards; symbols and signs of
>  government authorities, the Armed Forces of Ukraine and other
> military formations; symbols of territorial communities; symbols and
> signs of enterprises, institutions and organizations;

> postage stamp - a state sign, manufactured according to the procedure
> set forth by legislation, with specified face value and state,
> serving as the tool of payment for postal services provided by the
> national operator.

The Russian Copright [4] and Postal [5] laws include similar clauses:

> Article 8. Works Not Protected by Copyright
>
> The following are not protected by copyright:
>
> official documents (laws, court decisions, other texts of
> legislative, administrative or judicial character) and official
> translations thereof; State emblems and official signs (flags,
> armorial bearings, decorations, monetary signs and other State
> symbols and official signs); works of folklore; communications
> concerning events and facts that have informational character.

> the state signs of post payment - post stamps and other signs,
> applied to the post sendings and those confirming the payment of
> services to postal communication;

[1]http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Stamps/Public_domain
[2]http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Ukraine._Law_on_Copyright_and_Related_Rights
[3]http://www.welcometo.kiev.ua/pls/ili/docs/LAW_ENG/EQ2759-III_28-05-03.HTML
[4]http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Russian_Federation._Law_on_Copyright_and_Neighboring_Rights
[5]http://www.russianpost.ru/resp_engine.aspx?Path=RU/Home/law/postlaw

Would it be correct to conclude that Russian stamps are in the public
domain as well?

Ruud


from_name: Jussi-Ville Heiskanen

subject: [Foundation-l] Wikimania 2007 - get ready for the third edition.

body:
On 8/16/06, Sue Reed <sreed1234 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> There is something strange and geeky about me mentioning the World Science
> Fiction convention on a wikimedia email list, but it fits the situation.
> They have a really great system of organizing and planning future
> conferences several years in advance. The convention is coming up for this
> summer in Los Angeles, the 2007 convention location was chosen by popular
> vote last year, and the 2008 convention location will be chosen at this
> year's convention.

What you neglect to mention is the wonderful way in which the Worldcon
rotation operates. For those not in the know; the Worldcon operates in
a four year cycle, roughly speaking, and though the actual voting is
only one year ahead, the submissions have to be verified much earlier,
and actual campaigning usually starts four years in advance.

We will never take the same rotation system as Worldcons, as they are
horribly US-centered, three years rotating between East Coast, West
Coast and the Middle of the United states, the fourth year all US
sites being free to compete against possible candidate sites outside
the US, but it is not a bad idea to think whether we need a formal
rotation structure to assure venues do not tend to cluster either in
Central Europe or North America, or whether we will trust things
working out naturally.

--
--
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen, AKA. Cimon Avaro

Candidate for Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation in the
September 2006 elections.


from_name: Samuel Klein

body:
On Thu, 17 Aug 2006, Aphaia wrote:

> /me nods. A int'l conference I know, which usually gather 1,000 people
> or so, is scheduled 3 years before. And honestly I doubt we can say it
> is steadily growing ... (who cares for aesthetics in this world? Heh,
> but it is another problem). For your information, the conf. is
> regurarly trilingual. English, French or German. The local language
> isn't included as its official language. Some tracks are provided
> English a/o local language translation.

Which conference is this?

> spheres is awasome. Over 10 hotels were occupied by participants, 2
> hotels and public convention halls in city serves the convention.
> Registration begins in the fall before one year (so organizers have a
> pool of money beforehand), printed program is sent before one month of
> convention, etc.  See http://gencon.org

Sounds nice.  Gencon is its own LLC; their cons are for-profit, run by
Wizards of the Coast's Peter Adkison... a slightly different kind of
event, if still focused on pleasing its attendees.

> taking" or just "is ongoing" ... because I have now many things to
> discuss about its linguistic aspects ... I am now strongly hesitant to
> call it an intenational event in its full meaning. I know most of
> "int'l" computer related conf. are monolingual but Wikimania is not

This is not in itself a reason to be the same; we don't have to be limited
by what most tech conferences do...

> is at least bilingual. So, you won't be realized the monolinguality of
> Wikimania beaten me heavily. It was really a shock when I learned not
> only the ongoing conference at Boston but also Frankfurterkonferenz
> had been also monolingual (de facto English), since I have read
> possible interpretation and translation were discussed by mailinglist
> .....

Interpretation and translation were discussed.  Even budgeted for.  But in
the end dropped for lack of explicit vocal interest by attendees.  There
is a chicken and egg problem here, as with the geographic diversity of
active Wikimedians.  Announcing clearly that there will be strong bi- or
multi-lingual support at a conference helps bring attendees who would need
and use such services, and who would otherwise not come.

> keynotes (planeries). Due to the current workload, currently I have no
> enough time to summarize my proposal for universal access to Wikimedia
> things for "ESAFL/ESASL", so I expect you as those to input your
> opinion frankly, and also expect the next year conf. is greatly
> progressing at this point.

I assume you mean "english as a foreign language" / "english as a second
language".  Perhaps those on this list who have experience with events
that cater to multilingual (and ESL/EFL) audiences can suggest how other
groups reach these goals.

This reminds me of the World Social Forum, which tries to be multilingual
and accessible.  They have an interesting structure for planning
committees, including representatives from underrepresented communities
of attendees:

http://www.ussf2007.org/org_chart.html

--SJ


from_name: Anthony

subject: [Foundation-l] Foundation's position on non-free images

body:
On 8/16/06, Erik Moeller <eloquence at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 8/16/06, Anthere <Anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> > I think the projects are not (should not be) managed by the Foundation.
> > The Foundation supports the projects, which is very different. Jimbo or
> > others may provide some guidance, but it is not the role of the
> > Foundation to say "fair use is allowed" or "fair use is not allowed".
>
> I'll state for the record my disagreement with that. I think copyright
> policy should be made on the Foundation level in cooperation with the
> projects. The current situation is an unsustainable mess.
>
FWIW, I don't think the Foundation should come along and say "fair use
is allowed" or "fair use is not allowed", but mainly because that's
such a ridiculous statement - it would be like saying "free speech is
allowed" or "free speech is not allowed".

I do think it is the role of the foundation to work with the community
to come up with an a consensus agreement on what is and isn't allowed,
on a very high level basis.  The basis of the definition should be
freedom, and the definition should answer the question "what is free
enough" on a high level basis, without referring to laws of specific
nations.  IOW, it'd answer the question of what to do with certain
content which is copyrighted, not licensed under a free license, but
could be used quite liberally without permission under certain
conditions, such as fair use - without actually mentioning fair use.

Anthony


list: commons-l

from_name: Florian Straub

subject: [Commons-l] Rethinking [[COM:DEL]]

body:
On Thu, 17 Aug 2006 10:51:19 +1000 "Brianna Laugher" <brianna.laugher at gmail.com> wrote:

> > http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Flominator/Deletion_proposal
>
> That's quite nice. Having the discussion on the image talk page is
> good because at the moment discussions are very separated from the
> images. However when we delete the image, would we then keep the talk
> page? That's a little odd.

An alternative would be "subst:"ing the discussion page into the deletion discussion when deleting an image. What would be the problem in keeping the discussion at all?

> Also it wouldn't work for mass or multiple deletion requests.
You could still write them into the daily deletion discussion page ...

Another idea would be to discuss the deletion request right within the image and to automatically categorize them by day.

Regards,

Flo

@Avatar: I used Outlook Express and it still worked at the list archives :)

--

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Ideal f?r Modem und ISDN: http://www.gmx.net/de/go/smartsurfer


subject: [Foundation-l] bylaws (second call)

body:
On 8/16/06, Anthere <Anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Lars Aronsson wrote:
> > Brad Patrick wrote:
> >
> >
> >>- With such a diluted definition of 'member' what is the real
> >>  point of being a 'member'?
> >
> >
> > There was a decision point back in 2002 or so, where Wikipedia was
> > still more or less Jimbo's private property, and the question was
> > where to put it.  Many Germans and other Europeans wanted a
> > membership association, but Jimbo went for a foundation.  Later
> > (in 2004) the German national chapter was structured exactly like
> > the membership association (Verein) that they had wanted also for
> > the international body.  There is a fundamental difference between
> > the two kinds of organization, but I think this was more clear to
> > the Germans than it was to Jimbo or most Americans.
> >
> > (This seems to be a European/American cultural divide.  When I
> > look at an article such as the [[New England Anime Society]] the
> > *first* question I ask is *how many members* do they have?  And
> > this is not answered.  This is like not knowing the annual
> > turnover for a business or the population of a city.  Is it
> > thousands or millions?)
> >
> > However, one fundamental requirement for a membership association
> > was also missing.  The word "Verein" means union, a get-together
> > of equals.  The corresponding verb "sich vereinen" means "to
> > unite", to team up.  And there simply was nobody who equalled
> > Jimbo.  The German Wikipedians could get together as equals to
> > form their national chapter.  Their elected board was only
> > slightly more into Wikipedia than the rest.  There was nobody
> > there with the God-like status of Jimbo.
> >
> > I think the only way Wikipedia could have been turned into a real
> > membership association is if a global "chapter" of wikipedians had
> > been formed in 2002, without Jimbo, and then started to negotiate
> > with Jimbo about the future rights to domain names and servers.
> > As we all know, this didn't happen.
> >
> > This leaves Jimbo with the decision, and it is a fact that his
> > position is more like that of Bill Gates, Andrew Carnegie, or
> > Alfred Nobel.  One day he finds himself in possession of something
> > that should live on after him, and there really is little point in
> > his family to inherit it.  What do you do in such a situation?
> > You start a foundation.  Its bylaws is your last will. If a board
> > member needs to leave, the rest of the board must find a new board
> > member.  Many newspapers are owned by foundations, so it makes
> > sense for a web media venture as well.
> >
> > The fact that two out of five board members should be elected by
> > the community is merely a curious detail of the Wikimedia
> > Foundation.  This is not expected from a foundation.  Foundations
> > are used for purposes where democracy is not an issue. And in fact
> > the Wikimedia Foundation works perfectly alright without
> > democracy, as does the Nobel Foundation.  The former only needs to
> > keep the servers running.  The latter only needs to find the best
> > scientists.  Both tasks can be accomplished with a handful of
> > administrators and a network of experts.  These small tasks are
> > independent of the whole body of article-editing or science that
> > they serve.
> >
> >
> >>Is it political so members have control of the organization in
> >>some way? Philosophical, in that we have 'card carrying' members
> >>to prove allegiance to something?
> >
> >
> > The German chapter fills both roles, as far as I can see.
>
> I thought your summary of the past very accurate and clear.
>
> Just a couple of comments regarding your last big paragraph.
> Your premise that the two members be elected from the community is a
> curious detail, because WMF is a Foundation and elected members are not
> expected in a Foundation, is incorrect.
>
> The WMF is not really a Foundation, but by name. It is in reality nearer
> to be an association.
>
> The second point is that the goal of the WMF support goes far beyond
> from merely keeping the servers running.
>
> ant

I didn't originally respond to the comment by Lars because I think it
is so far off the mark.  Jimmy Wales is not Bill Gates, Andrew
Carnegie, or Alfred Nobel.  His company, Bomis, provided the start-up
costs for Wikipedia, perhaps on the order of a million dollars, but
Jimbo didn't leave Wikimedia with the money to sustain itself for any
significant period of time.  It's the broad base of donors from all
over the world that keep Wikimedia running financially, and it's the
broad base of volunteers from all over the world that make it more
than some Wikicity.

Wikimedia doesn't fit the stereotypical foundation nor the
stereotypical membership association.  I'd like to see it move closer
to a membership association.  I'm really not sure whether or not
there's any chance the board is going to give up their seemingly
absolute power and allow that to happen.

Anthony


subject: [Foundation-l] bylaws (second call)


from_name: Steve Bennett

body:
On 8/17/06, Andrew Dunbar <hippytrail at gmail.com> wrote:
> 99% clear so thanks very much. My advice then is to adpot a policy of
> "use straight apostrophes for markup and curly apostrophes for words".
> Where d''o and d''a will break formatting or require ugly workarounds,
> d''o and d''a will always "just work". (And look better too).

That would be practical if keyboards had a "curly apostrophe" key. How
do you propose that editors type it?

Steve


body:
On 8/17/06, Andrew Dunbar <hippytrail at gmail.com> wrote:
> No problem. Linguists create grammars by interviewing people who speak
> them and it apparently works best if these informants can't analyse their
> language grammatically. We're going very well so far! (-:

Hence the quote "Believing everything an informant says in his
language, and nothing he says about it."

I had another thought, would it be possible to hack the nap parser
such that a small set of magic words like d''a etc are parsed
differently? If there's only a small number of special cases and
they're not ambiguous (ie, no one would ever really want a d followed
immediately be an a in italics...), then that might work? Or with
javascript :)

Steve


from_name: valdelli at bluemail.ch

body:
If you upload images in Commons you follow rules established for
Commons and used in any countries. If you upload images in Hungarian
Wikipedia you use hungarian law and these images could be used only
for hungarian side of Wikipedia.

For example the italian law allows the use of screenshot of films
but with limited use, since this is only an italian law these images
are uploaded only in Italian database and not in Commons.

Ilario

----Messaggio originale----
Da: saintonge at telus.net
Data: 17.08.06 5.39
A: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List"<foundation-l at wikimedia.org>
Oggetto: Re: [Foundation-l] Foundation's position on non-free
images

Tomek "Polimerek" Ganicz wrote:

>Tisza Gergo wrote:
>
>
>>There is an ongoing debate in the Hungarian Wikipedia community
about
>>image license policies. I didn't find anything about the
Foundation's
>>position on the issue (except for the rather vague [[m:
Foundation
>>issues]]), so I'll try to ask here:
>>
>>
>The same is on Polish :-) I think there should be an official
Foundation
>policy about it. When we were asking people from Foundation around
1
>year ago, the answers where different from one person to another,
and
>then two groups of users (pro fair-use and anti fair-use) were
using
>these diffrent answers as a key argument. Finally, someone asked
simple
>  question: do we really want to make Polish Wikipedia to
constantly
>break Polish Law?
>
I very much disagree that there should be a single policy on this
that
affects all projects.  There is too much variation in the laws of
different countries, and in the needs of different projects (not
just
Wikipedias).  It should be up to each project to find its own level
of
comfort in this, as long as it is carried on in a general
atmosphere of
copyright respect.  The question of whether or not someone is
"breaking"
the law is rarely very clear.

Ec

_______________________________________________
foundation-l mailing list
foundation-l at wikimedia.org
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l


subject: [Commons-l] Rethinking [[COM:DEL]]

body:
On Thu, 17 Aug 2006 15:47:33 +1000  "Brianna Laugher" <brianna.laugher at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 17/08/06, Florian Straub <Flominator at gmx.net> wrote:
> > On Thu, 17 Aug 2006 10:51:19 +1000 "Brianna Laugher"
> <brianna.laugher at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > > > http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Flominator/Deletion_proposal
> > >
> > > That's quite nice. Having the discussion on the image talk page is
> > > good because at the moment discussions are very separated from the
> > > images. However when we delete the image, would we then keep the talk
> > > page? That's a little odd.
> >
> > An alternative would be "subst:"ing the discussion page into the
> deletion discussion when deleting an image. What would be the problem in keeping
> the discussion at all?

> Do you mean *not* keeping the discussion?
No, i didn't. I meant keeping them at the talk page.

> Keeping orphan talk pages around would be weird. I don't really like that
> idea.
They wouldn't be orphans, since there used withing the daily pages ;)

> > Another idea would be to discuss the deletion request right within the
> image and to automatically categorize them by day.
>
> What do you mean, "within the image"?
Discussing the matter withing the image description. The problem would be the missing documentation when the picture is deleted.

What about simple daily pages like we use at http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:LKB?

Regards,

Flo
--

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"Feel free" mit GMX DSL: http://www.gmx.net/de/go/dsl


body:
IMHO in Official requirements for bidding cities should be specified
that town in country with local Wikimedia chapter are "strongly"
supported in the final choice.

IMHO the first problem is an organizational problem and if the
Wikimedia's town is supported by a local chapter and other external
chapters it means that WMF could confide in a group already present
and organized.

At moment I could read a lot of proposed towns without connection
with local chapters (i.e. Geneva) which are only a "nice to have". In
this moment these proposals seems to be only a brainstorming.

Regards

Ilario

----Messaggio originale----
Da: notafishz at gmail.com
Data: 16.08.06 17.28
A: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List"<foundation-l at wikimedia.org>,
<wikipedia-l at wikimedia.org>, "Wikimedia Translators"<translators-
l at wikimedia.org>
Oggetto: [Foundation-l] Wikimania 2007 - get ready for the third
edition.

Dear all,

Wikimania 2006 just closed its doors a week or so ago, and it is
already time to think about the next edition.

As happened in 2005 and 2006, the city hosting Wikimania in 2007
will
be chosen among whichever candidate cities dare/deign/want to
participate in the "hosting Wikimania" contest.

All information concerning how to launch a bid for your
city/location
can be found on meta:

*http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania_2007
*http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania_2007/Bids
*http://meta.wikimedia.
org/wiki/Wikimania_2007/Official_requirements_for_bidding_cities

Please follow the instructions on that last page to build your
bid.
The Wikimania 2007 organizing team stays at your disposal for any
questions you might have concerning the bidding process and/or the
bidding requirements.

Happy bidding!

Delphine


from_name: Neil Harris

body:
Ivan Krsti? wrote:
> Jay R. Ashworth wrote:
>
>> there's a project underway to formalize the very wikitext grammar with
>> which you're compatible.
>>
>
> There are efforts to produce something formal-like for some subset of
> the wikitext syntax. To my knowledge, no useful formal grammar can be
> produced for the complete syntax.
>
>
Just to mention this again...

[[Parsing expression grammar]]s are rather powerful tools for this sort
of thing; they are extremely useful for situations where you have ad-hoc
BNF grammars with ambiguity and/or added constraints, and in particular
where the boundary between the lexical and syntactic layers is
ill-defined, as in Wikitext, which often results in multiple possible
parses or unlimited lookahead.

PEGs can be generated directly from BNF, with the application of tweaks
to avoid left-recursion.

[[Packrat parser]]s implement PEGs in linear time. The basic idea is
brute-force top-down matching with memoization to prevent a
combinatorial explosion: this seemingly naive approach actually performs
very well in practice, and the amount of memory consumed is surprisingly
small, by the standards of modern computers. They can be compiled into
native code using a parser-generator approach, and can usually be sped
up/slimmed down quite considerably using a bit of hackery, where small
but common special case parts of the grammar can be replaced by
hand-written code using fast algorthms such as regexps.

There are a number of GPL'd implementations of packrat parsers already
available in a variety of languages.

-- Neil


from_name: Andrew Dunbar

body:
On 8/16/06, Sabine Cretella <sabine_cretella at yahoo.it> wrote:
>
> > I took part in that thread and then, as now, as have not received a definitive
> > answer and certainly no references at all to explain the orthography or the
> > grammatical reasons for it.
> >
> > My main question is does Neapolitan use a) a single character that looks like
> > an English double quote mark or two adjacent apostrophes or b) a character
> > that looks like an English apostrophe which in certain situations can occur
> > as a "double letter"?
> >
> it substitutes the letters that are not pronounced
>
> Articles
>
> 'o (male)
> 'a (feamale)

So if it substitutes letters which are not pronounced, what are those
unpronounced letters in 'o and 'a? My guess is that they are a special
exception which are always written 'o and 'a perhaps historically having
had an official letter. If this is the case we could say the rule is:

A double apostrophe occurs when contraction is made with the definite
articles, these being always written with an apostrophe.

So my further questions:
a) Is there a "full spelling" for 'o and 'a?
b) Are there any words besides 'o and 'a which take an apostrophe even
when not part of a contraction?

> de = preposition
>
> like in Italian the preposition + the article become "one word" --> d''a
>
> there is no "unique" character - one' belongs to the preposition the
> other to the article
>
> pe + 'a --> p''a
>
> That is the rule of course it also depends on pronunciation whenever a
> preposition that ends in a vowel meets a definite article this way of
> writing is neccessary. There is no Neapolitan keyboard as such - some
> created a keyboard layout that helps to type more easily, but that's all
> - no official stuff.
>
> The way of writing Neapolitan dates back to the 18th century when it
> still was used as written language in everyday life - then due to
> historical reasons Italian substituted Neapolitan. Of course some
> changes are needed to adapt these old ways of writing and communicating
> to our days ... only think about IT-terminology.
>
> So well, the reason for having these double '' and for being them two
> distinct chars hopefully is cleared by this. If not: please let me know.

99% clear so thanks very much. My advice then is to adpot a policy of
"use straight apostrophes for markup and curly apostrophes for words".
Where d''o and d''a will break formatting or require ugly workarounds,
d''o and d''a will always "just work". (And look better too).

Well it's my POV that this is the best goal to aim for for all Wikis and
there are certainly many who disagree with me, but I suspect few of them
are involved in Neapolitan wikis.

You could go half way and recommend straight apostrophes except in
the case of the double apostrophe but that sounds ugly to me.

Andrew Dunbar (hippietrail)

> Best, Sabine
>
>
> Chiacchiera con i tuoi amici in tempo reale!
>  http://it.yahoo.com/mail_it/foot/*http://it.messenger.yahoo.com
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>

--
http://linguaphile.sf.net


list: wikien-l

from_name: stevertigo

subject: [WikiEN-l] CITE nazis

body:
--- Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:

> The one [case] that is absolutely imperative for all editors is to recognize
> that "If this claim would be libellous if false, it is absolutely not
> acceptable to simply put a 'citation needed' tag and hope for the best."
> It is extremely painful to see those.  "Lord John Doe was a porn star in
> 1943. <citation needed>"  In such cases, being a citation nazi is the
> right thing to do.

1) I dont think anybody can disagree with this, but its important to recognise
that not everyone *can* tell the difference, (just as with images - see "fakes"
thread above) and yet such people may be quite capable in other areas. Its not
useful to think of it as an epidemic, but as a limited skillset.

2) Another dimension to this is ease of editing. (!) Wiki through web page forms
is probably somewhat cumbersome for casual readers who are capable but not active.
(Lazy bums, yes). Iv'e got some ideas for how to deal with that, but thats for a
different list which I dont really read anyway.

-SV

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
http://mail.yahoo.com


body:
On 8/17/06, Eric Astor <eastor1 at swarthmore.edu> wrote:
> Single case that shows something interesting:
> '''hi''hello'''hi'''hello''hi'''
>
> Try running it through MediaWiki, and what do you get?
> hihellohihellohi

That's awesome :)

> In other words, you've discovered that the current syntax supports improper
> nesting of markup, in a rather unique fashion. I don't know of any way to
> duplicate this in any significantly formal system, although I believe a
> multiple-pass parser *might* be capable of handling it. In fact, some sort
> of multiple-pass parser (the MediaWiki parser) obviously can.

Is this not the sort of "backwards compatibility" that we could safely
do without? Does anyone intentionally use that kind of construct?

> Also, templates need to be transcluded before most of the parsing can take
> place, since in the current system, the text may leave some
> syntactically-significant constructs incomplete, finishing them in the
> transclusion stage...

That's sort of a given, isn't it? What's the downside of doing
transclusion first?

> if it had been properly escaped). This even holds true for bold and italics,
> since you need indefinite lookahead to be able to tell whether the first
> three quotes in '''this'' should be parsed as ''', ', or . The
> situation gets even worse when you try to allow for improper nesting.

Personally I find the rules for multiple apostrophes very strange and
unpredictable - and hence worth changing. I was really surprised when
I sat down one to day test what happens when you stack one, two,
three...ten apostrophes. Not what I expected at all. No takers to
replace ''' with // or something?

> Other places require fixed, but large, amounts of lookahead... freelinks
> require at least 9 characters, for example. Technically, I'll admit that a

What's a freelink?

> GLR parser (or a backtracking framework) could manage even the indefinite
> lookahead that I mentioned... but it's still problematic, since the grammar
> is left ambiguous in certain cases.
>
> Oh, right - and we'd need to special-case every tag-style piece of markup,
> including every allowed HTML tag, since formal grammars generally can't
> reference previously-matched text. This also applies to the heading levels -
> we'd need separate ad-hoc constructs for each level of heading we wanted to
> support, duplicating a lot of the grammar between each one.

I don't understand, can you give an example?

> P.S. As indicated above, I honestly feel that the difficulties aren't
> insurmountable - if you're willing to build an appropriate parsing
> framework, which will be semi-formal at best.

What would such a thing look like, formal BNE rules mixed in with text
like "Actually if FOO is "boo" then special case Z is invoked..."?

Steve


body:
On 8/17/06, Jay R. Ashworth <jra at baylink.com> wrote:
> Fine, but a) those are not the only problems he's having, and b) No
> [[Flag Day]]s.

Ok, that's the third time you've used the expression "flag day" on
this list. After the second time, I looked it up and wasn't
enlightened. What the hell do you mean? :)

Steve


body:
On 8/17/06, Jay R. Ashworth <jra at baylink.com> wrote:
> IIRC, Steve, wasn't a large part of the problem that the parser would
> puke and die when presented with a *link* to such a page?

Yes, categories specifically. But hey, once you've (I've) suggested
modifying the parser, suddenly everything becomes "possible".

Seriously, though, it seemed like all the dramas at nap wiki are
solvable by writing '' instead of '' whenever italics are not
wanted. The only remaining question is how to make doing that a
pleasant experience for the average nap wiki user. IMHO, a javascript
hack or a mediawiki hack at the time when a page is saved is the best
way of doing that. For extra politeness, we could even transform that
combination back into '' when loading it into the editor to save the
user that ugliness.

The added realisation that '' only occurs in a small number of fixed
occurrences makes the implementation of that hack child's play. No
parsing, no grammar...

Steve


body:
On 8/17/06, Jay R. Ashworth <jra at baylink.com> wrote:
> Well that's fine... but *getting from Eric's example to yours* is a
> problem of semantics: what did the user *mean*.  Without disambiguating
> rules, there may be no way to tell.

There is in a WYSIWYG editor, because the user will make sure that
what's displayed is what he wants.  :)

> Fine, but a) those are not the only problems he's having, and b) No
> [[Flag Day]]s.

a) They're the only problems he's having with constructing a formal
grammar, which is all I was talking about, and b) why not, provided i)
the current parser is kept as a legacy and modified to convert to the
XML format rather than straight to HTML and ii) the XML can be
converted into roughly the current wikitext on demand for those who'd
prefer to work with it?  The goal would still be accomplished, in that
reusers would have a much easier time dealing with our data (yes, I
know that's not my original stated goal).

But c) I can see we're likely never going to agree on even this
watered-down version of my argument, and d) what we think probably
doesn't matter unless one of us is willing to try writing up an
implementation, so e) I think it's best to drop this line of
discussion (again, and yes I know I was the one who re-brought it up).


subject: [WikiEN-l] CITE nazis

body:
--- Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:

> In many cases, the issue is further complicated by the question of
> exactly _how_ a source is used.
> ...
> And the NYT and Weekly World News are both more or less easy cases.  The
> difficult cases are partisan publications writing "factually" about
> political events, and things of that nature.

Right. There are plenty of out unreliable "reliable sources" out there
(The Pentagon, etc.). Even after tracing back --from blog to local TV page to
major news media to an anonymous source somewhere high up in the Eskimo
government --even deriving an "original source" is often just linking to some
political page with somebody's claims and interpretations on it.

As I said before sources are often just claims and interpretations, and
virtually none of it is "facts." So why should Wikipedia expect to be a higher
standard? And of we want to introduce some value judgements about who's
interpretations are more correct, we need to understand that such is often too
close to POV to deal with without some broader editorial policy (and heirarchy).

The case in point which brought me to post the thread had nothing to do with
particular claims though, and had everything to do with OWN (incivil abuse of
reverts) with regard to how certain material is presented: as somebody's
clinical interpretation, or or as an actual human-readable explanation of a
human event or concept. Calls to CITE are too often just smokescreen for a weak
or incivil or POV argument, and if you do give a source (some famous intellectual,
for example), they say "get a real source" (a 'The Pentagon' spokeswoman for example.)
I pay no attention to such calls for "CITE."

The way I interpret that policy is simply as a "give us something, anything"
(to click on) policy --it does'nt establish *veracity* (just as reading the lede
to [[Truth]] doesnt inspire one to read any more of the article) but it does give
people something to click on and feel good about the truthiness of the spun
interpretation of facts they are reading. A claims X, B claims Y, C claims Z,
[some links at the bottom] is about as good as it gets for any news source at any
particular snapshot of time. The "higher standard" is NPOV, not veracity.

-SV

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
http://mail.yahoo.com


from_name: mingli yuan

body:
Dajoo is a sourceforge project try to build a personal wiki-based
platform to help people manage their knowledge. It was designed to own
a plugin system in the kernel by which we can develop various tools
for different purpose.

The markup it adopted is compatible with Mediawiki, and now
interoperability with Mediawiki is under developing. On my personal
computer, now it can access Wikipedia freely. I will release the next
version with the interoperability features in September.

The project is now in the early stage, and you can download and try it
at  http://sourceforge.net/projects/dajoo/

Thanks.

[[zh:User:Mountain]]


subject: [WikiEN-l] First post

body:
On 8/17/06, Richard Holton <richholton at gmail.com> wrote:
> I got both messages fine. IIRC, there's an option for the mailing list to
> not have it mail you your own messages...perhaps it's set for you.

No, he was just on moderation, like all new members of the list.

Steve


body:
On 8/17/06, Jay R. Ashworth <jra at baylink.com> wrote:
> IIRC, Steve, wasn't a large part of the problem that the parser would
> puke and die when presented with a *link* to such a page?

In part (it also screws up formatting any time the words are used),
but that doesn't preclude a parser hack, does it?  It may mean that
whatever solution they're currently using would become screwy if such
a parser extension gets installed, of course.  Which is quite feasible
. . . custom extensions have been installed on other WMF wikis before
for various reasons, although usually only in batches (e.g. the Poem
extension on Wikisource).  And this wouldn't be a hard extension to
write, if an extra parser pass on one of our smaller wikis (Wikipedia
#42 by article count, 12,000-odd) isn't an issue.


from_name: Alphax (Wikipedia email)

body:
Jeff V. Merkey wrote:
> Kelly Martin wrote:
>
>> On 8/16/06, Delphine M?nard <notafishz at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>>> Wikimania 2006 just closed its doors a week or so ago, and it is
>>> already time to think about the next edition.
>>>
>>>
>> Actually, it was time to do that about six months ago.  We really need
>> to be planning these things more aggressively.  In my opinion, we
>> should know where the next year's Wikimania is going to be before we
>> start the planning for the current year.
>>
>>
>>
> Good Point,
>
> Greg mentioned this this morning as well this was a hot topic of
> discussion that needed addressing.
>
> A few suggestions I'll put on the main site:
>
> Polynesian Language Institute, Hawaii
> Sidney, Australia. (great place but very expensive for a lot of folks)

It's spelt "Sydney", and there's already a lot of discussion at
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikimania_2007/Australia and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:AWNB#Wikimania wrt. this.

--
Alphax - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax
Contributor to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia
"We make the internet not suck" - Jimbo Wales
Public key: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax/OpenPGP

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body:
Jeff V. Merkey wrote:
> Kelly Martin wrote:
>
>> On 8/16/06, Delphine M?nard <notafishz at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>>> Wikimania 2006 just closed its doors a week or so ago, and it is
>>> already time to think about the next edition.
>>>
>>>
>> Actually, it was time to do that about six months ago.  We really need
>> to be planning these things more aggressively.  In my opinion, we
>> should know where the next year's Wikimania is going to be before we
>> start the planning for the current year.
>>
>>
>>
> Good Point,
>
> Greg mentioned this this morning as well this was a hot topic of
> discussion that needed addressing.
>
> A few suggestions I'll put on the main site:
>
> Polynesian Language Institute, Hawaii
> Sidney, Australia. (great place but very expensive for a lot of folks)

It's spelt "Sydney", and there's already a lot of discussion at
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikimania_2007/Australia and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:AWNB#Wikimania wrt. this.

--
Alphax - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax
Contributor to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia
"We make the internet not suck" - Jimbo Wales
Public key: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax/OpenPGP

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body:
Jeff V. Merkey wrote:
> Kelly Martin wrote:
>
>> On 8/16/06, Delphine M?nard <notafishz at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>>> Wikimania 2006 just closed its doors a week or so ago, and it is
>>> already time to think about the next edition.
>>>
>>>
>> Actually, it was time to do that about six months ago.  We really need
>> to be planning these things more aggressively.  In my opinion, we
>> should know where the next year's Wikimania is going to be before we
>> start the planning for the current year.
>>
>>
>>
> Good Point,
>
> Greg mentioned this this morning as well this was a hot topic of
> discussion that needed addressing.
>
> A few suggestions I'll put on the main site:
>
> Polynesian Language Institute, Hawaii
> Sidney, Australia. (great place but very expensive for a lot of folks)

It's spelt "Sydney", and there's already a lot of discussion at
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikimania_2007/Australia and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:AWNB#Wikimania wrt. this.

--
Alphax - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax
Contributor to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia
"We make the internet not suck" - Jimbo Wales
Public key: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax/OpenPGP

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body:
Jeff V. Merkey wrote:
> Kelly Martin wrote:
>
>> On 8/16/06, Delphine M?nard <notafishz at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>>> Wikimania 2006 just closed its doors a week or so ago, and it is
>>> already time to think about the next edition.
>>>
>>>
>> Actually, it was time to do that about six months ago.  We really need
>> to be planning these things more aggressively.  In my opinion, we
>> should know where the next year's Wikimania is going to be before we
>> start the planning for the current year.
>>
>>
>>
> Good Point,
>
> Greg mentioned this this morning as well this was a hot topic of
> discussion that needed addressing.
>
> A few suggestions I'll put on the main site:
>
> Polynesian Language Institute, Hawaii
> Sidney, Australia. (great place but very expensive for a lot of folks)

It's spelt "Sydney", and there's already a lot of discussion at
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikimania_2007/Australia and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:AWNB#Wikimania wrt. this.

--
Alphax - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax
Contributor to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia
"We make the internet not suck" - Jimbo Wales
Public key: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax/OpenPGP

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from_name: David Gerard

subject: [WikiEN-l] First post

body:
On 17/08/06, Richard Holton <richholton at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 8/14/06, Gregory Kohs <thekohser at gmail.com> wrote:

> > Did I submit this correctly, yesterday?  At the time, it seemed like my
> > first post, because my earlier, true "first post" hadn't yet appeared in
> > the
> > mailing list.  I'm waiting on this important post to show up now, but I
> > don't want to re-submit and create havoc in the queue.

> I got both messages fine. IIRC, there's an option for the mailing list to
> not have it mail you your own messages...perhaps it's set for you.

I think we just hadn't taken Greg off mod as yet :-) Everyone who
joins wikien-l is moderated for their first message; a listadmin
should see the moderated message in the spam pile and send it through.
(This is a nuisance, but was instituted to keep persistent trolls
out.) Greg's messages from this email should go straight through now.

- d.


from_name: Ilia Alshanetsky

subject: [Wikitech-l] PHP 5.2.0RC2 testing

body:
Hello!

You are receiving this email because your project has been select to
take part in a new effort by the PHP QA Team to make sure that your
project still works with PHP versions to-be-released. With this we
hope to make sure that you are either aware of things that might
break, or to make sure we don't introduce any strange regressions.
With this effort we hope to build a better relation between the PHP
Team and the major projects.

If you do not want to receive these heads-up emails, please reply to
me personally and I will remove you from the list; but, we hope that
you want to actively help us making PHP a better and more stable tool.

The second release candidate of PHP 5.2.0 was released today, it can
be downloaded from http://downloads.php.net/ilia/. A great deal of
work was done since RC1 to stabilize the code, with over 50 bug fixes
since then.  I'd like to ask everyone to try this release, in
particular paying attention to input processing, something that has
changed a fair bit with the introduction of the filter extension. If
you discover any (we hope not) please notify PHP's QA team at "php-
qa at lists.php.net".

In case you think that other projects should also receive this kinds
of emails, please let me know privately, and I will add them to the
list of projects to contact.

Best Regards,

Ilia Alshanetsky
5.2 Release Master


body:
On 8/17/06, Sabine Cretella <sabine_cretella at yahoo.it> wrote:
>
> > So if it substitutes letters which are not pronounced, what are those
> > unpronounced letters in 'o and 'a? My guess is that they are a special
> > exception which are always written 'o and 'a perhaps historically having
> > had an official letter. If this is the case we could say the rule is:
> >
> lo + la + le (plural form) d''e also exists
> > A double apostrophe occurs when contraction is made with the definite
> > articles, these being always written with an apostrophe.
> >
> > So my further questions:
> > a) Is there a "full spelling" for 'o and 'a?
> >
> it is not used - you only find it in veeeery old texts. nowadays they
> only use 'o, 'a and in plural form 'e

I just found 'a, 'e, and 'o on en.wiktionary. I am going to add la,
le, and lo as
alternative spellings and mark them as obsolete. Would you say this is
correct?

> > b) Are there any words besides 'o and 'a which take an apostrophe even
> > when not part of a contraction?
> >
> yes - 'nfrumma,
>
> 'mbrugli?

English Wiktionary also includes 'a = from, 'e = of, 'llustr? = to illustrate,
'ntr?llece = vivaciously, 'nzularch?a = jaundice

> also there it substitutes a letter - in all cases the substituted letter
> is a vowel (as much as I have in mind now
>
> and there's the article ll' used in front of a vowel
>
> sorry, but things come in mind while writing and imagining sentences -
> consider that I know some grammar rules, but I don't know all of them -
> my Neapolitan comes from everyday use when talking with people in this
> region. The few rules I know help me to write as correctly as possible
> and according to Carmine who proofreads my texts they are quite well and
> getting always better - during the last ones there were only some really
> minor changes. If we need further, more exact information I need to find
> out where I can get a grammar book - it is impossible to find it here
> where I live (that might seem strange, but it is like that).

No problem. Linguists create grammars by interviewing people who speak
them and it apparently works best if these informants can't analyse their
language grammatically. We're going very well so far! (-:

Andrew Dunbar (hippietrail)

> Best, Sabine
> Chiacchiera con i tuoi amici in tempo reale!
>  http://it.yahoo.com/mail_it/foot/*http://it.messenger.yahoo.com
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>

--
http://linguaphile.sf.net


body:
Steve Bennett wrote:
> On 8/17/06, Andrew Dunbar <hippytrail at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> 99% clear so thanks very much. My advice then is to adpot a policy of
>> "use straight apostrophes for markup and curly apostrophes for words".
>> Where d''o and d''a will break formatting or require ugly workarounds,
>> d''o and d''a will always "just work". (And look better too).
>>
>
> That would be practical if keyboards had a "curly apostrophe" key. How
> do you propose that editors type it?
>
> Steve
> _______________________________________________
>
Use backquotes instead? eg. d``a, d``o, in which `` gets treated as a
magic word (like RFC or ISBN) which is automagically, and transparently,
converted to d""a and d""o within the parser at an
early stage during page rendering?

Kludgy, yes, but backquote is a standard ASCII character, and at least
on my keyboard, is easily accessible.

-- Neil


from_name: Brianna Laugher

subject: [Commons-l] Rethinking [[COM:DEL]]

body:
On 17/08/06, Florian Straub <flominator at gmx.net> wrote:
> What about having one page per day, discussing the deletion requests on the
> talk page of the image and collecting them by using a template on the daily
> page? Just an idea:
> http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Flominator/Deletion_proposal

That's quite nice. Having the discussion on the image talk page is
good because at the moment discussions are very separated from the
images. However when we delete the image, would we then keep the talk
page? That's a little odd.

Also it wouldn't work for mass or multiple deletion requsts.

There are some interesting points made on [[COM:VP]] as well. I like
the idea of splitting by reason - Nilfanion suggested reasons such as
"problem user" and "mass request" (for category/template request).

To Gregory Maxwell - you mentioned the toolserver supplies "filtered
links" to show what is up for deletion on "your wiki" - can you
provide a link?

cheers
Brianna


from_name: Simetrical

body:
On 8/17/06, Steve Bennett <stevage at gmail.com> wrote:
> Is this not the sort of "backwards compatibility" that we could safely
> do without? Does anyone intentionally use that kind of construct?

Maybe, maybe not, but people expect that if there's a ''' open, then
''' will close it.  They won't expect an intervening '' (or [[ or ] or
anything else) to affect matters.  Besides, what would you suggest
they type, '''hi''''''''hello'''hi'''hello''''''''hi'''?  God only
knows what that would do.

> That's sort of a given, isn't it? What's the downside of doing
> transclusion first?

Well, I don't think it's so much a downside as something that's
impossible to work into a formal grammar.  I'm guessing the issue is
that templates mix syntax with semantics: the semantics of the
template influence the output of the parse tree.  So a pass to replace
all the templates has to be done before you can even start talking
about a formal grammar.  But it's a given, yes, as you say.

> What's a freelink?

A URL-like thing that was typed without any particular surrounding
syntax (it gets autolinked).  Similar lookahead would presumably be
necessary for RFCs, ISBNs, and PMIDs (okay, that's enough to convince
me to agree that they should be ditched :) ).  In general, a lookahead
of no more than one character is considered desirable.

> > Oh, right - and we'd need to special-case every tag-style piece of markup,
> > including every allowed HTML tag, since formal grammars generally can't
> > reference previously-matched text. This also applies to the heading levels -
> > we'd need separate ad-hoc constructs for each level of heading we wanted to
> > support, duplicating a lot of the grammar between each one.
>
> I don't understand, can you give an example?

He *seems* to be saying that you'd have to make special rules for each
allowed HTML tag, and presumably each allowed attribute and property
thereof, and maybe even every combination of them (!).  Would there be
any advantage in leaving those out of the grammar and keeping Parser
and Sanitizer separate as they are now?


from_name: Rob Church

subject: [Wikitech-l] An error occur when send a mail

body:
On 17/08/06, liu haokai <haokai.liu at gmail.com> wrote:
> Well, can I conclude that the problem is that the Mediawiki submit a UTF-8
> mail address. I refered the database of my mediawiki, and the mail address
> is stored in UTF-8.

I don't have the original post to hand, but if it's a machine running
Windows, it could well be this bug:
http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4979. Windows-based SMTP
servers can't handle the "John Smith <john at smith.org>" email address
format, and croak on it. The workaround in comment #2 on the
referenced URL should help.

Rob Church


body:
On 8/17/06, Steve Bennett <stevage at gmail.com> wrote:
> Ok, that's the third time you've used the expression "flag day" on
> this list. After the second time, I looked it up and wasn't
> enlightened. What the hell do you mean? :)

It's at the bottom of the English [[Flag Day]] article:

"Flag day is also a term used in discussing computer systems to denote
a change which will require a complete restart or conversion of a
sizable body of software or data. This usage of the term originates
from an obscure such change in the [[Multics]] operating system's
definition, which was scheduled for the US's Flag Day, June 14th,
1966. [http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/F/flag-day.html]"


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [Foundation-l] Wikiversity

body:
Michael R. Irwin wrote:

>I favor sticking with the
>current definition of NPOV which has evolved and stabilized at Wikipedia
>to avoid confusion for experienced Wikimedians and simply title other
>specific policies appropriately.
>
That would be wrong.  Wikiversity will develop its own community, and a
manner of applying NPOV that will be all its own.  The underlying
principle must still stand.  The collective wisdom that went into the
development of the concept at Wikipedia certainly involves people who no
longer participate.  Can we say with confidence that they forsaw how
NPOV might be applied in a wikiversity.  On the other hand, Wikiversity
will draw its own followers, just as have the other sister projects.
Many of them will not have been a part of the development of Wikipedia.
Should that be a basis for not hearing their voices in a menaingful
manner.

One could look at the sister projects collectively as a successful
exercise in keeping forks under the Wikimedia umbrella.  Established
communities tend to protect what they have done, even if it's wrong.
Revitalization and renewal when properly implemented leave room for new
and often heretical ideas.  New ideas often need to face overwhelming
inertia before they can be applied.  If you are concerned about stacked
boards  you should also be concerned about stacked policies.

>>Wikversity should have goals. They should be measurable. The project
>>needs to meet the minimum standards of the Wikimedia Foundation;
>>fundamental in this is a commitment to avoiding support of any one
>>POV, to be verifiable (where this is an option) and to be free.
>>
>>
>For this to be possible the Foundation must define its specific minimum
>standards.
>
>We are clearly striving to meet the Foundation's minimum specific
>pitch.   Paraphrased personally as:  Help provide all free human
>knowledge freely to all humans who wish it.
>
Let's not limit ourselves to what is free now.  In the simplest example,
the work of some authors who died in 1936 is not free now, but it will
go into the public domain at the end of this year and become free.
Lessig's goal of making all human knowledge universally available makes
sense to me.  I'm sure that he, as much as any other among us,
recognizes that much of it is not yet free, but that should not detract
from the goal, nor should it be taken as a green light to act stupidly.

>So entropy
>cannot always increase in the closed tree system therefor thermodynamics
>is all wrong, a miracle is required and engineers who believe in
>thermdynamics rather than God creating miracles as required are all
>wrong or congenital idiots.
>
The problem with congenital idiots is that they interfere with the flow
of discourse, not by their own intention, but because some amateur
psychiatrist has chosen to indicate their presence.

>It is
>difficult for me to understand how one would truly study Christiananity
>via NPOV.   You either reach the point of understanding Christ's answer
>to the politicians inquiring about the really real answers to life, the
>universe, and everything paraphrased (rather than the existing 6 or 7
>hundred commandments) concisely as:
>
>1. Love God completely with all your heart.
>2. Love others as you love yourself.
>
>and begin to see how to integrate your other knowledge and worldviews
>with ever more complex integrations of these two rules or you do not
>truly understand "Christianity".
>
>How could an atheist "NPOV" the two rules above to effectively teach
>Christianity to others?   We would be quibbling about shifting words,
>language, historical shading, cultural biases, etc. until the cows come
>home.
>
>To an atheist "God" is a non sequitor or zero.
>
>1. Love nothing with all your heart.
>2. Love your neighbors as you love yourself.
>
>Instead of an expanding set of useful self consistent beliefs/equations
>provided by the historical genius/messiah Jesus Christ or the Son of God
>himself (God himself if you purchase the trinity theory) you get a
>shrinking personal universe of:  Love nothing, not even yourself.
>
>To an agnostic a big unknown.
>
>1.  Love big X with all your heart.
>2.  Love your neighbors as yourself.
>
This is a very interesting example because you give two premises for
Christian thought.  One is clearly debatable by atheists and agnostics;
the other could have developed as easily in a humanistic context.
Consensus is achieved by stressing what we have in common rather than
what divides us.  Why insert doubts by needlessly changing "others" to
"your neighbors"?  Perhaps that common view could be used to attain a
mutual respect regarding the other premise.

>>Throwing crap at a wall until some of it sticks means you deal with a
>>lot of crap. Let's be a bit more discerning than that, please.
>>
>>
>Actually very few of our other participants actually simply throw crap
>at the wall.   I guess I am a bit unique in that regard.  One of the
>policies up for vote and doing fairly well if I recall correctly  (3/3
>for) is "Edit boldly."  I always personally add   "....  serene in the
>knowledge that another wiklar (one contraction among many proposed I
>will leave you in suspense regarding who devised it from "wiki scholar")
>will correct any errors identified boldly.   This is pretty clearly a
>cheap trick based upon past successful en.wikipedia tactics to get some
>material started  (crap tossed) to encourage additional participation
>via further bold editing.
>
It strikes me as unfortunate that this should have so quickly descended
into a voting process.  What makes voting so evil is that by putting the
issue into a strictly black and white framework it excludes possibly
better other options that are never put on the table.


subject: [Foundation-l] Wikiversity