subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia for education

body:
--- Jimmy Wales <jwales at bomis.com> wrote:
> Daniel Mayer wrote:
> > Well in order to be "acceptable" in at least US
> public schools,
> > Wikipedia would have to dramatically censored.
> Sadly, state and
> > local school boards in the US have effectively
> censored the content
> > of textbooks by not accepting material that could
> possibly be
> > offensive to a very long list of lobby groups
> (both on the right and
> > left of the political spectrum).
>
> I wonder if NPOV would be sufficient for the bulk of
> this requirement.
>
> What I mean here is that our NPOV policy and wiki
> process tends to
> make pretty sure that no material is offensive to a
> very long list of
> wikipedians, from a wide variety of political and
> cultural
> backgrounds.
>
> Not everything in wikipedia is going to be
> considered by mainstream
> parents as appropriate for children, that's for
> sure.  Probably 99%
> is, but I acknowledge that a large number of people
> do feel that
> children should have even NPOV presentations of some
> information
> withheld from them until they are older.
>
> I heard a news story the other day that in
> California, textbooks
> are now forbidden to mention Mount Rushmore.  See:
> http://www.wtvw.com/Global/story.asp?S=1288473

I think that's terrible. Wikipedia, NPOV or not,
should never censor to that degree. We may never be
worthy of becomming a high-school text book, but will
be worthy of much more instead.

> Wikipedia would obviously handle that topic
> differently.  We would not
> omit the existence of Mount Rushmore, but we would
> cite the names and
> arguments of those who find it offensive.
>
> A lot of the excessive political correctness that we
> read about in the
> news is really just a lack of talent in expression.
> It's entirely
> possible to talk about controversial things in a way
> that is not
> itself controversial.
>
> --Jimbo

No, our NPOV stance will always be contravercial. For
some, censorship is absolutely nessesary. For others
(most), inclusion is nessessary. These make it
impossible to have a truely non-contravercial
information source.
--LittleDan

__________________________________
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The New Yahoo! Search - Faster. Easier. Bingo.
http://search.yahoo.com


list: wikien-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: steven l. rubenstein

subject: [WikiEN-l] NO-FX ban

body:
Brion, I think that ultimately, you are right -- vigilance and patient
deletion or reversion is the only way to deal with such a troll.  But even
reverting crap is a form of swatting.  If the question is whether we simply
ignore someone and let them do what they want, or act in some way against
vandalism, it seems we all agree on some form of action.

The question is, what form.  From context it seems like you are arguing
against banning.  Well -- and I raise this as a general question, not just
concerning No-FX -- would you ban under any circumstances?

Clearly, banned people will always have a way to work around a ban.  But
from the discussion I have seen on this page, the main point of banning is
not that it effectively keeps someone out; rather, once it is clear that a
banned person has returned, other members of the community have more
authority (ok, not a great word here -- let's say less cause for
self-doubt?) in deleting or reverting.

Steve

At 03:34 PM 5/22/2003 -0700, you wrote:

>On Fri, 23 May 2003, Erik Moeller wrote:
> > No-Fx has vandalized Zoe's user page. He appears to be yet another
> > reincarnation of the banned user Michael, working on the same articles in
> > the same style and not responding to messages.
> >
> > So, should we ban him? He will probably just reappear under a new name,
> > but if we do this often enough, he might be deterred.
>
>It seems he's found a delightful game: bait the Wikipedians and watch them
>swat. People play this game with their cats all the time; neither cat nor
>human ever seem to tire of it.
>
>But what if the cat stops swatting? The cruel human will get bored and
>stop taunting the poor cat with yarn / flashlight / laser pointer.
>
>Stop giving him the satisfaction of making a big fuss. Just revert crap
>that's crap, and work with stuff that's good (should there be any). What
>more do we need?
>
> > I should point out that the problem of users appearing under dozens of
> > names would probably go away if we required an email confirmation during
> > signup, although that might deter some users from creating an account.
>
>You have heard of hotmail and yahoo, right? :)
>
>-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
>
>_______________________________________________
>WikiEN-l mailing list
>WikiEN-l at wikipedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>
>
>---
>Incoming mail is certified Virus Free.
>Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com).
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Steven L. Rubenstein
Assistant Professor
Department of Sociology and Anthropology
Bentley Annex
Ohio University
Athens, Ohio 45701
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from_name: Daniel Ehrenberg

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Lir and his clones

body:
--- The Cunctator <cunctator at kband.com> wrote:
> On Thu, 2003-05-22 at 01:52, Ray Saintonge wrote:
> > Daniel Mayer wrote:
> >
> > >That said, I do want to say that any
> "dictatorial" type of system is
> > >inherently flawed and the results are only as
> good as the leadership and
> > >mediation skills of the current dictator (which
> can be anything between
> > >benevolent to malevolent).
> > >
> > A malevolent dictator would never have had the
> altruistic followers that
> > Jimbo has had here.  In such circumstances the
> 'pedia would have had far
> > fewer articles over the same time.
> >
> Never underestimate the appeal of malevolent
> dictators. Wikipedia would
> still be popular under a malevolent dictator. He'd
> be deposed, though.
>
> --tc

For an extreme example (not that this applies to you
Jimbo), just think of 1984 (the book).
--LittleDan

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
The New Yahoo! Search - Faster. Easier. Bingo.
http://search.yahoo.com


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikipedia-l] larousse.wikipedia.org?

body:
Je ?a?do 22 Majo 2003 18:12, Toby Bartels skribis:
> So am I correct to think that nobody will ever *run*across*
> <larousse.wikipedia.org> -- that is, they'll never find it
> without typing in "larousse" at some point themselves?

Oh sure they will, if they're reading the mailing list archives, if
they're reading Wikipedia History pages which talk about our servers,
if they're subscribed to wikitech-l and we talk about doing something
on larousse, etc. But nobody's advertising anything like "Visit
larousse.wikipedia.org, the free encyclopedia!" Nor are we slapping
URLs links to larousse.wikipedia.org all over everything. We are not
using "Larousse" as a business name, nor as a product name, nor as the
name of a service we offer. It's just a cuter, easier to remember way
of referring to "the computer reachable at 130.94.122.199".

If any of the temporary links directly on larousse.wikipedia.org found
their way into search engines, they should be gradually removed by the
present redirect to www.wikipedia.org.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [WikiEN-l] Please, no more personal attacks

body:
Je ?a?do 22 Majo 2003 18:26, Daniel Ehrenberg skribis:
> > Je ??a??do 22 Majo 2003 10:55, Daniel Ehrenberg
> > skribis
>
> Brion, the Esperanto reply heading you use didn't
> render properly on my computer. Are you using the
> x-system or something else?

That's Unicode (UTF-8 encoding). Webmail systems like Yahoo have
notoriously poor support for anything but Latin-1, alas. I like to
think I'm pushing the acceptance of internet standards forward. ;)

And yes, that was sent with proper headers:

Content-type: text/plain;
  charset=utf-8
Content-transfer-encoding: 8BIT

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia for education

body:
Well, I'd take that news article with a grain of salt.  I too am very
worried about censorship, and the dumbing down of American education.  But
this is a complex issue; the State of Ohio chose to take no stand on the
teaching of "creation science."  This is a position that upset a lot of
scientists and science teachers, but had they banned the teaching of CS
others would have called it censorship.  I think Ray is right that there is
a way to bring disputes into the open, though.

But I suspect that the issue concerning Mt. Rushmore is not just censorship
in order to spare the feelings of Native Americans.  Publishers of school
textbooks are very conscious of space limitations.  There has been a big
push in the United States to begin including material in the curriculum
that hitherto had been left out.  But to include new stuff, some old stuff
has to go.

So there is another force at work in Wikipedia besides NPOV.  Because the
wikipedia is not paper, we do not have to get rid of one thing just to make
room for another.

S

At 04:01 PM 5/22/2003 -0700, you wrote:

>Jimmy Wales wrote:
>
>>Daniel Mayer wrote:
>>
>>>Well in order to be "acceptable" in at least US public schools,
>>>Wikipedia would have to dramatically censored. Sadly, state and
>>>local school boards in the US have effectively censored the content
>>>of textbooks by not accepting material that could possibly be
>>>offensive to a very long list of lobby groups (both on the right and
>>>left of the political spectrum).
>>I wonder if NPOV would be sufficient for the bulk of this requirement.
>>
>>What I mean here is that our NPOV policy and wiki process tends to
>>make pretty sure that no material is offensive to a very long list of
>>wikipedians, from a wide variety of political and cultural
>>backgrounds.
>>
>>Not everything in wikipedia is going to be considered by mainstream
>>parents as appropriate for children, that's for sure.  Probably 99%
>>is, but I acknowledge that a large number of people do feel that
>>children should have even NPOV presentations of some information
>>withheld from them until they are older.
>>
>>I heard a news story the other day that in California, textbooks
>>are now forbidden to mention Mount Rushmore.  See:
>>http://www.wtvw.com/Global/story.asp?S=1288473
>>
>>Wikipedia would obviously handle that topic differently.  We would not
>>omit the existence of Mount Rushmore, but we would cite the names and
>>arguments of those who find it offensive.
>>
>>A lot of the excessive political correctness that we read about in the
>>news is really just a lack of talent in expression.  It's entirely
>>possible to talk about controversial things in a way that is not
>>itself controversial.
>I just read that news story.  It shows how deeply embedded the dumbing
>down process has become.  The most significant fact is that the textbook
>publishers want to sell books, and they will do whatever it takes to
>maximize their market share.  If that means pandering to the lowest common
>denominator that's what they'll do.  That's not the same as NPOV.
>
>The NPOV process happens openly right in front of everybody.  Both sides
>of an issue get a full airing on the way to a mutually acceptable
>understanding.  The distilled results of that process are akin to only
>showing final answers on a math test.
>
>Ec
>
>_______________________________________________
>WikiEN-l mailing list
>WikiEN-l at wikipedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>
>
>
>
>---
>Incoming mail is certified Virus Free.
>Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com).
>Version: 6.0.478 / Virus Database: 275 - Release Date: 5/6/2003

Steven L. Rubenstein
Assistant Professor
Department of Sociology and Anthropology
Bentley Annex
Ohio University
Athens, Ohio 45701
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subject: [Wikipedia-l] MPAA ratings (Was: Two issues here: what is legal to have on the server and what is legal in the user's nation)

body:
Can we please please PLEASE move this thread to somewhere it might be
relevant, like [[Talk:MPAA ratings sytem]] or /dev/null?

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Hmm, can I block David Stewart?

body:
Je ?a?do 22 Majo 2003 21:35, Oliver Pereira skribis:
> Okay, this is scary. Looking at "Recent changes", I'm getting the
> following:
>
> "*  (diff) (hist) . . Seven deadly sins; 05:28 . . David Stewart
> (Talk | block) (adding paras on history and evolution of the seven
> deadly sins)"
>
> David Stewart is a signed-in user. That "block" link shouldn't be
> there... I don't know if it's actually a functional link, but I think
> I'd better not try clicking on it, just in case it is... :)

Does no one read? :)

See the big bold red text at the top of
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:New_server_madness

It's the same root problem. No, the link is not functional. (It'll get
you to the block page, but it will refuse to do anything.)

Some change in the login system presumably is at fault. I'm not very
familiar with the login system and am not sure what changed offhand.
I've been hoping Lee would take a look at it, having recently tweaked
it while integrating some changes from Tim, but if he doesn't I'll see
what I can do.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Graham Burnett

subject: [WikiEN-l] Where's the picture of Chumbawamba gone???

body:
Hi- anybody know aht's happened to the image I posted up a while back of
Chumbawamba at http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Chumbawamba.jpg ? It
seems to have been deleted...

Thanks Graham (Quercus robur)


from_name: Lee Pilich

body:
At 21:46 22/05/2003 +0100, Graham (Quercus rober) wrote:
>Hi- anybody know aht's happened to the image I posted up a while back of
>Chumbawamba at http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Chumbawamba.jpg ? It
>seems to have been deleted...

It has indeed disappeared, apparently into thin air. I daresay some
friendly developer will be able to have a look into what's happened (it's
the revision of 22:06 22 Nov 2002 that's missing).

In the meantime, I've re-uploaded an older version of it, one that is
bigger than the missing version. You might want to shrink it as you did before.

lp (camembert)


list: wikitech-l

from_name: The Cunctator

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Countering the vandals who attack users (not just
	pages)

body:
On Thu, 2003-05-22 at 21:59, Erik Moeller wrote:
> > David A. Wheeler wrote in part:
>
> >> At the least, why not let the User:NAME pages be ONLY editable
> >> by NAME?  The "User_talk:" spaces need to be editable in some way,
> >> but I don't see a need for others to "fix" the User: space of someone;
> >> it's not critical that that content be fixed, and there's advantanges
> >> to having some areas that are "precious" to each user.
>
> > Your other suggestions were against Wikipedia's openness,
> > and I'm happy to be confident that they will never happen.
> > But I do think that read-only user pages *as*an*option*
> > would be a useful idea.  There have been other problems before.
>
> It is an option. Leave a message on a sysop's talk page and ask them to
> protect your user page.
>
Then the user himself would be unable to edit it.


subject: [Wikitech-l] Search dead (searchindex.MYI) [german]

body:
Je ?a?do 22 Majo 2003 22:00, Thomas Corell skribis:
> Seach results in the following error:
>
>   "1016: Can't open file: 'searchindex.MYI'. (errno: 145)"

Hmm, again... Okay, I'll do the same index rebuild that I did for the
Japanese wiki:
  REPAIR TABLE searchindex
  ALTER TABLE searchindex type=myisam;
(That'll chug away for a few minutes.)

If this happens again in the future, let me know. Hopefully this'll fix
it.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: alvaro

subject: [Wikitech-l] How to get the IP of a logged user ?

body:
Hello,

My problem is :

Daniel C Boyer... you know, this "*relatively* unknown" US painter.
There had been a lot of discussions on en:wki to admit "him" as an article.

The same problem exists on fr: with the same Daniel C Boyer (DCB).

This afternoon, an anonym IP made 2 contributions, adding the DCB's
birth date in the ephemerids and details on the DCB entry.

Then, 30 seconds later, the known DCB user made 2 little (minuscule)
contributions, I think to say "you see, I'm not here just to make my
advertising, I make contributions".

I feel this is unfair ! and I wanted to check from where (traceroute)
these contributions were made.

here is the end of the traceroute on the IP 141.219.44.92

12  dcr1-loopback.Chicago.cw.net (208.172.2.99)  166.949 ms  166.918 ms
179.923 ms
13  bpr2-so-0-0-0.ChicagoEquinix.cw.net (208.175.10.98)  167.948 ms
163.850 ms  166.953 ms
14  208.174.224.74 (208.174.224.74)  177.897 ms  174.949 ms  176.934 ms
15  atm4-0x2.mtu2.mich.net (198.108.23.30)  197.952 ms  187.859 ms
229.941 ms
16  207.75.40.2 (207.75.40.2)  191.956 ms  187.922 ms  192.943 ms
17  patpc4.lib.mtu.edu (141.219.44.92)  225.956 ms  197.867 ms  187.942 ms

You know, there are not a lot of contributions from Chicago on fr:  ;-)

So, my question is: How to retrieve the IP address...

merci / thanks / danke / gracias


subject: [Wikitech-l] Content-type setting

body:
Je ?a?do 22 Majo 2003 22:24, John R. Owens skribis:
> When I try getting an OGG file (in this case, [[Image:Tri.ogg]]
...
> Content-Type: text/plain

Oops! Okay, it should now be putting out application/ogg for .ogg files.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikitech-l] Bug fixes, feature freeze

body:
Je ?a?do 22 Majo 2003 22:36, Erik Moeller skribis:
> > I was planning to use this weekend to update the wikis to the
> > latest software,
>
> Does this include those which are still running on UseMod?

Not unless Lee is planning to finish the new conversion script for me
tomorrow... ;)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [WikiEN-l] Back to the source no NPOV

body:
On Thu, 2003-05-22 at 12:56, Jimmy Wales wrote:
> http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%3ANPOV
>
> I think there's some confusion popping up about NPOV, evidenced in
> part by Cunc's suggestion that NPOV is a Platonic ideal.  I think I
> know what he means, and I might agree with him in a way, but I think
> other people may be misunderstanding what he's saying.  (Or, perhaps I
> just disagree with Cunc.)

Don't blame me! The problem is that what is defined on
[[Wikipedia:NPOV]] != "neutral point of view". That is, the concept
denoted by the four letters NPOV, as defined within the Wikipedia
context, is not congruous to the concept denoted by the phrase "neutral
point of view".

This is a basic problem.

By way of analogy: say I defined something called "WikiPeace" as "the
safety of logged-in Wikipedia users from denigrating comments or
improper edits from anonymous users." There is certainly some
concordance between this concept and the standard concept of "peace on
Wikipedia", as evident from their interchangeability in some contexts:

"That's the fourth time 168.42.100.1 has vandalised my user page. So
much for having some WikiPeace/peace on Wikipedia."

But they are not congruous:

"The only way to guarantee WikiPeace is to ban anonymous users."

is true, but

"The only way to achieve peace on Wikipedia is to ban anonymous users."

is not.

Wikipedia:NPOV has a similar problem. It simply does not mean the same
thing as "neutral point of view".

For example, take the following paragraph:
>
> But if someone says that a particular statement of mine is not NPOV,
> that's a different matter.  Lots of perfectly true and objective
> statements are not NPOV, because they would be disputed by people who
> are reasonable but mistaken.

If one tries to replace "NPOV" with "neutral point of view" they get
gibberish.

So lets look at non-gibberish formulations:

Possible formulation 1)
"Lots of perfectly true and objective statements are not *neutral*,
because they would be disputed by people who are reasonable but
mistaken"

That doesn't really make sense.

Possible formulation 2)
"Lots of perfectly true and objective statements are not *written from a
neutral point of view*, because they would be disputed by people who are
reasonable but mistaken"

That also doesn't make sense.

Possible formulation 3)
"Lots of perfectly true and objective statements are not *written with
the necessary context to explain how people currently perceive the
topic*, because they would be disputed by people who are reasonable but
mistaken"

Ah, now we're getting somewhere. Note that formulations 1) and 2)
actually have something to do with "neutral point of view", but 3) does
not.

And that's the problem.

Solution: figure out what concise concept is expressed by "NPOV" in the
above statements.

I could give you my prediction as to what would be the positive result
of such an exercise, but I'll wait to see if the above is at all
convincing to the interested parties.


from_name: Sean Barrett

subject: [Wikipedia-l] larousse.wikipedia.org?

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

Toby Bartels wrote:
| Sean Barrett wrote:
|
|
|>My servers are named Orwen, Orgoch, and Orddu.  For two Wikicents, who
|>did I lift the names from?  No fair googling.
|
|
| These are the Fates in ancient Wales.
| They may be found today in Lloyd Alexander's Prydain Chronicles
| (but he didn't invent them).

Very good.  And even tho Disney made a cartoon of "The Black Cauldron,"
I don't expect them to sue me.

[Okay, go ahead and insert a Spanish Inquisition joke here.]

- --
~ Sean Barrett     | When trouble arises and things look bad,
~ sean at epoptic.com | there is always one individual who perceives
~                  | a solution and is willing to take command.
~                  | Very often, that individual is crazy.
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Version: GnuPG v1.2.1 (MingW32)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

iD8DBQE+zbXSv/8xpnvE6M8RAny0AJ9meH8i4fWjjykcLAKDeAdsz7UiPwCgnTSa
FO+0QoyxQwxGg+eb/v3g6pE=
=wasg
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from_name: Geoff Burling

subject: [WikiEN-l] Back to the source no NPOV

body:
On Thu, 22 May 2003, Jimmy Wales wrote:

> Geoff Burling wrote:
> > Well, ask anyone, & you'll most likely be told, ``I have a perfectly
> > NPOV. It's the rest of you who are biassed & don't know all of the
> > important facts." ;-)
>
> If someone says that, then they are confusing NPOV with "objective" or
> "unbiases" or "true" or "the whole truth and nothing but the truth" or
> something like that.
>
That was partly the point I meant to make, with humor. But the confusion
lies on more levels than just one: I've had numerous occasions to talk
with people who seriously express the POV I quoted above. (This comes
up a lot if one talks about religion.)

I hope all of us have found ourselves slipping into the fallicy I
alluded to in my brief comment; if not, either you're living in denial
or a better person than I will ever be. And it was meant to serve
as a reminder, like a string around a finger, that we can slip into
it unless we are careful.

That was all.

Geoff


from_name: Guillaume Blanchard

subject: [Wikipedia-l] dates on fr:

body:
> I suspect it's just Aoineko being fancy.
> Please could we have a plain old comma instead?

I didn't made any aesthetic change.
It was just a bug.
The file is shared on the french wikipedia at this address :
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikip%E9dia:LanguageFr.php
I asked everybody if they were ok with this new version before to send it.
By the way the old version was " ? " but I put ", " like Tarquin suggested.
You are free to change.

Aoineko


from_name: julien tayon

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Re: [Wikitech-l] How to get the IP of a logged
 user ?

body:
[...]
> I'm definitely with Cunc here on both counts. I don't have a
> problem with anyone being both a contributer and a subject--we've
> already had that case before, and it's no problem as long as the
> subject understands that the article about him in the main wikipedia
> space is not his personal page, and may be edited by others in ways
> he doesn't like.
>
> And yes, this is clearly not a "tech" issue, so I've moved it to
> the main list.
>
I see a point, what we try to improve is not space or memory usage. The
point is to promote NPOV. Don't you think that the opposite of
objectivity is subjectivity, so to say being both the topic and the
writer, or the judge and the trialed.
I don't it is possible for anyone to write about himself
?objectively? therefore the behaviour in itself is flawed. Having NPOV
articles also means promoting NPOV behaviour.

It is my opinion and I agree with it. ;)

Jul
"The poetry of heroism appeals irresitably to those who don't go to a
war, and even more so to those whom the war is making enormously
wealthy."
		-- Celine


from_name: Lee Daniel Crocker

body:
> (Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com>):
>
> See the big bold red text at the top of
> http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:New_server_madness
>
> It's the same root problem. No, the link is not functional. (It'll get
> you to the block page, but it will refuse to do anything.)
>
> Some change in the login system presumably is at fault. I'm not very
> familiar with the login system and am not sure what changed offhand.
> I've been hoping Lee would take a look at it, having recently tweaked
> it while integrating some changes from Tim, but if he doesn't I'll see
> what I can do.

Sorry, hadn't noticed. I'll take a look.

--
Lee Daniel Crocker <lee at piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/>
"All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past,
are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified
for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC


from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [WikiEN-l] Uwe Kils is now a sysop

body:
Since there were no objections, I have made Uwe a sysop.

Regards,

Erik


from_name: John R. Owens

subject: [Wikitech-l] Content-type setting

body:
When I try getting an OGG file (in this case, [[Image:Tri.ogg]]
([[Media:Tri.ogg]], whatever you want to call it, it's still
http://www.wikipedia.org/upload/b/b6/Tri.ogg ), it gets this back for a
HTTP head:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Fri, 23 May 2003 05:16:55 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.27 (Unix) PHP/4.3.1
Last-Modified: Sat, 17 May 2003 04:05:28 GMT
ETag: "8772a-3061-3ec5b508"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 12385
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/plain
              ^^^^^^^^^^

Is this just something else that we forgot to turn on on the new server?
Or has it been giving this kind of a Content-type all along? It sure is
ugly when my browser tries to actually show it as text, either way. :p

--
John R. Owens http://www.ghiapet.homeip.net/
I tried.  I tried to warn them.  But it all happened, just the way I
remembered.
				--Commander Jeffrey David Sinclair


subject: [WikiEN-l] NO-FX ban

body:
No-Fx has vandalized Zoe's user page. He appears to be yet another
reincarnation of the banned user Michael, working on the same articles in
the same style and not responding to messages.

So, should we ban him? He will probably just reappear under a new name,
but if we do this often enough, he might be deterred.

I should point out that the problem of users appearing under dozens of
names would probably go away if we required an email confirmation during
signup, although that might deter some users from creating an account.

Regards,

Erik


from_name: Dante Alighieri

subject: [WikiEN-l] Several new articles on Jaguar cars

body:
Someone at the IP address 194.228.103.247 has created a couple of new
articles on Jaguars that all contain data from the website
www.jaguarracing.wz.cz to which a link was also added to the Jaguar (car)
page by the same user. Anyone want to weigh in on whether this constitutes
a copyright violation?

-----

Dante Alighieri
dalighieri at digitalgrapefruit.com

"The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their
neutrality in times of great moral crisis."
    -Dante Alighieri, 1265-1321
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subject: [Wikitech-l] Bug fixes, feature freeze

body:
I was planning to use this weekend to update the wikis to the latest
software, and do the database updates required for that. There are
also some remaining problems from the server change that I need to
take a look at.

I'd like to strongly suggest that we put the software into feature
freeze for at least a week until all the wikis are fully functional
with the latest software, and they can all be updated from the
scripts in the distribution.  From that point, maintenance should
be much easier and not the ad-hoc affair it is now.

--
Lee Daniel Crocker <lee at piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/>
"All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past,
are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified
for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Sound on wikipedia

body:
I have some question about sound on Wikipedia.

1) Ogg format is a recommendation or an obligation ?
1 bis) Can we use other format like mp3, wav, etc... ?
2) Do you planed to support feature like <embed> ?

That's all.

Aoineko


subject: [Wikitech-l] Content-type setting

body:
> (John R. Owens <jowens.wiki at ghiapet.homeip.net>):
> When I try getting an OGG file (in this case, [[Image:Tri.ogg]]
> ([[Media:Tri.ogg]], whatever you want to call it, it's still
> http://www.wikipedia.org/upload/b/b6/Tri.ogg ), it gets this back for a
> HTTP head:
>
> HTTP/1.1 200 OK
> Date: Fri, 23 May 2003 05:16:55 GMT
> Server: Apache/1.3.27 (Unix) PHP/4.3.1
> Last-Modified: Sat, 17 May 2003 04:05:28 GMT
> ETag: "8772a-3061-3ec5b508"
> Accept-Ranges: bytes
> Content-Length: 12385
> Connection: close
> Content-Type: text/plain
>               ^^^^^^^^^^
>
> Is this just something else that we forgot to turn on on the new server?
> Or has it been giving this kind of a Content-type all along? It sure is
> ugly when my browser tries to actually show it as text, either way. :p

Yep, that's it exactly: the server's mime configuration has to be
updated to include Ogg audio.  I can fix that right away.

--
Lee Daniel Crocker <lee at piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/>
"All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past,
are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified
for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC


subject: [Wikitech-l] Bug fixes, feature freeze

body:
> (Erik Moeller <erik_moeller at gmx.de>):
> Lee-
> > I was planning to use this weekend to update the wikis to the latest
> > software,
>
> Does this include those which are still running on UseMod?

No, those are all Brion's job :-)

--
Lee Daniel Crocker <lee at piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/>
"All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past,
are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified
for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC


subject: [Wikitech-l] IP stuff

body:
The Cunctator, Lee Daniel Crocker,

Wrong question, wrong place to ask. :-(
I apologize to you.

Goodbye


body:
On Thu, 2003-05-22 at 21:22, Daniel Ehrenberg wrote:
>
> --- The Cunctator <cunctator at kband.com> wrote:
> > Yes, it would. Gotta love that passive voice: "the
> > [[communist state]]
> > article was intended..." By whom, I wonder.
> >
> > Moreover, if you read the content of the [[communist
> > state]] entry, it's
> > evident that it's not just about theory.
>
> I'm just repeating what was said previously on this list.

The question which, like Chthulu, rises forbiddingly from the depths,
is: why did you do so?

And I'm not trying to be pusillanimous. I'm just trying to point out
that avoiding the passive voice is healthy practice.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] IP stuff

body:
 The Cunctator, Lee Daniel Crocker,

 Wrong question, wrong place to ask. :-(
 I apologize to you.

 Goodbye

Alvaro


subject: [Wikitech-l] Error in search on WikipediaNL

body:
Je Vendredo 23 Majo 2003 01:29, Andre Engels skribis:
> Searching (as well as moving) on WikipediaNL results in a database
> error.
>
> Error message:
>
> 1016: Can't open file: 'searchindex.MYI'. (errno: 145)

Sigh... Okay, doing same fix as Japanese and German. Give a shout if it
continues to happen.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikitech-l] Optimizing default prefs

body:
Je Vendredo 23 Majo 2003 00:57, Erik Moeller skribis:
> Underlining:

We should just get rid of this option and not specify anything about
underlining in our style sheet. Every browser has an option to set
this, and people turn underlining off in the site just because we
override their browser settings.

> Remember password:

This should absolutely *not* *not* *not* be on by default.

> Other users should be security aware enough to tick off the "Remember"
> checkbox during login.

I might wish the same, but I don't believe it. :)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Sound on wikipedia

body:
> 1) Ogg is recommended because it's a public standard,
> freely available on all computers. MP3 has patent problems,
> but is a de facto standard and should also be OK (if the
> only source material you have is MP3, don't bother recoding
> to Ogg as that will only reduce quality further). WAV is
> uncompressed, and therefore unacceptable except in the
> rarest of cases (I can only think of a few: like short test
> sounds in articles about digital signal processing).

sure wav's ADPCM is a poor compression ;o)
if I asked if we can use mp3 is mostly because ogg is not supported by
<embed>.

> 2) No, I don't ever plan to support embed. Sounds sould
> play on demand only. I do plan to make some nicer features
> for audio and video playback at some point.

<embed> can play on demand only -> autostart="false"
I suppose we can deal with sound without a player, but I think it's pity.
<embed> is W3C standard, isn't it ?
I don't know at all what percentage of browser support it,
but thank to <noembed> tag, we can manage all case. no ?

regards,

Aoineko


subject: [Wikipedia-l] My identity is being used by another and Aoineko is totally out of his wits

body:
> Guillaume Blanchard wrote:
> > Anthere defended someone who used someone else nickname to make
> >multi no-npov modification on a article. So, for joke I created an
> >account named "Anth?re" (with accent).
>
> I think it is probably best for us all to avoid such jokes.

sorry


subject: [WikiEN-l] NO-FX ban

body:
Brion-
> Stop giving him the satisfaction of making a big fuss. Just revert crap
> that's crap, and work with stuff that's good (should there be any). What
> more do we need?

First: Lee has banned No-Fx, so this will only be applicable to the next
incarnation, should there be any.

Neither option is very appealing. Michael seems to be a person with mental
problems, and I doubt he much cares about the existence of other users on
Wikipedia at all. He considers it his playground, or maybe an information
storage system. Those who try to talk to him are insulted.

Furthermore, it is not easy to determine which of the information he
inserts is actual junk. For example, a couple of days ago I noticed that
he had changed one on the articles on my watchlist and modified the
release date of an album. I checked the date from multiple sources, and
the old one was correct. I do not know where he gets his information from,
but much of it is quite obviously incorrect.  Add to this the personal
insult to people like Zoe, on whose user page he put the text "I like oral
sex" and pasted the whole oral sex article.

Just reverting everything he writes may be an acceptable solution for the
time being, but it's also considerable work, and needlessly spams the
server. Every couple of days some newbie will ask why we do it because his
edits seem to be acceptable. I would really like to see these matters
resolved more quickly and concentrate on writing an encyclopedia.
Otherwise I fear at some point we might have 10 or 20 users like him at
our hands in the future.

There may be the option of threatening legal action, but if Michael is as
stubborn as I think, that will also not really deter him.

>> I should point out that the problem of users appearing under dozens of
>> names would probably go away if we required an email confirmation during
>> signup, although that might deter some users from creating an account.

> You have heard of hotmail and yahoo, right? :)

True, but signing up for a new account takes time -- all these email
account providers ask plenty of questions. He may go through it a couple
of times, but unless he is a script kiddie, he'll probably get tired of it
soon enough.

Regards,

Erik


subject: [Wikitech-l] Countering the vandals who attack users (not just pages)

body:
David-
> Sadly, it appears that there are some hurtful vandals out there
> who are attacking the people trying to counter them. For example,
> User:Zoe has just posted that she's abandoning her efforts to counter
> vandals; see: http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/User%3AZoe
> which begins: "I'm tired of fighting, I'm tired of arguing,
> I'm tired of being called names."

First, Zoe made this decision about a month ago:

http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=User:Zoe&oldid=869255

And it had to do with more than just vandals editing her page. If that was
the problem, she could have just protected it, as some sysops have done.

> Here's a more controversial idea: perhaps some
> information relating to deletion of pages and banning of users
> should be hidden from non-sysops.  For example,
> since "delete" can only be done by sysops,  why not just tell
> non-sysops that a deletion occurred, but not WHICH sysop did it?
> By the same token, perhaps some discussion areas should be
> only readable/writeable by sysops, in particular a discussion
> area to discuss banning someone.

This is not going to happen. At Wikipedia we strongly value openness and
transparency, and the lack of different "user classes". Sysops should
merely be the "executive organs" of the users at large. If you want to see
a system that works the opposite way, take a look at Everything2, where
new users are told that they should expect half of their first articles to
be deleted. Users are only notified of deletions by an anonymous bot
called "Klaproth" and have no way of questioning them. The party line is
that "abuses may happen, but they will probably be rare". The whole E2
system is built up so that users have to work their way to the top,
gaining new privileges as they write. It has 13 different levels, many of
which come with new "powers". Suffice it to say that as a level 1 user,
your opinions are not worth much. Oh, as for censored conversations, the
only real forum they have is the "chatterbox", and if you say something
they don't like, any editor or "god" (they are really called gods) can
unleash the "Everything Death Borg" on you and silence you.

Are you scared yet? I hope you're scared. I'm not making this up. This is
what happens when you let a bunch of insecure geeks run a collaborative
writing community :-). Any power that is not kept in check by those who do
not have it is likely to be abused.

We are always looking for new solutions that allow us to maintain two
ideals:

1) We want to productively create an accurate, high quality encyclopedia.
2) We want our system to be as free of restrictions and power structures
and as open and transparent as reasonably possible.

Regards,

Erik


subject: [WikiEN-l] NO-FX ban

body:
Daniel-
> Don't throw around the term 'mental problems'; my
> little brother is autistic.

Your point being? I did not say that everyone who has mental problems
would be an annoying user. I am saying that some people who are annoying
users have mental problems, which makes it hard to apply conventional
solutions. It would be fatal to assume that all our users behave
rationally.

> Erik, it takes no work to type in 'a' for each
> criterion when signing up for yahoo or hotmail.

I don't know about Hotmail, but last time I tried to create a fake account
on Yahoo it took quite a bit of work; there are various checks in place. I
think they also have a [[Captcha]] of some kind.

Regards,

Erik


from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Optimizing default prefs

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:
> Regarding the skins, I think Cologne Blue *could* become the standard with
>   some design fixes, but we should stick with Standard for now.

IMO Colonge Blue is nearly as bad as Nostalgia as far as usability is
concerned. The emphasis of that design seems to be concentrated on making
things look pretty and not on making things easy to use or find.

It would probably be better to just add a bit of color to our logo and the
Standard Header.

> Underlining:
>
> Users who like their links underlined can still turn on this option, but
> extrapolating from the above, I would guess that non-underlined links are
> more popular. Note that we are a very link-heavy page, so the high amount
> of underlining on a page can get quite distracting. Links are reasonably
> easy to distinguish from normal text when non-underlined.

I agree. At one time underlining was the standard way to mark hyperlinks but
most websites don't do this anymore. One of the first settings I changed was
this one (IMO all the hyperlink underlining is really really ugly ; right
along with the even older web "standard" of having all non-bgcolor filled
backgrounds display as gray).

> Remember password:
>
> This option needs to be distinguished from underlining, as it can also be
> accessed on the login screen, not just on the preferences screen, and is
> thus likely to be noticed by more people. However, I still think this
> should be the default. There are users at places where they do not want
> their password remembered, such as cafes and changing terminals at work.
> What is the standard case and what the exception, though? My guess is that
>   most people log in to Wikipedia from one or two machines, and that the
> browser on that machine is reasonably secure from access by others. Other
> users should be security aware enough to tick off the "Remember" checkbox
> during login.

Hm. Since this is more of a security issue I think the current behavior is
best. I for one often use my school's computer lab to get a quick check of my
watchlist. So the last thing I would want is for the school computer to
remember my login and allow somebody to run amok with my sysop-enabled
account (actually I always explicitly log-out, and clear the history and the
cache of any public computer after I use it - but most people don't do this).

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


from_name: Karim Moussally

subject: [WikiEN-l] Another user greeting boilerplate

body:
Just a heads-up that I've created another boilerplate user-greeting for
those users who have made some good edits but have not yet created a user
ID. It's much the same as the Standard User Greeting, except that it is
more appropriate for those users who have not yet really "joined" the
Wikipedia.

http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%3AStandard_user_greeting

-----

Karim Moussally
kmoussally at cal.berkeley.edu

"Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre
minds. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly
submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his
intelligence."
    -Albert Einstein, attributed

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subject: [WikiEN-l] (no subject)

body:
Yeah, that last one from Karim Moussally was from me. That's my real name.
Darn multiple sig files. ;)

-----

Dante Alighieri
dalighieri at digitalgrapefruit.com

"The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their
neutrality in times of great moral crisis."
    -Dante Alighieri, 1265-1321
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from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Two issues here: what is legal to have on the server and what is legal in the user's nation

body:
This is getting pretty far afield from wikipedia issues, so we
should try to wrap it up or bring it back to something directly
relevant to wikipedia soon.

Lee Daniel Crocker wrote:
> Agreed. I just thought it a bit unfair to demonize the MPAA when
> for the most part it is the American public itself that's the
> problem.  Our prudery is not a case of an authoritarian minority
> oppressing the freedom-loving masses; it's a case of the
> authoritarian masses oppressing the freedom-loving minority.

American culture isn't prudish, it's self-contradictory and
hypocritical.  When I said that American is the porn capital of the
world, I meant it in terms of per-capita consumption and per-capita
production.

Adult entertainment is a huge and mainstream business.

"The General Motors Corporation, the world's largest company, now sells
more graphic sex films every year than does Larry Flynt, owner of the
Hustler empire."

http://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/23/technology/23PORN.html

So, yeah, there is prudishness, but there's also a lot of
non-prudishness coupled with hypocrisy.

--Jimbo


body:
alvaro wrote:
> Daniel C Boyer... you know, this "*relatively* unknown" US painter.
> There had been a lot of discussions on en:wki to admit "him" as an article.

I don't see the problem.  It does seem a bit tacky for him to have
written an entry on himself, and I wouldn't want to encourage the
practice generally, but it doesn't seem worth worrying about very
much.


from_name: Oliver Pereira

subject: [WikiEN-l] NPOV and controversial material

body:
On Thu, 22 May 2003, Jimmy Wales wrote:

> Hmmm, I'm not sure where I fit into all that.  I don't think drugs are
> evil, I do think murder is bad.  I don't think "war is peace", not
> literally, but I *very strongly* supported the liberation of Iraq, and
> although I'm opposed to the death penalty, I do think it is possible
> that in some instances, killing people would help reduce murder rates.

I'm sure you meant to write, "Please let's not discuss politics on the
mailing list," but somehow it came out as a statement of your political
views. :(

There has been a ridiculous number of messages in the last twenty-four
hours about politics. Partly about the invasion of Iraq, but mostly about
U.S. laws regarding nudity in films, of all things! All utterly off-topic,
of course. Can we please not do this? All the analysis on the latter
subject is already covered in the relevant Wikipedia article anyway. What?
You mean it isn't? Oh, well, there's an opportunity for you...

Go and write [[Nudity in film]], or something... ;)

Oliver

+-------------------------------------------+
| Oliver Pereira                            |
| Dept. of Electronics and Computer Science |
| University of Southampton                 |
| omp199 at ecs.soton.ac.uk                    |
+-------------------------------------------+


subject: [WikiEN-l] NO-FX ban

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:
> Obviously a change in strategy is required if we want to do anything
> other than re-ban Lir and Michael all day long. To continue to use the
> same strategy that we *know* is ineffective is neurotic.

I hear what you're saying, and look forward to some fresh ideas.  :-)

--Jimbo


body:
David A. Wheeler wrote:
> Attacks on users and sysops - particularly highly dedicated ones -
> are much more dangerous to the Wikipedia than
> simple attacks on a few pages.  If these kinds of attacks cause
> people to stop weeding out bad pages or vandals for
> fear of retribution, the project is doomed.

I agree, but in large part this is a social phenomenon, and the best
defense that we can have against it is a strong culture of mutual
support and caring.  Regular users should know that they are in the
family, so to speak, and that the malicious actions of a few newcomers
or passerby are not worthy of a lot of emotional energy.

> Is there any way the software could be modified to make it harder
> for vandals to counter-attack the people who are trying to
> remove vandalism?

Quite possibly -- subtle changes to software can make for big changes
to social environments.  But, the changes aren't always what are hoped
for.  It's a tricky business.

> At the least, why not let the User:NAME pages be ONLY editable
> by NAME?  The "User_talk:" spaces need to be editable in some way,
> but I don't see a need for others to "fix" the User: space of someone;
> it's not critical that that content be fixed, and there's advantanges
> to having some areas that are "precious" to each user.

But there are disadvantages as well.  We aren't a free homepage
provider, so although custom has it that the User: space is relatively
wide open, a big part of what makes wiki work so well is mutual
vulnerability.  That mutual vulnerability carries risks, of course,
but it also encourages individual responsibility, thoughtfulness
towards others, etc.

I don't agree at all with your ideas of hiding some information from
users... one of our great strengths is transparency and openness.
We've tried really hard -- and with some success -- to avoid
cliquishness in terms of sysops, banning, policy discussions, etc.

One of the things that keeps the "in crowd" honest is a commitment to
transparency and personal accountability.  Moves away from that may
help sysops avoid being yelled at by trolls, but it also risks bad
behavior on *our* part.

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikitech-l] [tfoote@bomis.com: A MUST see]

body:
A friend forwarded me this humor page, and I tried to use
it with http://www.wikipedia.org, with the very surprising
result that it returned the "Index of /" from wikipedia, rather
than the Snoop-Dogg lingo translation of the page.

Probably this is evidence of something we've done wrong?

----- Forwarded message from tfoote at bomis.com -----

From: tfoote at bomis.com
Date: Thu, 22 May 2003 16:54:47 -0700 (PDT)
To: Jimmy Wales <jwales at joey.bomis.com>
Subject: A MUST see

You have got to see this now:

http://www.asksnoop.com/shizz_frame.php

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


from_name: Anthere

body:
> I don't agree at all with your ideas of hiding some
> information from
> users... one of our great strengths is transparency
> and openness.
> We've tried really hard -- and with some success --
> to avoid
> cliquishness in terms of sysops, banning, policy
> discussions, etc.
>
> One of the things that keeps the "in crowd" honest
> is a commitment to
> transparency and personal accountability.  Moves
> away from that may
> help sysops avoid being yelled at by trolls, but it
> also risks bad
> behavior on *our* part.
>
> --Jimbo

I agree with all this.

There is one area though where transparency of
information is not offered to regular users, it is in
the deleted pages.
Once a page is deleted, no one except sysops can look
at it. I think it right only sysops can delete and
undeleted pages.
But I think it wrong regular users can not from time
to time check whether pages were not unproperly
deleted (not along community defined rules).

That is a feedback control not offered in Wikipedia. I
think providing a feedback tool would help
strengthening the trust regular users have in sysops.
And be a real commitment to transparency and accountability.

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
The New Yahoo! Search - Faster. Easier. Bingo.
http://search.yahoo.com


body:
I regret making that comment on the list, I thought that I was writing
privately.  I stand by the comment, of course, but it's inappropriate
for me to discuss politics on the list.  (Inappropriate for all of us,
actually!)

Toby Bartels wrote:
> Jimmy Wales wrote in part:
>
> >I *very strongly* supported the liberation of Iraq
>
> Well, who wouldn't?  I've always supported liberation in every country.
> Nevertheless, I *very strongly* opposed the recent naked agression
> towards Iraq by the United States military.  ^_^
>
>
> -- Toby
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l


body:
On Thu, 22 May 2003, Lee Daniel Crocker wrote:

> I'm definitely with Cunc here on both counts. I don't have a problem
> with anyone being both a contributer and a subject--we've already had
> that case before, and it's no problem as long as the subject understands
> that the article about him in the main wikipedia space is not his
> personal page, and may be edited by others in ways he doesn't like.

I've been thinking about this myself. I certainly don't think that
noteworthy people should be excluded just because they are also
Wikipedians, but I can see that people might not trust people's edits to
articles about themselves, so I think maybe we should discourage people
from making such edits. Quite apart from the NPOV issue, I think we should
only include information which is verifiable from publically available
sources, and if people edit articles about themselves, they are likely to
include things which no-one else can check.

And on the same subject, I think that the founders of the world's largest
open content encyclopaedia could do with having their own articles. Would
it be possible to make [[Jimbo Wales]] and [[Larry Sanger]] into articles
instead of redirects to their user pages, or would that just mess
everything up?

Oliver

+-------------------------------------------+
| Oliver Pereira                            |
| Dept. of Electronics and Computer Science |
| University of Southampton                 |
| omp199 at ecs.soton.ac.uk                    |
+-------------------------------------------+


subject: [WikiEN-l] Back to the source no NPOV

body:
The Cunctator wrote:
> Don't blame me! The problem is that what is defined on
> [[Wikipedia:NPOV]] != "neutral point of view". That is, the concept
> denoted by the four letters NPOV, as defined within the Wikipedia
> context, is not congruous to the concept denoted by the phrase "neutral
> point of view".
>
> This is a basic problem.

Fair enough, I suppose.  It's jargon, and jargon is dangerous in that
way.

I'd recommend changing it, but it's so well entrenched in our culture
now, that...

--Jimbo


body:
> David A. Wheeler wrote in part:

>> At the least, why not let the User:NAME pages be ONLY editable
>> by NAME?  The "User_talk:" spaces need to be editable in some way,
>> but I don't see a need for others to "fix" the User: space of someone;
>> it's not critical that that content be fixed, and there's advantanges
>> to having some areas that are "precious" to each user.

> Your other suggestions were against Wikipedia's openness,
> and I'm happy to be confident that they will never happen.
> But I do think that read-only user pages *as*an*option*
> would be a useful idea.  There have been other problems before.

It is an option. Leave a message on a sysop's talk page and ask them to
protect your user page.

Regards,

Erik


body:
Anthere wrote:
> But I think it wrong regular users can not from time
> to time check whether pages were not unproperly
> deleted (not along community defined rules).

I'm sympathetic, but we do need a way to delete some things
*permanently* and *completely*.  Examples would include copyright
infringement, goatse.cx picture, etc.

Since almost anyone can be a sysop, and since we're trying to
eliminate the "prestige" of being a sysop, there does exist a way for
anyone who is really interested to gain access to the deleted
material.

--Jimbo


from_name: Daniel Ehrenberg

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Lir and his clones

body:
--- Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> Daniel Mayer wrote:
>
> >That said, I do want to say that any "dictatorial"
> type of system is
> >inherently flawed and the results are only as good
> as the leadership and
> >mediation skills of the current dictator (which can
> be anything between
> >benevolent to malevolent).
> >
> A malevolent dictator would never have had the
> altruistic followers that
> Jimbo has had here.  In such circumstances the
> 'pedia would have had far
> fewer articles over the same time.
>
> >The Romans started on the tract of a
> dictatorial-type system back with
> >Augustus Caesar. Now Augustus was a great leader -
> just like Jimbo - but the
> >system he created totally depended on the strength
> of charactor of the
> >Emperor. So when a person with poor leadership
> skills or morals takes over in
> >such a system then we have Neros and Caligulas.
> >
> I thought of a Roman emperor comparison when i was
> composing my previous
> response to this, specifically Marcus Aurelius.
>
> >We /do/ plan on changing the system as part of the
> process of setting up the
> >Wikimedia Foundation, BTW, so there is nothing to
> be angry about.
> >
> My concern and support about the much bruited
> foundation has not been
> based on the actions of our present dictator, but on
> insuring long term
> continuity that would protect the project and make
> it self-sustaining
> far into the future.
>
> Ec

So you think that wikipedia will slowly die out if we
never make the Wikimedia foundation?
--LittleDan

__________________________________
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http://search.yahoo.com


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Lir and his clones

body:
--- Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> LittleDan wrote:
> >....
> > In all of the other wikis (except for the ones
> modeled
> > after us), there is no "supreme-dictator-for-life"
> (as
> > you put it, perhaps humorsly, in a previous post).
> > Most other wikis despise that we have one person
> > running the whole thing. I don't think we should
> keep
> > doing your unpopular decisions just because you
> own
> > the servers. When you created Wikipedia, you also
> gave
> > up control of it. We are a community, not governed
> by
> > one person, but by everyone. On many of the About,
> > FAQ, and similar pages, you state that Wikipedia
> is an
> > anarchy, but that really is not true. As long as
> you
> > unilaterally make decisions like this, wikipedia
> will
> > never be a true anarchy, always a dictatorship.
> > --LittleDan
>
> This is way off base here. Jimbo has been tirelessly
> caring, compassionate and
> fair and has been a true "benevolent dictator" in
> the spirit of Linus
> Torvalds.
>
> His guidance and the resources he has donated has
> gotten us to where we are.
> Not only does he spend a good deal of his time on
> Wikipedia-related things
> but he has also donated many tens of thousands of
> dollars of his own money
> into the project. He didn't have to do that.
>
> And he did this all this without the faintest hint
> that he expected to get
> anything out of Wikipedia other than the
> satisfaction in knowing that he is
> nurturing a project that is creating one of the best
> free resources on the
> Internet. Trying to ensure that human knowledge is
> made freely available to
> everyone; IMO, few things are nobler than that.
>
> That said, I do want to say that any "dictatorial"
> type of system is
> inherently flawed and the results are only as good
> as the leadership and
> mediation skills of the current dictator (which can
> be anything between
> benevolent to malevolent).
>
> The Romans started on the tract of a
> dictatorial-type system back with
> Augustus Caesar. Now Augustus was a great leader -
> just like Jimbo - but the
> system he created totally depended on the strength
> of charactor of the
> Emperor. So when a person with poor leadership
> skills or morals takes over in
> such a system then we have Neros and Caligulas.

wasn't Augustus Caesar stabbed in the back by his son,
Brutus? (not that I'd do that to Jimbo)
>
> But in a free wiki like this it is easier to "split
> the empire" (sic fork) if
> we have bad leadership. This threat should put some
> limit on how "malevolent"
> a dictator can be.
>
> So there are some checks and balances even in the
> system we have now. Although
> this really is the ultimate check so a better system
> with more checks and
> balances is needed.
>
> You are young so I'm assuming your angry outbust is
> really directed at the
> system and not the man.
>
> We /do/ plan on changing the system as part of the
> process of setting up the
> Wikimedia Foundation, BTW, so there is nothing to be
> angry about.
>
> Save your ideas for when we start to draft
> Wikimedia's charter.

Why don't we draft a charter now and use it for the
operation of wikipedia even before the foundation is
set up.
>
> In the spirit of WikiLove (a Jimbo concept :),
>
> -- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
>
--LittleDan

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subject: [Wikipedia-l] IP stuff

body:
--- Erik Moeller <erik_moeller at gmx.de> wrote:
> > Hi all,
> > I don't think is the wrong place to ask.
> > I also think that hide IP to logged user led us to
> many problems we didn't
> > encounter before the Phase III.
> > Here is the problems I see :
> > - Same user who use multiple identity to justify a
> pov opinion
> > - Same user who use multiple identity to make
> multi votes
> > - Vandale who use user account to hide its ip
> > As sysop I have no idea to how block a logged user
> even if he do massive
> > vandalism (except send a message to this list and
> pray for one of the gods
> > can stop him).
> > I don't see any good reason to hide logged user
> IP.
> > It worked fine on Phase I & II, no ?
>
> Aside from privacy concerns, it would allow any
> sysop to ban any other
> user, which might cause problems. To alleviate these
> concerns, we could
>
> 1) store the IP number the user signed up with in
> his user data
> 2) allow sysops to look up the IP number of any user
> who has signed up
> less than a month ago.
>
> This would make it impossible for sysops to obtain
> ALL the IP numbers of a
> user, or to ban long time contributors, but still
> allow them to ban
> vandals effectively by IP address.
>
> Regards,
>
> Erik

I think the type of vandals where it is necessary to
ban very quickly and with no previous discussion are
only the very tough ones, posting by bots for example,
and making it hard for humans to clean the mess. These
ones don't wait a month before vandalising, more
likely a couple of minutes. Should this type of
situation be foreseen, I would put the time limit to
one day instead of one month.

For any "questionable" vandalism or "questionable"
edits (such as Daniel editing his page apparently),
banning is wrong. My Red Dice option of rainclouding
people and their contributions is better.

__________________________________
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The New Yahoo! Search - Faster. Easier. Bingo.
http://search.yahoo.com


body:
Cunc-
>>> David A. Wheeler wrote in part:
>>
>>>> At the least, why not let the User:NAME pages be ONLY editable
>>>> by NAME?  The "User_talk:" spaces need to be editable in some way,
>>>> but I don't see a need for others to "fix" the User: space of someone;
>>>> it's not critical that that content be fixed, and there's advantanges
>>>> to having some areas that are "precious" to each user.
>>
>>> Your other suggestions were against Wikipedia's openness,
>>> and I'm happy to be confident that they will never happen.
>>> But I do think that read-only user pages *as*an*option*
>>> would be a useful idea.  There have been other problems before.
>>
>> It is an option. Leave a message on a sysop's talk page and ask them to
>> protect your user page.
>>
> Then the user himself would be unable to edit it.

You don't say? Well, these are the problems of read-only pages. ;-)

Regards,

Erik


subject: [Wikipedia-l] IP stuff

body:
> Hi all,
> I don't think is the wrong place to ask.
> I also think that hide IP to logged user led us to many problems we didn't
> encounter before the Phase III.
> Here is the problems I see :
> - Same user who use multiple identity to justify a pov opinion
> - Same user who use multiple identity to make multi votes
> - Vandale who use user account to hide its ip
> As sysop I have no idea to how block a logged user even if he do massive
> vandalism (except send a message to this list and pray for one of the gods
> can stop him).
> I don't see any good reason to hide logged user IP.
> It worked fine on Phase I & II, no ?

Aside from privacy concerns, it would allow any sysop to ban any other
user, which might cause problems. To alleviate these concerns, we could

1) store the IP number the user signed up with in his user data
2) allow sysops to look up the IP number of any user who has signed up
less than a month ago.

This would make it impossible for sysops to obtain ALL the IP numbers of a
user, or to ban long time contributors, but still allow them to ban
vandals effectively by IP address.

Regards,

Erik


body:
--- Jimmy Wales <jwales at bomis.com> wrote:
> I regret making that comment on the list, I thought
> that I was writing
> privately.  I stand by the comment, of course, but
> it's inappropriate
> for me to discuss politics on the list.
> (Inappropriate for all of us,
> actually!)
>
> Toby Bartels wrote:
> > Jimmy Wales wrote in part:
> >
> > >I *very strongly* supported the liberation of
> Iraq
> >
> > Well, who wouldn't?  I've always supported
> liberation in every country.
> > Nevertheless, I *very strongly* opposed the recent
> naked agression
> > towards Iraq by the United States military.  ^_^
> >
> >
> > -- Toby

Apology accepted of course.
But...as far as I am concerned, I already know that
position of you, so there is nothing new here ;-)

Anthere (still me, with no accent)

__________________________________
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The New Yahoo! Search - Faster. Easier. Bingo.
http://search.yahoo.com


body:
Hello,

Okay, this is scary. Looking at "Recent changes", I'm getting the
following:

"*  (diff) (hist) . . Seven deadly sins; 05:28 . . David Stewart (Talk |
block) (adding paras on history and evolution of the seven deadly sins)"

David Stewart is a signed-in user. That "block" link shouldn't be there...
I don't know if it's actually a functional link, but I think I'd better
not try clicking on it, just in case it is... :)

Oliver

+-------------------------------------------+
| Oliver Pereira                            |
| Dept. of Electronics and Computer Science |
| University of Southampton                 |
| omp199 at ecs.soton.ac.uk                    |
+-------------------------------------------+


subject: [WikiEN-l] Back to the source no NPOV

body:
--- Jimmy Wales <jwales at bomis.com> wrote:
> The Cunctator wrote:
> > Don't blame me! The problem is that what is
> defined on
> > [[Wikipedia:NPOV]] != "neutral point of view".
> That is, the concept
> > denoted by the four letters NPOV, as defined
> within the Wikipedia
> > context, is not congruous to the concept denoted
> by the phrase "neutral
> > point of view".
> >
> > This is a basic problem.
>
> Fair enough, I suppose.  It's jargon, and jargon is
> dangerous in that
> way.
>
> I'd recommend changing it, but it's so well
> entrenched in our culture
> now, that...
>
> --Jimbo

Before I joined Wikipedia, I'd always thought 'point
of view' meant who was the narrator in a story, like
first person, third person omnicient, etc. Maybe we
should invent a word to replace the clumsy acronym
"NPOV", since it is already so distanced from its
original meaning. Or we could just say "unbiased",
but, then again, FOX claims to be unbiased...
--LittleDan

__________________________________
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The New Yahoo! Search - Faster. Easier. Bingo.
http://search.yahoo.com


subject: [WikiEN-l] NO-FX ban

body:
--- Jimmy Wales <jwales at bomis.com> wrote:
> Brion Vibber wrote:
> > Obviously a change in strategy is required if we
> want to do anything
> > other than re-ban Lir and Michael all day long. To
> continue to use the
> > same strategy that we *know* is ineffective is
> neurotic.
>
> I hear what you're saying, and look forward to some
> fresh ideas.  :-)
>
> --Jimbo

Soft security seems to work for the other wikis, but
since we're the biggest wiki, it doesn't seem to work
for us. Is there something in the  middle?
--LittleDan

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
The New Yahoo! Search - Faster. Easier. Bingo.
http://search.yahoo.com


body:
--- Dante Alighieri <dalighieri at digitalgrapefruit.com>
wrote:
> Someone at the IP address 194.228.103.247 has
> created a couple of new
> articles on Jaguars that all contain data from the
> website
> www.jaguarracing.wz.cz to which a link was also
> added to the Jaguar (car)
> page by the same user. Anyone want to weigh in on
> whether this constitutes
> a copyright violation?
>
> -----
>
> Dante Alighieri
> dalighieri at digitalgrapefruit.com

If it's just *data* from that website, there is no
copywrite violation. Information itself isn't
copywrited.
--LittleDan

__________________________________
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The New Yahoo! Search - Faster. Easier. Bingo.
http://search.yahoo.com


subject: [WikiEN-l] Please, no more personal attacks

body:
--- The Cunctator <cunctator at kband.com> wrote:
> On Thu, 2003-05-22 at 21:22, Daniel Ehrenberg wrote:
> >
> > --- The Cunctator <cunctator at kband.com> wrote:
> > > Yes, it would. Gotta love that passive voice:
> "the
> > > [[communist state]]
> > > article was intended..." By whom, I wonder.
> > >
> > > Moreover, if you read the content of the
> [[communist
> > > state]] entry, it's
> > > evident that it's not just about theory.
> >
> > I'm just repeating what was said previously on
> this list.
>
> The question which, like Chthulu, rises forbiddingly
> from the depths,
> is: why did you do so?
>
> And I'm not trying to be pusillanimous. I'm just
> trying to point out
> that avoiding the passive voice is healthy practice.

If I avoided the passive voice, I probably still would
have said "someone said..."
--LittleDan

__________________________________
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The New Yahoo! Search - Faster. Easier. Bingo.
http://search.yahoo.com


from_name: Fred Bauder

body:
A partial response:

>
>> Those who would delete any mention of [[Tiananmen Square]] from the
>> article on [[China]] cover themselves with shame.
>
> I agree completely that an article on [[China]] needs to have a
> mention of [[Tiananmen Square]].  What reasons were given for omitting
> it?

The edit, by 172, which removed this language is at:

http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=China&diff=853200&oldid=851466

172's comment: "(the democracy movement doesn't pose a threat to the CPC's
power )"

Fred


from_name: David A. Wheeler

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Countering the vandals who attack users (not just pages)

body:
Ah well, I knew many of these ideas would be controversial!
Thanks for the many replies.

However, I haven't heard anyone comment about changing the
"talk" pages into a threaded discussion group:

> A related idea might be to modify the "talk" system so that it's
> more like a bulletin board, with threaded messages and
> a clear identification of who made it (click on "reply" to reply
> to that item, maybe in a threaded way). That way, any message is
> clearly
> identified with its REAL author.  A side-effect would be that
> the attribution would happen automatically (no more
> forgetting ~~~~).  That way, when people discuss things, they
> can't make it appear that someone else made an outrageous/nasty
> statement.
(Yes, a "diff" will show reality, but it's hard to go through
every diff to see what really happened.)

Presumably there's some acceptance of mailing lists, since
we're talking on one...! :-).  Are there fewer objections to
this idea?


subject: [Wikitech-l] Deletion improvements

body:
In CVS:

If an article with less than 500 characters is to be deleted, at most the
first 150 characters are automatically suggested as a deletion reason.
This should automate the frequent practice of pasting the text of nonsense
articles into the deletion reason.

If an article with a history is to be deleted, a warning is inserted,
linking to the article history (so as to avoid accidentally deleting a
vandalized page with a valid history).

If a blanked article with a history is to be deleted, and the next earlier
revision contains less than 500 characters, at most the first 150
characters are automatically suggested as a deletion reason. Nonsense
pages are often blanked, just checking the current revision for nonsense
is not good enough.

New texts in Language.php for this feature:
- excontent, exblank, exbeforeblank, historywarning

Regards,

Erik


subject: [WikiEN-l] NO-FX ban

in_reply_to: <20030523130331.32607.qmail@web41811.mail.yahoo.com>; from littledanehren@yahoo.com on Fri, May 23, 2003 at 06:03:31AM -0700

body:
Daniel Ehrenberg wrote:
> Soft security seems to work for the other wikis, but
> since we're the biggest wiki, it doesn't seem to work
> for us. Is there something in the  middle?

Well, although we obsess over difficulties on the mailing list, the
reality is that soft security works remarkably well for us across a
broad spectrum of possible and actual problems.  Hard security (bans)
works well for passing vandals, but has a decidedly mixed record on
some others.

Despite all our (necessary and important) kvetching on the list, we
should remember that at any given time, you can check recent changes
and 99%+ of the edits are delightful WikiMagic.

Just now, I see User:Sned and User:Evercat working together on an
article on [[BCC]].  User:Frecklefoot is continuing his excellent
article on [[Sundog Frozen Legacy]].  These quiet folks never come to
our attention on the list, but they are the heart and soul of what
we're here for.

--Jimbo


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Wikipedia for education

body:
Sheldon Rampton wrote:
> My old school textbooks never mentioned the genocide against Native
> Americans, and judging from Larner's account, it seems that this is
> something that ought to be mentioned when students learn about Mount
> Rushmore -- unless, of course, we think "history" should consist
> solely of self-congratulatory propaganda.

Right, well, that's exactly my point.  The example was just something
I heard in the news the other day and isn't essential.

My point, stated abstractly, is that outside of a few cases where
extreme ideologues (of whatever sort) have sway, or where most people
feel that children shouldn't have certain information *period*, NPOV
is likely to be satisfactory to most of the people who are concerned
about the content of school texts.  That more or less flows naturally
from what NPOV means and how the wikipedia process works to generate
it.

As a practical matter, it's easy to see a school admin blocking
wikipedia from student access at school if we have photos of
genetalia, or an article about 'fuck', no matter how NPOV.  But I
don't think we'll be blocked merely for having an NPOV article on
Mount Rushmore, including all the unsavory history that you cited.

For now, I'm not too worried about whether wikipedia is acceptable to
school boards.  That's not our primary mission, which is to create an
NPOV encyclopedia for adults.  But in the future, when we get ready
(possibly under the 'Nupedia' brand name or whatever) to produce an
"edited" or "finalized" or "certified" or "peer reviewed" version,
then it could quite possibly be a design goal to make sure that we
have a very good shot at school acceptance.

--Jimbo


from_name: Thomas Corell

body:
Seach results in the following error:

  "1016: Can't open file: 'searchindex.MYI'. (errno: 145)"

Someone at work?
--
Smurf

smurf at AdamAnt.mud.de
-------------------------  Anthill inside! ---------------------------


body:
On Fri, 23 May 2003, Jimmy Wales wrote:

> Date: Fri, 23 May 2003 03:39:03 -0700
> From: Jimmy Wales <jwales at bomis.com>
> Subject: [Wikitech-l] [tfoote at bomis.com: A MUST see]
>
> A friend forwarded me this humor page, and I tried to use
> it with http://www.wikipedia.org, with the very surprising
> result that it returned the "Index of /" from wikipedia, rather
> than the Snoop-Dogg lingo translation of the page.
>
> Probably this is evidence of something we've done wrong?
>
> ----- Forwarded message from tfoote at bomis.com -----
>
> From: tfoote at bomis.com
> Date: Thu, 22 May 2003 16:54:47 -0700 (PDT)
> To: Jimmy Wales <jwales at joey.bomis.com>
> Subject: A MUST see
>
> You have got to see this now:
>
> http://www.asksnoop.com/shizz_frame.php
>
>
> ----- End forwarded message -----

I've noticed that kind of behaviour a few weeks ago, when I was trying to
wget something, so it's not just something overlooked in setting up the
new server, most likely. At the time, I assumed it was either because I
didn't bother to do the cookie setup with wget, or it was set to reject
some User-Agent:s to keep the bots and such out. Of course, it could be
just a coincidence and have nothing to do with what was happening with me,
AND I could just be plain wrong about what was going on for me.

--
John R. Owens http://www.ghiapet.homeip.net/
Londo Mollari: It is good to have friends, is it not, Mr. Garibaldi?  Even
	if maybe only for a little while.
Michael Garibaldi: Even if only for a little while.


in_reply_to: <8mOlT2ZxpVB@erik_moeller>; from erik_moeller@gmx.de on Fri, May 23, 2003 at 04:27:00PM +0200

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:
> 2) Having talk pages handle comments thread-style automatically while
> retaining wiki-form would be desirable.

Can you explain what you mean by this?  What do you mean by "retaining
wiki-form"?

One thing that I like about the current talk pages is that they are
wiki pages, so that they can be refactored from time to time.  It is
true that we don't really do much refactoring, and that it's a huge
social taboo to edit other people's comments during a discussion, but
there's something important, I think, about the mutual trust that's
built up when we *can* screw with each other's remarks, but *don't*.

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikitech-l] Bug fixes, feature freeze

body:
Lee-
> I was planning to use this weekend to update the wikis to the latest
> software,

Does this include those which are still running on UseMod?

Regards,

Erik


in_reply_to: <8mOlUGBxpVB@erik_moeller>; from erik_moeller@gmx.de on Fri, May 23, 2003 at 04:55:00PM +0200

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:
> You could still choose to use "Edit this page" instead, but "reply
> to this" would be a convenience, because you would not have to
> scroll to the proper place in the wikitext and would not have to
> sign your comment.

Sweet, then count me as being fully on board with this.  That's
pretty neat.


from_name: Richard Grevers

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Sound on wikipedia

body:
On Fri, 23 May 2003 01:42:39 +0900, Guillaume Blanchard
<gblanchard at arcsy.co.jp> gave utterance to the following:

>> 1) Ogg is recommended because it's a public standard,
>> freely available on all computers. MP3 has patent problems,
>> but is a de facto standard and should also be OK (if the
>> only source material you have is MP3, don't bother recoding
>> to Ogg as that will only reduce quality further). WAV is
>> uncompressed, and therefore unacceptable except in the
>> rarest of cases (I can only think of a few: like short test
>> sounds in articles about digital signal processing).
>
> sure wav's ADPCM is a poor compression ;o)
> if I asked if we can use mp3 is mostly because ogg is not supported by
> <embed>.
>
>> 2) No, I don't ever plan to support embed. Sounds sould
>> play on demand only. I do plan to make some nicer features
>> for audio and video playback at some point.
>
> <embed> can play on demand only -> autostart="false"
> I suppose we can deal with sound without a player, but I think it's pity.
> <embed> is W3C standard, isn't it ?

Nope - it's Netscape proprietary. The W3C equivalent would be <object
type="audio/rtp-vorbis"> (or possibly type="audio/vorbis")
--
Richard Grevers
Confucius say: People having gift for gab know not how to wrap it up


from_name: Karl Eichwalder

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: [Wikitech-l] How to get the IP of a logged user ?

body:
Oliver Pereira <omp199 at ecs.soton.ac.uk> writes:

> And on the same subject, I think that the founders of the world's largest
> open content encyclopaedia could do with having their own articles. Would
> it be possible to make [[Jimbo Wales]] and [[Larry Sanger]] into articles
> instead of redirects to their user pages, or would that just mess
> everything up?

Redirecting to user pages is arguable and IMO simply wrong.  But I
don't know enough to right an article.

--
                                                         |      ,__o
http://www.gnu.franken.de/ke/                            |    _-\_<,
ke at suse.de (work) / keichwa at gmx.net (home)               |   (*)/'(*)


body:
_______________________________________________

I thank you for that comment Erik. I know about that page. Parts of it were moved on meta. Others comments dealing about what could be only bare mistakes or a little too quick decisions made by our sysops in very stressful moments, are the reasons for the birth of [[Wikipedia:votes for undeletion]]. There is nothing wrong with making mistakes from time to time.

However, for a proper feedback, are needed both tools and information. If noone give regular users the information they kindly ask, there are only questions unanswered, and no feedback.

Ant

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subject: [WikiEN-l] Admin nominations

body:
Toby Bartels <toby+wikipedia at math.ucr.edu> wrote:
Anth?re (but forced to be only "Anthere" on [[fr:]]) wrote in part:

>Recently, many people were proposed to be sysops. They
>were mostly sold the "trust" display, rather than what
>syosp really is (a police force). The more sysops
>there are, the less trust will be granted to non
>sysops, imho.

Why do you think that sysops really are a police force?
What do I, as a sysop on [[en:]], do that makes me a police officer?
If you equate sysops with police, perhaps the real problem
is that sysophood isn't being implemented correctly on [[fr:]].

--- Toby
_______________________________________________

Hello

Both an answer to you and Daniel

There is nothing insulting against police in what I say. Police is necessary imho. There are all types of people in policemen. Mostly regular people, some very good people, and from time to time a couple of bad ones. Like in every profession. But amha the role of the police is double (that is only the way I see it) first police enforce the rules made by a group, and second they may have a role of mediator between people, trying to de-escalate violence display (this is a practice in poor suburbs in France, I have been living in such places at some point). Of course, mediation can be done by other people, but I believe it should be one of the tools the police should use to maintain peace. Not only punishment.

But police do not make the rules themselves. They, as citizens, participate to the rules being made, but no more than any other citizens. That is not their job to do so, but a privilege.

---------------------------------
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from_name: Sheldon Rampton

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Wikipedia for education

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

>  I heard a news story the other day that in
>  California, textbooks
>  are now forbidden to mention Mount Rushmore.  See:
>  http://www.wtvw.com/Global/story.asp?S=1288473

Well...for starters, I'd personally recommend being wary about any
information that comes from the blow-dried "talent" on Fox News. In
any case, here's the "rest of the story":

(1) The news story above (by a woman named Ann Moore, who apparently
does a regular feature called "The Moore You Know") cites a number of
examples of alleged neutering of textbooks, all seemingly for reasons
of leftist "political correctness," such as not allowing the
representation of women as nurses, depictions of junk food, etc.
However, she doesn't mention any specific textbooks in which this has
happened.

(2) With regard to Mount Rushmore, the story is a bit more
complicated than Moore's brief mention suggests. Back in the days
when I was in school, my textbooks didn't mention that the guy who
built Mount Rushmore was a leader in the Ku Klux Klan. Here's a
discussion from a review of a book on the subject by Jesse Larner:

>There are complex stories behind those faces on Mount Rushmore that
>have been edited out of the guidebooks and textbooks. There is the
>story of how the land on which Rushmore stands was expropriated from
>the Lakota Sioux in 1877, abrogating a major treaty. There is the
>story of the sculpture's creator and ideologue, Gutzon Borglum, a
>leader in the Ku Klux Klan, who saw in the expansion of European
>settlement across the American West the fulfillment of white racial
>destiny. Rushmore is prefigured in the story of Custer, who sealed
>the fate of the Black Hills when he discovered gold there in 1874.
>Larner traces the meaning and evolution of the Custer battle
>commemorations, and pursues the ways in which Custer's defeat, the
>killings at Wounded Knee, and Rushmore, are linked in the story of
>the Indians' loss of the Black Hills. Mount Rushmore also traces
>modern political uses of the monument, from Cold War television
>broadcasts to Boy Scout conventions to political campaigns. It looks
>at Rushmore's semi-religious status as the national shrine of
>Democracy, and contrasts this with political restrictions on the
>practice of Indian religions in the Black Hills. Finally, Larner
>deals with previous works on Rushmore that have avoided its message
>of conquest, preferring to focus on a simplistic narrative of
>national glory. Even the tour guides at Rushmore understand little
>of its real history, or of the legal fact that the land from which
>it rises belongs to the Lakota.
http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/biblio?inkey=16-1560253460-2

Viewed in its full historical context, therefore, this example
illustrates how the story of "censorship from textbooks" involves a
whole lot more than the decision to mention or not mention some
monument. My old school textbooks never mentioned the genocide
against Native Americans, and judging from Larner's account, it seems
that this is something that ought to be mentioned when students learn
about Mount Rushmore -- unless, of course, we think "history" should
consist solely of self-congratulatory propaganda.

(3) With regard to depictions of things like "junk food,"
unfortunately there is no shortage of this in our schools. Channel
One, a for-profit company, provides video equipment and programming
to many cash-strapped schools throughout America, in exchange for
which the schools have signed contracts promising to show kids a
daily quota of TV commercials for companies like Pizza Hut. There is
a long and sad story (which I will truncate here) involving the use
of schools as marketing venues for fat- and sugar-laden fast foods.
If anyone wants to know more about this, read Marion Nestle's
excellent book, "Food Politics." (Nestle is a nutritionist who bears
no relation to the chocolate company.) One school got so carried away
by these promotional activities a few years back that it actually
suspended a student for the "disruptive" thought crime of wearing a
Pepsi T-shirt to a Coke Day rally. Here's an interview with the
student that I personally found amusing:
http://www.fadetoblack.com/interviews/mikecameron/

The bottom line is that all sorts of forces -- commercial, political
and social -- take an interest in influencing the way we educate our
youth. It isn't just coming from some "politically correct" clique.
And should we expect or want things otherwise? I think most of us
*hope* school boards would step in and exert editorial oversight if a
textbook referred to black people as "niggers" or described Hitler as
a great man. Judgments about appropriate content for textbooks don't
qualify as "censorship," and different people are bound to have
different views about what is and isn't appropriate. Some people may
think that a decision not to mention Mount Rushmore is absurd and
ridiculous. Outside our national cult of patriotism, however, I
imagine some folks in Europe and elsewhere think it is equally absurd
and ridiculous that Americans would revere a mountain-sized statue of
the heads of dead presidents.
--
--------------------------------
|  Sheldon Rampton
|  Editor, PR Watch (www.prwatch.org)
|  Author of books including:
|     Friends In Deed: The Story of US-Nicaragua Sister Cities
|     Toxic Sludge Is Good For You
|     Mad Cow USA
|     Trust Us, We're Experts
--------------------------------


body:
Erik Moeller <erik_moeller at gmx.de> wrote:
Anthere-
> However, for a proper feedback, are needed both tools and information. If
> noone give regular users the information they kindly ask, there are only
> questions unanswered, and no feedback.

I agree. I am sure sysops will be more willing to paste the content of
deleted pages once the deletion feature is improved (currently
Special:Undelete is almost unusable because of the page size; flushing the
archive might be a tempfix). The changes I just made, with the text of
short pages auto-pasted into the comment field by default, should also
help. Patience :-)

Regards,

Erik
_______________________________________________

If I know a developer is really thinking in improving the process, I am more than willing to be patient Erik

Thanks

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subject: [Wikitech-l] Bug fixes, feature freeze

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:
> Je ?a?do 22 Majo 2003 22:36, Erik Moeller skribis:
>
>>>I was planning to use this weekend to update the wikis to the
>>>latest software,

What about some "pending" updates? I hope Brion or Lee will take a look
at my changes. Possibly there is the need of some changes.

I think you meen 'no CVS changes' with feature freeze?

--
Smurf
  --- Anthill Inside! ---


body:
Brion Vibber wrote:
> Je ?a?do 22 Majo 2003 22:00, Thomas Corell skribis:
>Seach results in the following error:
>>  "1016: Can't open file: 'searchindex.MYI'. (errno: 145)"
> Hmm, again... Okay, I'll do the same index rebuild that I did for the
> Japanese wiki:
>   REPAIR TABLE searchindex
>   ALTER TABLE searchindex type=myisam;
> (That'll chug away for a few minutes.)
> If this happens again in the future, let me know. Hopefully this'll fix
> it.

Well, of course I will mail here, can't do anything else. And if I
detect it early enough it reduced complains on various 'talk' pages.

--
Smurf
  --- Anthill Inside! ---


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikipedia-l] IP stuff

body:
Je Vendredo 23 Majo 2003 06:03, Guillaume Blanchard skribis:
> About banning people I only mention "massive vandalism".
> Banning people was not the main point to ask to be able to see IP
> like before.
> For me show the IP address of everybody like in Phase I & II is to :
> - Be equal to anonymous users (as for privacy as for banning)
> - Limit multi vote by same user
> - Reduce identity steal
> - Break some suspicion that create very bad atmosphere
> I suppose you had a good reason to remove this feature in Phase III,
> but I don't know it.

It never existed in phase II, only in the UseModWiki we used for phase
I. Magnus did not include such a feature in the phase II code.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


body:
Je Vendredo 23 Majo 2003 05:09, John R. Owens skribis:
> On Fri, 23 May 2003, Jimmy Wales wrote:
> > A friend forwarded me this humor page, and I tried to use
> > it with http://www.wikipedia.org, with the very surprising
> > result that it returned the "Index of /" from wikipedia, rather
> > than the Snoop-Dogg lingo translation of the page.
> >
> > Probably this is evidence of something we've done wrong?

It's a bug on their part, but we should be treating it slightly
differently, ie *not* by returning a directory index. :)

If I put in "http://www.wikipedia.org" it makes these requests:
GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.0
GET // HTTP/1.0 "
(note the double slash)

"http://www.wikipedia.org/":
GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.0
GET /// HTTP/1.0
(triple slash!!)

http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/":
GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.0
GET /wiki/// HTTP/1.0
GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.0
GET /style// HTTP/1.0
(seems it just puts double slashes on the end of everything. not sure
why it's asking for /style as a directory...)

"http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page":
GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.0
GET /wiki/Main_Page//
GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.0
GET /style// HTTP/1.0

> I've noticed that kind of behaviour a few weeks ago, when I was
> trying to wget something, so it's not just something overlooked in
> setting up the new server, most likely. At the time, I assumed it was
> either because I didn't bother to do the cookie setup with wget, or
> it was set to reject some User-Agent:s to keep the bots and such out.

It should give you a 403 rejected response for wget. (If you really need
to use wget to fetch _single_ files, use the --user-agent option. This
is to discourage recursive fetches of the entire site.)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikitech-l] Google and our mailing lists

body:
Je Vendredo 23 Majo 2003 07:22, Erik Moeller skribis:
> Our mailing list archive currently seems to be only indexed up to
> January by Google, which, if I remember correctly, is the same time
> Google temporarily stopped indexing Wikipedia articles due to a
> robots.txt mishap.
>
> Would it be possible to change the robots.txt so that our mailing
> lists archives are fully indexed again?

No, since our robots.txt doesn't forbid it. Nor would that mishap have
directly prevented those directories (in /pipermail and /mailman, which
do not being with /w) from being indexed and spidered.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikitech-l] Error in search on Wikipedia FR

body:
Je Vendredo 23 Majo 2003 05:38, alvaro skribis:
>      SELECT cur_id,cur_namespace,cur_title,cur_text FROM
> cur,searchindex WHERE cur_id=si_page AND ( (MATCH (si_title) AGAINST
> ('l?nder')) ) AND cur_namespace IN (0) LIMIT 0, 20
...
> Hi, Brion,
> M?me traitement que wiki japonais et n?erlandais ?

Oui, certement. En proces...

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikitech-l] CVS

body:
Je Vendredo 23 Majo 2003 05:45, Thomas Corell skribis:
> Andre Engels wrote:
> > It used to be that the Wikipedia php-files could be found at
> > http://cvs.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/wikipedia/phpwiki/ne
> >wcodebase/ However, when I look now, none of the files has been
> > edited in the past five weeks, although there has been discussion,
> > and even announcements, on this list. Why?
>
> Lee announced the new location weeks ago:
>
> http://cvs.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/wikipedia/phase3/

To clarify, we moved everything to a new module because Lee decided to
redo the directory structure of the code. CVS really, *really* doesn't
handle that case well: effectively, you have to 'delete' all the files
and 'create' new ones in the subdirectories, so we'd lose the
continuity of versions anyway.

Additionally, 'phpwiki/newcodebase' was unwieldy (besides, 'PhpWiki' is
the name of a *different* wiki software package, and it was potentially
confusing).

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikitech-l] Deletion improvements

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:
> New texts in Language.php for this feature:
> - excontent, exblank, exbeforeblank, historywarning

I hope I can add it in LanguageDE.php today, before the feature freeze.

Smurf
--
MANAGEMENT ANNOUNCEMENT:
Due to actual budget restraints the light at the end of the tunnel
will be turned off without any notice.
  --- Anthill Inside! ---


subject: [WikiEN-l] Power structure of Wikipedia

in_reply_to: <8mOlWduSpVB@erik_moeller>; from erik_moeller@gmx.de on Fri, May 23, 2003 at 05:58:00PM +0200

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:
> Please review for any errors.

"Jimbo's active influence is very limited, however, as he believes in
the principle of minimal interference.  That does not mean that he is
lazy: He reads almost every post on the mailing lists and responds to
many of them, but in most cases, he tries to let the wiki-system and
WikiLove work their magic."

This has two errors.  The most glaring is the claim that I'm not lazy.
I most certainly am!  ;-)

But seriously, I'm not sure what "the principle of minimal
interference" is, so I'm not sure that I agree with it.

The reason that I almost never edit on the Wikipedia itself is that
since I'm called on to make tough political choices, it's best that I
not get involved in battles over particular pages.

I often dig through people's edit histories when there is a
controversy, and I try to mediate conflicts as I see them happening.

Now that the website is not so slow, I might try monitoring specific
talk pages to try to mediate conflicts before they blow into the
mailing list.

--Jimbo