body:
Permanently blocked editors formulating policy on Wikipedia is BAD. I've
submitted this policy for deletion:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Miscellany_for_deletion/Wikipedia:OURS

-Scott Stevenson [[User:Netscott]]

On 6/5/06, Raphael Wegmann <raphael at psi.co.at> wrote:
>
> Jimmy Wales wrote:
> > Resid Gulerdem wrote:
> >>    The admins are only part of the community now and
> >> will stay like that in the future, as far as I can
> >> see. Are some modifications needed in your opinion? I
> >> believe the answer is yes. I do not know if you could
> >> see the proposal [[WP:OURS]] I posted on this list
> >> recently. I think it can be useful and can be
> >> developed further. I tried to outline some important
> >> points which may reduce the conflicts between the
> >> admins and the users. If you saw it, do you think it
> >> is feasible?
> >
> > I see no reference to WP:OURS in google, so I am unable to comment.  Can
> > you send it to me?
> >
>
> I've just created the proposed policy on [[Wikipedia:OURS]].
>
> --
> Raphael
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


list: wikien-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: John Lee

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Psychology of problem Wikipedians: excessive "need
 for	cognition"

body:
David Gerard wrote:

>Karl A. Krueger wrote:
>
>
>
>>When people attempt to explain other people's actions in terms of
>>psychological disorders or oddities, it seems to me that it often
>>reflects a lack of respect or human sympathy for the people thus
>>diagnosed.
>>
>>
>
>[snip long post not addressing the point at all]
>
>
>Gosh, I guess that means we can't call obvious problem cases obvious
>problem cases, and certainly can't try to address the actual problem,
>because it might be rude to do so. Thanks for clearing that up.
>
>
>- d.
>
>
On a similar topic, I would like to know if anyone has added "Wikipedia
is not a counseling or rehabilitation centre" to [[WP:NOT]] yet. We're
here to write an encyclopaedia, not deal with people who have issues,
however deserving of our help and/or sympathy they may be. If they need
help, the Befrienders, Alcoholics' Anonymous, and other such
organisations are in /that/ direction.

I don't believe people should attribute to insanity what can be
attributed to ignorance or plain dickery, but when the insanity/problem
is obvious, we shouldn't kid ourselves.

John


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Steve Bennett

subject: [Wikitech-l] Some statistics I wish I had...

references:
<44833A27.1050303@wikia.com> <e60nvo$9pt$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<e61ngb$r2h$1@sea.gmane.org>

body:
Thanks for posting the data, I replotted it as a set of four
superimposed lines and here's my interpretation:

*Overall not much has changed between 2002 and now. Obviously now we
have a "longer tail" but other than that the curves are very similar
*2003 was a very un-newbie year. It had the sharpest dip in newbie
contributions and a strong middle section (300-700 days)
*2004 was more newbieish than 2005 - more contributions < 300 days,
less < 700 days, and about the same afterwards.

In fact, breaking age ranges up from 0-300, 300-700 and 700+ (just
because that's what the data shows), the years rank as follows (most
contributions to least contributions):
0-300: 2002, 2004, 2005, 2003
300-700: 2003, 2005, 2004, 2002
700+: 2004, 2005, 2003, 2002

But I'm not really finding any major conclusions leaping out. It would
be silly to talk of "drop off in newbie participation" because all
these figures are proportional, not absolute.

Just for interest, here are the percentage contributions for 2005
divided into blocks of 100 days. Read the column on the left as
"People with up to X days"

100	27.43
200	18.40
300	15.01
400	12.50
500	8.76
600	6.16
700	4.09
800	3.69
900	2.31
1000	1.64

I think someone else pointed out the medians, but just to double
check, they are:
2002: 150
2003: 240
2004: 180
2005: 220

I calculated these semi-manually and it's quite possible my method was
wonky. Basically, I tried to find the figure where half the
occurrences were from younger editors, and half were older editors. No
guarantees.

Steve

On 6/5/06, Tim Starling <t.starling at physics.unimelb.edu.au> wrote:
> I wrote:
> > Average was easiest, so I did that as a first try. It shows an initial
> > upward trend, stabilising in early 2005 at about 300 days.
>
> Here's a histogram series for the same data in the form of an animated GIF.
> It shows the distribution of editor age, averaged over a whole year, for
> years 2002-2005.
>
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Days_since_first_edit_histogram.gif
>
> -- Tim Starling
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>


subject: [WikiEN-l] [[WP:OURS]] - A proposal for admin-user relations

body:
Resid Gulerdem wrote:

>The proposal [[WP:OURS]] is below. Since I am
>referring to another proposal [[Wikipedia:Wikiethics]]
>in this proposal, I copy-pasted the updated version of
>the Wikiethics proposal below too for your
>convenience. Right after the proposals, I provided
>further explanations about them.
>
>Please consider this as a sincere effort from a
>relatively new user who lived through some hard times
>because of some structural problems. I would like to
>see the success of this project like many others,
>liked the philosophy behind Wiki movement, and would
>like to suggest some small changes for a better
>environment at which Wikiediting has some written
>ethical statements and standards and user rights and
>admin privileges are well-balanced. That, I believe
>will have some positive impact on Wikipedia. The
>proposals are needed in my opinion if Wikipedia will
>be a welcoming community and an encyclopedia at the
>same time in the future while it is growing.
>
>
Just so we're all on the same page, what is the "philosophy" behind the
Wiki movement? Also, what makes this relevant to Wikipedia? Wikipedia is
an encyclopaedia being built through a wiki because a wiki happens to be
the most efficient way to write an encyclopaedia, not for any
philosophical reasons.

>(The sections below are my earlier messages to some
>people during the discussion on this list. I combined
>the relevant ones together and cc'ing to the list if
>anyone else missed them too.)
>
>------------
>[[WP:OURS]]
>------------
>
>[[WP:OURS]] (sysOp User RelationS or Wikipedia is
>ours) is a policy aimed to clarify the relations
>between sysops and users.
>
>[This could be named as [[WP:AURS]] (Admin-User
>RelationS) as well.]
>
>
Um....what problems are there between sysops and users that need
clarification? I rarely see a strict dividing line between admins and
ordinary users. In many polemical meta issues, Wikipedians have not been
divided along any demarcation boundary that would indicate a significant
causatory relationship between the sysop flag and one's views of a
particular subject.  The fact that admins often seem to "gang up" is
usually caused by the fact that they've been here the longest, so they
*tend* to have a better view of what's going on. ([[Correlation does not
imply causation]], for anyone who's interested.)

>1. '''Ethics and Standards'''
>
>'Content disputes' are one of the main dispute type
>encountered. To avoid that, users need to follow
>well-established ethics and standards of Wikipedia
>(e.g.
>[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Rgulerdem/Wikiethics])
>
>
Those "ethics" are controversial and are not supported by the community.
What's wrong with current policy that necessitates a new policy?

>[I think content disputes and the disputes around a
>controversial issue are very important to address. If
>the standards are applied strictly to everyone, that
>would reduce the energy loss around these kind of
>disputes.]
>
>
This ignores the fact that in a [[meritocracy]] (which includes
encyclopaedia publishing houses), some people's opinions do count more
than others.

>[It is easier to write an article on a purely
>technical matter ''in general'' (e.g. nose, motor,
>etc). If the issue is controversial, that cause some
>problems because sometimes (if not all the times)
>admins are also part of the disputes. Their experience
>and privileges then does not constitute a base for
>neutralization of the article but -let me put it this
>way- rather make them a target for
>accusations. 'Wikilawyering' is not a term to explain
>only ordinary user behavior. It is important to
>realize that there is no stronger factor to polish the
>reputation of Wikipedia than a neutral account
>of the controversial issues.]
>
>
This seems to be grandstanding to me. What're you getting at?

>[I referred to an updated version of a proposal I
>started. I could not have a chance to put it to a vote
>properly.]
>
>2. '''Subject oriented study groups and committees'''
>
>Based on the area of specialization and interest,
>experienced users (more than 6 months of editing
>experience) may join the study groups. Study groups
>work on the controversial articles categorized
>as being related to their area of specialization and
>can make recommendations on particular points. If
>necessary, the study groups may also supervise
>controversial articles until the dispute is resolved.
>
>
This idea may have some merit, and is worth exploring. It depends on how
the community reacts, however. Such committees should not be placed on a
pedestal, nor should they be given excessive privileges. Standing
mini-arbcoms for dealing with content disputes is something worth
considering, nevertheless.

>[Another way of eliminating disputes, I think, is to
>form some study groups based on the area of
>specialization of the users, say 'history of science',
>etc., for example. When the disputes arise,
>the users may ask the opinion of the related study
>groups. The group may vote if necessary on the dispute
>and comes up with a decision. It does not have to be a
>final decision though, as usual. Many
>violations such as 3RR, edit-wars, etc. can be
>diminished that way which may result in a more
>friendly atmosphere between users and admins who feel
>obligated to force the rules consciously.]
>
>3. '''Mentor-mentee program'''
>
>Each user is strongly encouraged to chose only one
>admin mentor when s/he create an account in Wikipedia.
>The users blocked by more than 3 admins are required
>to have a mentor. Users can change their
>mentor anytime they like before involved in a dispute
>by the approval of the new admin chosen to be a
>mentor. Anonym users are out of this program and these
>accounts will be managed as before.
>
>
What is the purpose of this? Isn't this just coddling confirmed problem
editors? This smells like pointless [[m:instruction creep]].

>[This will indicate the popularity of the admins and
>will provide a dynamic measure of their success. This
>dynamic approach might be better than reelecting them
>periodically. There is almost no accountability of
>admins in a practical way. They should be accountable
>to the community. A periodic reaffirmation can be
>added to this too, if someone thinks is of paramount
>importance.]
>
>
We've gone down this road before. RECONFIRMATION OF ADMINS IS NOT A GOOD
IDEA. (Refer to the talk page archives of RfA.) Also, [[WP:NOT]] a
democracy. Popularity should never be a factor in deciding whether an
admin should remain an admin or not. The only thing that matters in any
encyclopaedia publishing house is whether an editor or supervisor's net
contribution is positive or negative.

>4. '''Limited block policy'''
>
>A user can be blocked by only the mentor. In the case
>the mentor is not available, an explanation should be
>posted to the mentors talk page. The mentor can
>unblock the user anytime s/he thinks is appropriate.
>Anonym IP's will be managed as before.
>
>Indefinite block can only be decided by ArbCom, not by
>an admin.
>
>
Any reason for this? As far as I can tell, rogue decisions are undone
pretty quickly (refer to Carnildo's actions in the Joeyramoney scandal)
and legitimate decisions stand. If it ain't broke, why fix it?

>[Admins know the rules better. If there is a concern
>about a user's edits, they can discuss and get an
>agreement on a block based on the rules. It should not
>be hard to convince an admin about the applicability
>of a specific policy. This approach put the discussion
>of the validity of a block onto the admins involved
>rather than to an admin-user dialogue which, not
>surprisingly, results in a block. This part also gives
>the flexibility to the admins who think a block is
>unnecessary but do not want to step on another admin's
>toe.]
>
>[And maybe for once, all users who are blocked so far
>should be able to ask for an unblock, unconditionally,
>after this policy gets approval, if it does. That may
>bring some reconciliations and peace
>to the project.]
>
>
WHY?

This seems to be a very poorly thought out proposal to me, with no
unifying theme. It appears to be something created solely for the
purpose of mollycoddling trolls who have issues of their own. Wikipedia
is not a counseling centre, and it is not a place for the reformation of
editors who cannot work with other editors either. If you have personal
problems in working with other Wikipedians, and as a result are
contributing a net negative, you have no place here. End of story. We're
an encyclopaedia publishing house, not a democracy.

John


subject: [WikiEN-l] "refactoring" signatures

body:
On 6/5/06, Steve Summit <scs at eskimo.com> wrote:
> Indeed not.  But (a) we "encouraged" it the day we implemented
> the "Raw signature" checkbox next to the Nickname field on the
> Preferences page, and (b) because it's an intensely personal
> issue, when it comes time to discourage abuses, the way you do it
> matters.

Would it be possible to limit the length of the signature? There's
probably a limit to how offensively creative one can be in 50
characters...

Steve


subject: [Wikitech-l] New error message

body:
Haven't seen this one before - was previewing a change to a page:

Database error
>From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search
A database query syntax error has occurred. This may indicate a bug in
the software. The last attempted database query was:

    (SQL query hidden)

from within function "oaiUpdatePage". MySQL returned error "1213:
Deadlock found when trying to get lock; Try restarting transaction
(10.0.0.2)".

Steve


list: foundation-l

from_name: valdelli at bluemail.ch

body:
There is no sense in this question. Who takes part in the board should have
quality of leadership because we are a community.

If a person has other relevant qualities but the community doesn't accept
he as leader, there is no other reason to have he in the board. The board
should be representative and to verify this condition there is only one way.

Regards

Ilario

>-- Messaggio originale --
>Date: Tue, 6 Jun 2006 03:06:25 +1000
>From: Angela <beesley at gmail.com>
>To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List" <foundation-l at wikimedia.org>
>Subject: [Foundation-l] Would you consider being on the Board?
>Reply-To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List <foundation-l at wikimedia.org>
>
>
>With the talk on this list recently of jobs that need doing, I'm
>interested to know whether there are many people who would be
>interested in being a member of the Board if there were more seats
>available. If that is something you'd consider, please let me know.
>
>Note that I'm not saying this is a possibility right now, but it would
>make planning easier if we had something more than guesswork of who
>might be a candidate to go on.
>
>Angela.
>_______________________________________________
>foundation-l mailing list
>foundation-l at wikimedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l


subject: [Foundation-l] Would you consider being on the Board?


list: wikimedia-l


body:
The community could accept only representative members voted with normal
procedure.

Because who has this mandate, he should have the possibility to complete
his job until the end of his own mandate without change of mind. Please,
accept the good sides of democracy and not those negative.

Regards

Ilario

>-- Messaggio originale --
>Date: Tue, 6 Jun 2006 03:06:25 +1000
>From: Angela <beesley at gmail.com>
>To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List" <foundation-l at wikimedia.org>
>Subject: [Foundation-l] Would you consider being on the Board?
>Reply-To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List <foundation-l at wikimedia.org>
>
>
>With the talk on this list recently of jobs that need doing, I'm
>interested to know whether there are many people who would be
>interested in being a member of the Board if there were more seats
>available. If that is something you'd consider, please let me know.
>
>Note that I'm not saying this is a possibility right now, but it would
>make planning easier if we had something more than guesswork of who
>might be a candidate to go on.
>
>Angela.


from_name: Cormac Lawler

body:
On 6/5/06, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:

> This is a semi-digression, but one thing that would also be nice to know
> is how to get on those (new or old) committees, and what sorts of time
> and expertise they require.  I know I'd be willing to devote some time
> to a committee if it aligned with my interests and expertise, but the
> process is currently a bit murky to me.
>

Hi Mark,
you can find all existing committees listed at:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_committees

Not all committees have their details or procedures outlined yet (I'm
not sure if some of them are operational), but the following committee
pages detail how their membership is managed:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special_projects_committee
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Chapters_committee/Rules_of_procedure
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Communications_committee

With regards to time, I can only speak for the committee that I'm
involved with (the special projects committee), and even still, it
really depends on the kind of work that you're interested in doing.
Some work is constant (ie evaluating and responding to requests for
collaboration, requests to use our content in some way etc.), some
work is occasional, like writing grant proposals, but, overall, it's
an hour or two per day along with a three hour or so meeting more or
less every two weeks. Again, different committees will have different
workloads, methods, so it's difficult to say exactly what and how much
is involved.

With regards to expertise, that's something that I'd like to get a
much better picture of, as we sometimes get proposals for things that
we are just not currently equipped to deal with, and it would be good
to know who in the community to turn to at times like those. I think I
can speak for the whole SPC that we'd love to hear ideas on how to
improve this process, get more people involved, and generally get
through our burgeoning workload that bit faster and more efficiently.

Cormac


subject: [WikiEN-l] "refactoring" signatures

body:
Daniel R. Tobias wrote:

>On 5 Jun 2006 at 00:08, Steve Summit <scs at eskimo.com> wrote:
>
>
>
>>Tony: I agree, cutsie sigs are as annoying as hell, too, but: are
>>they *really* that big a problem in the grand scheme of things?
>>
>>
>
>The "cutesie sigs" problems seems to be like the userbox problem all
>over again... once again you have a bunch of users who seem to be
>treating Wikipedia like another Myspace or LiveJournal, and another
>bunch of editors/admins who are so offended by this that they insist
>on taking draconian action against the first group... and then both
>groups escalate matters and get much more heated-up about it than the
>whole silly issue deserves.
>
>
Ditto. It seems every time I take a short break for a holiday or exams
stuff like this happens. These days I just keep my head down and go with
the flow.

John


from_name: Sam Spade

subject: [WikiEN-l] The admin problem

body:
> In this case, assuming my memory is not malfunctioning yet again, I
> believe Sam's "cite" was: "a certain percentage of Americans are
> Christian, Jewish, or Muslim".  Which then became: "the majority of
> humans believe in God."
>
> In other words, the cite was no good for what he wanted to claim, and
> only served to add America-centrism to his long list of offensive
> editing practices.

Look at them again.

It was three cites, 2 of american, the third a BBC international
survey. Not that the facts make any difference, when you already have
your mind made up. I expected encyclopedia readers to be better than
this...

SS


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Francis Tyers

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Tajik wikipedia (again)

body:
Hi,

Would it be possible to get ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? on the bottom of the edit
box? (Like we have for the special characters on the en and ro
Wikipedias)?

Also how does one go about getting the interface language changed? Are
there po files that can be edited?

Thanks,

Fran


subject: [WikiEN-l] "refactoring" signatures

body:
Guettarda wrote:

>On 6/5/06, Daniel R. Tobias <dan at tobias.name> wrote:
>
>
>>On 5 Jun 2006 at 00:08, Steve Summit <scs at eskimo.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>>>Tony: I agree, cutsie sigs are as annoying as hell, too, but: are
>>>they *really* that big a problem in the grand scheme of things?
>>>
>>>
>>The "cutesie sigs" problems seems to be like the userbox problem all
>>over again... once again you have a bunch of users who seem to be
>>treating Wikipedia like another Myspace or LiveJournal, and another
>>bunch of editors/admins who are so offended by this that they insist
>>on taking draconian action against the first group... and then both
>>groups escalate matters and get much more heated-up about it than the
>>whole silly issue deserves.
>>
>>
>
>
>Except that, while there is a rationale for complaining about the userbox
>issue (campaigning, divisive userboxes, etc), there is no inherent problem
>with sigs beyond the obvious space usage and that, while it can be annoying,
>rarely poses a real problem, since sigs belong at the end of paragraphs.
>It's certainly no more of a problem than is subst:'ing {{unsigned}}
>
>Not only is the software set up to use custom sigs, they are also quite
>useful.  It takes two clicks to get to the talk page of a standard sig like
>I use, only one with a custom sig.  It's also easier to follow conversations
>long conversations when you can pick out the sigs without reading them
>(though that may only apply to people who read "whole paragraph").  That
>said, of course, there's nothing wrong with refactoring sigs on your talk
>page.  Of course, since it's Tony doing it, it looks like WP:POINT, yet
>again.  Once again, the cure seems worse than the disease (from a person
>with an unformatted sig and only one "vanity" userbox)
>
>Ian
>
>
I think the problem is not so much with custom sigs as with people who
use fancy coding. It's irritating, especially when editing in a tight
spot with a lot of extraneous HTML code. (Try closing an [[WP:RFD]] and
you'll see what I mean.) The best custom sigs (such as mine) get their
point across without having to resort to too much HTML. Mine is entirely
in wikicode, because all the customisation it has is a link to my talk.
This isn't a really big problem, though, IMO. Nevertheless, on one's own
talk page, as long as the substance of the comment is unaltered, there
shouldn't be anything wrong with altering customisation-heavy sigs.

John


from_name: Alison Wheeler

body:
On Mon, June 5, 2006 20:20, Jimmy Wales wrote:
> We have
> some very good board candidates who are not famous in the community and
> who could bring to the table professional expertise that we greatly
> need, but who would not put themselves through the troll wars of an
> election.

To pick up on this point, it has become a truism that there are editors
who think this is a social democracy of some sort - that user interaction
is the main point of our projects - and those who are more aware that this
is about the creation of a freely-accessible encyclopedia to every person
on the planet*. But whilst volunteers like me and you may find the social
aspects to our activities here very enjoyable, that creation process is
what matters far more.

This means that whilst the projects themselves can be pretty much
self-organised and democratic, the foundation really cannot be. The
foundation has legal requirements upon it; it is a Company with its own
legal and financial identity and the management of that company has to
move to a more secure and 'professional' basis, which means that it isn't
a matter of 'support by the masses of registered users' but demonstrations
of experience, skills and knowledge that can be brought to improve the
prospects of reaching that target we all seek.

During the last five years of founding and growth Wikipedia has been
pretty much like one of those garage companies; the choice of people
getting involved as much for their connections with the founders as their
skills. Nothing at all wrong with that; some great companies have started
out like that. But they've all known that at some point some changes would
have to happen in order to reach the next level. We need to grow our
finances and our public relationships to match and support the plans of
our editors, and the bigger we get the more that really matters.

And this is the point that, it seems to me, we have recently arrived at.
We shouldn't throw out the baby with the bathwater; the way the projects
work is mostly brilliant, and what isn't people are working on. But the
Foundation has to have a secure basis on which to proceed, so some
selectivity has be used if it is to continue to support the projects in
the way we all want and expect.

I would hope that anyone interested in joining the board - now or in the
future - would be someone already aware of the way we work well together
(mostly!), someone who has been 'around here' a while, but that isn't all
that can matter anymore.

Alison Wheeler

* Those in orbit are very welcome too!


from_name: Daniel R. Tobias

subject: [WikiEN-l] To: Jimmy Wales - Admin-driven death of Wikipedia

body:
On 5 Jun 2006 at 13:53, "Selina ." <wikipediareview at gmail.com> wrote:

> Racism is illegal and as well as the editor puts Wikipedia in a bad
> position. If people can't put bigotry aside and instead try to force
> articles into their personal view of the world, it's right to ban them.

How is racism illegal?  Racism is a belief system, and unless you
have a regime that prosecutes thought-crimes, it can't be made
illegal.  Certain forms of speech or action that are racially-
related, and perhaps motivated by racism, are illegal in certain
places, though the free-speech protections of some countries'
constitutions place sharp limits on the criminalization of pure
speech without action in those places, including the United States.

--
== Dan ==
Dan's Mail Format Site: http://mailformat.dan.info/
Dan's Web Tips: http://webtips.dan.info/
Dan's Domain Site: http://domains.dan.info/


body:
On Mon, June 5, 2006 21:10, Gregory Maxwell wrote:
> On 6/5/06, Alison Wheeler <wikimedia at alisonwheeler.com> wrote:
> [snip]
>> is about the creation of a freely-accessible encyclopedia to every
>> person
>> on the planet*.
> [snip]
>
> And when did the purpose of the project relax from being the creation
> of perpetually [[Free content]] to merely the creation of content
> which is accessible without a charge?
>
> I'm picking a nit here, no doubt, but it's an important one... and I
> don't want to see this thread cited in a later argument when Wikimedia
> UK isn't around to clarify.
>


subject:
[WikiEN-l] Psychology of problem Wikipedians: excessive "need
 for cognition"

body:
Selina . wrote:

>On 05/06/06, Katie the Obscure <nihthraefn at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>>On 6/5/06, John Lee <johnleemk at gawab.com> wrote:
>>
>>>On a similar topic, I would like to know if anyone has added "Wikipedia
>>>is not a counseling or rehabilitation centre" to [[WP:NOT]] yet. We're
>>>here to write an encyclopaedia, not deal with people who have issues,
>>>however deserving of our help and/or sympathy they may be. If they need
>>>help, the Befrienders, Alcoholics' Anonymous, and other such
>>>organisations are in /that/ direction.
>>>
>>>I don't believe people should attribute to insanity what can be
>>>attributed to ignorance or plain dickery, but when the insanity/problem
>>>is obvious, we shouldn't kid ourselves.
>>>
>>>John
>>>
>>>
>>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_is_not_therapy
>>It's only an essay, but it says a lot.
>>
>>--
>>niht-hr?fn
>>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Keitei
>>
>>
>
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_is_not_therapy?action=history
>As you can see it was written only about 2 months ago, ENTIRELY by Fred
>Bauder (see differences between his last edit and the most recent edit -
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_is_not_therapy?diff=48498374&oldid=45622959).
>It's his personal opinions, it's not policy at all.
>In fact it should probably be in his userspace.
>
>
It's tagged as an essay for a reason.

John


body:
>
>But community vote is not the only way to get board members.  We have
>some very good board candidates who are not famous in the community and
>who could bring to the table professional expertise that we greatly
>need, but who would not put themselves through the troll wars of an
>election.
>

Personally I (totally) agree, impersonally I disagree.

I've had experience on this situation when I was in Italy when a politic
government could not be done in the past and the nation have had a "technical"
government with very good ministers. They have made a very, very good job
but for a limited time because the representatives of politic didn't accept
to be replaced. What is the moral? There is a part in the community who can
move opinions and destroy the good job of "skilled" persons, if these technical
members don't have the ability to be a little more leader.

Regards

Ilario


body:
(just found that my answer lost itself!)

On Mon, June 5, 2006 21:10, Gregory Maxwell wrote:
> On 6/5/06, Alison Wheeler <wikimedia at alisonwheeler.com> wrote:
> [snip]
>> is about the creation of a freely-accessible encyclopedia to every
>> person
>> on the planet*.
> [snip]
>
> And when did the purpose of the project relax from being the creation
> of perpetually [[Free content]] to merely the creation of content
> which is accessible without a charge?
>
> I'm picking a nit here, no doubt, but it's an important one... and I
> don't want to see this thread cited in a later argument when Wikimedia
> UK isn't around to clarify.

Firstly, it was a post by me and nothing to do with WMUK, but
"freely-accessible" content *is* "perpetually free content" so far as I
too am concerned and is not restricted just to charges.  Freedom can refer
to platform, access, language, methods (eg not just print but braille and
spoken) not just cash and where it goes. Just as Wikimedia isn't now only
about Wikipedia - where we started. We have all the projects to improve
and expand.

The cash we need to support our range of projects though, is another thing
entirely. We need lots of that ... and to spend it wisely ...

Alison Wheeler


from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [Foundation-l] Site notices, bots, fundraising, etc.

body:
--- Michael Snow <wikipedia at earthlink.net> wrote:
> Incidentally, I know the idea of a Fundraising committee is still just
> getting off the ground, but could we get an idea of when we would have a
> fundraiser, and for how long? In order for the site notices to be
> effective, we have to maintain some downtime between uses, and we need
> to be able to plan the other uses as much as possible.

The board is voting on the establishment of the fundraising committee on the board wiki. If they
pass the resolution I wrote w/o modification, then the committee should be set up soon (next
couple weeks). I imagine the first order of business would be to organize the next fundraiser.
Pre-planning may begin as soon as this weekend if I can find the time.

But having a drive soon is not too pressing due to the huge success of the last fundraiser, higher
than expected non-fundraiser background donations since, and lower than expected expenses so far
this year. The spending side may change if one or more committees asks for a significant increase
in their budget (now being worked on).

-- mav

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


subject: [Foundation-l] Where we are headed

body:
--- Michael Snow <wikipedia at earthlink.net> wrote:
> One
> use of interest to us is that if a company has a charitable giving
> program in which employees can have an amount withheld from their
> paychecks to the charity of their choice, the company would need the
> charity's EIN. I'm not aware of any serious problem for a nonprofit
> publishing this number (the American Red Cross publishes theirs on their
> website). In fact, I've suggested putting ours out there in order to
> make it easier for companies to add us to gift-matching programs, but
> I'm not aware that this has been done yet.

Our EIN has been on the foundation wiki for some time now:

http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Deductibility_of_donations

Of course, that whole set of pages needs to be re-done so finding things like that are easy.

-- mav

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


subject: [Foundation-l] Where we are headed


from_name: Tony Sidaway

subject:
[WikiEN-l] "refactoring" signatures (was: cancelation of the
	deletion review of the satanism userbox)

body:
On 6/5/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:

?[[Wikipedia:Concordia|C]][[User:Cuivienen|uivi]][[User:Cuivienen/Esperanza|?]][[User:Cuivienen|nen]][[User
talk:Cuivienen|T]]|[[Special:Contributions/Cuivienen|C]]|[[Special:Emailuser/Cuivienen|@]] on [[Tuesday]], [[30 May]] [[2006]] at 20:54
[[UTC]]'''

Now *that* is what I call "taking the piss".


from_name: Platonides

subject: [Wikitech-l] HTML normalization, transclusions, nesting

body:
"Nick Jenkins" wrote:
> Yes, it is slightly unfortunate that "|" has been overloaded to mean
> both a parameter and to perform table-related functions.
>
> Of course with 20/20 hindsight, it's easy to say it could be useful to
> have two different constructs for these purposes. I suppose it's
> theoretically possible to introduce a new construct of some type
> (example: "%") to indicate parameters (since I suspect parameter
> delimiters are probably used less than "|" in tables), and have an
> overlap period when both the new and the old construct work to allow
> transitioning, and to then turn off/deprecate "|" for parameters. Then
> the old HTML "<table>" syntax could be dropped if there was general
> support for it (bias disclaimer: I personally prefer the
> wiki-table-syntax to the HTML-table-syntax), because "|" would no
> longer interfere with templates or ParserFunctions.

I'm sure | is more used as parameter delimiter than table marker. You only
need to count the number of [[link|named links]] a page has, and the number
of tables.


subject: [WikiEN-l] "refactoring" signatures

body:
On 6/5/06, Lord Voldemort <lordbishopvoldemort at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> [[User:Can't sleep, clown will eat me|32Can't sleep, clown will eat me]]
>
> I think that's 70 characters including spaces, punctuation and
> brackets.  Just for reference purposes.

[[User:Can't sleep, clown will eat me|]]

That's considerably shorter.

And of course it's not normally necessary for users to choose ridiculous names.


subject: [WikiEN-l] "refactoring" signatures

body:
On 6/5/06, Lord Voldemort <lordbishopvoldemort at gmail.com> wrote:
> [[User:Can't sleep, clown will eat me|32Can't sleep, clown will eat me]]
>
> I think that's 70 characters including spaces, punctuation and
> brackets.  Just for reference purposes.

I'm going to assume you meant to add "And obviously Can't sleep, clown
will eat me's name is well within the limits of a reasonable length
user name, and hence signature". And then I'm going to disagree.

Steve


subject: [WikiEN-l] "refactoring" signatures

body:
On 6/5/06, George Herbert <george.herbert at gmail.com> wrote:
> You could use (2x or 3x user name length + some fixed amount), to let people
> have separate links to User: and User talk: pages, which I find useful.

Nah. If you really want that, just make the strings %T% and %C%
automatically substitute for those links, if necessary. Hard limit on
sigs for everyone! Allowing people with longer names twice as many
characters in their sigs makes the problem worse, by encouraging
longer names. Hard limit on sigs for everyone!

Seriously, my only complaint with silly sigs is trying to wade through
them in the wikimarkup. Hard limit on sigs for everyone!

> Tony (and others) - what length and display mode of page editing gets
> signatures to the point that they bother you?  Past two lines of standard
> screen size edit window?

Let's see...[[User Talk:Stevage|]] has 22. I'll be generous. 30 characters.

Steve


from_name: Andrew Gray

subject: [WikiEN-l] "refactoring" signatures

body:
On 05/06/06, Tony Sidaway <f.crdfa at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 6/5/06, Lord Voldemort <lordbishopvoldemort at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > [[User:Can't sleep, clown will eat me|32Can't sleep, clown will eat me]]
> >
> > I think that's 70 characters including spaces, punctuation and
> > brackets.  Just for reference purposes.
>
> [[User:Can't sleep, clown will eat me|]]
>
> That's considerably shorter.
>
> And of course it's not normally necessary for users to choose ridiculous names.

This prompts a thought.

Most people know of the pipe trick with wikisyntax - typing [[Article
name (modifier)]] displays as _Article name (modifier)_; typing it
[[Article name (modifier)|]] - ie, with a single | character but no
alternate text  - is converted into [[Article name (modifier)|Article
name]], displaying as _Article name_

How difficult would it be to adapt the wikisyntax such that
[[|Namespace:Article name]] or [[Namespace:Article name||]] is
converted into [[Namespace:Article name|Article name]]? I've noticed
this a few times before, often when linking to Wikipedia policy pages
or cats - not quite as useful a shortcut as the pipe trick, but it'd
be handy to have.

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


subject:
[WikiEN-l] cancelation of the deletion review of the satanism
	userbox

body:
On 6/5/06, Fastfission <fastfission at gmail.com> wrote:
> Here's a tip: When two dozen people complain about your unilateral
> decisions to delete things or what have you, you should consider
> re-opening it up to discussion, rather than insisting on your
> correctness.

Hmmm, you've got it wrong.  One or two people made some ludicrous
complaints.  They made a RfC ("re-opening it up to discussion" ) and
the result is that there is no significant challenge here to the
normal process of refactoring.

Please read the history of this affair.  You may find that it is
considerably different from your preconceived ideas.


body:
On 6/5/06, Fastfission <fastfission at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I think we should err on the side of non-unilateral action

What does that mean?  How does this fit in with "Be bold"?


body:
On 6/5/06, Mark Wagner <carnildo at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 6/5/06, Guettarda <guettarda at gmail.com> wrote:
> > It's also easier to follow conversations
> > long conversations when you can pick out the sigs without reading them
>
> When you're reading a talkpage via a diff, it's a lot harder to pick
> out the end of a paragraph and figure out who wrote it when the author
> used a fancy signature with a half-dozen links in it.

Yep. Here are some good examples:
[[User:NoSeptember|'''NoSeptember''']]
[[User talk:NoSeptember|''talk'']] 14:22, 5 June 2006 (UTC)

Jun. 5, '06<tt> '''[19:23] <[{{fullurl:user:freakofnurture}}
freak]|[{{fullurl:user talk:freakofnurture|action=edit&section=new}}
talk]>'''</tt>

--[[user:Celestianpower|Cel]][[User:Celestianpower/Esperanza|es]][[User:Celestianpower|tianpower]]
[[user talk:Celestianpower|h?blame]] 13:09, 5 June 2006
(UTC)

--[[User:GeorgeMoney|GeorgeMoney]] [[User_talk:GeorgeMoney|T]]·[[Special:Contributions/GeorgeMoney|C]]
03:17, 5 June 2006 (UTC)

<tt>[[User:RadioKirk|Radio]][[Special:Contributions/RadioKirk|Kirk]]</tt> <tt>[[User
talk:RadioKirk|talk to
me]]</tt> 05:06, 5 June 2006 (UTC)

?[[Wikipedia:Concordia|C]][[User:Cuivienen|uivi]][[User:Cuivienen/Esperanza|?]][[User:Cuivienen|nen]][[User
talk:Cuivienen|T]]|[[Special:Contributions/Cuivienen|C]]|[[Special:Emailuser/Cuivienen|@]] on [[Tuesday]], [[30 May]] [[2006]] at 20:54
[[UTC]]'''

(yes, the comments are actually part of the signature)

[[User:NSLE|NSL]][[WP:EA|E]]
([[User_talk:NSLE|T]]+[[Special:Contributions/NSLE|C]]) at
01:19 [[Coordinated Universal Time|UTC]]
([[2006-06-04]])

'''[[User:Nobleeagle|Nobleeagle]]''' [[User_talk:Nobleeagle| (Talk)]] 07:50, 9
April 2006 (UTC)

--'''[[User:Fbv65edel|Fbv]]'''[[User:Fbv65edel|65]]''[[User:Fbv65edel|edel]]''
([[User_talk:Fbv65edel|discuss]] |
[[Special:Contributions/Fbv65edel|contribs]]) 23:59, 10 April
2006 (UTC)

--[[WP:EA|S]][[User:Siva1979|iva1979]][[User talk:Siva1979|Talk to
me]] 15:32, 4 May 2006 (UTC)

[[User:Titoxd|Tito]][[Wikipedia:Esperanza|xd]]([[User_talk:Titoxd|?!?]] -
[[Wikipedia:WikiProject edit counters/Flcelloguy's Tool|help
us]]) 05:01, 4 June 2006 (UTC)

That should offer some food for thought. And for anyone who made it
through all that, puzzle for the day: is [[User:Richard Branson]] for
real?

Steve


from_name: Steve Summit

subject: [WikiEN-l] "refactoring" signatures

body:
Tony Sidaway wrote:
> On 6/5/06, Steve Summit <scs at eskimo.com> wrote:
>> Human nature is what it is and cannot be swept aside or redefined.
>
> This is why the LART was invented.

But of course, the LART is a just another symptom of the very
same problem I'm talking about.


subject: [WikiEN-l] "refactoring" signatures

body:
On 6/5/06, Steve Summit <scs at eskimo.com> wrote:
> Human nature is what it is and cannot be swept aside or redefined.

This is why the LART was invented.


subject: [WikiEN-l] "refactoring" signatures

body:
On 6/5/06, George Herbert <george.herbert at gmail.com> wrote:
> Some form of the basic template that we use for {{user|Name}} and
> {{vandal|Name}} might also help.  Those templates are extremely compact on
> pages and yet allow you to pack a bunch of displayed info on pages.

Can you elaborate? Transcluding would be a huge performance hit.
Substing would put us back where we started. Do we really need all
those links? Surely user and talk are enough? No?

Steve


subject: [WikiEN-l] "refactoring" signatures

body:
On 05/06/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:

> > How difficult would it be to adapt the wikisyntax such that
> > [[|Namespace:Article name]] or [[Namespace:Article name||]] is
> > converted into [[Namespace:Article name|Article name]]? I've noticed
> > this a few times before, often when linking to Wikipedia policy pages
> > or cats - not quite as useful a shortcut as the pipe trick, but it'd
> > be handy to have.
>
> Um, that's already the case? I don't know how long it's been around,
> but that definitely works.

You know, before suggesting things in future, I really ought to *test* them...

Sorry all!

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


from_name: Guy Chapman aka JzG

subject: [WikiEN-l] "refactoring" signatures

body:
On Mon, 5 Jun 2006 23:10:10 +0100, you wrote:

>And of course it's not normally necessary for users to choose ridiculous names.

Careful now.  Some of us are deeply attached to our nicks :-)

Guy (JzG)
--
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG


body:
On 6/5/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> "Be bold" gives you a licence to attempt to do the right thing once.
> "Don't be a dick" says stop attempting when other people tell you to.

Absolutely.  Now apply this to signatures.

However you seem here to be suggesting that I'm being told to any
great degree that signatures are uniquely immune from refactoring.
Tain't so.  We'd probably need a strong consensus to make an exception
to policy of that magnitude.


subject: [Wikitech-l] MLMW - question about extension page

body:
"Grace Pastorelly Ruiz"wrote:
> Hi,
>
> i'm writing a Specialpage named Languages (Special:Languages) to display
> some information from language table (multilingual)
> but i got a problem, the data is shown twice and also in any special page
> this information is shown.

It is shown on ANY page, as if it were part of the MediaWiki:Sitenotice

It's the first time i try to do it. Tt works, but don't really know if it's
the correct way. If you change the LocalSettings part by
require_once('includes/SpecialPage.php');
SpecialPage::addPage(new SpecialPage('Languages'));

It then works.

I needed to move the SpecialLanguages.php from /extensions folder to
/includes to have MediaWiki find it.
As the page is added by the LocalSettings, the same line at MLMWLanguages
can be commented.

BTW, ISO 639_2 for english & spanish are en & es, not eng & spa
http://www.oasis-open.org/cover/iso639a.html


from_name: Minh Nguyen

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Monobook

body:
Berto wrote:
> Here you are :)
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Infobox_Language
>
> B?rto

Hi B?rto,

I haven't taken a look at the pms: copy of Infobox Language, but I spent
a whole day importing that into the Vietnamese Wikipedia. That template
actually embeds a slew of helper templates (scroll down in the edit
page), so the problem is probably that you haven't imported all of those
templates (and translated them...) as well.

--
Minh Nguyen <mxn at zoomtown.com>
AIM: trycom2000; Jabber: mxn at myjabber.net; Blog: http://mxn.f2o.org/


subject: [WikiEN-l] "refactoring" signatures

body:
On 6/5/06, Fastfission <fastfission at gmail.com> wrote:
> I think we can all agree that in cases where a signature really does
> significantly hinder editing, it should be reduced to the point where
> it doesn't.
>
> I'm not sure we will ever agree on a quantitative way of deciding
> that. The annoyance is a qualtitative effect, so the inability to put
> a good number on it won't be helpful.
>
> If you set a hard number, people will just come up with creative ways
> to be annoying within that number of characters. If we do have any
> guidelines, better for them to be qualtitative, IMO. It will cause
> occasional back-and-forth but if people start complaining about
> individual signatures then it's probably a good indication that it is
> enough of a nuisance to require some changing.

For me, the annoyance is almost entirely proportional to the number of
characters taken up in wikitext, so it's quantitative not qualitative.
Set a hard limit of 70 chars and I'll be happyish. 35 and I'll be
twice as happy. You don't want to see what would happen if it was
17.5.

The visual effects of colourful signatures are actually mildly
benefical to me, if anything.

Steve


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Tajik wikipedia (again)

body:
Francis Tyers wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Would it be possible to get ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? on the bottom of the edit
> box? (Like we have for the special characters on the en and ro
> Wikipedias)?
>
> Also how does one go about getting the interface language changed? Are
> there po files that can be edited?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Fran

Hi Fran,

If you have administrator privileges at the Tajik Wikipedia, go to
<http://tg.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Allmessages> and click on the
links under the "Name" column to translate each message individually.
I'd suggest translating the most prominent messages that way at first,
although you'll eventually want to create a LanguageTg.php file with all
the localization strings, so that MediaWiki can come bundled with a
Tajik localization in the future:
<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Language.php>.

--
Minh Nguyen <mxn at zoomtown.com>
AIM: trycom2000; Jabber: mxn at myjabber.net; Blog: http://mxn.f2o.org/


subject: [WikiEN-l] "refactoring" signatures

body:
On 6/5/06, George Herbert <george.herbert at gmail.com> wrote:
> Not being even vaguely involved in the server management / performance side
> of things, how much of a hit are we talking about?  How much additional
> resources do the various admin pages full of {{vandal|}} and {{user|}}
> impose?

I'm not either. But that never stops me. The thing about signatures,
is they're used on thousands of pages. If every user's signature is
transcluded, that's hundreds of thousands of extra transclusions. It
would be great if that wasn't a major problem, but I suspect it is.

> In terms of parsing the proposed %T% %C% etc variables, are there other
> variables being run in-line which would serve as a performance comparison as
> well, for that approach?

I don't understand the question. "Variables being run in-line"?

Steve


from_name: Stephen Bain

subject: [WikiEN-l] "refactoring" signatures

body:
On 6/5/06, John Lee <johnleemk at gawab.com> wrote:
> >
> I think the problem is not so much with custom sigs as with people who
> use fancy coding. It's irritating, especially when editing in a tight
> spot with a lot of extraneous HTML code. (Try closing an [[WP:RFD]] and
> you'll see what I mean.) The best custom sigs (such as mine) get their
> point across without having to resort to too much HTML. Mine is entirely
> in wikicode, because all the customisation it has is a link to my talk.
> This isn't a really big problem, though, IMO. Nevertheless, on one's own
> talk page, as long as the substance of the comment is unaltered, there
> shouldn't be anything wrong with altering customisation-heavy sigs.

We should encourage everyone with an outrageous, fancy or creative sig
to instead develop an outrageous, fancy or creative userpage (where
there really is scope to express one's self), and have their signature
as primarily a simple link there, so people are actually able to go
and see it.

--
Stephen Bain
stephen.bain at gmail.com


from_name: brion at pobox.com

subject: [Wikitech-l] MediaWiki automated test run failure 2006-06-06

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

Running test Table security: embedded pipes (http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2006-April/034637.html)... FAILED!
Running test Link containing double-single-quotes '' (bug 4598)... FAILED!
Running test BUG 1887, part 2: A <math> with a thumbnail- math enabled... FAILED!
Running test Language converter: output gets cut off unexpectedly (bug 5757)... FAILED!
Running test HTML bullet list, unclosed tags (bug 5497)... FAILED!
Running test HTML ordered list, unclosed tags (bug 5497)... FAILED!
Running test HTML nested bullet list, open tags (bug 5497)... FAILED!
Running test HTML nested ordered list, open tags (bug 5497)... FAILED!
Running test Parsing optional HTML elements (Bug 6171)... FAILED!
Running test Inline HTML vs wiki block nesting... FAILED!
Running test Mixing markup for italics and bold... FAILED!

Passed 379 of 390 tests (97.18%) FAILED!


subject:
[WikiEN-l] Psychology of problem Wikipedians: excessive "need
	for cognition"

body:
On 6/5/06, John Lee <johnleemk at gawab.com> wrote:
> >
> On a similar topic, I would like to know if anyone has added "Wikipedia
> is not a counseling or rehabilitation centre" to [[WP:NOT]] yet. We're
> here to write an encyclopaedia, not deal with people who have issues,
> however deserving of our help and/or sympathy they may be. If they need
> help, the Befrienders, Alcoholics' Anonymous, and other such
> organisations are in /that/ direction.

"Dammit, Jimbo, I'm an encyclopaedia, not a doctor."

--
Stephen Bain
stephen.bain at gmail.com


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Tajik wikipedia (again)

body:
Francis Tyers wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Would it be possible to get ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? on the bottom of the edit
> box? (Like we have for the special characters on the en and ro
> Wikipedias)?
>
> Also how does one go about getting the interface language changed? Are
> there po files that can be edited?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Fran

Ah, almost forgot: first read the directions in my previous e-mail; if
you have administrator privileges at the Tajik Wikipedia, you can edit
<http://tg.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Edittools> using the
"charinsert" syntax found at
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Edittools>. This will create an
insert box *below* the Summary line and Save and Preview buttons. If you
want the box to appear between the edit box and Summary line, place the
code in <http://tg.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Copyrightwarning> instead.

--
Minh Nguyen <mxn at zoomtown.com>
AIM: trycom2000; Jabber: mxn at myjabber.net; Blog: http://mxn.f2o.org/


subject: [WikiEN-l] "refactoring" signatures

body:
On 6/6/06, Andrew Gray <shimgray at gmail.com> wrote:
> Most people know of the pipe trick with wikisyntax - typing [[Article
> name (modifier)]] displays as _Article name (modifier)_; typing it
> [[Article name (modifier)|]] - ie, with a single | character but no
> alternate text  - is converted into [[Article name (modifier)|Article
> name]], displaying as _Article name_
>
> How difficult would it be to adapt the wikisyntax such that
> [[|Namespace:Article name]] or [[Namespace:Article name||]] is
> converted into [[Namespace:Article name|Article name]]? I've noticed
> this a few times before, often when linking to Wikipedia policy pages
> or cats - not quite as useful a shortcut as the pipe trick, but it'd
> be handy to have.

Um, that's already the case? I don't know how long it's been around,
but that definitely works.

Steve


body:
On 6/6/06, Tony Sidaway <f.crdfa at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 6/5/06, Fastfission <fastfission at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > I think we should err on the side of non-unilateral action
>
> What does that mean?  How does this fit in with "Be bold"?

"Be bold" gives you a licence to attempt to do the right thing once.
"Don't be a dick" says stop attempting when other people tell you to.

Steve


from_name: Mark Gallagher

subject: [WikiEN-l] "refactoring" signatures

body:
G'day John,

> Daniel R. Tobias wrote:
>>On 5 Jun 2006 at 00:08, Steve Summit <scs at eskimo.com> wrote:
>>
>>>Tony: I agree, cutsie sigs are as annoying as hell, too, but: are
>>>they *really* that big a problem in the grand scheme of things?
>>
>>The "cutesie sigs" problems seems to be like the userbox problem all
>>over again... once again you have a bunch of users who seem to be
>>treating Wikipedia like another Myspace or LiveJournal, and another
>>bunch of editors/admins who are so offended by this that they insist
>>on taking draconian action against the first group... and then both
>>groups escalate matters and get much more heated-up about it than the
>>whole silly issue deserves.
>
> Ditto. It seems every time I take a short break for a holiday or exams
> stuff like this happens. These days I just keep my head down and go with
> the flow.

Worl, the solution is obvious, isn't it?  Stop taking short breaks (stop
going on holidays, don't study for your exams, etc.), and we'll be
spared the madness!

To think, after all the Wikipedia soul-searching, it turns out the whole
newbies vs admins kerfuffle was caused by John Lee leaving his keyboard!

--
Mark Gallagher
"What?  I can't hear you, I've got a banana on my head!"
- Danger Mouse


subject: [WikiEN-l] "refactoring" signatures

body:
On 6/5/06, Fastfission <fastfission at gmail.com> wrote:
> People should be allowed and encourage to develop their personal
> identity on Wikipedia

Why?  Wikipedia isn't a web host, a blog or a social networking site.
Those who are looking for such sites will find that there are plenty
of those around.  There is only one Wikipedia.


subject: [WikiEN-l] "refactoring" signatures

body:
On 6/6/06, George Herbert <george.herbert at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Playing the devil's advocate a bit...
>
> Why do User pages and space even exist, then?
>

Is that a serious question?  They exist so that editors can write
about personal matters related to their work on the encyclopedia.

For instance you can look at my userspace and you'll see pretty much
the kind of thing a Wikipedian does.

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3APrefixindex&from=Tony+Sidaway%2F&namespace=2


from_name: Oskar Sigvardsson

subject: [WikiEN-l] "refactoring" signatures

body:
On 6/5/06, George Herbert <george.herbert at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 6/5/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > On 6/5/06, George Herbert <george.herbert at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > You could use (2x or 3x user name length + some fixed amount), to let
> > people
> > > have separate links to User: and User talk: pages, which I find useful.
> >
> > Nah. If you really want that, just make the strings %T% and %C%
> > automatically substitute for those links, if necessary.
>
>
>
> I'd buy that for a dollar.  Code?

How about this: {{subst:User:AUserName/sig}}? That little trick would
pretty much guarantee that any limit on nicks is useless.

--Oskar


from_name: Walter van Kalken

body:
I know I would stand a minimal chance if one at all, but the thought has
crossed my mind yes. Especially with the last elections (when I was in
good standing with everyone). But I figured that you and Anthere were
doing a great job so why run. If htere would have been a third seat back
then I would have run.

At this moment I am to "damaged" by my own doing to stand a chance. But
yes I would be interested.

Waerth/Walter

>With the talk on this list recently of jobs that need doing, I'm
>interested to know whether there are many people who would be
>interested in being a member of the Board if there were more seats
>available. If that is something you'd consider, please let me know.
>
>Note that I'm not saying this is a possibility right now, but it would
>make planning easier if we had something more than guesswork of who
>might be a candidate to go on.
>
>Angela.
>_______________________________________________
>foundation-l mailing list
>foundation-l at wikimedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>
>
>


subject: [WikiEN-l] "refactoring" signatures

body:
On 6/6/06, George Herbert <george.herbert at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> To summarize, "This is for Wikipedia work, not personal stuff... but some
> personal stuff is OK."  Exactly the sort of ambiguity which lets everyone
> get in maximum amounts of trouble by misinterpreting it in their favor.
>
> You (Tony) emphasize the WP work aspect.  Other people take the other
> information aspects at its word... and some go overboard.
>

What nonsense.  There is personal stuff.  To remind you, you falsely
claimed that "People should be allowed and encourage to develop their
personal identity on Wikipedia" and I said:

"Why?  Wikipedia isn't a web host, a blog or a social networking site.
Those who are looking for such sites will find that there are plenty
of those around.  There is only one Wikipedia."

"Some personal stuff is okay" is not the same as "People should be
allowed and encourage to develop their personal identity on
Wikipedia".  Rather the reverse, I should say.


subject: [WikiEN-l] "refactoring" signatures

body:
On 6/6/06, Tony Sidaway <f.crdfa at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 6/6/06, George Herbert <george.herbert at gmail.com> wrote:

>  To remind you, you falsely
> claimed that "People should be allowed and encourage to develop their
> personal identity on Wikipedia"

That's wrong.  Fastfission said that.


from_name: George Chriss

subject: [WikiEN-l] Some statistics I wish I had...

body:
I am not a statistician, but I did throw some numbers together to create an overall metric for the
editing growth of en:Wikipedia.  The idea is thus: How many "active editors" do we have at any
given time, and how much are they actually editing at any given time?  Find a way to put both on
the same graph and you have a slick graph without getting buried in detail.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Wiki_editing_growth_guide.png
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:En_wikipedia_overall_editing_growth.png

Start at (0,0) and follow the arrowheads that indicate time progression. (Loop-d-loops are
possible, but didn't show up.)  I used numbers from a toolserver page and did some simple
manipulation and plotting.

In short: Wikipedia, as of a year ago, was attracting more editors each month while keeping up an
average of 115 edits/month/Wikipedian.

Hope this helps,
George
meta|en|irc:[[User:GChriss]]

<quote who="Jimmy Wales">
> (Sorry for the cross posting, but there are several groups who might
> find this interesting.)
>
> For years now, it has been common for people to claim that "all the good
> editors are jumping ship" or "we are losing our best people".
> Generally, this has not proven to be true: people come and go, to be
> sure, but as some people drift away, others have drifted in.  Whether
> the rate of burnout is "too high" or "too low" or "just right" is quite
> hard to say.
>
> However, it ought to be possible to at least quantify what that rate
> actually is, by using the Erik Zachte statistics or a modification of them.
>
> I would be fascinated if we could figure out such statistics as
>
> "For any given edit, what is the average length of service of the
> editor?"  "For any given edit, what is the median length of service of
> the editor?"  These could be measured by either time since first edit,
> or total number of edits or (perhaps best) some weighted average of the
> edit history.
>
> It would be nice to track that number over time... are we becoming
> "younger" as a community, "older" as a community?  Staying about the
> same?  Are old-timers sticking around longer than they used to, or
> jumping ship faster?
>
> There are also a whole set of related questions around newbies:
>
> Are newbies more likely to stick around, or less likely to stick around,
> than they were a year ago.  Some people feel we are being overrun by
> newbies, others feel that we are becoming a more closed and cliqueish
> community which does not welcome newbies.
>
> I would measure this by saying "Of people who made at least 100 edits a
> month ago, how many of them made at least 100 edits this month".  And
> similar stats for "at least 10 edits".  (Merely looking at "new
> accounts" would not be right, because we had a huge spike in new account
> creation when it became necessary to have an account to create a new page.)
>
> --Jimbo
>
>
> --
> #######################################################################
> #    Office: 1-727-231-0101       |  Free Culture and  Free Knowledge #
> #    http://www.wikipedia.org     |     Building a free world         #
> #######################################################################
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


subject: [Wikitech-l] [WikiEN-l] Some statistics I wish I had...

body:
I am not a statistician, but I did throw some numbers together to create an overall metric for the
editing growth of en:Wikipedia.  The idea is thus: How many "active editors" do we have at any
given time, and how much are they actually editing at any given time?  Find a way to put both on
the same graph and you have a slick graph without getting buried in detail.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Wiki_editing_growth_guide.png
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:En_wikipedia_overall_editing_growth.png

Start at (0,0) and follow the arrowheads that indicate time progression. (Loop-d-loops are
possible, but didn't show up.)  I used numbers from a toolserver page and did some simple
manipulation and plotting.

In short: Wikipedia, as of a year ago, was attracting more editors each month while keeping up an
average of 115 edits/month/Wikipedian.

Hope this helps,
George
meta|en|irc:[[User:GChriss]]


from_name: Delirium

body:
Mathieu Amo wrote:
> On 6/6/06, Anthere <Anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>
>> To remove the bias of large language groups or large projects and to
>> make elections a less painful system, we might also rely on a system of
>> "grand electeurs" (each language/project nominate a couple of people to
>> vote in their name). The "grand electeurs " group being more likely to
>> elect people based on their participation on Foundation issues, rather
>> than purely on their fame.
>>
>
> I really like this idea, but it will be a tricky work to write down a
> policy for this kind of elections. This sounds a lot like the US
> Electoral College (that's where it's come from, I guess), but I think
> it will give us everything we need : the possibilty for the
> communities to really express themselves, and the assurance that the
> electors will have a good knowledge of the Foundation and its works.
> However, this would mean more wiki-politics. And nobody likes that.
>

Is the whole issue really a problem?  It only would be if everyone votes
mainly for "their" people, but I'm not sure that's the case, and
instituting a system like that might actually make it happen.  When the
first board elections were held, for example, Americans made up at least
a plurality of those voting, possibly a majority, and yet the two
winners were French and British (and the next-most-supported was German).

-Mark


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] MediaWiki 1.6.7 released

body:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

MediaWiki 1.6.7 is a security and bugfix maintenance release of the
Spring 2006 snapshot:

An HTML/JavaScript-injection vulnerability in the edit form has been closed.
This vulnerability was new in 1.6.0; MediaWiki versions 1.5.x or earlier are
not affected.

Extensions, comments, and <nowiki> sections are now handled in a one-pass
way which is more reliable and safer. Under earlier versions of MediaWiki,
certain extensions could be abused to inject HTML/JavaScript into the page.

Additional precautions are made against offsite form submissions when
the restricted raw HTML mode is enabled.

Some small localization and user interface updates are also included.

* (bug 6051) Improvement to German localisation (de)
* (bug 6017) Update bookstore list for German language (de)
* (bug 6138) Minor grammar tweak in "loginreqlink"
* (bug 5957) Update for Hebrew language (he)
* Increase robustness of parser placeholders; fixes some glitches when
  adjacent to identifier-ish constructs such as URLs.
* (bug 5384) Fix <!-- comments --> in <ref> extension
* Nesting of different tag extensions and comments should now work more
  consistently and more safely. A cleaner, one-pass tag strip lets the
  'outer' tag either take source (<nowiki>-style) or pass it down to
  further parsing (<ref>-style). There should no longer be surprise
  expansion of foreign extensions inside HTML output, or differences
  in behavior based on the order tags are loaded.
* (bug 885) Pre-save transform no longer silently appends close tags
* Pre-save transform no longer changes the case of close tags
* Edit security precautions in raw HTML mode, etc

Full release notes:
http://svn.wikimedia.org/viewvc/mediawiki/tags/REL1_6_7/phase3/RELEASE-NOTES
http://svn.wikimedia.org/viewvc/mediawiki/tags/REL1_6_7/phase3/HISTORY

Download:
http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/wikipedia/mediawiki-1.6.7.tar.gz

MD5 checksum:
cbcba609339abb5688068e5dc379110b  mediawiki-1.6.7.tar.gz

SHA-1 checksum:
b5aadd8240d63c644728d071e4f452d0efacf5bf mediawiki-1.6.7.tar.gz

Before asking for help, try the FAQ:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/FAQ

Low-traffic release announcements mailing list:
(Please subscribe to receive announcements of security updates.)
http://mail.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-announce

Wiki admin help mailing list:
http://mail.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l

Bug report system:
http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/

Play "stump the developers" live on IRC:
#mediawiki on irc.freenode.net

- -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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list: commons-l

from_name: Brianna Laugher

subject: [Commons-l] Welcoming Committee needs some help

body:
Please help us stalk newbies!
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Orgullobot/Welcome_log

When they are new is our best chance to catch them and correct their
mistakes, before they upload 200 images under a wrong license and no
categories... these are the two most important mistakes. Uploading
stuff under unacceptable/wrong/no license or no source, and not
categorising good images.

Orgullobot automatically welcomes around 50-70 new users per day, who
have made at least one edit or upload. EugeneZelenko and I cannot
check this many people. As we know it takes 2 seconds to upload a
copyvio and 2 months to get rid of it... but the earlier we can catch
them the quicker they can be deleted. Be ruthless!

So all you need to do is just check their contribs and if they have
made any mistakes, correct them (if you want) and tell them how to
correct them and what they did wrong. e.g. post {{please link images}}
when they should categorise. Use NSD and {{copyvio}}, tell them
there's no originality in screenshots, there's no fair use, use
CommonsHelper to transfer images...etc.  Once you've done this remove
their name from the log.

If, by some miracle, they don't make any mistakes, you may want to
congratulate them, or else just move onto the next person. :)

Note YOU DON'T HAVE TO BE AN ADMIN TO DO THIS! You just have to have a
decent understanding of what's OK and what's not, and what the correct
procedure is.

Hope to see some new eyes on this log soon!

Brianna


from_name: Angela

subject: [Foundation-l] Where we are headed

body:
On 6/6/06, Erik Moeller <eloquence at gmail.com> wrote:

> One person who immediately comes to mind is Achal Prabhala, an
> important, charismatic and brilliant international leader in the
> "Access to Knowledge" movement, i.e. availability of free textbooks
> and other learning resources, international IP law, etc. (he gave an
> excellent speech at Wikimania on the topic).

I met Achal when I was in South Africa, and again at Wikimania last
year. If there is to be an advisory board, he should definitely be
considered for that since he has a lot of very relevant experience and
would seem to support our goals. I'd rather keep the actual board
limited to people with experience of Wikimedia though, rather than
outsiders to increase the chance the Board members are aware of the
community's concerns and have some motivation to follow the wishes of
the community.

Angela.


subject: [Foundation-l] Where we are headed


from_name: Tim Starling

body:
I wrote:
> Average was easiest, so I did that as a first try. It shows an initial
> upward trend, stabilising in early 2005 at about 300 days.

Here's a histogram series for the same data in the form of an animated GIF.
It shows the distribution of editor age, averaged over a whole year, for
years 2002-2005.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Days_since_first_edit_histogram.gif

-- Tim Starling


body:
Tels wrote:
> Moin,
>
> On Monday 05 June 2006 09:54, Tim Starling wrote:
>> Jimmy Wales wrote:
>>> I would be fascinated if we could figure out such statistics as
>>>
>>> "For any given edit, what is the average length of service of the
>>> editor?"  "For any given edit, what is the median length of service
>>> of the editor?"  These could be measured by either time since first
>>> edit, or total number of edits or (perhaps best) some weighted
>>> average of the edit history.
>> Turns out we can.
>>
>> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Days_since_first_edit.png
>>
>> Average was easiest, so I did that as a first try. It shows an initial
>> upward trend, stabilising in early 2005 at about 300 days.
>> How's that?
>
> Cool :)
>
> Does that mean after about 300 days after account creation, people give up
> at editing?
>

No, the average time before people abandon their accounts would be much
shorter. Many accounts have never edited at all, I imagine there are also
many accounts with only 1 or 2 edits. An average over accounts would be
skewed towards this end. This is an average over edits, so it is skewed
towards very active editors.

One interpretation would be to assume that most edits are performed by a
core group of very active editors. Then you could say that the average age
of a very active editor is about 300 days. You have to phrase it carefully,
because there are two factors which limit this figure: attrition and growth.
Editors getting tired and leaving will cause it to be reduced, as will an
influx of new editors.

What would be really nice is if we could get a handle on these two factors
separately.

-- Tim Starling


from_name: Bryan Derksen

subject: [WikiEN-l] Category analysis with perl

body:
Steve Bennett wrote:
> On 6/6/06, Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen at shaw.ca> wrote:
>> I'm deliberately leaving the "or
>> its subcategories" off of the is-a template, so that we can continue
>> having things like [[Category:Seattle]] be a subcategory of
>> [[Category:Cities in Washington]] (or whatever the real category names
>> are) like we do now.
>
> I think we just decided in the long thread that that's a bad idea as follows:
> Cities in Washington is a taxonomic category
> Seattle is a thematic category
> Thematic categories should never be subcategories of taxonomic
> categories (although the reverse is ok)
>
> If your proposal is to allow for a graceful changeover, then I understand.

I don't think a "changeover" is needed, and I don't see why thematic
categories being subcategories of taxonomic categories is a bad thing
provided the categories are all properly labelled. The way things are
now are pretty intuitive for human browsing, which makes sense since
humans are the ones that organized it the way it is. But if you want to
spider a collection of articles on a taxonomic basis (for example
building a list of all cities in the United States with articles) then
all you need to do is write the spider to ignore subcategories that
aren't labelled as taxonomic. It'll ignore [[Category:Seattle]] and all
the contents thereof.

Seems to me that forbidding thematic subcategories to taxanomic
categories will result in a huge number of orphaned thematic categories.

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body:
With the talk on this list recently of jobs that need doing, I'm
interested to know whether there are many people who would be
interested in being a member of the Board if there were more seats
available. If that is something you'd consider, please let me know.

Note that I'm not saying this is a possibility right now, but it would
make planning easier if we had something more than guesswork of who
might be a candidate to go on.

Angela.


from_name: Resid Gulerdem

body:
>From: Raphael Wegmann <raphael at psi.co.at>
>Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
>To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
>Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] To: Jimmy Wales -
Admin-driven death of Wikipedia
>Date: Mon, 05 Jun 2006 17:49:21 +0200
>
>Jimmy Wales wrote:
> > Resid Gulerdem wrote:
> >>    The admins are only part of the community now
and
> >> will stay like that in the future, as far as I
can
> >> see. Are some modifications needed in your
opinion? I
> >> believe the answer is yes. I do not know if you
could
> >> see the proposal [[WP:OURS]] I posted on this
list
> >> recently. I think it can be useful and can be
> >> developed further. I tried to outline some
important
> >> points which may reduce the conflicts between the
> >> admins and the users. If you saw it, do you think
it
> >> is feasible?
> >
> > I see no reference to WP:OURS in google, so I am
unable to comment.  Can
> > you send it to me?
> >
>
>I've just created the proposed policy on
[[Wikipedia:OURS]].
>
>--
>Raphael
>

Mr. Wales,

I was wondering if you could review the proposal
[[WP:OURS]] and [[WP:ETH]]?

I would like to know also if you are aware of the
discussion and weird admin actions going around this
proposals recently:

Right after I posted the proposal [[WP:OURS]] to this
mailing list (it includes a link to the updated
version of the proposal [[Wikipedia:Wikiethics]] on my
old user page [[User:Rgulerdem\Wikiethics]]) someone
deleted that page immediately:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:DRV#User:Rgulerdem.2FWikiethics

An editor [[User:Raphael]] decided to have a copy of
the updated version of [[Wikipedia:Wikiethics]] from
my old user page to improve it further. It is also
deleted right away. Lots of wikilawyering and
insincerity going around:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:DRV#User:Raphael1.2FWikiethics

He further formulated his version of the proposal
[[WP:OURS]] after modifications, rewording, and some
improvements on the main space. It is deleted too
right after created without a single word on its
talk page. I cannot provide a link for this because
even the 'deletion discussion page' is deleted.

I hope now it is clear what may 'admin-driven death of
Wikipedia' mean. With this structure and functioning
it is not possible to have a health product in my
opinion. As Wikipedia gets bigger one may expect this
admin problem become more apparent and frustrating.

Please note that on purely technical issues the
problems are smaller than the ones on the
controversial issues. Many (not all) of the
admins as far as I can see are some college kids
mostly sitting around a computer. As a result
Wikipedia is evolving very fast towards an online
forum or clubhouse with an heavy ideologic bigotry
and a tone on social issues determined by the
instincts of some computer operators and programmers
playing encyclopedist. This does not make the
Wikipedia a reliable source of information. Lynching
editors according to their background that their names
may imply does not bring any honor to Wikipedia.

I would appreciate if you could give some feedback
about these concerns. Please again consider those as
friendly and sincere concerns from a user who likes
the Wikipedia be successful. I am just pointing out
the danger which will get Wikipedia down tomorrow
if not today. I have some further ideas similar to
[[WP:Wikiethics]] and [[WP:OURS]] towards constructing
a better structure but an administrative will is
necessary to be able to implement that. Your
comments will result in either continuation or end of
my Wiki experience.

Best,

Resid

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


body:
On 6/6/06, Lord Voldemort <lordbishopvoldemort at gmail.com> wrote:
> I think before (or maybe along with) this call, you need to specify
> the requirements of Board members. Some people may not understand
> fully the time requirements

It's hard to say what the time requirements will be since a lot of
what the Board previously did is being decentralised though
committees, or handed over to staff, such as the future CEO.

Angela.


subject: [WikiEN-l] The admin problem

body:
G'day Steve,

> On 6/5/06, Sam Spade <samspade.thomasjefferson at googlemail.com> wrote:
<snip/>
>>To the peanut gallary, no, my opinions are not always facts, but the
>>information I was inserting into the respective articles is. Check the
>>cites.
>
> A "cite" does not make a fact, and it does not make something worthy
> of conclusion.

In this case, assuming my memory is not malfunctioning yet again, I
believe Sam's "cite" was: "a certain percentage of Americans are
Christian, Jewish, or Muslim".  Which then became: "the majority of
humans believe in God."

In other words, the cite was no good for what he wanted to claim, and
only served to add America-centrism to his long list of offensive
editing practices.

--
Mark Gallagher
"What?  I can't hear you, I've got a banana on my head!"
- Danger Mouse


from_name: Anthere

body:
Delirium wrote:
> Jimmy Wales wrote:
>
>
>>valdelli at bluemail.ch wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>>>The community could accept only representative members voted with normal
>>>procedure.
>>>
>>>
>>
>>Of course.
>>
>>But community vote is not the only way to get board members.  We have
>>some very good board candidates who are not famous in the community and
>>who could bring to the table professional expertise that we greatly
>>need, but who would not put themselves through the troll wars of an
>>election.
>>
>>
>
> This sounds reasonable, although I think they're not entirely different
> things, if we're speaking in an informal sense (which is really what
> will dominate community-board relations more than the formal setup
> will).  It's possible, for example, that there are people who would
> actually prevail in an election, but are deterred from running because
> of the election process.  If they were appointed, those people could be
> said in some tea-leaf-reading sense to actually represent the
> community.  Then there are gradations---people who wouldn't actually win
> an election, but who are generally respected and don't engender much
> objection; then unknown people; and finally people who are actively
> disliked by a large segment of the community.
>
> We could try some variation on some of the consensus-style methods we
> tend to use on the encyclopedia.  For example, solicit nominations,
> possibly in private, and then privately contact the people nominated to
> ask if they'd accept a position if chosen.  Then make a (public) list of
> potential candidates, and solicit feedback on them, possibly
> privately-expressed feedback so people don't have to publicly attack
> anyone.  Then appoint the people who have reasonably good consensus
> support.  Assuming the feedback is indeed expressed in private, and the
> list is more than a handful of people, those not selected shouldn't
> really be negatively impacted (not being selected for 2 slots out of a
> list of, say, 15 isn't particularly bad).
>
> This is a little trickier than the way we do it on articles, because to
> avoid public flamewars and driving people off, much of it would have to
> be done in private communications, and therefore the decision of what
> constitutes consensus would have to be made by whoever reads those
> emails.  It could be the current board, or someone they designate.
> Technically/formally, that would essentially be the board appointing new
> members itself, but if you five agree to follow some rough community
> consensus in making those appointments, I'm pretty sure you're not going
> to actually lie to us and claim someone had consensus support when they
> didn't, even if we have no way of verifying that.
>
> Anyway that's a pretty off-the-top-of-my-head outline of how to design a
> system that merges community consensus and sensitivity towards potential
> members who aren't politicians, so I'm sure there are better ways of
> doing it.  I do think some sort of balancing of those goals is
> necessary, though.
>
> -Mark

Your email is very interesting Mark.

Before we recruit a new trustee, we should consider the following points
carefully:
* What sort of person we are looking for, and what skills, qualities or
experience do they need?
* How will a new potential trustee benefit our organisation? (with
perhaps a list of benefits / advantages and decide if a candidate will
meet these.)

To answer these questions, we might look at this list of 12 main roles
for the board

What do trustees do?

Trustee boards have twelve main roles:

1: Set and maintain vision, mission and values

Generally, I think this will be best done by community members.

2: Develop long-term strategy with the chief executive officer

This might require big shot outsiders, people with a large vision and
bringing insight we do not necessarily have in our organiation

3: Establish and monitor policies to govern organisational activity
(guidance of staff, reporting policies, monitoring policies, code of
conduct, conflict of interest policies)

These might be best done by people who already know a bit about non
profit organisations.

4: Set up employment procedures, plus recruit and select new trustees board

again, might be better to know non profit organisation, plus human
management, organisation skills... and probably to know pretty well the
community.

5: Ensure compliance with governing document. In this case... we should
first *write* the governing document, which allow us to comply with the
charitable goals.

May come from community... or not.

6: Ensure accountability as required by law

Here, a board member will legal experience might be best.

7: Ensure compliance with the law

Same

8: Maintain proper fiscal oversight (securing resources, monitoring
spendings, approval of financial statement, budget, fundraising...)

Requires someone experienced on fiscal issues.
Probably a big shot might help on this side as well (fundraising) or a
bizdev specialists (both are probably not in the community).

9: Select and support the chief executive

Errrrr. Collective role :-)

10: Respect the role of staff. Staff guidelines.

Tricky in an organisation based largely on volunteers

11: Maintain effective board performance

a performant chair might be best here

12: Promote the organisation

Hiya. All big shots and many community members are good at that. So,
this is not a major need for the current research of new board members.

---------

if you look at it well, you will see that we probably need one or two
big shots to help in particular with vision and fundraising issues (in
short, someone with good insight, and who will make the Foundation
appears brigther).

We may benefit of professionals who know very well non profit
organisations management (may or may not come from outside), finances
and legal issues.

This suggests to me we need probably to expand the board from 5 to 9. My
best perception of this would be 5-6 from community. And 3-4 outsiders.

I would support Tim resigning as early as possible. I have nothing
against him, but we need active board members and he is simply not.
Resigning this summer for example.

Wikimania will be the opportunity to meet a lot of people. Last year
Wikimania was also that opportunity. We'll also be able to meet
outsiders over there, and maybe to consider inviting them on the board.

What I would like to is that we replace Tim with an outsider and add two
community people. Or if more board members are replaced, two outsiders
and two community people.

But what would be suitable would be to stick to the needs defined above.
More help in finances, legal, fundraising, non-profit organisation.

Outsiders will obviously be appointed. For community members, we roughly
have 4 solutions
* board appoint people (benefit, we are more likely to get people with
the best skills compared with what we need. Drawback : see current
criticism)
* community votes for people (Drawback : less chance to get great people
from minority languages or projects. Might miss some great choices.)
* community votes per group perhaps, board pick up in the outcome
(en.wiki arbitration type). (Drawback : board might be expected to pick
up those with highest number of votes anyway)
* Board pre-selection, then community vote (Benefit : more likely to get
what is truely needed).

To remove the bias of large language groups or large projects and to
make elections a less painful system, we might also rely on a system of
"grand electeurs" (each language/project nominate a couple of people to
vote in their name). The "grand electeurs " group being more likely to
elect people based on their participation on Foundation issues, rather
than purely on their fame.


subject: [WikiEN-l] A categorical question

body:
Steve Bennett wrote:
> Can anyone tell me whether [[Lasers]] is a taxonomic category or a
> thematic category?
>

Folksonomies aren't quite ontologies
I say this with utmost apologies
Cleaning up they resist
But at least they exist
Rather than just being technol'gies

(Utmost apologies for that as well.)

-Mark


from_name: sean at epoptic.com

body:
On Tue, Jun 06, 2006 at 12:04:35PM +0100, Selina . wrote:

> Maybe you don't have laws against it with your happy little "patriotic"
> organisations like the KKK, but in civilised countries like the UK and
> Germany (for just two examples) racism/hate speech is illegal. Get used it
> it, the US is simply backwards in most social issues compared to the rest of
> the world (another example could be the prudishly religious aspects that's
> not so far off from the Puritans)
>
> --
> Selina -

That some countries punish thoughtcrime is not surprising.  That some
people are proud of the fact that their countries don't pass laws
forbidding people to think particular thoughts is not surprising either.

--
 Sean Barrett     | My wife says I should get up and go to
 sean at epoptic.com | work, but the voices in my head say
                  | I should stay home and clean my guns.


from_name: Fred Bauder

subject: [WikiEN-l] Are lists subject to WP:NOR?

body:
I would vote no on your poll.  Yes, it is original research, but
provides links to many other articles. Sometimes it is better to
ignore the strict rule.

Fred

On Jun 6, 2006, at 4:00 AM, Peter Jacobi wrote:

> And if so, in which sense?
>
> I've just put [[List of groups referred to as cults]] on
> AfD:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/
> List_of_groups_referred_to_as_cults
>
> (For the 3rd time by me alone, so I expect some eye-rolling and
> name-calling)
>
> My main concern is about NOR, and I suspect some other lists having
> the same problem. Whereas each individual entry has its source
> (that's just the idea of the list, that you google for some source
> calling Wikipedia, Randism, Shia and whatsnot a "cult"), but the
> list as such, even cum grano salis, has never been published,
> hopefully because no one has considered it to make much sense, to
> link such a diverse set of "groups".
>
> As WP:NOR was invented to relieve us from difficult decisions (Is
> "X theory of hairy strings" a valid Theory of Everything? -- We
> don't bother to check the formulas, it's not published in peer-
> reviewed journals), shouldn't this axe also prune more creative lists?
>
> Regards,
> Peter Jacobi
>
> [[User:Pjacobi]]
>
> --
>
>
> Der GMX SmartSurfer hilft bis zu 70% Ihrer Onlinekosten zu sparen!
>       Ideal f?r Modem und ISDN: http://www.gmx.net/de/go/smartsurfer
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


from_name: Mathieu Amo

body:
On 6/6/06, Anthere <Anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> To remove the bias of large language groups or large projects and to
> make elections a less painful system, we might also rely on a system of
> "grand electeurs" (each language/project nominate a couple of people to
> vote in their name). The "grand electeurs " group being more likely to
> elect people based on their participation on Foundation issues, rather
> than purely on their fame.

I really like this idea, but it will be a tricky work to write down a
policy for this kind of elections. This sounds a lot like the US
Electoral College (that's where it's come from, I guess), but I think
it will give us everything we need : the possibilty for the
communities to really express themselves, and the assurance that the
electors will have a good knowledge of the Foundation and its works.
However, this would mean more wiki-politics. And nobody likes that.

Solensean.

--
He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was
mad. And that was all his patrimony.
Sabatini, Rafael.

Wikip?dia, l'encyclop?die libre.
http://fr.wikipedia.org


from_name: Anthony DiPierro

body:
On 6/6/06, Anthere <Anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Still... it is significant that the candidate with the most votes is
> from the language wikipedia which is the largest. Then that the two next
> candidates were respectively from the second biggest and third biggest
> languages (as well as in both cases participants to the english speaking
> version). Would a great italian person, not participating to the english
> or the french or the german languages have a chance ? Unlikely.
>
I'd say it's pretty much a requirement that a board member speak the
English language fairly well, since this is the language in which the
business of the board is conducted.  Location is enough of an issue,
no sense adding language to the mix.

Of course this doesn't rule out someone who doesn't participate at all
in the English language projects.  In fact, I suppose it doesn't even
rule out someone who doesn't speak English *if* the board wants to
spend foundation money hiring a translator.  But I do think it makes
is "unlikely", as you put it, that someone who doesn't participate at
all in the English language projects (or at the very least the mailing
lists) would make the best board member.

Maybe if there was already a translation system in place...
global-l at wikimedia.org, a tightly moderated mailing list (to keep the
traffic low) where every message was translated into 20 languages or
so?  It's a ways off, at the least.

Anthony


subject: [WikiEN-l] Types of categories

body:
On 6/6/06, Roger Luethi <collector at hellgate.ch> wrote:
> I guess the reason I am only mildly interested in hierarchies is that many
> interesting attributes (dead/alive, colors, professions) don't fit well
> into hierarchies. I think the real power comes from combining attributes.
>
> The German WP is much closer to that. For instance, they don't have
> categories like "Polish Chemists". They only have the attribute categories
> "Polish" and "Chemist". From a practical point of view, that's less usable
> than what we have (they basically need to use CatScan which is fairly
> limited, and casual users don't know about it anyway). But it's
> conceptually cleaner, and they are in a better position for making
> interesting experiments.
>

That brings up another, longer term, to-do for categories: they should
be language independent.  For instance [[Marie Curie]] is in de: and
en: (they happen to have the same title, but even if they don't they
are linked via interwiki links).  [[Kategorie:Pole]] is linked to
[[Category:Polish people]].  So there should be no need to categorize
Marie Curie twice (multiply by the actual number of languages which
have a Polish people category and an article on Marie Curie).

This is pretty simple theoretically.  The only real problem is getting
the multiple category schemes in sync.  Considering your point about
how the German categorization scheme differs from the English one,
this might be a lot harder in practice than it is in theory.

> > > Your definitions of taxonomies and attributes need work :-).
> >
> > Heh :) Input welcome! I think the distinction between "taxonomy" and
> > "attribute" is probably a sliding scale. It comes down to what is
> > natural. Do we really think in terms of "nobel laureates"? I doubt it
>
> Combining rigid rules with common sense is hard. I am tempted to quote your
> line about inevitable disaster.
>
Personally I don't see the difference between taxonomies and
attributes, as described.  But I suppose one (taxonomies?) could be
described as partitioning (an article can only be in one taxonomy
category) whereas attributes can be mixed.  Under that definition
though, all taxonomies are attributes (but not vice-versa).  I'm not
sure how close that definition is to reality though.

Anthony


from_name: Philip Welch

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Aww, so cute,
	a banned user is trying to take us down with a DMCA notice
	(Forwarded email)

body:
On Jun 6, 2006, at 7:24 AM, Death Phoenix wrote:

>> It's still against the rules to give legal advice for free, because
>> the rules are made by lawyers, and lawyers' business is giving legal
>> advice.
>
> Really? I get free legal advice from my lawyer all the time, though
> I guess
> the "free" part could be in dispute. For instance, my mortgage
> agreement is
> up for renewal, and I go to my lawyer to update the paperwork. He
> does not
> charge by the hour for this service, and instead has a fixed price.
> While I
> am there, I also let him know of some changes in my life and whether I
> should update my will. He says not necessarily, but tells me what
> changes in
> my life DO require an update on my will. Did he just give me free
> legal
> advice, and if so, is this against the rules?
>
> Now, let's say I don't go to the lawyer on an unrelated matter,
> let's say I
> call him up out of the blue to tell him of changes in my life and
> ask him
> whether I should update my will. Did he just give me free legal
> advice, and
> if so, is this against the rules?

Maybe. I was joking anyway.

--
Philip L. Welch
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Philwelch


from_name: Guettarda

body:
On 6/5/06, Tony Sidaway <f.crdfa at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 6/5/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> ? style="font-variant:small-caps"> color="gray">[[Wikipedia:Concordia|C]][[User:Cuivienen|uivi]]
> color=green>[[User:Cuivienen/Esperanza|?]][[User:Cuivienen|nen]][[User
>
> talk:Cuivienen|T]]|[[Special:Contributions/Cuivienen|C]]|[[Special:Emailuser/Cuivienen|@]] style="font-size:85%;"> on [[Tuesday]], [[30 May]] [[2006]] at 20:54
> [[UTC]]'''
>
> Now *that* is what I call "taking the piss".

Ok, I see your point on that one.  Wow.  LOL

Now, to get onto userboxes that are really disruptive, how about the ones
that say "This user contributes in American English" or "This user
contributes in British English".  Isn't this, in essence, a rejection on
Wikipedia's policy on accepting both AE and BE?  Sure, on talk pages and one
new pages, you should follow whatever spelling you prefer.  But on
established pages you should put your own spelling preferences aside and
follow the established spelling.  Since this is a userbox which attacks one
of the most basic compromises that allow the project to function, aren't
these the real problem?  I couldn't care less if people want to declare what
political party they support or their opinion is on fox hunting - but
something which says "I don't support the spirit of compromise that
Wikipedia depends on"...those userboxes piss me off, even though I have
strong feelings on the issue of spelling (I was unhappy that I had to write
my dissertation using AE spelling, but I got over it quite quickly).

Ian