from_name: Pedro Sanchez

subject: [Commons-l] Commons != kindergarden

body:
On 11/12/06, Artur Fija?kowski <wiki.warx at gmail.com> wrote:
> 06-11-12, Diego Renato <diego.renato at gmail.com> napisa?(a):
> > Will you ban me? It is not a good idea.
>
> No... I really don't like banning anyone (or I simple can't people I want :P)
>
> Main problem (hidden in the topic), is that:
>
> People uploading copyvio images are not BAD, they are simple not
> informed well !!
>
> I don't know Spanish, so I can't check it by myself, but I have bad
> feeling that closing upload on es.wiki was made in tihs way:
>
> OK - we have same politics of licenses as commons, so we can close
> upload on our wiki.
>
> And now people come to commons, they don't know anything about
> copyrights/licenses, they are unable to find anything in Spanish
> language about it, so they do what they think is good...
>
> This assumption is based on another observation:
>
> Lots of uploads are fair use images from en.wiki and images from
> 'random' webpages.
>
> On pl.wiki we have LARGE and clear instruction: If you don't know what
> you are doing, don't even think of moving images from en.wiki and web,
> and I think it works ...
>
> So as said TOR: closing upload is OK, but it must be made with care
> cause Commons is very very vulnerable project.
>
> AJF/WarX
> _______________________________________________
> Commons-l mailing list
> Commons-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l
>

Now the "Upload file" on the spanish wiki links directly to the
commons upload dialog with spanish instructions (
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:Upload?uselang=es )
First line, suggest to read First steps.
Second line: tells to upload only free stuff
3rd line: only upload useful stuff
4th line: give detailed info

So if anything needs to be added, it hsould be done at COmmons (since
it's where the page is located)


list: wikien-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: geni

subject: [WikiEN-l] Fiction and Wikia

body:
On 11/13/06, Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> Essentially, we could make a policy that any relevant external
> resource that meets the Free Content Definition may be linked in a
> more visible place than non-free resource. Going a bit beyond free
> licensing, we could also require that the site at least make complete
> dumps available on a regular basis, to enable community migration.
>

Would could but we have enough spam already from free content projects.

--
geni


list: commons-l

subject: [Commons-l] Commons != kindergarden

body:
On 11/12/06, Barcex <lv.cabc at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> 2006/11/12, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com>:
> >
> >
> > Commons was not started as a free-culture media repository of
> > spectacular cultural potential. It was started as a shared image
> > repository service project for the Wikimedia projects. Here we have
> > Commons admins claiming it's toooo haaaard to do the job Commons was
> > invented for, so they'll start behaving in an actively hostile manner
> > to other Wikimedia projects.
> >
> >
>
>   Perhaps we should involve more active admins from Wikipedias into Commons.
> For instance, there are just 6 Spanish Wikipedia admins that are also admins
> on Commons of a total of 88 admins there.
>
> Barcex.
>
> _______________________________________________
> Commons-l mailing list
> Commons-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l
>
>
>

;) And some mexican  editors are commons admins but not es admins ;)


from_name: Rob

subject: [WikiEN-l] Using search to explore and find issues w/ articles

body:
On 11/13/06, Angela <beesley at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Better than france -> Italy
> > Better than germany -> Italy
> > Cheese Eating Surrender Monkies -> France

I've recreated the last one but pointed the redirect elsewhere
because, believe it or not, we actually have an article called
[[Cheese-eating surrender monkeys]].


subject: [Commons-l] Principles of organisation - who do we serve?

body:
On 11/13/06, Florian Straub <flominator at gmx.net> wrote:

> I've just talked to Elian. She said that if it was a consensus between the
> commons people it would be ok.
>
> What do we do? Poll?
>

I'm not seeing any oposition.

--
geni


list: foundation-l

from_name: Walter Vermeir

subject: [Foundation-l] Anti-vandalism IRC channel for small projects

body:
Guillaume Paumier <guillom.pom at ...> writes:

>
> Hello,
>
> I have been willing for quite a long time now to create an anti-vandalism
> channel on IRC dedicated to projets with a small community and with few
> edits (usually called "small projects"). There are already some tools [1]
[cut]

When there are serious vandal-problems on a small wiki because
there are no (active)sysops you can ask for help on the steward channel.

#wikimedia-stewards

http://chat.wikizine.org

The can help out and/or make you sysop for a couple of hours to deal with the
emergency.

[[meta:user:walter]]


list: wikimedia-l


from_name: Sydney aka FloNight

subject: [WikiEN-l] An observation

body:
---- Oskar Sigvardsson <oskarsigvardsson at gmail.com> wrote:

=============
On 11/13/06, charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com
<charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:
> It's an atmosphere thing. Creating a good atmosphere and working environment is mission-critical, and not just for the participation of women. Everyone should bear this in mind, at all times. It is just not easy to explain, to those who don't find it natural. 'Civility' in the broadest sense is the key.
>
> Charles

Yes, exactly! People sem to have read in a whole lot in what I said
that I didn't mean. I'm not saying there should be a "quota" of female
editors on the arbcom, that would be insane. I'm just saying that
there obviously is a problem here, and that we can't just say "Gender
is irrelevant on wikipedia" (like geni did), because frankly, that's
just as insane.

Wikipedia is clearly a place where men feels more comfortable than
women and that is something that is a BAD thing. And a bunch of guys
trying to ignore the issue is just making it worse.

--Oskar

PS. Can we please get a woman to start reading the mailing list? :)
This is getting weird with just us boys.

==================================================

Daily reader.

Assumption at least partly wrong, I think. Most women I know are much to busy with other activities to become very active as a Wikipedia volunteer. Overtime this is likely to change. For me it did when all three of my children were in college.

Sydney Poore aka FloNight aka Poore5


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Mark Williamson

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Policy draft: Wikimedia projects are not the
	place for national constitution

body:
> You showed extremely high level of irresponsibility. As well as all
> people from the community forgot to say me that you are a kid.
> However, I see that it seems that you became mature now... And this is
> good for you. Because your relevancy in talk with other people will
> increase.

Whether or not I am a "kid" is was and is completely irrelevant.
Having a sense of humour is not limited to kids.

> Mark, just read. Some people may want to use Wikipedia in the process
> of nation building. At least, two times people tried that. Zlatiborian
> didn't pass, Siberian passed. However, wish to build a nation is a
> legitimate (I hope this is the right word) wish and people were doing
> that in the past, are doing that now and will be doing that in the
> future.

Zlatiborian was a request for a Wikipedia in a new _language_ same
with Siberian. Yes, they are both the languages of newly-created
"nationalities" which did not previously exist. But a language is a
language.

> One of the importan part of a nation is a national language (of
> course, there are exceptions). And one who wants to make it's own
> nation will try to make a language, too; and, then, to make Wikipedia
> edition in that language.

Yes, but as I said before, Wikipedia requests are to be judged on the
merits of the language itself. Zlatiborian was and clearly is far too
close to BCS to be allowed to have a separate WP; Siberian might be
allowed a separate WP as long as they keep to NPOV and there are no
objections from real Siberians (so far I only see objections from
non-Siberian Russians).

> So, we came to language.
>
> Language may be constructed/artificial or it can be formalized
> dialect. In both cases 5-10 people are enough to force opening
> Wikipedia in such language (cf. Siberian Wikipedia). And their only
> intention was to make national identity around the language and
> Wikipedia in such language.

No -- it doesn't seem to be the actual intention. The primary
intention is furthering and promotion of a language. The secondary
goal may be to legitimize a national identity, but that's not
particularly relevant.

> I hope that it is more clear now or you will continue to pretend that
> you are not understand that?

Not the way you've said it, no. It has nothing to do with nations.
Siberian should be judged as a language alone:

1) Is it in Ethnologue? No.
2) Can it really be found in Google? No.
3) Are there any secondary sources (referring explicitly to Siberian
as codified by Volgota group)? Some recent newspaper articles, so it
does exist, but no books or anything to make it notable.
4) Does it have support from majority of Siberian people? So far,
Siberians in general have not given their opinion.

> Mark, Wikimedia Foundation as well as local chapters, including
> Wikimedia Serbia, are involved as a party in Russian internal politics
> as it supports a group of self-proclaimed separatists because there
> were 10 people who wanted to work on Siberian Wikipedia. Maybe there
> are some principles for which we should fight, but this one is very
> foolish.

We could say the same thing about the Kurdish Wikipedia. Quite simply,
it is at the sole discretion of the WMF to decide what languages it
would like to have and which ones it wouldn't. We can't bend to
pressure from political entities to not have certain languages. They
must be evaluated internally.

> So, there are some other things then number of speakers, too.

As I said before, there are as of yet little opinion from real
Siberian people. I think this is important, and we need to wait for
it.

Mark

--
Refije dirije lanm? yo paske nou posede pw?p bato.


from_name: Alphax (Wikipedia email)

subject: [WikiEN-l] An observation

body:
Ryan Wetherell wrote:
> On 11/12/06, Oskar Sigvardsson <oskarsigvardsson at gmail.com> wrote:
>> If there is an overwhelming amount of males over females it usually
>>  signifies something bad (with a few exceptions, like say
>> professional wrestling). We have a host of brilliant female editors
>> but apparently not many of them are running for arbcom. This is a
>> very, very bad thing. We should encourage gender equality whenever
>> we can, just saying "We are wikipedia, here gender doesn't matter"
>> is naive. There is obviously a problem here and we should work to
>> fix it. We don't want to be a boys-club.
>>
>
> I'm sorry, but the last thing we need on Wikipedia is affirmative
> action.
>

Yes, there are already too many teenagers here. Suggest we ban anyone
not of legal drinking age (which for the more progressive countries,
allows younger editors). Require all editors to drink while editing can
come later...

--
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: Guillaume Paumier

body:
Hello,

I have been willing for quite a long time now to create an anti-vandalism
channel on IRC dedicated to projets with a small community and with few
edits (usually called "small projects"). There are already some tools [1]
but I think an IRC channel would be really practical. Despite TangoTanto's
great efforts and help, I have not been able to run pgk's bot [2] reporting
possible vandalism for dozens of projets on the same IRC channel. So now I
am asking for help from people who are more skilled than me in technical
stuff and Python (although being more skilled than me in those fields isn't
very difficult). I have already registered a channel on freenode [3] where
TangoTango and I have been trying to run the bot correctly for weeks, in
vain.

Being able to watch vandalism on small projects is really important since
there are few people to revert them. Please help running the bot or
modifying it so as to be able to manage multiple small projects on the same
channel.

Thanks.

guillom

[1] See http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/SWMT
[2] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Pgkbot
[3] irc://irc.freenode.org/wm-vandalism-small
--
Guillaume Paumier
Disciplus Simplex
http://fr.wikipedia.org : Resistance is futile ? You will be assimilated.


from_name: Brianna Laugher

subject: [Commons-l] Deleting images

body:
On 13/11/06, Lennert B?hm <lennert.boehm at gmx.de> wrote:
> While we are on the topic of too much work and not enough people to do it:
> Tonight I felt particularly motivated and decided to make myself useful
> deleting superseded images. Trusting the people who had posted those
> images there I made my way through the first dozen or so of the list, when
> I suddenly decided it might be a good idea, just to be on the safe side,
> to perform a check-usage on those images. Turns out some of those images
> weren't only used on one or two Wikipedias, but more than a dozen. So I
> ended up undeleting most of the images, because I really got better things
> to do than first check all those images if they're still in use somewhere,
> and then making I don't know how many edits in as many Wikipedias changing
> the links.
> So I think if we ever won't to work off the backlog we have accumulated we
> either "train" the normal users to fix the links when they add the images
> there or we find some possibility to do it automatically using bots
> running parallely on all WPs or something.
> I don't know if that's possible to implement, but I for myself have better
> things to do than do all of this by hand.

Yes, indeed. Please see
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_permissions/CommonsDelinker
which is a proposal for a Wikimedia-wide bot to delink for us.

Brianna


subject: [Commons-l] Deleting images

body:
Also, if you want to look for "easy" images to delete (ie images that
aren't being used elsewhere), use this "Bad Old Ones" script written
by Magnus Manske:

http://tools.wikimedia.de/~magnus/bad_old_ones.php?category=Unknown_-_August_2006

(you can change the category in the URL)

ok it is slow to load at first... but then it will tell you in one
glance whether an image is being used or not. so you can skip the ones
that ARE being used and do the easy ones first. :)

cheers,
Brianna

On 13/11/06, Brianna Laugher <brianna.laugher at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 13/11/06, Lennert B?hm <lennert.boehm at gmx.de> wrote:
> > While we are on the topic of too much work and not enough people to do it:
> > Tonight I felt particularly motivated and decided to make myself useful
> > deleting superseded images. Trusting the people who had posted those
> > images there I made my way through the first dozen or so of the list, when
> > I suddenly decided it might be a good idea, just to be on the safe side,
> > to perform a check-usage on those images. Turns out some of those images
> > weren't only used on one or two Wikipedias, but more than a dozen. So I
> > ended up undeleting most of the images, because I really got better things
> > to do than first check all those images if they're still in use somewhere,
> > and then making I don't know how many edits in as many Wikipedias changing
> > the links.
> > So I think if we ever won't to work off the backlog we have accumulated we
> > either "train" the normal users to fix the links when they add the images
> > there or we find some possibility to do it automatically using bots
> > running parallely on all WPs or something.
> > I don't know if that's possible to implement, but I for myself have better
> > things to do than do all of this by hand.
>
> Yes, indeed. Please see
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_permissions/CommonsDelinker
> which is a proposal for a Wikimedia-wide bot to delink for us.
>
> Brianna
>


from_name: Andrew Gray

subject: [WikiEN-l] Fiction and Wikia

body:
On 13/11/06, Phil Sandifer <Snowspinner at gmail.com> wrote:

> Obviously this involves a bit of a paradigm shift, in that we would
> be linking to projects that are not, strictly speaking, sister
> projects. But if we're serious about moving this stuff out of
> Wikipedia (And I sincerely believe we should be serious about it if
> we want to have high-quality out-of-universe articles on Wikipedia,
> since to date nobody has managed to write an article that does both)
> we need to provide the people who use Wikipedia for this sort of
> information a clear alternative - not "go away and find somewhere
> else," but "go to this project over here."

Out of interest, do we do anything like this for Memory Alpha?

--
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk


from_name: Abigail Brady

subject: [WikiEN-l] Fiction and Wikia

body:
On 11/13/06, Andrew Gray <shimgray at gmail.com> wrote:
> Out of interest, do we do anything like this for Memory Alpha?

There's a {{template|Memoryalpha}}, but that makes things regular
external links.

I think at least Memory Alpha is of sufficient quality that we could
do this box thing. It would also help focus in-universe writing energy
there.  I got into a spectacular disagreement with someone on a talk
page yesterday regarding Star Trek : got accused of "blasphemy" for
daring to suggest that non-canon material should be allowed near the
canon material, and for noting that we need to cite episodes.  We
can't be having with this sort of thing.

--
Abi


from_name: Florian Straub

body:
> Brion Vibber wrote:
>> Brianna Laugher wrote:
>>> On 12/11/06, Florian Straub <flominator at gmx.net> wrote:
>>>> Awesome! Is there any chance to activate it directly for new
>>>> registrations
>>>> on commons or do they people have to confirm their adresses first?
>>>
>>> Thanks, Brion. Specifically, could we require that new registered
>>> users must have a confirmed email address before uploading? With talk
>>> page email notifications as default setting.
>>
>> That's a complete about-face from Wikimedia's traditional policy of
>> allowing anonymous contributions, so before I set that up I'd need to
>> know this is acceptable to Wikimedia.
>
> (I should clarify that I think it's a good idea, personally. But I would
> not feel comfortable implementing that policy without both community
> agreement and approval from upstairs for the ground rules changing
> dramatically.)

I've just talked to Elian. She said that if it was a consensus between the
commons people it would be ok.

What do we do? Poll?

Regards,

Flo


from_name: Gregory Maxwell

subject: [Commons-l] Commons != kindergarden

body:
On 11/13/06, Pedro Sanchez <pdsanchez at gmail.com> wrote:
> ;) And some mexican  editors are commons admins but not es admins ;)

No shock: a real minority of es edits are made from .mx.


body:
On 11/13/06, Walter Vermeir <walter at wikipedia.be> wrote:
>
>
> When there are serious vandal-problems on a small wiki because
> there are no (active)sysops you can ask for help on the steward channel.
>
> #wikimedia-stewards
>

Yes, I know that, I'm always on this channel. The point here is not to get
someone to revert / block / delete nonsense, it is to *notice* vandalism
(just like other anti-vandalism channels do).

--
Guillaume Paumier
Disciplus Simplex
http://fr.wikipedia.org : Resistance is futile ? You will be assimilated.


from_name: Earle Martin

subject: [WikiEN-l] An observation

body:
On 13/11/06, Brian Salter-Duke <b_duke at bigpond.net.au> wrote:
> On Sun, Nov 12, 2006 at 10:18:06PM -0500, Phil Sandifer wrote:
> > I figured we'd implemented mandatory drinking ages ago. I mean, how
> > else to explain RFA?
>
> Do you mean applying to be an Admin, "voting" at RFA, or both. I can
> just about manage voting while sober, but I think I would have to be
> totally newted to apply.

I was stone cold sober when I applied, but reading the comments made
me want to take to drink...

--
Earle Martin
            http://downlode.org/
http://purl.org/net/earlemartin/


body:
On 12/11/06, Florian Straub <flominator at gmx.net> wrote:
>  "Brion Vibber" <brion at pobox.com> wrote on Saturday, November 11, 2006 2:20
> PM:
>
> > Anthony wrote:
> >> Brion, Tim,
> >>
> >> We are having a discussion on commons-l about why email notification
> >> of one's own talk page hasn't been enabled for commons.  Can one of
> >> you please respond and let us know if there is a technical or other
> >> reason not to enable it, or can one of you turn it on?
> >
> > Woops, probably should have done it along with meta. On now.
>
> Awesome! Is there any chance to activate it directly for new registrations
> on commons or do they people have to confirm their adresses first?

Thanks, Brion. Specifically, could we require that new registered
users must have a confirmed email address before uploading? With talk
page email notifications as default setting.

Brianna


from_name: Milos Rancic

body:
On 11/13/06, Mark Williamson <node.ue at gmail.com> wrote:
> Ahh, I did read it now and I believe that "constitution" is not the
> word you're aiming for. Yes, it does have the intended meaning, but in
> the phrase "national constitution" it is usually referring to a
> document by which a nation was founded and upon which all of its laws
> are based.

So, make some better name.

> I don't agree with the page because it seems like it was crafted
> specifically by you with the idea to support the existance of separate
> BCS Wikipedias (which is opposed by Jimbo, but will probably continue
> for a long time), but to oppose the existance of Zlatiborian and
> Montenegrin Wikipedias.

I don't oppose Montenegrin Wikipedia. I just said that if they want to
write in Nikcevic's way, it should pass OR they should have their own
grammar/orthography. (Also, I voted for opening Montenegrin Wikipedia
as well as I am trying to find 5 native speakers and active
Wikipedians.)

BTW, what Ethnologue says for Zlatiborian and Zlatiborians? ;)

> As has been noted in the past many, many, many times, Wikipedias are
> for _languages_ not _countries_.
>
> In Europe, the concept of language is very much tied to the concept of
> the modern nation-state. But in many places this is not so. Take for
> example Aromanian -- there is no nation-state. Or Romani. It is very
> much an international language.

You are completely missing the point. The intention of the document is
to explain that Wikipedia should not be involved in constituing of new
nations. And this is not the only condition for making Wikipedia.
Including that there may be a general rule which says that very close
languages shouldn't have separate Wikipedias (BCS, Lusatian, and so
on).

> Also, I don't see what the reason for this page is. Maybe you are
> worried about whether or not the various Balkan Wikipedias should or
> should not be separate, but nobody outside of that region is. The
> issue is well behind us. Nobody is planning on closing sr.wp or bs.wp,
> they have too many articles, and Zlatiborian and Montenegrin were
> voted against in the proposals for new Wikis.

The main reason is discussion about Siberian Wikipedia. As you are
famous as someone who is supporting hoaxes, you have to me a good
lesson to be very sceptic about new languages. In the case of
Siberian, it is very unclear how much people talk that artificial
language. Besides that, there are also laughing in Novosibirsk about
Siberian as a hoax, such on Zlatibor was a year ago about Zlatiborian
:)


from_name: Lennert Böhm

subject: [Commons-l] Deleting images

body:
Thanks, I'll try that some time.

Lennert B


subject: [WikiEN-l] Fiction and Wikia

body:
On 11/13/06, Phil Sandifer <Snowspinner at gmail.com> wrote:
>What if we had a sentence like "links are not appropriate to articles
> that do not add substantial and quality information about the subject
> that is outside the purview of Wikipedia."
>
> -Phil

Doesn't help much. As soon as you have a template people are going to
start slapping it all over the place. Remember last.fm?

--
geni


subject: [WikiEN-l] Kill CSD A7!

body:
On 11/12/06, Brian Salter-Duke <b_duke at bigpond.net.au> wrote:
[snip]
> to see it. How much good stuff is going down the gurgler because of
> speedy deletion by admins who know nothing about what the article was
> about and that it needed help and TLC not killing?

It's not hard to argue that if it was so poor that you couldn't tell
what it was that losing it wouldn't be much of a loss.

Wikipedia won't be done anytime soon, and quality takes time... No
need to panic for or against  deleting anything.


body:
Standard language of PMR is written in Cyrillic.

Yes, it is a "separatist region", but that does not cancel the fact
that it is taught in schools there.

Mark

On 13/11/06, Bogdan Giusca <liste at dapyx.com> wrote:
> Monday, November 13, 2006, 1:34:19 PM, Milos wrote:
>
> > Please, look at
> > http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_projects_are_not_the_place_for_national_constitution
>
> Yep. It seems we're going to have the same endless talks again. :-)
>
> <<
> Case Moldovan Wikipedia: (1) standard language Wikipedia (+)
> >>
>
> You missed the fact that Moldovan standard language is the same as the
> Romanian standard language.
>
> And that the standard language of Moldova is written in Latin
> script, just like Romanian, not in Cyrillic, like the mo.wiki...
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>

--
Refije dirije lanm? yo paske nou posede pw?p bato.


subject: [Commons-l] Commons != kindergarden

body:
Anthony wrote:
> On 11/12/06, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
>> If a user uploads an image without information and we're unable to get
>> ahold of them we must delete it.  This is a pretty different situation
>> from a user who makes a few copyedits to the text of an article.
>>
>> This substantial difference is demonstrated clearly by the relative
>> deletion rates of images and article on enwiki.   Images are deleted
>> at a much higher rate relative to new image uploading than articles
>> are relative to new article creation.
>>
>> I welcome contributions from new users on commons... but I think it's
>> both unfair and masochistic to demand users who are currently
>> unwilling to undertake the burden of participating in a multilingual
>> project to make their uploads to commons.
>>
> Your problem and solution don't seem to be properly coordinated.  The
> problem is people who come to commons, create accounts, and then never
> check those accounts.  It really has little to do with
> multilingualism.  If English WP shut off uploads and sent people to
> commons it would be mostly the same problem.
>
> Commons isn't ready for a large influx of contributions by what I'll
> call "drive-by contributors from other projects".
>
> It probably will be some day.  I hope we are all in agreement that
> that's what we want, even if we can't agree on whether or not to start
> working on it *now*.
>
> I wonder if it's time to take this to foundation-l, as it's a major
> issue which affects pretty much all of the projects.
>

I was ready to take it to Foundation-l at the point at which WarX said
"I am going to block anyone from eswiki", because it would probably
drive people back to the es: fork...

--
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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subject: [Commons-l] Deleting images

body:
Brianna Laugher wrote:
> Also, if you want to look for "easy" images to delete (ie images that
> aren't being used elsewhere), use this "Bad Old Ones" script written
> by Magnus Manske:
>
> http://tools.wikimedia.de/~magnus/bad_old_ones.php?category=Unknown_-_August_2006
>
> (you can change the category in the URL)
>
> ok it is slow to load at first... but then it will tell you in one
> glance whether an image is being used or not. so you can skip the ones
> that ARE being used and do the easy ones first. :)
>

Unfortunately the toolserver appears to be up the creek again...

--
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: Phil Sandifer

subject: [WikiEN-l] Kill CSD A7!

body:
On Nov 13, 2006, at 5:37 AM, <charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com>
<charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:

> "Dan Collins" wrote
>
>> well, make prods stricter. say prods cannot be removed by author or
>> substantive contributor
>
> Not at all a good idea. But I'm not convinced that authors always
> do remove PROD notices. When they don't, something is achieved, in
> the sense that AfD is relieved of the burden.

In my experience, PRODs will take place about 80% of the time, but of
that 80% about 25% will later be contested. So far I've seen exactly
one article that really should have died survive a PROD and an AfD,
and one more get PRODded, undeleted, and then survive AfD.

-Phil


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Tim Starling

subject: [Wikitech-l] AntiSpoof issues

body:
Neil Harris wrote:
> Hi Tim;
>
> I've already thought of this (see my recent E-mail on the Wikitech list
> -- for some reason, I can't find the lengthy E-mail I thought I'd sent
> earlier that I refer to there).
>
> Fortunately, not much "real cleverness" is needed.
>
> The basic idea is the one suggested by multiple posters on the list:
> * an aggressive canonicalization process (which must still have the
> transitivity requirement above)
> * looking up candidates with matching canonical forms (up to some limit,
> perhaps 20, to stop denial-of-service attacks)
> * if #(candidates) > limit, treat as a spoof, to fail-safe
> * then a second pass to do the checking _much_ more carefully, without
> any need for transitivity or over-compression
>
> I'd be happy to E-mail you an implementation in Python of the very
> simple but more careful second-pass code, as a function
> are_confusable_strings() that takes two Python strings as input, and
> returns a boolean value. This can then be called from the PHP pass.

Sure, email away.

> If we do this, we should be able to make the first pass even more
> aggressive than it is currently, to catch more possible spoof
> candidates, whilst still eliminating false positives in the second pass,
> thus improving both the false-positive and false-negative rates to a
> fraction of their current levels.

Generally speaking, you can't tell whether a given pair of names is an
attempted spoof just by comparing the strings. You need to know the
motivation of the person who created it. On the one hand we have users who
want to find the minimal variation of their given name or Internet nickname
that isn't already taken, and on the other hand, we have trolls who want to
find the minimal variation of an existing username that isn't disallowed by
the software. Both users wish to evade the software restrictions, but one of
them has a motivation that we will tolerate, and one of them does not.

As Gregory suggested, one useful heuristic would be to look at the number of
edits of the target user. Another one that I proposed on IRC yesterday is a
length heuristic -- i.e. collisions of short usernames are more likely to be
accidental than collisions of long ones.

> We should _not_ remove the cross-script pairs from the list, as there
> are still whole-script confusables, eg "caxap", "soccer" --
> surprisingly, 3% of English dictionary words have matching Cyrillic
> spoofs, and 1% have Greek spoofs -- however, the second pass should
> completely eliminate any problems caused by the transitivity in the
> first pass.

We have to remove some of the cross-script pairs until the software is
changed, to fix the spurious within-script conflations. I'm not going to
make everyone suffer while we have our leisurely chat about possible
long-term fixes.

There is a need for judgement, regardless of the software in use. Trolls
will go on trolling regardless of what anti-spoofing restrictions we have in
place. Our aim should be to minimise their impact, and heuristic systems
with a high false positive rate do quite the opposite.

-- Tim Starling


subject: [WikiEN-l] Kill CSD A7!

body:
On 11/13/06, Phil Sandifer <Snowspinner at gmail.com> wrote:
> In my experience, PRODs will take place about 80% of the time, but of
> that 80% about 25% will later be contested. So far I've seen exactly
> one article that really should have died survive a PROD and an AfD,
> and one more get PRODded, undeleted, and then survive AfD.

80% of completed prods later contested? This sounds *very* high to me
and is completely inconsistent with the undo rate for discussionless
deletion. What data did you base this conclusion on?

In general I'd agree with the notion that greater scrutiny tends to
cause more and more surprising outcomes... and I'm not quite sure what
to make of that.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Kill CSD A7!

body:
On Nov 13, 2006, at 3:15 PM, Gregory Maxwell wrote:

>
> 80% of completed prods later contested? This sounds *very* high to me
> and is completely inconsistent with the undo rate for discussionless
> deletion. What data did you base this conclusion on?

No, no - 25% of completed prods. Mostly they die without a whisper.

-Phil


subject: [WikiEN-l] Kill CSD A7!

body:
On 11/13/06, Phil Sandifer <Snowspinner at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Nov 13, 2006, at 3:15 PM, Gregory Maxwell wrote:
> > 80% of completed prods later contested? This sounds *very* high to me
> > and is completely inconsistent with the undo rate for discussionless
> > deletion. What data did you base this conclusion on?
>
> No, no - 25% of completed prods. Mostly they die without a whisper.

Er, I initally wrote 25% out of 80% of .. but snipped it off. Darnit.

I still think 20% (1/5) of the total prods is fairly high.


from_name: Sean Whitton

subject: [Foundation-l] More stewards...

references:
<ej9h5h$mis$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<c13e6b500611130259u5951ae89gc6c83ac22c31b6d5@mail.gmail.com>
	<ej9vkq$bl7$1@sea.gmane.org>

body:
The steward's roll has always been (correct me if I'm wrong here) a
functional one where stewards aim to avoid making decisions and
judgements and just follow the processes necessary. I think that the
stewards are all perfectly skilled at judging the consensus of the
community, of course, but I am fearful that it would undermind their
position.

I may of course be nit-picking here, but I think we need to be careful
as the position of steward, while usually low-profile, can have an
influence in certain situations.

Thanks,
S

On 13/11/06, Anthere <Anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Well... you know... yesterday, on irc, it was suggested that Danny
> should not be reconfirmed since he was staff and needed the status to do
> office action, but I should be reconfirmed. Granted, no one mentionned
> Jimbo should be reconfirmed... :-)
>
> /me vaguely wonders how she would do if not reconfirmed...
>
> Right now, stewards lose stewardship was becomming inactive. Or they
> lose it because another steward decides to remove them their access.
> If this is acceptable, I have been wondering if we could not simplify
> things by having stewards self-confirm their group ? For example, after
> new elections, all stewards would do a clean up of their group (and
> remove inactive or bad stewards). Would that be shocking ?
>
> Ant
>
>
>  Sean Whitton wrote:
> > Although I agree that we should reconfirm stewards, do we really need
> > to do so the the board members?
> >
> > There is no easy solution here as board members are not automatically
> > stewards or anything, the point I'm making is that reconfirming Jimbo
> > seems a little strange.
> >
> > S
> >
> > On 13/11/06, Anthere <Anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> >
> >>Last steward election was nearly a year ago. Since then, some stewards
> >>resigned, some were removed, some became inactive. We need more stewards.
> >>
> >>Please see here:
> >>http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Stewards/elections_2006-2
> >>
> >>The rules are basically the same than last year but for one thing.
> >>Previous stewards will have to be reconfirmed. Inactive stewards will be
> >>removed.
> >>
> >>The rules for election are not yet fully finalized. Please comment on
> >>them in the next few days. Currently, some people think dates may not be
> >>best. Others are not certain previous stewards should be reconfirmed.
> >>
> >>Ant
> >>
> >>_______________________________________________
> >>foundation-l mailing list
> >>foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> >>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
> >>
> >
> >
> >
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>

--
	?Xyrael / Sean Whitton ~ Knowledge is power, but only wisdom is liberty
		sean at silentflame.com (PGP: 0x25F4EAB7) | xyrael.net


subject: [Foundation-l] More stewards...


from_name: Anthere

subject: [Foundation-l] More stewards...

body:
Well... you know... yesterday, on irc, it was suggested that Danny
should not be reconfirmed since he was staff and needed the status to do
office action, but I should be reconfirmed. Granted, no one mentionned
Jimbo should be reconfirmed... :-)

/me vaguely wonders how she would do if not reconfirmed...

Right now, stewards lose stewardship was becomming inactive. Or they
lose it because another steward decides to remove them their access.
If this is acceptable, I have been wondering if we could not simplify
things by having stewards self-confirm their group ? For example, after
new elections, all stewards would do a clean up of their group (and
remove inactive or bad stewards). Would that be shocking ?

Ant

  Sean Whitton wrote:
> Although I agree that we should reconfirm stewards, do we really need
> to do so the the board members?
>
> There is no easy solution here as board members are not automatically
> stewards or anything, the point I'm making is that reconfirming Jimbo
> seems a little strange.
>
> S
>
> On 13/11/06, Anthere <Anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>>Last steward election was nearly a year ago. Since then, some stewards
>>resigned, some were removed, some became inactive. We need more stewards.
>>
>>Please see here:
>>http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Stewards/elections_2006-2
>>
>>The rules are basically the same than last year but for one thing.
>>Previous stewards will have to be reconfirmed. Inactive stewards will be
>>removed.
>>
>>The rules for election are not yet fully finalized. Please comment on
>>them in the next few days. Currently, some people think dates may not be
>>best. Others are not certain previous stewards should be reconfirmed.
>>
>>Ant
>>
>>_______________________________________________
>>foundation-l mailing list
>>foundation-l at wikimedia.org
>>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>>
>
>
>


subject: [Foundation-l] More stewards...


subject: [Commons-l] Bands from Brazil - Why?

body:
So we know why we're getting a lot of copyvio / unlicensed material
from Eswiki users...  It's not a trivial problem but at least we
understand it.

We're getting a lot of 'misplaced articles' Portuguese in the gallery
namespace on commons. Most of the ones I've seen seem to be various
advertisements and a lot of garage bands from Brazil.

Anyone know if there is some systematic cause of these which we could amend?


subject: [WikiEN-l] Overuse of {{fact}}, redux

body:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_faux_pas

Highlighting specific examples is left as an exercise to the reader.

--
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: geni

subject: [WikiEN-l] something to look into

body:
On 11/13/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> http://www.opinioneditorials.com/guestcontributors/rcurry_20061113.html

Why? Wikipedia appears to have taken the facts and ignored the
opinions so I don't see a problem.

--
geni


body:
On 13/11/06, Bogdan Giusca <liste at dapyx.com> wrote:
> Tuesday, November 14, 2006, 12:00:31 AM, Mark wrote:
>
> > Standard language of PMR is written in Cyrillic.
>
> > Yes, it is a "separatist region", but that does not cancel the fact
> > that it is taught in schools there.
>
> Yes, it has been discussed this before: it's not standard Moldovan,
> as used by the government of Moldova. So why is it at the mo subdomain?
> Shouldn't it be at mo-cyr.wikipedia.org ?

Well, I would agree with the government of PMR on this point: although
Moldova calls it official normative language "Moldovan", it is
essentially Romanian. As they say in Dubossary, "Limbe moldaven'aske
se skrie yn alfabetu kirilik". The Latin-script schools in
Transnistria are considered "Romanian-medium education".

And as was mentioned earlier in this thread, countries do not have a
monopoly over languages. What the government of Moldova says about the
Moldovan language is irrelevant when it comes to the norms used on
Wikipedia. A large portion of "Moldovan speakers" live in Ukraine,
Belarus, Russia, and Kazakstan, and most of these people were familiar
with Cyrillic to write their language. Similarly, while Russian state
law says that Cyrillic is the official script of the Federation, the
Tatar Wikipedia uses Latin script. Why?

And why doesn't the Serbian Wikipedia use Latin, used on nearly all
Serbian websites? Because it differentiates them from the Bosnian
Wikipedia and, to a lesser extent, the Croatian Wikipedia (this
because Croatian norms are already a bit different).

Script choice is a very interesting sociolinguistic topic. In Moldova,
sure, most people will choose Latin. But why can't they write in
ro.wp? Their normative language is identical to Romanian, save a few
turns of phrase, a handful of technical words and a couple of
syntactical inexactities (and of course the i vs a controversy, but
then even Romania is not uniform in that regard).

The reason that mo.wp should be written in Cyrillic is because a mo.wp
written in Latin makes no sense and has no use. Anybody Moldovan who
writes their native language in Latin, knows when reading a list of
languages to select "Romanian", even if they will declare to the death
that their language is Moldovan. So far, there have only been two
camps of native Moldavians on mo.wp: Latin users who are militantly
assertive that their language is identical with Romanian and that the
two WPs should be merged, and Cyrillic users who think that a Moldovan
WP makes little sense if written in Cyrillic.

> I think that's the main point of disagreement and both Moldovans and
> Romanians disagree with the current state.

Nooo... the main point of disagreement seems to be a bit more radical,
like "NU EXISTA LIMBA MOLDOVENEASCA EXISTA DOAR LIMBA ROMANA" with
lots of exclamation marks afterwards. Or "NU A PROPAGANDA SOVIETIC".
Or something like that.

> Anyway, Mark, what do you want to do with this encyclopedia? I don't

Well, I was just sitting along pushing it forward and waiting for a
better contributor. It seems now that it is self-maintaining, and so I
leave it alone.

> that in the last six months it got *any* new original content, despite
> the thousands of trolling edits by numerous sock-puppets of Romanian,
> Russian, Bulgarian, Greek, American and possibly Georgian origin.

That's because you haven't been looking clearly. I saw new original
articles on the Kyiv metro, the Ukrainian language, and population
theory. One of them was in the last month or so. But of course you
don't notice these things... you're only what, the admin there? Psh.

Mark

--
Refije dirije lanm? yo paske nou posede pw?p bato.


body:
> The reason that mo.wp should be written in Cyrillic is because a mo.wp
> written in Latin makes no sense and has no use. Anybody Moldovan who
> writes their native language in Latin, knows when reading a list of
> languages to select "Romanian", even if they will declare to the death
> that their language is Moldovan. So far, there have only been two
> camps of native Moldavians on mo.wp: Latin users who are militantly
> assertive that their language is identical with Romanian and that the
> two WPs should be merged, and Cyrillic users who think that a Moldovan
> WP makes little sense if written in Cyrillic.

Err... make that "Cyrillic users who think that a Moldovan WP makes
little sense if written in _Latin_". Duh.

--
Refije dirije lanm? yo paske nou posede pw?p bato.


body:
On 11/13/06, Mark Williamson <node.ue at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 13/11/06, Milos Rancic <millosh at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'd totally forgotten about how oblivious you were. Responding to all
> my points as if I were serious. Everyone else, even most of the
> Serbians, were able to tell I was kidding. I was actually expressing
> somewhat of a Pan-Yugoslav position through use of extreme sarcasm,
> basically, that "now everybody tries to break off from the unitary
> South Slavic nation". The intention wasn't specifically that but to
> highlight how ridiculous it is that we have languages in 3 versions of
> what can't even be called different _dialects_ of the same language
> (maybe if you had one in Cakavian instead of "Croatian").

You showed extremely high level of irresponsibility. As well as all
people from the community forgot to say me that you are a kid.
However, I see that it seems that you became mature now... And this is
good for you. Because your relevancy in talk with other people will
increase.

> But it is _completely irrelevant_. As I said, we do not have
> Wikipedias for nations, but for languages. It is simply impossible to
> use Wikipedia to build a new nation. To form a language where nothing
> existed before, perhaps, but to build a new nation, no. It's not
> possible, because _we do not create Wikipedias for nations!_.

Mark, just read. Some people may want to use Wikipedia in the process
of nation building. At least, two times people tried that. Zlatiborian
didn't pass, Siberian passed. However, wish to build a nation is a
legitimate (I hope this is the right word) wish and people were doing
that in the past, are doing that now and will be doing that in the
future.

One of the importan part of a nation is a national language (of
course, there are exceptions). And one who wants to make it's own
nation will try to make a language, too; and, then, to make Wikipedia
edition in that language.

So, we came to language.

Language may be constructed/artificial or it can be formalized
dialect. In both cases 5-10 people are enough to force opening
Wikipedia in such language (cf. Siberian Wikipedia). And their only
intention was to make national identity around the language and
Wikipedia in such language.

I hope that it is more clear now or you will continue to pretend that
you are not understand that?

> Besides, although nation creation is mentioned often in the discussion
> it is truly not relevant. What _is_ relevant are the merits of the
> language itself. How many people speak it? How many people are willing
> to edit its Wiki? etc.

Mark, Wikimedia Foundation as well as local chapters, including
Wikimedia Serbia, are involved as a party in Russian internal politics
as it supports a group of self-proclaimed separatists because there
were 10 people who wanted to work on Siberian Wikipedia. Maybe there
are some principles for which we should fight, but this one is very
foolish.

So, there are some other things then number of speakers, too.


body:
On 11/13/06, Milos Rancic <millosh at gmail.com> wrote:
[snip]
> You are completely missing the point. The intention of the document is
> to explain that Wikipedia should not be involved in constituing of new
> nations.
[snip]

Then make that clear.. the document goes on and on about languages.

Languages != nations.

Leave the languages out of it.

...and since when did we make new wikipedias for separate nations
rather than separate dialects?


from_name: Gabriel Simões

subject: [Wikitech-l] Inserting new components in each session of forum

body:
How can I insert one kind of component for each session os discussion?
Have some way to identify ==Session #== mark to insert this componente?
Thank's
------------------------------------
Gabriel da Silva Sim?es
Mestrando em Ci?ncia da Computa??o
Instituto de Inform?tica - UFRGS
SBC #12250
ICQ #16149875
CEL #(51)93232480


subject: [WikiEN-l] something to look into

body:
On 13/11/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> geni wrote:
> > On 11/13/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> >> http://www.opinioneditorials.com/guestcontributors/rcurry_20061113.html
> >
> >
> > Why? Wikipedia appears to have taken the facts and ignored the
> > opinions so I don't see a problem.
>
> If that is the case, then fine.  That's why I wanted people to look into it.
>
> Perhaps you are not familiar with the history of this topic and Rex
> Curry.  My concern is that he has managed somehow to push his POV and
> original research agenda into Wikipedia, and that he is using his
> success in doing so to bolster his own cause.

Oh, god, *him*. Fascist-salute guy.

Summary for those unaware: RC thinks he has a conclusive theory that
the Pledge of Allegiance is irretrievably linked to the Nazi salute,
and the Nazis were godless commies, or something like that. (My eyes
tend to screw up after the first few paras of inpenetrable prose) He
spams places wildly with it. (My personal favourite: he will review
vaguely-related books on Amazon, saying "interesting, but has failed
to notice recent research that [...textdump...]"

He's spammed us before, but I thought we were shot of him. Gah.

As to Geni's "keep the facts, junk the opinion", I have a strong
suspicion that his "facts" aren't even remotely facts - if we're
citing this guy *anywhere* in any of our articles I'd advise taking an
extremely prejudiced chainsaw to those.

--
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk


from_name: Oskar Sigvardsson

subject: [WikiEN-l] An observation

body:
On 11/13/06, charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com
<charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:
> It's an atmosphere thing. Creating a good atmosphere and working environment is mission-critical, and not just for the participation of women. Everyone should bear this in mind, at all times. It is just not easy to explain, to those who don't find it natural. 'Civility' in the broadest sense is the key.
>
> Charles

Yes, exactly! People sem to have read in a whole lot in what I said
that I didn't mean. I'm not saying there should be a "quota" of female
editors on the arbcom, that would be insane. I'm just saying that
there obviously is a problem here, and that we can't just say "Gender
is irrelevant on wikipedia" (like geni did), because frankly, that's
just as insane.

Wikipedia is clearly a place where men feels more comfortable than
women and that is something that is a BAD thing. And a bunch of guys
trying to ignore the issue is just making it worse.

--Oskar

PS. Can we please get a woman to start reading the mailing list? :)
This is getting weird with just us boys.


subject: [WikiEN-l] something to look into

body:
On 11/13/06, Andrew Gray <shimgray at gmail.com> wrote:
> As to Geni's "keep the facts, junk the opinion", I have a strong
> suspicion that his "facts" aren't even remotely facts - if we're
> citing this guy *anywhere* in any of our articles I'd advise taking an
> extremely prejudiced chainsaw to those.

Well one example would be:

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

he bosts about this but it doesn't cite him and I don't see a problem
with the article.

--
geni


subject: [WikiEN-l] An observation

body:
On 11/13/06, Oskar Sigvardsson <oskarsigvardsson at gmail.com> wrote:
> Yes, exactly! People sem to have read in a whole lot in what I said
> that I didn't mean. I'm not saying there should be a "quota" of female
> editors on the arbcom, that would be insane. I'm just saying that
> there obviously is a problem here, and that we can't just say "Gender
> is irrelevant on wikipedia" (like geni did), because frankly, that's
> just as insane.
>

Not really. Particaly when you consider it is likely that there are a
number of wikipedians who would probably editify with a gender outside
the normal two (Just wait untill some of our more ah sexualy illiberal
critics notice http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Furry_Wikipedians)

I don't care how old you are. I don't care what sex you are. I don't
care what skin shade you are. I don't care what sexual orientation you
are. I don't care about your marital status.

I will care about the langue you speak and sometimes which country you
are in when dealing with copyright issues.

> Wikipedia is clearly a place where men feels more comfortable than
> women and that is something that is a BAD thing.

Why?

> And a bunch of guys
> trying to ignore the issue is just making it worse.

Why?

--
geni


from_name: Steve Block

subject: [WikiEN-l] something to look into

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:
> http://www.opinioneditorials.com/guestcontributors/rcurry_20061113.html

Looking at the article above, I'm no whiz at this ip address stuff but
maybe someone who is can look at these ip accounts:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Contributions&target=66.234.65.216

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Contributions&target=66.234.65.212

The first three sets of the four numbers are identical, they have only
edited the articles linked to by the editorial Jimmy mentions, and they
have pushed external links into the articles which are by the author of
the editorial above, see the internet archive link below

http://web.archive.org/web/20060528124014/http://members.ij.net/rex/pledge1.html

which was inserted in
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Edward_Bellamy&diff=prev&oldid=5363260

That said, I don't see that any of the claims this bloke makes are true.
  He's spinning the facts to make his own role in them more important.
We don't appear to reference him at all in the Bellamy salute article
regarding doctored photos of Charles Lindbergh, we reference A. Scott
Berg who Curry declares agrees with him.  The info on the Lindbergh
photos was added by User:Shield2,
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Contributions&target=Shield2

Don't know if that user is related to the above accounts, or
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Contributions&target=67.22.42.138
and whether the contributions of those two accounts need investigating?

Just my quick thoughts on what may be happening.

Steve block

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from_name: Nick Jenkins

subject: [Wikitech-l] On style sheets

body:
> What I'm thinking is that a beta.en.wikipedia.org instance wouldn't be
> so bad, if it had the same data on the back end.

Along a similar vein, would it help to have a public test wiki that always ran the absolute bleeding edge? (As opposed to
test.wikipedia.org which runs an NFS checkout before the sync, and as such usually differs little from most of the Wikipedia sites).
Example hostname: http://dogfood.wikipedia.org/ . That way keen people could try new stuff out earlier, and maybe we might get some
feedback sooner, before changes impact the whole userbase, thus possibly resulting in greater harmony?

All the best,
Nick.


subject: [Wikitech-l] On style sheets

body:
Nick Jenkins wrote:
>> What I'm thinking is that a beta.en.wikipedia.org instance wouldn't be
>> so bad, if it had the same data on the back end.
>
> Along a similar vein, would it help to have a public test wiki that
> always ran the absolute bleeding edge? (As opposed to test.wikipedia.org
> which runs an NFS checkout before the sync, and as such usually differs
> little from most of the Wikipedia sites). Example hostname:
> http://dogfood.wikipedia.org/ . That way keen people could try new stuff
> out earlier, and maybe we might get some feedback sooner, before changes
> impact the whole userbase, thus possibly resulting in greater harmony?

There's test.leuksman.com. For security reasons, we wouldn't want such a
thing on the main cluster, and after SUL is enabled, we won't be able to
have it on a *.wikipedia.org domain either.

In any case, it wouldn't be very much earlier than test.wikipedia.org, just
a few days in most cases. I don't think it's going to work to rely on random
community review in that period, I think we need to have a testing procedure
for CSS changes which allow us to actively test for this kind of problem.

I reviewed the diff before I put these changes live, and I checked
test.wikipedia.org for obvious fatal errors. I would have visually checked
the English Wikipedia main page too, before sync, if we had a procedure in
place for that. George Herbert's suggestion to have a beta.en.wikipedia.org
running on the same database would be one to do that.

-- Tim Starling


subject: [Wikitech-l] MediaWiki automated test run failure 2006-11-11

body:
> Second, the test suite can run from multiple source files. Extensions
> with their own test files can append them to $wgParserTestFiles, and
> they'll get automatically run alongside the main tests.
>
> It might be nice to break up the big test file into smaller, more
> manageable pieces.

Very nice.

Now, the question I have is: How small do you want to make the pieces / tests?

There is something kind of satisfying about the simplicity of having one test per file, similar to how PHP's .phpt "make test"
system works.

A structure like this helps somewhat with the "different tests must have different names" requirement, in that you can't have a file
with the same name twice in the same directory.

It also makes it easier for people to add tests and send them in (a whole new small file is easier for most folks to work with than
a diff), and it's easy to disable tests (just move them into another directory), and it's easy to get a quick overview of what the
current tests are (just do an "ls").

Basically in this system $wgParserTestFiles would probably become $wgParserTestDirs, and it would be a directory name rather than a
test .txt filename that was added to the global, and every file in a directory would be a set of parserTest tests to be run, and
parserTests.txt would probably be split up into 400+ files in maintenance/parserTests/*.txt, and the testitem table would maybe get
an extra field (ti_dir) and ti_name might be renamed ti_filename.

Thoughts? Sounds good, or sounds sucky?

All the best,
Nick.


from_name: Matt R

subject: [WikiEN-l] something to look into

body:
--- Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> If that is the case, then fine.  That's why I wanted people to look into it.
>
> Perhaps you are not familiar with the history of this topic and Rex
> Curry.  My concern is that he has managed somehow to push his POV and
> original research agenda into Wikipedia, and that he is using his
> success in doing so to bolster his own cause.

One section he references -- [[Swastika#Russia]] --  has been deleted as
unsourced:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Swastika&diff=87574917&oldid=87109469

-- Matt

___________________________________________________________
All new Yahoo! Mail "The new Interface is stunning in its simplicity and ease of use." - PC Magazine
http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/nowyoucan.html


subject: [Commons-l] [Foundation-l]  Bands from Brazil - Why?

body:
On 11/13/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> Note to Foundation-L: Artur is proposing to block all es: and pt:
> contributors to Commons to save Commons admin work. That this goes
> against the actual purpose of Commons as a service project to other
> Wikimedia projects seems to have escaped him. Can someone rein him in?

Notice to Foundation-L, David must have lost his meds again and is trolling.

No one is seriously proposing anything of the sort.

If david continues trolling on the commons list he is going to get
asked to unsubscribe.


subject: [Foundation-l] [Commons-l] Bands from Brazil - Why?


from_name: Andrew Gray

subject: [WikiEN-l] Overuse of {{fact}}, redux

body:
On 13/11/06, Sean Barrett <sean at epoptic.com> wrote:

> Angela stated for the record:
> > Wouldn't it make more sense to move every unsourced statement to the
> > talk page or elsewhere and add them back when they're sourced? I don't
> > see how having {{fact}} on almost every line is helpful to readers of
> > the article.
>
> It serves the purpose of warning our readers that a large fraction of
> that article is composed of [[Wikipedia:Complete bollocks]].

It's charmingly inept in concept, too. Huges swathes would be better
characterised as "here is how local culture differs from an American
norm", and the attempt to granularise on a country-by-country level
leads us to get a lot of tedious cutting-and-pasting with bizzare
gaps. Our reader can happily conclude that "fanny" is an entirely
innocuous word in the UK, whilst asking unfamiliar women their age in
.au or .nz is somehow much less offensive than elsewhere in
l'anglophonie...

I really haven't much idea what can be done with that article to make
it anything but a ragged group of half-reliable platitudes.

--
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk


from_name: Angela

subject: [WikiEN-l] Overuse of {{fact}}, redux

body:
Wouldn't it make more sense to move every unsourced statement to the
talk page or elsewhere and add them back when they're sourced? I don't
see how having {{fact}} on almost every line is helpful to readers of
the article.

Angela.


from_name: Brian Salter-Duke

subject: [WikiEN-l] An observation

body:
On Sun, Nov 12, 2006 at 10:18:06PM -0500, Phil Sandifer wrote:
>
>
> On Nov 12, 2006, at 9:46 PM, Alphax (Wikipedia email) wrote:
>
> >
> >Yes, there are already too many teenagers here. Suggest we ban anyone
> >not of legal drinking age (which for the more progressive countries,
> >allows younger editors). Require all editors to drink while editing
> >can
> >come later...
>
> I figured we'd implemented mandatory drinking ages ago. I mean, how
> else to explain RFA?

Do you mean applying to be an Admin, "voting" at RFA, or both. I can
just about manage voting while sober, but I think I would have to be
totally newted to apply.

Brian.

> -Phil
>
> ------------------------------

--
          Brian Salter-Duke            b_duke at bigpond.net.au
               [[User:Bduke]]  mainly on en:Wikipedia.
 Also on fr: Wikipedia, Meta-Wiki, WikiNews, WikiBooks and Commons


subject: [WikiEN-l] Kill CSD A7!

body:
geni wrote:
> On 11/12/06, Dan Collins <en.wp.st47 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> pfft. we need a7, that's how we get rid of the myspace teens and the
>> wanna-be-a-big-businesses. Do you have an example of an article that was
>> "unfairly" deleted? If it's used improperly, remove the tag. Either way, the
>> admin won't delete it if it isn't really nn.
>>
>
> Oh they might. Problem is that we have no other deletion method that
> could cope if we removed A7
>

Speedy A1

Very short articles providing little or no context (e.g., "He is a funny
man that has created Factory and the Hacienda. And, by the way, his wife
is great."). Limited content is not in itself a reason to delete if
there is enough context for the article to qualify as a valid stub.

Now I'd argue that any article which doesn't explain why someone is
significant fails to provide context.  So writing "Blah are a garage
band who will release their first album next year." Provides no context,
and even if it is hugely puffed out to detail how they met and where
they all went to school, it still fails to provide context.  Now an
article that provides context is "Blah are a garage band who will
release their first album next year. The album will be produced by Steve
Albini."  There you've got a smidge of why they might be significant.
Steve Albini has a Wikipedia article, so it may be debated that having
an album produced by him may be significant enough.

Now this stuff is what A7 is also supposed to stop, but in the last few
days, for example, I removed a speedy on a stub which noted the actress
appears in Hollyoaks, a popular soap.  It was speedied because
apparently that doesn't assert notability.  Now my rule of thumb is, if
the article claims something that hasn't or couldn't have happened to an
average person, namely me, and checks out, then I won't delete it under
A7.  Because I could have been in a band, I could have been an actor,
but I haven't appeared in a poular soap, and I haven't had an album
produced by Steve Albini.

A7 seems far too wide in it's subjectivity.  When it was proposed it
contained contextualising text, something along the lines of asserting
that you are a baker or a butcher may be true, but it doesn't assert any
importance.  The article should assert why you are an important baker or
butcher.  This text was removed within the first few days of adoption as
unnecessary, but I think it needs to be added back in to better
contextualise what is supposed to be deleted here.

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from_name: James Hare

subject: [Foundation-l] Java becomes Open Source, what next?

body:
I've heard that Kelly Martin is developing a MediaWiki made of Java. In any
case, Erik, it sounds great -- interactive learning applets is something
Wikiversity could use. I would like to thank Sun Microsystems for this
contribution to open source.

On 11/13/06, Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org> wrote:
>
> Sun Microsystems will make all the Java code they own available under the
> GPL:
>
> http://www.sun.com/software/opensource/java/
>
> This is a very major step. IMHO we should now make Java core part of
> our own strategy, as it's one of the best ways to deliver interactive
> content (high quality animations, learning tools, etc.). There are
> large numbers of free applets that we can potentially use, esp. in
> Wikipedia and Wikiversity.
>
> My main question is: Are there security considerations with enabling
> the upload and embedding of Java Applets? According to
>
> http://java.sun.com/sfaq/
>
> one of the capabilities of applets is to open a connection to the
> originating host. Could this be used, e.g., to create auto-vandalism
> applets and if so, can we somehow protect against it?
>
> If security is a major issue, might it be feasible to maintain a
> whitelist of certificates (to allow applets from trusted authority to
> be uploaded directly), and to flag all other applets as
> "non-embeddable" until a sysop flips a switch, so they can be reviewed
> for security? We could add a big fat warning on the file description
> page.
>
> --
> Peace & Love,
> Erik
>
> Member, Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees
>
> DISCLAIMER: Unless otherwise stated, all views or opinions expressed
> in this message are solely my own and do not represent an official
> position of the Wikimedia Foundation or its Board of Trustees.
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>


subject: [WikiEN-l] Kill CSD A7!

body:
Brian Salter-Duke wrote:
> I would also suggest that articles that are put to AfD should not be
> speedy deleted. Once thay are there give people a chance to see them and
> comment. Maybe only cut short the closure if there are 20 delete "votes"
> and no keep "votes". I often see a speedy closure of a AfD debate and
> are curious about what was in it.

This is a little too open to gaming for my liking.  A lot of afds which
are closed as speedy actually are speedies, it is usually that the nom
is unaware of the fact.  If we acted as you suggest we would allow a
gaming of the system in which people could delay deletion through adding
an afd tag to an article which desperately should be speedied.  Some
people simply want the article because of driving traffic or playing google.

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from_name: Cary Bass

subject: [Commons-l] press release

body:
Oh my goodness... I can just see it... people uploading images just to have
the 1000000th.  One out of two images will be copyrighted...

Oh, the inhumanity!

/me is very afraid of a press release announcing this :)

Cary Bass

> -----Original Message-----
> From: commons-l-bounces at wikimedia.org
> [mailto:commons-l-bounces at wikimedia.org]On Behalf Of Anthere
> Sent: Monday, November 13, 2006 7:01 PM
> To: commons-l at wikimedia.org
> Subject: [Commons-l] press release
>
>
> Hi,
>
> I may just fall entirely out of the spot, but... is there a group of
> people working on a press release for the 1000000 of commons ?
>
> I looked around a bit and found only this
> *http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikim?dia_France/Communique_sur_le
> _million_de_Commons
> (in french, from the french association)
> *http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_logo_mosaic/Construct
> ionNotes
> (this gorgious new logo)
>
> When is thd 1M expected ?
>
> ant
>
> _______________________________________________
> Commons-l mailing list
> Commons-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l


from_name: Alphax (Wikipedia email)

subject: [Wikitech-l] AntiSpoof issues

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:
> Gregory Maxwell wrote:
>> On 11/12/06, Tim Starling <tstarling at wikimedia.org> wrote:
>>> We've been having quite a few complaints about false positives from the
>>> AntiSpoof extension -- an extension which attempts to prevent registration
>> Sorry to post again, another thought on this:
>>
>> It would probably be useful to reduce the comparison to the set of
>> users with no non-deleted edits. Who care if someone spoofs a deleted
>> user?
>
> We can expect that, say, [[User:Jimbo Wales]] won't actually have any
> edits on the majority of our wikis. Does that mean there's no need to
> check for spoofs of that username?
>

Yet Another Reason why SUL is needed yesterday...

--
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: Earle Martin

subject: [WikiEN-l] Overuse of {{fact}}, redux

body:
On 13/11/06, Andrew Gray <shimgray at gmail.com> wrote:
> Our reader can happily conclude that "fanny" is an entirely
> innocuous word in the UK, whilst asking unfamiliar women their age in
> .au or .nz is somehow much less offensive than elsewhere in
> l'anglophonie...

Which is part of the reason why I removed the entire section regarding
British and American English.

--
Earle Martin
            http://downlode.org/
http://purl.org/net/earlemartin/


from_name: Anthony

body:
On 11/13/06, Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> My main question is: Are there security considerations with enabling
> the upload and embedding of Java Applets? According to
>
> http://java.sun.com/sfaq/
>
> one of the capabilities of applets is to open a connection to the
> originating host. Could this be used, e.g., to create auto-vandalism
> applets and if so, can we somehow protect against it?
>
I think letting people embed java applets would be really really bad.
Besides the auto-vandalism applets, one could, for instance, write an
applet which reads the person's cookies and posts them on his own talk
page (or even better, emails them using [[Special:Emailuser]]).  See
[[cross-site scripting]] for more evil ideas.

> If security is a major issue, might it be feasible to maintain a
> whitelist of certificates (to allow applets from trusted authority to
> be uploaded directly), and to flag all other applets as
> "non-embeddable" until a sysop flips a switch, so they can be reviewed
> for security? We could add a big fat warning on the file description
> page.
>
Might as well give those people with certificates root access on all
the servers, and let all others upload applications which won't run on
the servers until a sysop glances at it and flips a switch.

Sorry if you find my sarcasm rude, but using java in this way has some
major security issues.  In fact, just using java applets at all has
enough security and privacy issues that it isn't enabled by default on
Firefox, and I personally haven't turned it on in quite a while.

Sorry again if I've been overly blunt.  It's a good general idea, but
I think it's way before its time.  Hopefully the opening of the source
code to java will speed up the addressing of these types of issues.

Alternatively, though this would be a much harder route, maybe some
subset of the java language could be made available, in much the same
way wiki-syntax translates into a subset of html.

Anthony


subject: [WikiEN-l] Kill CSD A7!

body:
Gregory Maxwell wrote:
> On 11/13/06, Phil Sandifer <Snowspinner at gmail.com> wrote:
>> In my experience, PRODs will take place about 80% of the time, but of
>> that 80% about 25% will later be contested. So far I've seen exactly
>> one article that really should have died survive a PROD and an AfD,
>> and one more get PRODded, undeleted, and then survive AfD.
>
> 80% of completed prods later contested?

Eh?  I read it as 80% of articles tagged for PROD are deleted, and then
a quarter of those are re-instated, which I think makes it 40% of
articles tagged as PROD are contested. (A quarter of 80% is 20%, added
to the initial 20% not deleted.)

Do I have it wrong?

Steve block

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from_name: Gregory Maxwell

subject: [Wikitech-l] Java becomes Open Source, what next?

body:
On 11/13/06, Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org> wrote:
[snip]
> My main question is: Are there security considerations with enabling
> the upload and embedding of Java Applets? According to
[snip]

When I first put up the Java Vorbis player I needed to make a
connection to an outside host (upload.wikimedia.org). Since I don't
have a signing cert I put it up without one, and users had to agree
with a "allow this to 0wn my machine" warning for it to play.  In
these first couple of days before I fixed it to run in the sandbox
over 10,000 people allowed their java to bypass security.

As such I could never support a general proposal user submitted java.

Even ignoring the sandbox breakout issues, the halting problem
ultimately means that we can not determine what arbitrary code will
do... The possibilities for vandalism are endless..  Imagine a little
animation of an atom turns into dancing penises for ten minutes on
alternate tuesdays.

> one of the capabilities of applets is to open a connection to the
> originating host. Could this be used, e.g., to create auto-vandalism
> applets and if so, can we somehow protect against it?

Yes. Originate the Java from a host that does nothing but originate
Java... and better yet, as above don't allow arbitrary code.

[snip]
> "non-embeddable" until a sysop flips a switch, so they can be reviewed
> for security? We could add a big fat warning on the file description
> page.

I think you're stepping two far... How about we start off treating
java like extensions?  We can obtain or build some nice general tools
(java graphers, etc)..

All of this is ignoring the amazing accessibility problems of Java.
Not only will all of this be totally inaccessible to people on low
tech devices and the visually impaired, but a huge amount of our
viewers just don't have java installed (I posted numbers on this
previously).

Fortunately, we have time to think about this.. Sun's complete java
suite will not be opensourced until March 2007...


from_name: Pierre Senellart

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Missing articles in
	enwiki-latest-pages-meta-history.xml.7z?

body:
Hi,

It seems that some articles are missing from the full dump of
Wikipedia-en with revisions enwiki-latest-pages-meta-history.xml.7z
(dating from August 26): I can't find an entry for "France" or "United
States" for instance. The fact that it is 5.1GB, while previous dumps
from July are more than 6GB may be another indication of this fact (I
haven't downloaded them yet, so I can't be sure).

Does anyone know why these entries are missing? More importantly, would
there be a way to be certain that the dump is truly complete before
making it available for download? Is there a dump somewhere that has all
articles with their revisions?

Thanks,

--
Pierre Senellart
pierre at senellart.com
http://pierre.senellart.com/
Tel. (work)   : +33 1 72 92 59 29
Tel. (home)   : +33 1 42 55 13 38
Tel. (mobile) : +33 6 73 96 82 89


from_name: shi zhao

subject: [Foundation-l] Sexual harassment in Wikipedia

body:
see http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Privacy_policy

"6 Where it is reasonably necessary to protect the rights, property or
safety of the Wikimedia Foundation, its users or the public."

plese help!

2006/11/11, Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org>:
> On 11/10/06, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> > Essentially I agree. It all comes down to mature judgement, and who is
> > capable of exercising it.  We have a lot of people who can too easily
> > jump to conclusions.
>
> Yes. One question is whether we want every language and project
> community to develop its own policy on these matters, or whether this
> is an area where it makes sense to have a single policy that is
> localized. This goes for checkuser and oversight as well. Perhaps an
> in-between solution makes sense, where the WMF requires that local
> policies identify and propose a group that consists of the most
> trusted users before granting these privileges on a language/project
> level.
>
> Perhaps it should also be a requirement that users who have the
> technical permission to use these tools disclose their identity to the
> WMF, so we have someone to deal with in case of abuse.
> --
> Peace & Love,
> Erik
>
> Member, Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees
>
> DISCLAIMER: Unless otherwise stated, all views or opinions expressed
> in this message are solely my own and do not represent an official
> position of the Wikimedia Foundation or its Board of Trustees.
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>

--
Chinese wikipedia: http://zh.wikipedia.org/
My blog: http://talk.blogbus.com
CNBlog: http://blog.cnblog.org/weblog.html
Social Brain: http://www.socialbrain.org/default.asp
cnbloggercon: http://www.cnbloggercon.org/

[[zh:User:Shizhao]]


from_name: Jens Frank

subject: [Wikitech-l] Geohack

body:
On Mon, Nov 13, 2006 at 09:27:20AM +0100, Magnus Manske wrote:
>
> As it is tradition for temporary fixes, this one seems to have become
> permanent ;-) with ~640000 hits in October, making up >8% of
> toolserver traffic.
>
Could you please change the logo of that page? I guess it's not really
necessary to use a 1MB big image on a page frequented that often.

Regards,

	jens


from_name: Mark Williamson

body:
On 13/11/06, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
> For your information.
> http://www.sil.org/iso639-3/documentation.asp?id=mol shows quite clearly
> that under both ISO-639-1/2/3 there is a code for Moldavian. To
> complicate this http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=mol
> does nor agree with this sentiment. So nobody gets it right, not even
> the organisation that maintains ISO-639-3.

It's difficult. Due to Western media hype about Transnistria "forcing
Romanians to use Cyrillic", the recognition of Cyrillic as a
legitimate script used for Moldovan is low internationally. When it is
mentioned that Cyrillic is used in Transnistria, the counter is always
that "they are forced to". There is no proof of this, and to the
contrary, many ethnic Moldavians in countries like Russia, Ukraine,
Belarus, and Kazakhstan continue to use the Cyrillic script, and
certainly nobody is "forcing" them.

Ethnologue fails to even mention that Cyrillic script is still used in
some regions.

But as you know, Ethnologue is not always accurate. They have a
separate entry for "Yinglish", which isn't even a dialect (more of a
sociolect continuum) and none for AAVE (arguably much more different
from Standard English than is Yinglish); an entry for Norn but none
for Singlish.

They do not apply a consistent standard to separate languages from
dialects. If I were editor, that would be one of my top priorities --
establish objective criteria, something along the lines of:

1) Does the community require a separate literature?
2) Is there a separate literary tradition?
3) Do the people consider themselves to use a different language?
4) Is mutual intelligibility under 80% (spoken/signed)?

But there are thousands of languages in Ethnologue, for many of which
very little information is available.

> We have had our fill with this nonsense too often. Mark is correct where
> he says that the language is not the country. The Dutch language is just
> one example where the name does not imply that everyone who speaks Dutch
> as his or her mother tongue is Dutch. Bogdan your argument does not
> wash. When you mention trolling, I wonder when you looked last in a
> mirror. Anyway the best you can do is ignore. That may be kinda hard but
> consider, if this project stinks, anyone knowledgeable will be able to
> sniff it out personally. Then again, roses grow best on dung.

I've pointed this out before (the "if you don't like it, don't look at
it" idea). The response is usually that "it gives a bad name to
Wikimedia", or "others find it offensive".

Mark

--
Refije dirije lanm? yo paske nou posede pw?p bato.


from_name: Magnus Manske

subject: [Wikitech-l] Geohack

body:
On 11/13/06, Jens Frank <jf at mormo.org> wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 13, 2006 at 09:27:20AM +0100, Magnus Manske wrote:
> >
> > As it is tradition for temporary fixes, this one seems to have become
> > permanent ;-) with ~640000 hits in October, making up >8% of
> > toolserver traffic.
> >
> Could you please change the logo of that page? I guess it's not really
> necessary to use a 1MB big image on a page frequented that often.

 Done.

About my original question...?

Magnus


from_name: Tim Starling

subject: [Wikitech-l] AntiSpoof issues

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:
> We can expect that, say, [[User:Jimbo Wales]] won't actually have any
> edits on the majority of our wikis. Does that mean there's no need to
> check for spoofs of that username?

Add an exception list. You can't expect a simple heuristic to get it right
in every case. [[User:Michael]] once created LiveJournal accounts
impersonating myself and a number of other English Wikipedia sysops. Do you
think any anti-spoof technology on LJ's site would have prevented this?

We have lots of users with no edits. Among them, famous people are surely in
the minority.

-- Tim Starling


from_name: Simetrical

body:
On 11/13/06, Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> If security is a major issue, might it be feasible to maintain a
> whitelist of certificates (to allow applets from trusted authority to
> be uploaded directly), and to flag all other applets as
> "non-embeddable" until a sysop flips a switch, so they can be reviewed
> for security? We could add a big fat warning on the file description
> page.

It makes more sense to me to use the system we use for JavaScript,
i.e., only sysops can add it to begin with.  Allowing applets from
trusted authorities is an interesting idea, but what does "trusted"
mean?  Trusted to not take up too many CPU cycles, to avoid playing
sound unless the user permits it explicitly, to not include material
that would be vulgar and thus attractive to vandals?

I definitely don't think anything whatsoever should be available to
non-sysops at all unless uploaded by a sysop, no matter how large the
warning message.  People are *way* too used to ignoring warning
messages.


body:
Brion Vibber wrote:
> Brianna Laugher wrote:
>> On 12/11/06, Florian Straub <flominator at gmx.net> wrote:
>>> Awesome! Is there any chance to activate it directly for new
>>> registrations
>>> on commons or do they people have to confirm their adresses first?
>>
>> Thanks, Brion. Specifically, could we require that new registered
>> users must have a confirmed email address before uploading? With talk
>> page email notifications as default setting.
>
> That's a complete about-face from Wikimedia's traditional policy of
> allowing anonymous contributions, so before I set that up I'd need to
> know this is acceptable to Wikimedia.
>

Anonymous text with the release "I wrote this" is one thing. Anonymous
images are another.

--
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: [Commons-l] Bands from Brazil - Why?

body:
On 13/11/06, Artur Fija?kowski <wiki.warx at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2006/11/14, Barcex <lv.cabc at gmail.com>:

> >     Just because Portuguese Wikipedia also closed uploads recently, adopting
> > the same policy than the Spanish Wikipedia.

> Nice that everybody was informed ...

Again: What do you think Commons was created for?

> ps. 6 days left and I start shooting to people

Note to Foundation-L: Artur is proposing to block all es: and pt:
contributors to Commons to save Commons admin work. That this goes
against the actual purpose of Commons as a service project to other
Wikimedia projects seems to have escaped him. Can someone rein him in?

- d.


from_name: Bogdan Giusca

body:
Monday, November 13, 2006, 1:34:19 PM, Milos wrote:

> Please, look at
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_projects_are_not_the_place_for_national_constitution

Yep. It seems we're going to have the same endless talks again. :-)

<<
Case Moldovan Wikipedia: (1) standard language Wikipedia (+)
>>

You missed the fact that Moldovan standard language is the same as the
Romanian standard language.

And that the standard language of Moldova is written in Latin
script, just like Romanian, not in Cyrillic, like the mo.wiki...


subject: [Commons-l] [Foundation-l] Bands from Brazil - Why?

body:
On 13/11/06, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 11/13/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:

> > Note to Foundation-L: Artur is proposing to block all es: and pt:
> > contributors to Commons to save Commons admin work. That this goes
> > against the actual purpose of Commons as a service project to other
> > Wikimedia projects seems to have escaped him. Can someone rein him in?

> Notice to Foundation-L, David must have lost his meds again and is trolling.
> No one is seriously proposing anything of the sort.

Artur has posted this for the second time, apparently in all seriousness.

> If david continues trolling on the commons list he is going to get
> asked to unsubscribe.

I'm not trolling; I'm being appalled at the attitude of Commons admins
to the projects that are supposed to be using Commons, particularly
es: and pt: for which Commons is their only image store.

- d.


subject: [Foundation-l] [Commons-l]  Bands from Brazil - Why?


from_name: brion at pobox.com

subject: [Wikitech-l] MediaWiki automated test run failure 2006-11-14

body:
An automated run of parserTests.php showed the following failures:

Reading tests from "/home/brion/src/wiki/phase3/maintenance/parserTests.txt"...
Running test TODO: Table security: embedded pipes (http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2006-April/034637.html)... FAILED!
Running test TODO: Link containing double-single-quotes '' (bug 4598)... FAILED!
Running test TODO: Template with thumb image (with link in description)... FAILED!
Running test TODO: message transform: <noinclude> in transcluded template (bug 4926)... FAILED!
Running test TODO: message transform: <onlyinclude> in transcluded template (bug 4926)... FAILED!
Running test BUG 1887, part 2: A <math> with a thumbnail- math enabled... FAILED!
Running test TODO: HTML bullet list, unclosed tags (bug 5497)... FAILED!
Running test TODO: HTML ordered list, unclosed tags (bug 5497)... FAILED!
Running test TODO: HTML nested bullet list, open tags (bug 5497)... FAILED!
Running test TODO: HTML nested ordered list, open tags (bug 5497)... FAILED!
Running test TODO: Parsing optional HTML elements (Bug 6171)... FAILED!
Running test TODO: Inline HTML vs wiki block nesting... FAILED!
Running test TODO: Mixing markup for italics and bold... FAILED!
Running test TODO: 5 quotes, code coverage +1 line... FAILED!
Running test TODO: dt/dd/dl test... FAILED!
Running test TODO: Images with the "|" character in the comment... FAILED!

Reading tests from "/home/brion/src/wiki/phase3/extensions/Cite/citeParserTests.txt"...

   1 previously failing test(s) now PASSING! :)
   1 new PASSING test(s) :)
   1 previously FAILING test(s) removed O_o
   1 new FAILING test(s) :(
Passed 437 of 453 tests (96.47%)... FAILED!


from_name: Kelly Martin

body:
On 11/13/06, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> All of this is ignoring the amazing accessibility problems of Java.
> Not only will all of this be totally inaccessible to people on low
> tech devices and the visually impaired, but a huge amount of our
> viewers just don't have java installed (I posted numbers on this
> previously).

I don't see client-side Java as serving any major purpose beyond
providing an alternative platform-independent way to deliver
multimedia content for people who don't have native players installed.
 Trying to implement any of the core application in Java at the client
end targets too small of a usability segment; many people have no JRE
installed in their computer (or at least no JRE extension in their web
browser), and even if they do they have a JRE that only supports
version 1.2 or even 1.1 of the specification.

Kelly


body:
On 14/11/06, David Monniaux <David.Monniaux at free.fr> wrote:

> David, you're generalizing. Say "some Commons admins" if you wish, but
> don't paint everyone with the same brush.

And the dissenting voices were ...

> In addition, there's definitely a problem if projects decide to close
> local uploads and redirect everybody to commons and:
> 1) They don't warn Commons beforehand.
> 2) At least some of their admins don't apply for adminship on Commons.
> We just cannot cope with languages we don't speak.

The whole point is to be a service project. All wikis that don't allow
non-free images were ultimately supposed to use Commons.

If you're saying Commons really can't handle that, then the thing
that's seriously wrong is at the Commons end.

- d.


from_name: Barcex

subject: [Commons-l] Bands from Brazil - Why?

body:
Gregory,

    Just because Portuguese Wikipedia also closed uploads recently, adopting
the same policy than the Spanish Wikipedia.

Barcex

2006/11/13, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com>:
>
> So we know why we're getting a lot of copyvio / unlicensed material
> from Eswiki users...  It's not a trivial problem but at least we
> understand it.
>
> We're getting a lot of 'misplaced articles' Portuguese in the gallery
> namespace on commons. Most of the ones I've seen seem to be various
> advertisements and a lot of garage bands from Brazil.
>
> Anyone know if there is some systematic cause of these which we could
> amend?
> _______________________________________________
> Commons-l mailing list
> Commons-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l
>
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from_name: Artur Fijałkowski

subject: [Commons-l] Bands from Brazil - Why?

body:
2006/11/14, Barcex <lv.cabc at gmail.com>:
> Gregory,
>
>     Just because Portuguese Wikipedia also closed uploads recently, adopting
> the same policy than the Spanish Wikipedia.
>
> Barcex

Nice that everybody was informed ...

AJF/WarX

ps. 6 days left and I start shooting to people


body:
Tuesday, November 14, 2006, 12:00:31 AM, Mark wrote:

> Standard language of PMR is written in Cyrillic.

> Yes, it is a "separatist region", but that does not cancel the fact
> that it is taught in schools there.

Yes, it has been discussed this before: it's not standard Moldovan,
as used by the government of Moldova. So why is it at the mo subdomain?
Shouldn't it be at mo-cyr.wikipedia.org ?

I think that's the main point of disagreement and both Moldovans and
Romanians disagree with the current state.

Anyway, Mark, what do you want to do with this encyclopedia? I don't
that in the last six months it got *any* new original content, despite
the thousands of trolling edits by numerous sock-puppets of Romanian,
Russian, Bulgarian, Greek, American and possibly Georgian origin.


from_name: geni

body:
On 11/14/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> If you're saying Commons really can't handle that, then the thing
> that's seriously wrong is at the Commons end.

Sure always has been. Commons and the wikis that use images on commons
have different objectives different aims and different people. You
should know about the problems at en.pedia Common's doesn't have
anywhere near en.pedia's resources.

--
geni


subject:
[Foundation-l] Fwd: [Commons-l] Principles of organisation - who do
	we serve?

body:
And another ...

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com>
Date: 14-Nov-2006 00:24
Subject: Re: [Commons-l] Principles of organisation - who do we serve?
To: Wikimedia Commons Discussion List <commons-l at wikimedia.org>

Florian Straub wrote:
>> Brion Vibber wrote:
>>> Brianna Laugher wrote:
>>>> On 12/11/06, Florian Straub <flominator at gmx.net> wrote:
>>>>> Awesome! Is there any chance to activate it directly for new
>>>>> registrations
>>>>> on commons or do they people have to confirm their adresses first?
>>>> Thanks, Brion. Specifically, could we require that new registered
>>>> users must have a confirmed email address before uploading? With talk
>>>> page email notifications as default setting.
>>> That's a complete about-face from Wikimedia's traditional policy of
>>> allowing anonymous contributions, so before I set that up I'd need to
>>> know this is acceptable to Wikimedia.
>> (I should clarify that I think it's a good idea, personally. But I would
>> not feel comfortable implementing that policy without both community
>> agreement and approval from upstairs for the ground rules changing
>> dramatically.)
>
> I've just talked to Elian. She said that if it was a consensus between the
> commons people it would be ok.

No disrespect to Elian, but since when does she set Wikimedia-wide
policy singlehandedly?

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
_______________________________________________
Commons-l mailing list
Commons-l at wikimedia.org
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l


subject: [Commons-l] Bands from Brazil - Why?

body:
06-11-14, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> napisa?(a):
> Again: What do you think Commons was created for?

Not for:
* collecting junk from whole world
* collecting images found on other websites
* teaching people what are copyrights (especially when they DON'T
understand English language)

AJF/WarX


from_name: Brianna Laugher

subject: [Commons-l] Deleting images

body:
On 13/11/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:
> Brianna Laugher wrote:
> > Also, if you want to look for "easy" images to delete (ie images that
> > aren't being used elsewhere), use this "Bad Old Ones" script written
> > by Magnus Manske:
> >
> > http://tools.wikimedia.de/~magnus/bad_old_ones.php?category=Unknown_-_August_2006
> >
> > (you can change the category in the URL)
> >
> > ok it is slow to load at first... but then it will tell you in one
> > glance whether an image is being used or not. so you can skip the ones
> > that ARE being used and do the easy ones first. :)
> >
>
> Unfortunately the toolserver appears to be up the creek again...

Yeah the Commons DB is mega-corrupt :( Missing all but the last couple
of weeks' entries that correspond to category membership. So all the
toolserver tools will give faulty results until this is fixed.

It's not like categories are the backbone of Commons, or anything...
:o here's hoping it gets fixed soon.

Brianna


from_name: Anthere

subject: [Commons-l] press release

body:
Hi,

I may just fall entirely out of the spot, but... is there a group of
people working on a press release for the 1000000 of commons ?

I looked around a bit and found only this
*http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikim?dia_France/Communique_sur_le_million_de_Commons
(in french, from the french association)
*http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_logo_mosaic/ConstructionNotes
(this gorgious new logo)

When is thd 1M expected ?

ant