body:
--- Yann Forget <yann at forget-me.net> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Le Monday 31 May 2004 11:52, Jimmy Wales a ?crit :
> > Anthere wrote:
> > > I'd like to remind you Yann, that everyone on
> fr;
> > > trust you for your PR activities. If you had an
> urgent
> > > need for official support, Jimbo would publicly
> > > brought it I think.
> >
> > I agree with this, even though I also support the
> creation of local
> > associations where a significant group of people
> desire it.
> >
> > The issue of official titles is a complete
> non-issue though.  Titles
> > are cheap and easy to generate -- just tell me
> what you want to be
> > called, and you can be called that.
>
> Thanks Jimmy.
> That's solve part of the problem, but not all.
>
> Because speaking in behalf of Wikimedia
> (internationally or locally) means not
> only to have the support of the board and the
> partipants, but to be able to
> implement a decision. This can have legal or
> financial implications. Right
> now I am more concerned with legal implications.
>
> For example, in my district ("d?partement"), primary
> and high schools already
> use Wikipedia has a reference for students and
> teachers. I would like to
> start a general promotion campaign to all schools in
> France, Switzerland,
> etc. I would like to be able to speak to school and
> university teachers,
> directors, librarians, etc., in behalf of Wikimedia.
> The first questions will
> be "Who do you represent?" and "Do you have a local
> organisation?"
>
> Practically this also means to print tee-shirts,
> leaflets, posters, etc.
>
> > --Jimbo
>
> Regards,
> Yann

Well, after the answer Jimbo gave you
"Who do you represent" answer is : I am an official
porte-parole from the Wikimedia Foundation

"Do you have a local organisation" answer is : Not
yet, but we are working on it. Legal and financial
implications must be carefully considered before any
official structure is set, to guarantee the proper
growth of our projects and make best use of the money
offered by our donators.

The tee-shirts and promotional material : I think Erik
had some tee-shirts printed or meant to be anyway.
Organising full scale promotional material production
will always be less expensive because of the large
scale. I think Walter from nl also worked on
promotional material at some point.

I invite you to make use (and to improve)
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_promotion
and in particular
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_T-shirts from
cafepress
and
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_promotion_material

Perhaps Walter, Erik, Tom and you could set a "special
promotion team" and work together to set us a full
collection of possibilities and promotional material,
from which all wikipedias could benefit.

It is probably unecessary and financially not so
interesting that all promotional material is done
independently in each country. Better make use of each
other ressources, and enlarge scale when possible.

I, for one, would be happy to see these pages improve,
and an easy way for each project to quickly have
material available.

How to find the money to have this material done :
well, ask the Foundation for a grant. Certainly, a
certain percentage of future budget can be used to
print material, in particular since these ones are
sold afterwards (hence, it is lending money).
I suspect that a donation call will occur quite soon
if I draw correct conclusions from my connection time
:-) and discussions on irc. Surely, a little
reasonable part of this money may be used for
promotion.
We may also make an extra call on the french wikipedia
for money for promotion for your talks.
My little left finger tells me we would get enough of
it.

This is not to say we should not have a french
association (I think we should), but to say that once
the Foundation is properly and efficiently organised,
we can also go through the Foundation for some issues.

If I may dare say, you are in particular looking for
* support to prove you are not a random speaker
* promotional material

The proposition above give you that.

On the other hand, if we hurry to make an association
essentially for this
* we risk doing mistake in the setting of the
association
* some one will have to organise a donation system
* some one will have to take care of money issue
(treasurer)
* some one will have to take care of all these
organisational points (like having teeshirt printed)

I'd say, not many people are willing to do this. So,
what about temporarily making best use of what we have
at hand ?

*this* is meant to be a solution *now*.

I'd like us to think globally rather than locally.
When there are few people to take care specifically of
one issue, and when less money and sweat can be used
to produce, we should just team up.

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Friends.  Fun.  Try the all-new Yahoo! Messenger.
http://messenger.yahoo.com/


list: wikimedia-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Anthere

subject: [Foundation-l] representation and official positions


list: wikipedia-l

subject: [Wikipedia-l] MBTI

body:
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedians_by_MBTI_type

How do you explain the current majority of NTs ?

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Friends.  Fun.  Try the all-new Yahoo! Messenger.
http://messenger.yahoo.com/


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Andre Engels

subject: [Wikitech-l] Klingon resurrected

body:
"Tim Starling" <ts4294967296 at hotmail.com> schrieb:

> The compromise agreed to by Erik and Timwi is to allow the Klingon
> Wikipedia, but to avoid interlanguage links. Accordingly, I have
> commented out the Klingon entry in $wgLanguageNames. This means that
> markup of the form [[tlh:wIqIpe'DIya]] will create an external link
> rather than an interlanguage link, just like links to meta or sep11.
> Otherwise the wiki is fully functional.

I find this a rather disappointing compromise. Either we consider this
a valid Wikipedia, and then I would like to use it as such. Or we
consider this not a valid Wikipedia, and then I have to wonder why
we put it on Wikimedia in the first place. Can I get my own Wiki here
too? I really get the feeling that the compromise is worse than either
of the alternatives it is compromising between.

And I also want to reiterate that if we would find Klingon not worthy
of a Wikipedia, then this should be doubly so for Tokipona.

Andre Engels


list: wikien-l

from_name: Daniel P.B.Smith

subject: [WikiEN-l] VfD etiquette

body:
On the Internet, one must be constantly aware that discussions that
"feel" as if they are taking place in a club-like atmosphere of a few
dozen people are, actually, completely open to the public. (The
Pentagon does not need to log my USENET posts in any Total Information
Awareness program; Google News, and Deja News before it have already
done that!).

In Votes for Deletion, conversations are sometimes conducted as if they
were taking place behind a contributor's back, with the sillier items
being openly sneered at and ridiculed. A lot of these remarks are
actually witty, e.g. "Delete this before his vanity develops an event
horizon" or "Delete. Delete fast. Delete ruthlessly. (this has nothing
to do with the [actual content], but I can't stand it when people use
'principal' when they mean 'principle')"

Unlike a closed-door executive session, these frank discussions are not
only taking place in public, but the contributor has been
all-but-invited to them by the placement of the VfD notice. Moreover,
the contributor may not arrive until a number of remarks have
accumulated or may not choose to announce his presence immediately.

In the case of the "event horizon" remark, there was actually a nice
symmetry, because the subject of the article had a weblog, _linked from
the article,_ in which _he_ was making rude remarks about the people
who were trying to get his article deleted.

Although the edit submission page warns that contributions be "edited
mercilessly," I do not believe that it is clear to a newcomer that the
seemingly wide-open opportunity to add a page is coupled with the
possibility that the page will be deleted. (This has recently been
addressed by a paragraph on "notability" on the
Wikipedia:Tutorial_(Keep_in_mind) page). I am sure that there are many
people who semi-innocently think that an encyclopedia page with a
friend's bio is a pleasant and amusing gift—rather like having
the International Star Registry name a star for them, only it's free.
And I am sure there are many pushy self-promoters actively looking for
fresh walls on which to paste their posters who do not see any "Post No
Bills" notice. Trickiest of all, as with USENET, I sometimes see
submissions that give me the impression being of well-meaning efforts
from people whose social and/or communications skills are marginal.

In reality, discussions on VfD _need_ to be frank and often critical,
and having a page undergo the VfD process must be enormously
ego-bruising, and there is probably not a lot that can be done to
soften the process.

But, particularly in VfD, discussants should maintain an awareness that
the contributors whose items are being discussed are quite likely to be
newbies, and are quite likely to be _present_.

--
Daniel P. B. Smith, dpbsmith at verizon.net alternate:
dpbsmith at alum.mit.edu
"Elinor Goulding Smith's Great Big Messy Book" is now back in print!
Sample chapter at http://world.std.com/~dpbsmith/messy.html
Buy it at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1403314063/


from_name: Fred Bauder

subject: [WikiEN-l] Request for arbitration?

body:
No, persumably the arbitrators all have requess for arbitration on their
watchlist. BTW, nicely written presentation of a difficult problem.

Fred

> From: David Gerard <fun at thingy.apana.org.au>
> Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Date: Mon, 31 May 2004 13:23:45 +0000
> To: wikien-l at wikipedia.org
> Subject: [WikiEN-l] Request for arbitration?
>
> I've added a request to [[Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration]]. Is there
> any step I'm supposed to take to bring it to the AC's attention further
> than posting it there?
>
>
> - d.
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l


from_name: Christian List

subject: [Wikitech-l] Danish localization on 1.3 removed

body:
On the danish Wikipedia we have already localized everything into danish on the new MediaWiki 1.3, but a couple of hours ago all the newly introduced translations disappeared.
Please, whoever deleted them, put them back ASAP.

Regards
Christian List
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from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Klingon

body:
Nikola Smolenski wrote:

>On Sunday 30 May 2004 19:27, Erik Moeller wrote:
>
>
>>up a vote? The result should be obvious soon. I regret to say that so far
>>the advocacy for a Klingon Wikipedia has been on the level of Klingon
>>diplomacy.
>>
>>
>
>A proof of Sapir-Worf? ;)
>
Perhaps.  That being said, would a Ferengi-pedia be evidence that we
have gone commercial? :-)

Ec


from_name: apogr

body:
Being a linguist and a translator I was amazed at the size and complexity of
the wikiventure and thought I might supply some information that I was
familiar with to stubs and/or non-stub branches of HU/En forkings.
To test how much enrgy to invest in volunteering at all I posted two entries
for probe, one for both language portals. My first English bit was well
received and duly corrected as I wished for myself. Other points in
discussion had a mixed reception.
My Hungarian postings on lingusitic terms were met with doubt from very
first moment and I had an argument in Hungarian with the sysop, and decided
to leave it as it was. Let the technocrats rule the world and the paranoids
to take over and enjoy what will remain of it.
As a second instance recently I have logged in to give a definition of  the
word dictionary (probe number 2) and some lines on how/when to use
dictionaries on the net with ample links. That entry has been removed and a
notice appeared in its place saying that it was found to be derived from the
net from another person's brainchild, which was a bleeding lie and
assumption in bad faith, of course.
Then I decided to break it to you. And thank you for your comments, because
it helped me somewhat.
So my latest is that the entry has been reversed since yesterday, but the
item remains in quarantine and is not moved to the set of searcheable
entries.
Indeed, you must watch out for Al quaida and the rest of the terrorists who
are planting verbal bombs just to shake your tower of Babel. Oh, my foot.
P.S. Besides P.G., I do not know of any other Hungarian wikipedians by name,
so there is no forum to discuss the issue any further. Tough luck.
F.K.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Timwi" <timwi at gmx.net>
To: <wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org>
Sent: Monday, May 31, 2004 1:22 AM
Subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: contributions to HU wiki

> Brion Vibber wrote:
>
> > There was no mention of abuse of sysop privileges. Any user *can* blank
> > and suppress others' work (which may well be crap, junk, pseudoscience,
> > biased tripe, etc). Without specific information, there's nothing to be
> > done or said.
>
> I see.
>
> Apogr & Ralesk, I suggest you supply "specific information".
>
> (Although I think I might mention that I disagree with Brion; although
> Apogr was a little vague in his original posting, he did give "specific
> information" in the sense that what he described clearly constitutes
> sysop privilege abuse.)
>
> Timwi
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


from_name: Richard Ames

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Klingon

body:
>From http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

"This is the list for discussing about the technical organization of the
Wikipedias"

Can we please move this Klingon discussion elsewhere.

Richard.


subject: [Wikitech-l] Categories and skins

body:
About categories... please include the display of categories in article
for skins other than monobook.

It is important that all cool features are displayed in all skins, to
ensure diversity of choice for editors. Otherwise, everyone will switch
to monobook to have the opportunity to see use new features; and we
might just declare now other skins dead (a dead skin... what an odd
idea... too much sun I guess)

ant

Nikola Smolenski wrote:
> I have made a patch which enables display of all articles that belong to
> multiple categories. Thus, for example, Category:Female/Orthodox/Saint would
> return all female orthodox saints (that is, all articles which are
> categorised with at least [[Category:Female]], [[Category:Orthodox]] and
> [[Category:Saint]]).
>
> I am not sure would this make for much greater database load, but that remains
> to be seen in practice. Line if(strchr($t,"/")) { and corresponding else
> block are actually not needed but I have left them because I figure that
> display of a single category is slightly faster this way, and that at that
> point it would be easier to turn off this feature if needed. It should also
> be easy to limit to number of categories if that turns out to be neccesary.
>
> Index: Parser.php
> ===================================================================
> RCS file: /cvsroot/wikipedia/phase3/includes/Parser.php,v
> retrieving revision 1.135
> diff -u -3 -p -r1.135 Parser.php
> --- Parser.php  15 May 2004 00:29:07 -0000      1.135
> +++ Parser.php  30 May 2004 09:11:00 -0000
> @@ -318,7 +318,21 @@ class Parser
>
>                 # FIXME: add limits
>                 $t = wfStrencode( $this->mTitle->getDBKey() );
> -               $sql = "SELECT DISTINCT cur_title,cur_namespace FROM
> cur,categorylinks WHERE cl_to='$t' AND cl_from=cur_id ORDER BY cl_sortkey" ;
> +               $t = preg_replace("'/+'","/",$t);
> +               if(strchr($t,"/")) {
> +                       $ta = explode("/",$t);
> +                       $tt="cur"; $tw="";
> +
> +                       $i=0;
> +                       foreach($ta as $v) {
> +                               $tt.=",categorylinks as cl$i";
> +                               $tw.="cl$i.cl_to='$v' AND
> cl$i.cl_from=cl".++$i.".cl_from AND ";
> +                       }
> +                       $tw=preg_replace("' AND
> cl[0-9]+[.]cl_from=cl[0-9]+[.]cl_from AND $'U","",$tw);
> +                       $sql="SELECT DISTINCT cur_title,cur_namespace FROM $tt
> WHERE $tw AND cl0.cl_from=cur_id ORDER BY cl0.cl_sortkey";
> +               } else {
> +                       $sql = "SELECT DISTINCT cur_title,cur_namespace FROM
> cur,categorylinks WHERE cl_to='$t' AND cl_from=cur_id ORDER BY cl_sortkey" ;
> +               }
>                 $res = wfQuery ( $sql, DB_READ ) ;
>                 while ( $x = wfFetchObject ( $res ) ) $data[] = $x ;


subject: [Wikitech-l] Category content display

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:

>I suggest two immediate changes to the category content display:
>
>1) That, when a category contains less than 200 pages (arbitrary number),
>we use a vertical display rather than a horizontal one, i.e.
>
>  Bohr, Niels
>  Einstein, Albert
>  Turing, Alan
>  Zuse, Konrad
>
Good.  But perhaps a 3-column display as with "All pages" could be more
practical.

Ec


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] Wiktionaries broken

body:
Somebody badly broke Wiktionary etc by overwriting /home/common/php with
files from /home/common/php-new. I'm trying to restore things.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [WikiEN-l] what's the deal with categories?

body:
Viajero wrote:

>Maybe I have been out of the loop but just what is the purpose of Categories?
>
>Just now I noticed that someone went through a bunch of pages I was watching and added the cateogry "Opera Composer" which seems entirely logical for the relevant articles, except that we have already have a page [[List of opera composers]]. Does this mean that this article is redundant? My personal instinct, which may or may not be relevant here, is not to do things in two different ways when one suffices. Will people continue to update the handmade lists now that Categories pages are available in such cases of redundancy as this? If not, they should be deleted, as outdated lists are a help to nobody.
>
Yes and no.  To some extent the manual lists are wish lists with empty
links appearing in red.  The category system can't pick up list elements
that don't exist.  Any manual list should probably receive a category
tag as well.  In a closed end subject or one that is effectively
closed-ended (such as the list of US presidents) there are strong
arguments from deleting the list when pages exist for all its elements.
The list of opera composers, however, is open-ended and should probably
remain so that new names can be added, and we can know which have been
done and which remain to be done.

Ec


from_name: Laurent GUERBY

subject: [Wikitech-l] tarball of wikipedia 1.3?

body:
On http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=34373 I could
only find 1.2.6, does anyone know where I can download the currently
installed version on en.wikipedia.org which seems to be 1.3?

Thank you in advance,

Laurent


list: foundation-l

from_name: Michael Snow

subject: [Foundation-l] Re: PhatNav: "A Wikipedia"

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:

>I have from Alex the US trademark application, which I will be filing
>today.
>
That's very good to hear, my thanks to Alex for handling that.

--Michael Snow


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Klingon Wikipedia

body:
Andr? M?ller wrote:

>As Andre Engels already made clear, neither the ISO code nor the SIL
>list can be taken for granted in all cases, regarding what we actually
>look for in their lists. He gave good examples, and so did Tim Starling.
>In fact, my opinion on this topic is, that we should use both the ISO
>and the SIL when we?re unsure again whether to allow a certain language
>or not. What were the 3 artificial languages on Ethnologue again?
>Esperanto, Interlingua and... Europanto or something, I don?t remember.
>Well, we have a Volap?k Wikipedia, to which I and some others even
>contribute, from time to time. Volap?k is not included in the SIL index
>but in the ISO codes. That?d be a pro.
>Thus, if the language can be found in either the ISO or the SIL list, it
>has a right to exist. But we should still consider each new language if
>there are enough contributors for it. Maybe 3 or 5 could be enough. That
>would speak for Klingon as well ? there is an ISO code (tlh), there are
>more than just 3 or 5 contributors, and the vocabulary and grammar is
>large enough as well (a fact that in my opinion doesn?t really apply for
>Sindarin/Quenya, for example). I don?t know off-hand which other
>constructed languages could be found in the ISO codes (too lazy to look
>it up now ;)), but I doubt that there are more ?fictional? languages
>besides Klingon.
>And Toki Pona is wiki-fied already ? it?d be unfair to remove it now, if
>it?s included in ISO/SIL or not.
>
>Okay, I think you understand my point.
>
I too would take this position. The presence of a language on either the
SIL or ISO lists is still only the basis for a "prima facie" decision to
accept or reject. In the absence of further decision we could act on
that as long as we are convinced that we have at least one person who
can do the work. With many Native American languages we would likely be
delighted to have a single hard-working proponent.

Ec


from_name: Tim Starling

subject: [Wikitech-l] Klingon resurrected

body:
Firstly, I'm disappointed Erik chose to characterise my stated
motivation as "false pretenses", as if I had some kind of bias towards
Klingon and I deliberately tried to mislead the list. I mistakenly
created Klingon, I did not try to pull a swiftie on the Wikimedia
community. I hope that Erik's choice of words was in error.

Jimbo issued one statement against Klingon and one statement in favour
of Klingon. His opinion was thus sufficiently ambiguous that my pretext
was removed. However he later clarified his position by withdrawing his
initial statement -- both on wikitech-l and on #wikipedia. I would have
been happy to re-enable the wiki as soon as he did this, however he
asked me to wait for the discussion to pan out.

The compromise agreed to by Erik and Timwi is to allow the Klingon
Wikipedia, but to avoid interlanguage links. Accordingly, I have
commented out the Klingon entry in $wgLanguageNames. This means that
markup of the form [[tlh:wIqIpe'DIya]] will create an external link
rather than an interlanguage link, just like links to meta or sep11.
Otherwise the wiki is fully functional.

http://tlh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

-- Tim Starling


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Categories and skins

body:
Thanks Brion !

Categories are great in Cologne skin. They are very discreet.

I keep my classical box of washing powder... sorry, my cologne blue skin.

Anthere wrote:
>
> About categories... please include the display of categories in article
> for skins other than monobook.
>
> It is important that all cool features are displayed in all skins, to
> ensure diversity of choice for editors. Otherwise, everyone will switch
> to monobook to have the opportunity to see use new features; and we
> might just declare now other skins dead (a dead skin... what an odd
> idea... too much sun I guess)
>
> ant


subject: [Wikipedia-l] MBTI

body:
Anthere wrote:

>http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedians_by_MBTI_type
>
>How do you explain the current majority of NTs ?
>
>
Wikipedians are not a representative sample of the general population. 8-)

Ec


subject: [WikiEN-l] categories

body:
I wanted to remind a neat point of history.
Categories have been discussed for a long time, a long time.
I think I remember that at some point it was suggested that they could
be only created by sysops, and after much concerting, so to avoid
anarchic creation of hundreds of categories.

It is funny to remember that :-)
I love alive wikipedia, with its anarchic growth :-)))


subject: [Wikitech-l] Wiktionaries broken

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:
> Somebody badly broke Wiktionary etc by overwriting /home/common/php with
> files from /home/common/php-new. I'm trying to restore things.

I've got them working again, more or less.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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from_name: Viajero

body:
Maybe I have been out of the loop but just what is the purpose of Categories?

Just now I noticed that someone went through a bunch of pages I was watching and added the cateogry "Opera Composer" which seems entirely logical for the relevant articles, except that we have already have a page [[List of opera composers]]. Does this mean that this article is redundant? My personal instinct, which may or may not be relevant here, is not to do things in two different ways when one suffices. Will people continue to update the handmade lists now that Categories pages are available in such cases of redundancy as this? If not, they should be deleted, as outdated lists are a help to nobody.

V.


subject: [Foundation-l] Copyright issues of wikimedia projects

body:
"Daniel Mayer" <maveric149 at yahoo.com> schrieb:
> --- Toby Bartels <toby+wikipedia at math.ucr.edu> wrote:
> > Mav's position, as he is stating it, is more extreme (and simply wrong IMO),
> > since he is claiming (I believe) that a noncopyleft licence like CC-sa
> > is not free to begin with.  Still, mav does have a point, as I said here:
>
> If CC-sa = Creative Commons Attribution Share-alike license, then I think you
> are confused (or at least made a typo). The CC by-sa is in fact more
> libre/copyleft than the GNU FDL since it does not have provisions for invariant
> sections. Thus its copyleft status is more permanent. The CC-by license is
> merely gratis with the only real requirement being attribution.

It's NOT free, you say? So, I may not use it freely? You DO have a strange
definition of 'free'.

> > So mav can reasonably argue (along with the FSF) that a copyleft licence
> > increases freedom overall, because it enforces freedom for derivative works.
> > But it does not increase the freedom of the ''original'' document --
> > as even the FSF would agree -- and could only decrease ''that'' freedom.
> > (And that was your point, Andre, which I agree with.)
>
> Decrease that freedom? How when anything from a derivative work can be
> reincorporated back into the original? In what way does that decrease the
> freedom of the original document?

By restricting how it may be used. What other way could there be to decrease
freedom?

Andre Engels


from_name: David Gerard

subject: [WikiEN-l] Request for arbitration?

body:
I've added a request to [[Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration]]. Is there
any step I'm supposed to take to bring it to the AC's attention further
than posting it there?

- d.


from_name: Yann Forget

body:
Hi,

Le Monday 31 May 2004 11:52, Jimmy Wales a ?crit :
> Anthere wrote:
> > I'd like to remind you Yann, that everyone on fr;
> > trust you for your PR activities. If you had an urgent
> > need for official support, Jimbo would publicly
> > brought it I think.
>
> I agree with this, even though I also support the creation of local
> associations where a significant group of people desire it.
>
> The issue of official titles is a complete non-issue though.  Titles
> are cheap and easy to generate -- just tell me what you want to be
> called, and you can be called that.

Thanks Jimmy.
That's solve part of the problem, but not all.

Because speaking in behalf of Wikimedia (internationally or locally) means not
only to have the support of the board and the partipants, but to be able to
implement a decision. This can have legal or financial implications. Right
now I am more concerned with legal implications.

For example, in my district ("d?partement"), primary and high schools already
use Wikipedia has a reference for students and teachers. I would like to
start a general promotion campaign to all schools in France, Switzerland,
etc. I would like to be able to speak to school and university teachers,
directors, librarians, etc., in behalf of Wikimedia. The first questions will
be "Who do you represent?" and "Do you have a local organisation?"

Practically this also means to print tee-shirts, leaflets, posters, etc.

> --Jimbo

Regards,
Yann
--
http://www.non-violence.org/ | Site collaboratif sur la non-violence
http://www.forget-me.net/ | Alternatives sur le Net
http://fr.wikipedia.org/ | Encyclop?die libre
http://www.forget-me.net/pro/ | Formations et services Linux


from_name: Walter van Kalken

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Klingon

body:
Message: 11
Date: 30 May 2004 17:10:00 +0200
From: erik_moeller at gmx.de (Erik Moeller)
Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] Re: Klingon
To: wikitech-l at wikipedia.org
Message-ID: <99rqNUZSpVB at erik_moeller>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII

Timwi-
> Erik Moeller wrote:

>>> with the discussion clearly showing majority
support for the
Klingon
>>> Wikipedia, please can we finally re-enable it now?
>>
>> I see no such majority support.

> Are you blind?

>See my response to Peter - if your standards of
>listing people as  "supporters" are the same as his,
>then I'm not surprised by the result.  Furthermore,
>it is obvious that a page about artificial languages
>would  primarily attract people interested in
>artificial languages, of which  there are many on
>Wikipedia thanks to our generous policy with regard
>to  conlangs. If you want to know if the majority of
>Wikipedia users supports  Klingon or not, you will
>have to hold a well-publicized vote about it.  This,
>or a compromise, is the only acceptable way out of
>the current  impasse.

Hello Erik,
No offense, but I am not interested in artificial
languages, nor a trekkie. But if they want a wiki why
not?? I found the vote in the meta wiki by a
publication in the village pump on the en wiki, that
is publicized right???

Waerth (mainly nl wiki)

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from_name: Geoff Burling

subject: [WikiEN-l] RE: WikiEN-l Digest, Vol 10, Issue 77

body:
On Mon, 31 May 2004, Jim Kork wrote:

> Angela wrote
>
> "You have been blanking articles without explanation (Serdar Argic),"
> No, I gave a reason, please check it out.

Your response is misleading. Having taken a look at the Serdar Argic article,
I note that you twice insisted on qualifying "Armenian Genocide" as "alleged",
& when both of those changes were reverted, you blanked the article.

The reasons you gave for this change was that without the word "alleged" the
article was POV -- only this assertion, with no proof or evidence either
at the Talk page for this article, nor at [[Talk:Armenian Genocide]].
(Incidentally you made 10 edits to the main Armenian Genocide page, which
were removed every time, & you never discussed the reaons for your changes.)

Also, you made 3 reversions to the [[Kemal Atatuerk]] article within 24 hours,
which -- even if you had an account -- would result in having your account
blocked.
>
> " removing facts from articles (Armenian Genocide) "
> Nobody agrees on that subject, the facts are your own facts, and I didn't
> remove it, I was trying to make it more unbiased, because that article is as
> it is right now extremely biased political article with full of weird
> attacks on the Turk side.

Uh, everybody except Turkish nationals (& perhaps even some of them) agree
that it happened, about the approximate number of people it affected, From
a quick glance at the history logs, your contributions was to misrepresent
cited sources to reduce the number of victims. If you have access to a
source that provides different numbers, you are welcome to add those figures;
you are welcome to change verifiable numbers -- unless you can clearly
show that they are misquoted, which you did not bother to do.

I will concede one point about [[Armenian Genocide]]: I did not see an
explanation for the Turkish POV. The article would be better if it were
provided -- although it would need to be clearly identified as such.
>
[snip]
>
> ">It would also be easier to people to communicate with
> >you if you created an account"
> Maybe, but that shouldn't be an excuse to block my ip.

The acts I detail above clearly show why you were blocked. But had you
created an account, it would have added to your credibility. New editors
often make mistakes out of ignorance, & creating an account on Wikipedia
tells the rest of us that you are interested in doing more than making
only a few, specific edits; by that simple act, you are showing that you
want to contribute for a while, & it worth someone's time to work with you.
>
> "When controversy erupts, it is
> >necessary to discuss it, and it is near
> >impossible to do that with an IP. Either make an
> >account or let it go."
> This I don't get much, what matters is that what we write, not our names,
> our user names and such. The discussion takes place in the discussion pages,
> oh by the way, the person who blocked me accused me of being Serdar Argic
> long before blocking me. Clearly we disagree on certain things, but I didn't
> know that wikipedia admins can use this difference as an excuse to block
> people whenever they like.
>
> It is also interesting that, you only welcome anonymous users for
> non-controversial stuff. For controversial articles, their voices do not
> count? Please, it is what we write, not who we are.
>
Indeed, it depends exactly on what one writes.

If I were to edit an article on the fictional J. Random Publicperson, to
add "Publicperson is a jerk", & offer nothing more, I'd expect it be speedily
reverted: I have made a claim, with no collaborating evidence or arguments
for why I wrote this. However, if I wrote the same sentence, then added
details such as he is known to have appeared drunk in public, made
inappropriate sexual comments to his colleague's children, & squandered
public funds to buy bauble-head dolls for his personal collection, some if
not all of that text should remain in some form. And even better would be
if I cited the journalist Busybody's book "The Embarassing Politician",
which made all of these claims, or mentioned that Publicperson was indicted
or arrested on these charges.

Sometimes a non-anonymous editor can get away with making a contribution
of the first example -- e.g., "Publicperson is a jerk", especially if the
article is not on a controversial topic. But with any controversial topic,
one has to make one's point as convincingly as possible.

And from the record, speaking as someone who is entirely disinterested
in the matter (I didn't even know that there was an article on Serdar Argic
until now), I find you have failed to be convincing.

Geoff


from_name: Anthere

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: VfD etiquette

body:
Jeeee, I totally agree with this... It is very important not to upset
people, in particular newbies. We easily forget this.

I must also say that a couple of times, I have been myself a bit
agressive, precisely because I felt this lack of etiquette toward the
contributor :-(

Daniel P.B.Smith wrote:
> On the Internet, one must be constantly aware that discussions that
> "feel" as if they are taking place in a club-like atmosphere of a few
> dozen people are, actually, completely open to the public. (The Pentagon
> does not need to log my USENET posts in any Total Information Awareness
> program; Google News, and Deja News before it have already done that!).
>
> In Votes for Deletion, conversations are sometimes conducted as if they
> were taking place behind a contributor's back, with the sillier items
> being openly sneered at and ridiculed. A lot of these remarks are
> actually witty, e.g. "Delete this before his vanity develops an event
> horizon" or "Delete. Delete fast. Delete ruthlessly. (this has nothing
> to do with the [actual content], but I can't stand it when people use
> 'principal' when they mean 'principle')"
>
> Unlike a closed-door executive session, these frank discussions are not
> only taking place in public, but the contributor has been
> all-but-invited to them by the placement of the VfD notice. Moreover,
> the contributor may not arrive until a number of remarks have
> accumulated or may not choose to announce his presence immediately.
>
> In the case of the "event horizon" remark, there was actually a nice
> symmetry, because the subject of the article had a weblog, _linked from
> the article,_ in which _he_ was making rude remarks about the people who
> were trying to get his article deleted.
>
> Although the edit submission page warns that contributions be "edited
> mercilessly," I do not believe that it is clear to a newcomer that the
> seemingly wide-open opportunity to add a page is coupled with the
> possibility that the page will be deleted. (This has recently been
> addressed by a paragraph on "notability" on the
> Wikipedia:Tutorial_(Keep_in_mind) page). I am sure that there are many
> people who semi-innocently think that an encyclopedia page with a
> friend's bio is a pleasant and amusing gift—rather like having the
> International Star Registry name a star for them, only it's free. And I
> am sure there are many pushy self-promoters actively looking for fresh
> walls on which to paste their posters who do not see any "Post No Bills"
> notice. Trickiest of all, as with USENET, I sometimes see submissions
> that give me the impression being of well-meaning efforts from people
> whose social and/or communications skills are marginal.
>
> In reality, discussions on VfD _need_ to be frank and often critical,
> and having a page undergo the VfD process must be enormously
> ego-bruising, and there is probably not a lot that can be done to soften
> the process.
>
> But, particularly in VfD, discussants should maintain an awareness that
> the contributors whose items are being discussed are quite likely to be
> newbies, and are quite likely to be _present_.
>
> --
> Daniel P. B. Smith, dpbsmith at verizon.net
> alternate: dpbsmith at alum.mit.edu
> "Elinor Goulding Smith's Great Big Messy Book" is now back in print!
> Sample chapter at http://world.std.com/~dpbsmith/messy.html
> Buy it at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1403314063/


from_name: Dan Miller

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Vanity pages

body:
I agree; I shouldn't have said that, and I'll watch
myself in the future.

Meelar

> In Votes for Deletion, conversations are sometimes
> conducted as if they
> were taking place behind a contributor's back, with
> the sillier items
> being openly sneered at and ridiculed. A lot of
> these remarks are
> actually witty, e.g. "Delete this before his vanity
> develops an event
> horizon" or "Delete. Delete fast. Delete ruthlessly.
> (this has nothing
> to do with the [actual content], but I can't stand
> it when people use
> 'principal' when they mean 'principle')"
>

=====
"The difference between extra-marital sex and extra marital sex is not to be sneezed at."

--George Will, on hyphen use

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from_name: Matthew Trump

body:
I've always been big fan of lists for many reasons and I thought
about this too.

I agree with Ray that one big advantage of lists is that they show
red links.

Another advantage is that lists can be formatted and augmented in
customized ways, ones that would take a large amount of customized
programming to produce. For example, the list of opera composers can
not only include uncreated articles, but it can also be hand-tailored
to include information like dates of birth, nationality--or perhaps
arranged in chronological order, or by nationality, etc. To me this
kind of information architecture is large part of the beauty of
Wikipeidia.

Many list articles are like a human-made SQL query from the database
of Wikipedia that would have required a huge overhead in database
fields to create automatically.

Certainly there may be lists that are rendered obsolete by
categories, but in the majority of cases, I see categories as
complementing lists in most cases, not replacing them.

But this will all shake out. The debate about how lists will work is
really over. Whatever was said is water under the bridge Now it's a
matter of the collectivity of contributions from editors actually
creating categories that will determine how they are really used.

As far as lists being "out of date". Well, that's *always* been an
issue with lists and will remain so. I don't see that as a problem,
really. We all do our best, to keep things synchronized and
up-to-date. Certainly categories will suffer that same thing too,
since many newe articles will be created without appropriate category
tags.

Ray Saintonge said:
> Viajero wrote:
>
>>Maybe I have been out of the loop but just what is the purpose of
>> Categories?
>>
>>Just now I noticed that someone went through a bunch of pages I was
>> watching and added the cateogry "Opera Composer" which seems
>> entirely logical for the relevant articles, except that we have
>> already have a page [[List of opera composers]]. Does this mean that
>> this article is redundant? My personal instinct, which may or may
>> not be relevant here, is not to do things in two different ways when
>> one suffices. Will people continue to update the handmade lists now
>> that Categories pages are available in such cases of redundancy as
>> this? If not, they should be deleted, as outdated lists are a help
>> to nobody.
>>
> Yes and no.  To some extent the manual lists are wish lists with
> empty
> links appearing in red.  The category system can't pick up list
> elements
> that don't exist.  Any manual list should probably receive a category
> tag as well.  In a closed end subject or one that is effectively
> closed-ended (such as the list of US presidents) there are strong
> arguments from deleting the list when pages exist for all its
> elements.
> The list of opera composers, however, is open-ended and should
> probably
> remain so that new names can be added, and we can know which have
> been
> done and which remain to be done.
>
> Ec
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


from_name: Jay Bowks

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] SIL Ethnologue vs. ISO codes for determination of
	language inclusion

body:
From: "Tim Starling"
> SIL seems to have little time for constructed languages, listing only
> three. ISO 639-2, on the other hand, has a policy allowing any language
> with more than 50 documents to obtain a code. Hence, Klingon is included
> in ISO's short list, but not in SIL's much longer one.
>
> My proposal is to automatically allow any language considered one of
> SIL's main languages, and to only seek community approval when it is not
> listed. I think we should largely ignore the ISO list.

Hi Tim,
The SIL ethnologue list is quite flawed.
In this respect the ISO codes are more
dependable...

The Ethnologue lists
http://www.ethnologue.com/show_family.asp?subid=827
Esperanto, Europanto, and Interlingua.
It further mentions that Interlingua is
a language of France...
http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=INR
It also claims that Esperanto is a language
of France, and that it has "200 to 2,000 people who
speak it as first language". If so it would be a
natural and non-artificial language for them
wouldn't it, those French native speakers of
Esperanto.... Highly irregular!

The list is flawed, and the fact that they include
"Europanto" is quite a joke, no kidding,
Europanto was a joke language developed
by translators within the EU and only for
amusement. To exclude Volap?k which
had at one time hundreds of thousands
of learners and users and still has a small
community of active users is just wrong
if one is going to include "Europanto"
which no one really uses as a community
except joking translators within the
EU Brussels, European Union buildings...
as Ethnologue points out.

The Ethnologue list is definitely flawed and
worse as a resource in this respect than the
use of ISO codes.

With regards,
Jay B.


subject:
[Wikitech-l] SIL Ethnologue vs. ISO codes for determination of
	language inclusion


from_name: Stan Shebs

body:
Viajero wrote:

>Maybe I have been out of the loop but just what is the purpose of Categories?
>
>Just now I noticed that someone went through a bunch of pages I was watching and added the cateogry "Opera Composer" which seems entirely logical for the relevant articles, except that we have already have a page [[List of opera composers]]. Does this mean that this article is redundant? My personal instinct, which may or may not be relevant here, is not to do things in two different ways when one suffices. Will people continue to update the handmade lists now that Categories pages are available in such cases of redundancy as this? If not, they should be deleted, as outdated lists are a help to nobody.
>
Yes, completely-filled-in and alphabetized but otherwise bare lists
don't offer much over a category, but the most useful lists add
annotations that help the reader find a desired entry without having
to click on every entry just to see what's there. I think it will be
a while before something as elaborate (and useful) as [[list of
battles]] can be auto-constructed from category tags!

Stan


from_name: Andre Engels

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Klingon Wikipedia

body:
"Tim Starling" <ts4294967296 at hotmail.com> schrieb:

> The Ethnologue, a language catalogue published by SIL International,
> does all of these things. SIL is a non-profit organisation dedicated to
> linguistics, language documentation and literacy. Their catalogue makes
> a division between languages and dialects based on linguistic rather
> than national concerns. They list 6,800 "main languages", plus dialects
> and alternate names. This is as opposed to ISO's approximately 490
> "languages", many of which even they admit are actually groups of
> languages.
>
> SIL seems to have little time for constructed languages, listing only
> three. ISO 639-2, on the other hand, has a policy allowing any language
> with more than 50 documents to obtain a code. Hence, Klingon is included
> in ISO's short list, but not in SIL's much longer one.
>
> My proposal is to automatically allow any language considered one of
> SIL's main languages, and to only seek community approval when it is not
> listed. I think we should largely ignore the ISO list.

I have taken a look at the SIL list, and I find it to be honest rather
astonishing. Looking at the languages in the Netherlands, I see that within
the official Dutch language area there's 2 languages according to SIL
(Dutch and Flemish including Zealandic), which sounds reasonable. But
then the part in the east of the Netherlands where Low Saxon dialects
are spoken, suddenly is considered 10 languages, whereas the many times
larger Low Saxon area in Germany is only 2. It seems that there is
measured with different measures there.

They even in some cases find 3 different languages where as far as I can
see more standard treatments (like the map on [[nl:Nederlands]] consider
them variations of the same _dialect_.

Even without those objections, the best thing to do seems not to be to
drop 639-2, but look at SIL and 639-2 for different purposes. 639-2 is
more applicable when the question is whether the language is large enough
to beincluded. SIL is more applicable when the question is whether a
language is enough separate to allow such. Still, I very much have the
impression that the criteria are not consistent in their application.

Andre Engels


from_name: Bryan Derksen

references:
<40BB67EF.7090906@telus.net>
	<E1BUkju-000PpS-00@post-20.mail.nl.demon.net>
	<40BB67EF.7090906@telus.net>

body:
At 02:30 PM 5/31/2004 -0400, Matthew Trump wrote:
>As far as lists being "out of date". Well, that's *always* been an
>issue with lists and will remain so. I don't see that as a problem,
>really. We all do our best, to keep things synchronized and
>up-to-date. Certainly categories will suffer that same thing too,
>since many newe articles will be created without appropriate category
>tags.

I think that categories will likely be quite helpful for keeping lists up
to date, actually. A little while back, for example, I was doing some work
on trying to get [[Links to disambiguating pages]] cleaned up; adding
disambiguation pages that had been missed, culling out pages that had once
upon a time been disambiguating pages but weren't any longer, etc. It was a
lot of hard labor and required some custom database searches, and was only
possible because disambiguation pages already had a pseudo-category tag in
the form of {{msg:disambig}}. Most other lists wouldn't have something like
that, so a "what links here" query would have been full of noise.

Since category listings are generated "bottom up", on the other hand, they
immediately respond to alterations made out "in the field". If a page gets
moved or disambiguated, or its contents change drastically enough to be
recategorized, it's immediately updated in the category list. Should be
quite handy, IMO.


from_name: Daniel Mayer

body:
--- Andre Engels <engelsAG at t-online.de> wrote:
> It's NOT free, you say? So, I may not use it freely? You DO have a strange
> definition of 'free'.

Not libre, which in this context means it is only half free. Yes, you can *use*
it freely, but the content itself is not free.

> > Decrease that freedom? How when anything from a derivative work can be
> > reincorporated back into the original? In what way does that decrease the
> > freedom of the original document?
>
> By restricting how it may be used. What other way could there be to decrease
> freedom?

Those restrictions are designed to ensure the freedom of the content, meaning
it can not be controled.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

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from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] Dir updates

body:
aa, ab, gu, and gv Wikipedias had symlinks going to the old version of
the script; also af had a link to the old style directory. I've pointed
them at the new files and they seem to work now.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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body:
--- Toby Bartels <toby+wikipedia at math.ucr.edu> wrote:
> I am at least in part misunderstanding you.
> If what you mean by the ?gratis? bit is that the ''licence''
> (which provides the ?libre? bit) is provided free of charge,
> then you are certainly correct that this is essential to free software.
>
> That said, I still don't think that it's really accurate
> to say that ?libre? + ?gratis? is the foundation of the movement.
> The foundation is purely ?libre?; ?gratis? is only a means to that end.

That is a valid viewpoint. In a far more fair world we wouldn't have copyrights
and patents at all. People would just freely work together to advance knowledge
and we would not have to deal with copyright and patent rubbish. But in the
world we live in we have to use the existing rules to get what we want. So we
write licenses to ensure content/software has some measure of freedom by giving
away certain rights we have over that content/software.

> >The English language word 'free' isn't the best one for this.
> >I will use gratis and libre from now on.
>
> So are you explicitly including ?copyleft?
> as part of the meaning of your term "libre"?

If the content itself is liberated from control, then it is libre. I'm sure
some people say many different things and try to draw a distinction between
libre and copyleft. For me the only practical way for content to be truly libre
is for it to be copyleft - otherwise (to use an analogy) its descendants
(derivative works) can be enslaved (put under proprietary control).

We can agree to disagree over the nuances.

Pax.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

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from_name: Marc Williams

subject: [Wikitech-l] wikipedia lookup button

body:
Please pardon me if this has been suggested before or if it already exists.

I am in love with Wikipedia.  What I, as a fairly new Wikipedia user,
would find terribly helpful would be a Wikipedia Lookup Button for my
browser similar to what Merriam Webster has:

http://www.m-w.com/button/

1) I'm reading something on the web that I would like to know more about
2) I highlight the phrase or word that I want to look up in Wikipedia
3) I press the Wikipedia browser button
4) Boom!  I'm taken right to the correct Wikipedia page


body:
--- Toby Bartels <toby+wikipedia at math.ucr.edu> wrote:
> No, ''that'' doesn't decrease the freedom of the document --
> it's other effects of the copyleft that do so.
>
> I'll give a specific (albeit still hypothetical) example:
>
> Suppose that there are two free documents that I like,
> one of which uses the GNU FDL licence, one of which uses CC-by-sa.
> I want to combine these two free documents into a single modified one.
> Even though both of them are supposed to be free, I can't do this!
> But if either of these documents uses the noncopyleft CC-by instead,
> then I am able to do what I want to do with the documents.
> The CC-by licence is more free; it gives me more freedoms.

Yes, but that deals with the freedom of your use, not the freedom of the
content since the CC-by text could just as easily be made into a proprietary
derivative work while the FDL and CC-by/sa text can only ever be libre (at
least until their copyright expires, which if Disney has its say will be
never). Fixing the compatibility issue is a major problem that must be
corrected, however.

Correcting that is my plan A since it has the largest payoff in the end (a
world in which the best representation of knowledge is not controllable). Using
a license of convenience in the interim would be a bad idea since works under
that license will not be copyleft, thus making derivative works of them
susceptible to proprietary control.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

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from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [Wikitech-l] Category content display

body:
I suggest two immediate changes to the category content display:

1) That, when a category contains less than 200 pages (arbitrary number),
we use a vertical display rather than a horizontal one, i.e.

  Bohr, Niels
  Einstein, Albert
  Turing, Alan
  Zuse, Konrad

In the long term we'll want neat things like paging, splitting by letter
etc. And of course the most requested feature is showing all categories
and articles in subcategories on a single page (tree-view), but I won't
code that one.

2) That the sorting criteria are actually used as the page title in the
category display, so that [[Category:Albert Einstein|Einstein, Albert]] is
rendered as such. It should be possible to override this, maybe using the
syntax [[Category:Albert Einstein|:Einstein, Albert]].

Any objections?

Regards,

Erik


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Klingon Wikipedia

body:
--- Ronald Chmara <ron at Opus1.COM> wrote:
> Regardless of any external language codes (we certainly don't have
> wikis for all the languages under any of the aforementioned schemes),
> it all comes down to an issue of who contributes. If a language had
> *no* official codes or recognition by linguists, but 500 contributors,
> it will probably be more successful than any officially recognized
> language that only has one or two contributors.

Although if a language *does* have an official language code and linguists that
that recognize it, then there should never be a question that we should start a
Wikipedia in that language soon after somebody volunteers to translate the
interface. Very few contributers or not.

Minus that, then we should look at a more complicated mix of considerations
(and the number of contributors idea is a good thing to look at).

All IMO, of course.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

__________________________________
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subject: [Wikipedia-l] MBTI

body:
--- Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> Anthere wrote:
>
> >http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedians_by_MBTI_type
> >
> >How do you explain the current majority of NTs ?
> >
> >
> Wikipedians are not a representative sample of the general population. 8-)
>
> Ec

NTs are to Wikipedia as flies are to fly paper (or moths to a flame). ;)

-- mav

__________________________________
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Friends.  Fun.  Try the all-new Yahoo! Messenger.
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subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: wikipedia lookup button

body:
On Mon, 31 May 2004 19:10:42 -0400, Ivan Krstic wrote:

> Marc Williams wrote:
>> I am in love with Wikipedia.  What I, as a fairly new Wikipedia user,
>> would find terribly helpful would be a Wikipedia Lookup Button for my
>> browser similar to what Merriam Webster has:
>
> Here is a proof-of-concept, sans icon (and with 'EN' hardcoded):
>
> http://www.kdb.hr/~ike/wikibutton.htm

I'll be darned; it works!  I changed the remaining MW reference inside the
code but the structure worked.  It even worked with multiple word phrases!
 This should definitely be a front page option.

 Thanks a million!


from_name: Jim Kork

body:
Angela wrote

"You have been blanking articles without explanation (Serdar Argic),"
No, I gave a reason, please check it out.

" removing facts from articles (Armenian Genocide) "
Nobody agrees on that subject, the facts are your own facts, and I didn't
remove it, I was trying to make it more unbiased, because that article is as
it is right now extremely biased political article with full of weird
attacks on the Turk side.

"and writing rude statements on other people's user pages
(User:PMelvilleAustin)"
Can you please tell me what it is, I didn't write any rude statement to
anybody.

"I'm not terribly surprised you were blocked."
I am not terribly suprised either, if you accuse me of removing "facts",
then I would assume you don't want me here either.

"If you are willing to contribute, I strongly advise you to read the
following policies first:"
I have already read them, and I am sad to see that you are using
disagreement as a vandalism excuse to block people from contributing.

">It would also be easier to people to communicate with
>you if you created an account"
Maybe, but that shouldn't be an excuse to block my ip.

"When controversy erupts, it is
>necessary to discuss it, and it is near
>impossible to do that with an IP. Either make an
>account or let it go."
This I don't get much, what matters is that what we write, not our names,
our user names and such. The discussion takes place in the discussion pages,
oh by the way, the person who blocked me accused me of being Serdar Argic
long before blocking me. Clearly we disagree on certain things, but I didn't
know that wikipedia admins can use this difference as an excuse to block
people whenever they like.

It is also interesting that, you only welcome anonymous users for
non-controversial stuff. For controversial articles, their voices do not
count? Please, it is what we write, not who we are.

Thanks

_________________________________________________________________
Learn to simplify your finances and your life in Streamline Your Life from
MSN Money. http://special.msn.com/money/0405streamline.armx


from_name: Ivan Krstic

subject: [Wikitech-l] wikipedia lookup button

body:
Marc Williams wrote:
> I am in love with Wikipedia.  What I, as a fairly new Wikipedia user,
> would find terribly helpful would be a Wikipedia Lookup Button for my
> browser similar to what Merriam Webster has:

Here is a proof-of-concept, sans icon (and with 'EN' hardcoded):

http://www.kdb.hr/~ike/wikibutton.htm

Cheers,
Ivan.


from_name: Ronald Chmara

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Klingon Wikipedia

body:
On May 31, 2004, at 6:26 AM, Jimmy Wales wrote:
> A proclamation
> ...3.  The rule should be external to Wikipedia, based on some other
> official standards.  The reason for this is that this is only our
> default, and the whole purpose of the rule is to give us one less
> thing to argue about.  Let some international body make the decision,
> and then we follow it unless we do something unusual.

Hm. I have no horse in this race, but isn't the sole determinant of a
successful wikipedia the number of active contributors?

Regardless of any external language codes (we certainly don't have
wikis for all the languages under any of the aforementioned schemes),
it all comes down to an issue of who contributes. If a language had
*no* official codes or recognition by linguists, but 500 contributors,
it will probably be more successful than any officially recognized
language that only has one or two contributors.

By using a "contributor" metric, we can prevent the small vanity (and
usually dead end) projects, and foster viable projects, regardless of
their "official" recognition by any given standards body. Of course,
then we'd have to argue about the number of individuals required to
start a project, but a contributor metric bypasses the whole "is it a
real language" issue entirely.

-Bop


from_name: K Forstner

body:
Good question.  I would NOT delete any of the handmade lists for one simple
reason: They have slowly grown and have had many intelligent contributors,
whereas now people who are not necessarily experts in all the various fields
(how could they) are in a hurry (you tell me why) compiling lists of all
sorts.

A few hours I mildly protested against one of those categorizations. See
[[George Ritzer]], pigeonholed as a "writer".

KF

----- Original Message -----
From: "Viajero" <viajero at quilombo.nl>
To: "English Wikipedia" <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
Sent: Monday, May 31, 2004 11:40 AM
Subject: [WikiEN-l] what's the deal with categories?

> Maybe I have been out of the loop but just what is the purpose of
Categories?
>
> Just now I noticed that someone went through a bunch of pages I was
watching and added the cateogry "Opera Composer" which seems entirely
logical for the relevant articles, except that we have already have a page
[[List of opera composers]]. Does this mean that this article is redundant?
My personal instinct, which may or may not be relevant here, is not to do
things in two different ways when one suffices. Will people continue to
update the handmade lists now that Categories pages are available in such
cases of redundancy as this? If not, they should be deleted, as outdated
lists are a help to nobody.
>
>
> V.
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


from_name: Mark Jeays

subject: [Wikitech-l] wikipedia lookup button

body:
Does this work for you? It does seems to work for me. Not very thoroughly
tested... I may be re-inventing the wheel here but I haven't seen this
before on Wikipedia either.

Just create any old bookmark in your links & then copy and paste this text
into the Location / URL box (should be all one line).

Firefox:

javascript:Qr=document.getSelection();if(!Qr){void(Qr=prompt('Enter word to
find in
Wikipedia:',''))}if(Qr)location.href='http://www.google.com/search?btnI=I\'m
+Feeling+Lucky&q=site:wikipedia.org+'+escape(Qr)

IE:

javascript:Qr=document.selection.createRange().text;if(!Qr){void(Qr=prompt('
Enter word to find in
Wikipedia:',''))}if(Qr)location.href='http://www.google.com/search?btnI=I\'m
+Feeling+Lucky&q=site:wikipedia.org+'+escape(Qr)

I just stole the m-w one and hooked up the google I'm Feeling Lucky, so it
may not work every time. I'm not sure there's a good way to guarantee that
it would work correctly every time, since we are currently relying on Google
for searching. If you remove the "btnI=I\'m+Feeling+Lucky" part of the URL
then you could go to the google results for that search. Not one-click, but
it would give you the chance to pick a good result.

I tried a few examples, and there are problems, for instance, searching on
"Ottawa Lynx" returns the "Ottawa" page and not the "Ottawa Lynx" page as I
wanted. It seemed to work as anticipated for a few other searches I tried
though.

Regards and hope you find this useful! (Actually, I think I am going to find
it very useful too!)

Cheers,

Mark Jeays (User:Dze27)

> -----Original Message-----
> From: wikitech-l-bounces at Wikipedia.org
> [mailto:wikitech-l-bounces at Wikipedia.org]On Behalf Of Marc Williams
> Sent: May 31, 2004 6:41 PM
> To: wikitech-l at wikipedia.org
> Subject: [Wikitech-l] wikipedia lookup button
>
>
> Please pardon me if this has been suggested before or if it
> already exists.
>
> I am in love with Wikipedia.  What I, as a fairly new Wikipedia user,
> would find terribly helpful would be a Wikipedia Lookup Button for my
> browser similar to what Merriam Webster has:
>
> http://www.m-w.com/button/
>
> 1) I'm reading something on the web that I would like to know more about
> 2) I highlight the phrase or word that I want to look up in Wikipedia
> 3) I press the Wikipedia browser button
> 4) Boom!  I'm taken right to the correct Wikipedia page
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l


from_name: fabiform

subject: [Wikitech-l] Category content display

body:
--- Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> Erik Moeller wrote:
>
> >I suggest two immediate changes to the category content display:
> >
> >1) That, when a category contains less than 200 pages (arbitrary number),
> >we use a vertical display rather than a horizontal one, i.e.
> >
> >  Bohr, Niels
> >  Einstein, Albert
> >  Turing, Alan
> >  Zuse, Konrad
> >
> Good.  But perhaps a 3-column display as with "All pages" could be more
> practical.

A similar three-column display is going to be needed very soon for
Special:Categories, as we already have over 1000 categories--they are currently
displayed in one long numbered list.  This list will also need to be broken
across many pages as time goes on.

Thanks to everyone who's created the category system.  I'm grinning as I read
down the list, there are some great ones already (from Aromatic hydrocarbon to
Latin percussion, or Anti-heroes to Nymphs).

Fabi.

__________________________________
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from_name: André Müller

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Klingon Wikipedia

body:
As Andre Engels already made clear, neither the ISO code nor the SIL
list can be taken for granted in all cases, regarding what we actually
look for in their lists. He gave good examples, and so did Tim Starling.
In fact, my opinion on this topic is, that we should use both the ISO
and the SIL when we?re unsure again whether to allow a certain language
or not. What were the 3 artificial languages on Ethnologue again?
Esperanto, Interlingua and... Europanto or something, I don?t remember.
Well, we have a Volap?k Wikipedia, to which I and some others even
contribute, from time to time. Volap?k is not included in the SIL index
but in the ISO codes. That?d be a pro.
Thus, if the language can be found in either the ISO or the SIL list, it
has a right to exist. But we should still consider each new language if
there are enough contributors for it. Maybe 3 or 5 could be enough. That
would speak for Klingon as well ? there is an ISO code (tlh), there are
more than just 3 or 5 contributors, and the vocabulary and grammar is
large enough as well (a fact that in my opinion doesn?t really apply for
Sindarin/Quenya, for example). I don?t know off-hand which other
constructed languages could be found in the ISO codes (too lazy to look
it up now ;)), but I doubt that there are more ?fictional? languages
besides Klingon.
And Toki Pona is wiki-fied already ? it?d be unfair to remove it now, if
it?s included in ISO/SIL or not.

Okay, I think you understand my point.
- Andr?
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body:
Timwi wrote:
> The dialog that pops up talks about Merriam-Webster. ;-)

It was a 2-minute copy and paste job :)
It's fixed now, still at http://www.kdb.hr/~ike/wikibutton.htm.

Cheers,
Ivan.


subject:
[Wikitech-l] SIL Ethnologue vs. ISO codes for determination
	of	language inclusion

body:
"Jay Bowks" <jjbowks at adam.cheshire.net> schrieb:

> The Ethnologue lists
> http://www.ethnologue.com/show_family.asp?subid=827
> Esperanto, Europanto, and Interlingua.
> It further mentions that Interlingua is
> a language of France...
> http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=INR
> It also claims that Esperanto is a language
> of France, and that it has "200 to 2,000 people who
> speak it as first language". If so it would be a
> natural and non-artificial language for them
> wouldn't it, those French native speakers of
> Esperanto.... Highly irregular!

As strange as it may sound, it is not fully nonsense. As
I understand, our own contributor and Steward Arno Lagrange
grew up in a family where Esperanto was the language spoken
at home, and thus can be considered a native speaker of the
language.

Andre Engels


subject: [Wikitech-l] a humble request about the category display bug

body:
Matthew Trump wrote:
> Could someone tell me what is the current status of the display
> problem with Categories at the top of article pages? I'm sure I'm not
> the first one to notice this, but on Mozilla and Opera at least, the
> category tag floats to the right and pushes images out into the
> middle of the page. It's causing some gawdawful looking results right
> now.

That's not actually a bug; it's just that *nothing* interacts well with
right-aligned images/tables (for instance, section edit links, and other
right-aligned images/tables).

The empty box has been removed for pages that have no categories, and
we've babbled a bit on irc about doing something different for the
category display but haven't done anything yet.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Roozbeh Pournader

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Klingon Wikipedia

body:
My personal experience in dealing with software internationalization
and computing in minority languages, is that SIL can't be trusted,
specially where it draws a line. ISO 639 started with a background in
what US Library of Congress was doing in categorizing books (written
form of languages). On the other hand, SIL started to find about very
local languages (many of which are not written, or share a written
form with a more common language), to help religious evangelists to
find about minor communities and translate the bible to the language.
I believe the written vs spoken distinction is very important here.

As an example, in the case of the Persian language, which I helped
start its wikipedia, we clearly could easily unify the encyclopedias
for what ISO 639 calls "Persian", and what SIL is calling Eastern
Farsi, Western Farsi, and Hazaragi. These three are sometimes
pronounced so differently which makes it impossible for a Tehrani
speaker to understand a native Kabuli, but are so similiar when
written, that we can write a single encyclopedic article that is
grammatically correct. SIL's Persian group, which can be found at
<http://www.ethnologue.com/show_family.asp?subid=1000> contains some
vague cases, but also the clear case of Tajiki which can't be unified
with the Persian wikipedia, since it's written in Cyrillic, not
Arabic. And guess what? ISO 639 already separates Tajiki and gives it
a separate entry and code.

On Mon, 31 May 2004 21:22:34 +1000, Tim Starling
<ts4294967296 at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> Jimmy Wales wrote:
> > 1.  The rule should not tell us to have separate wikipedias for
> > British English and Australian English and American English.  (Nor for
> > "African-American Vernacular English", popularly called "ebonics", nor
> > for "Southern American English", my own native dialect.)
> >
> > 2.  The rule should provide some means of exclusion for vanity
> > projects and extremely small (and thus unlikely to be successful)
> > groups.
> >
> > 3.  The rule should be external to Wikipedia, based on some other
> > official standards.  The reason for this is that this is only our
> > default, and the whole purpose of the rule is to give us one less
> > thing to argue about.  Let some international body make the decision,
> > and then we follow it unless we do something unusual.
>
> The Ethnologue, a language catalogue published by SIL International,
> does all of these things. SIL is a non-profit organisation dedicated to
> linguistics, language documentation and literacy. Their catalogue makes
> a division between languages and dialects based on linguistic rather
> than national concerns. They list 6,800 "main languages", plus dialects
> and alternate names. This is as opposed to ISO's approximately 490
> "languages", many of which even they admit are actually groups of
> languages.
>
> SIL seems to have little time for constructed languages, listing only
> three. ISO 639-2, on the other hand, has a policy allowing any language
> with more than 50 documents to obtain a code. Hence, Klingon is included
> in ISO's short list, but not in SIL's much longer one.
>
> My proposal is to automatically allow any language considered one of
> SIL's main languages, and to only seek community approval when it is not
> listed. I think we should largely ignore the ISO list.
>
> -- Tim Starling
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


from_name: delirium at hackish.org

subject: [Wikitech-l] Wikipedia-related project: WikiRover

body:
Quoting Erik Moeller <erik_moeller at gmx.de>:

> delirium-
> > This seems like a pretty hackish solution long-term.
>
> HTML is not hackish.

On the contrary, HTML is incredibly hackish.  It is not a semantic markup
language, and attempts to make it so (CSS classes and whatnot) are hacks to try
to shove some sematic information into what is a layout language.  Your
additional comments aren't even remotely related to the matter--yes, there are
free libraries to display HTML, but that only indicates it's a usable display
language, not a language for information-passing in abstract, non-layout form.
Are you seriously proposing that, say, an HTML table is a good abstract format
for information?  That writing a horribly ugly parser to convert HTML to LaTeX
is the best way of typesetting wikipedia articles in LaTeX?

I agree that wikitext should be parsed once, but it should be parsed once to a
semantic format.  If you must take something from the cesspool of HTML-related
technologies, XML would probably be the least offensive choice, but given that
there exist 40 years of mature technologies for parsing concrete syntax (like
wikitext) into abstract syntax trees, I don't see why we should use such a
hackish dot-com-style solution.

-Mark

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subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Klingon Wikipedia

body:
On 31 May 2004 16:31 GMT, Andre Engels <engelsag at t-online.de> wrote:
> Even without those objections, the best thing to do seems not to be to
> drop 639-2, but look at SIL and 639-2 for different purposes. 639-2 is
> more applicable when the question is whether the language is large enough
> to beincluded. SIL is more applicable when the question is whether a
> language is enough separate to allow such. Still, I very much have the
> impression that the criteria are not consistent in their application.

Well, gmail helps in mailing list discussions! This is just a link it
gave me right to your message:

Criteria for ISO 639-2
http://www.loc.gov/standards/iso639-2/criteria2.html

roozbeh


references:
<99YmazASpVB@erik_moeller>
	<1085533229.40b3ec2d0d632@secure.hackish.org>
	<20040526085951.A23015@meenakshi.cs.iitm.ernet.in>

body:
Quoting Arvind Narayanan <arvindn at meenakshi.cs.iitm.ernet.in>:

> Second, even those feel semantic markup is important (and I
> offer
> myself as an example) aren't going to be bothered to write <math>x</math>
> instead of ''x''. The primary goal of wikipedia is parsability by humans
> rather
> than computers, and the former application is currently so predominant over
> the
> latter that I'm not willing to inconvenience myself for the sake of semantic
> markup.

But that's the point: <math>x</math> is parsable by humans.  It means x is a
variable, and is instantly understandable.  Saying "x is typeset in italics" is
a typography detail that means nothing abstractly to humans (except perhaps
humans overly familiar with the details of typesetting math textbooks).  It
also makes Wikipedia basically a web encyclopedia, or else an ugly-looking
print encyclopedia.

]-Mark

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from_name: Tim Starling

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Klingon Wikipedia

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:
> 1.  The rule should not tell us to have separate wikipedias for
> British English and Australian English and American English.  (Nor for
> "African-American Vernacular English", popularly called "ebonics", nor
> for "Southern American English", my own native dialect.)
>
> 2.  The rule should provide some means of exclusion for vanity
> projects and extremely small (and thus unlikely to be successful)
> groups.
>
> 3.  The rule should be external to Wikipedia, based on some other
> official standards.  The reason for this is that this is only our
> default, and the whole purpose of the rule is to give us one less
> thing to argue about.  Let some international body make the decision,
> and then we follow it unless we do something unusual.

The Ethnologue, a language catalogue published by SIL International,
does all of these things. SIL is a non-profit organisation dedicated to
linguistics, language documentation and literacy. Their catalogue makes
a division between languages and dialects based on linguistic rather
than national concerns. They list 6,800 "main languages", plus dialects
and alternate names. This is as opposed to ISO's approximately 490
"languages", many of which even they admit are actually groups of
languages.

SIL seems to have little time for constructed languages, listing only
three. ISO 639-2, on the other hand, has a policy allowing any language
with more than 50 documents to obtain a code. Hence, Klingon is included
in ISO's short list, but not in SIL's much longer one.

My proposal is to automatically allow any language considered one of
SIL's main languages, and to only seek community approval when it is not
listed. I think we should largely ignore the ISO list.

-- Tim Starling


from_name: Lightning

body:
no safari love?

Lightning

On May 31, 2004, at 8:43 PM, Ivan Krstic wrote:

> Timwi wrote:
>> The dialog that pops up talks about Merriam-Webster. ;-)
>
> It was a 2-minute copy and paste job :)
> It's fixed now, still at http://www.kdb.hr/~ike/wikibutton.htm.
>
> Cheers,
> Ivan.
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>


from_name: Anthere

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re:MBTI

body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:
> --- Ray Saintonge
<saintonge-EynCeXvFgoheoWH0uzbU5w at public.gmane.org>
wrote:
>
>>Anthere wrote:
>>
>>
>>>http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedians_by_MBTI_type
>>>
>>>How do you explain the current majority of NTs ?
>>>
>>>
>>
>>Wikipedians are not a representative sample of the
general population. 8-)
>>
>>Ec
>
>
> NTs are to Wikipedia as flies are to fly paper (or
moths to a flame). ;)
>
> -- mav

Hmmmmmm.
Well, I hope more people will add themselves so we
improve statistics.

But after we noticed an apparent predominance of NT,
who think of

* why are those predominant ? What is the positive
feedback given to them and not given to others ?

* Are the other groups not attracted by WP ? Or are
they quickly leaving because they can't meet their
needs ?

* is it good for wikipedia community that mostly NT
are here ? Would not we benefit of more types ? How to
attract them and *keep* them ?

* who are the groups more embarassed with trolls ? Who
could better help best with wikistress attacks ?

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Friends.  Fun.  Try the all-new Yahoo! Messenger.
http://messenger.yahoo.com/


from_name: Matthew Trump

body:
Could someone tell me what is the current status of the display
problem with Categories at the top of article pages? I'm sure I'm not
the first one to notice this, but on Mozilla and Opera at least, the
category tag floats to the right and pushes images out into the
middle of the page. It's causing some gawdawful looking results right
now.


from_name: Stan Shebs

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re:MBTI

body:
Anthere wrote:

>
>
>But after we noticed an apparent predominance of NT,
>who think of
>
>* why are those predominant ? What is the positive
>feedback given to them and not given to others ?
>
>* Are the other groups not attracted by WP ? Or are
>they quickly leaving because they can't meet their
>needs ?
>
>
To put it simply, airline pilots are not encyclopedists. The
personality traits that make for a good pilot, for instance
split-second assessment and decision, are more likely to
generate conflicts in WP than to resolve them.

>* is it good for wikipedia community that mostly NT
>are here ? Would not we benefit of more types ? How to
>attract them and *keep* them ?
>
To take a different angle, you want people who are
introspective, because they're the ones who will want to
think about why they organizing information in a particular
way. You've already run into the non-introspectors; they
loudly declare that their way is the only way, and would
rather fight than figure out a compromise.

In general, we want people who are well-suited for the task
of building the information base. It doesn't do us any good
to bring in people who are ill-suited; they won't like it,
won't last long, and you probably won't like the results
of their work.

Stan


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re:MBTI

body:
Anthere wrote:

>Daniel Mayer wrote:
>
>
>>--- Ray Saintonge
>>
>>
><saintonge-EynCeXvFgoheoWH0uzbU5w at public.gmane.org>
>wrote:
>
>
>>>Anthere wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>>http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedians_by_MBTI_type
>>>>
>>>>How do you explain the current majority of NTs ?
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>Wikipedians are not a representative sample of the
>>>
>>>
>general population. 8-)
>
>
>>>Ec
>>>
>>>
>>NTs are to Wikipedia as flies are to fly paper (or
>>
>>
>moths to a flame). ;)
>
>
>>-- mav
>>
>>
>
>Hmmmmmm.
>Well, I hope more people will add themselves so we
>improve statistics.
>
>But after we noticed an apparent predominance of NT,
>who think of
>
>* why are those predominant ? What is the positive
>feedback given to them and not given to others ?
>
>* Are the other groups not attracted by WP ? Or are
>they quickly leaving because they can't meet their
>needs ?
>
>* is it good for wikipedia community that mostly NT
>are here ? Would not we benefit of more types ? How to
>attract them and *keep* them ?
>
>* who are the groups more embarassed with trolls ? Who
>could better help best with wikistress attacks ?
>
>
I'm neither surprised nor worried about the skewed results.  I can
easily understand how some of these other types would not be given to
spending long hours banging on the keyboard to write encyclopedia
article.   Some of them are like spouses who complain when we never come
to the dinner table or to bed.  Some we would all find unbearable.

Ec

Ec


from_name: Timwi

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Klingon

body:
Sheldon Rampton wrote:

> Personally, I think this whole thing is silly. I don't think there
> should be a Wikipedia in Klingon, or Ferengi, or Pig-Latin, or any other
> pseudo-language.

You are about the fortyseventhousandtwohundredandninetythird person to
call it a "pseudo-language" (or "nonsense language" or any other
variant). That doesn't make it any more true, nor does it put Klingon
anywhere near the same level as "Pig Latin" or "Bork Bork Bork". Inform
yourself before passing such derogatory and unjustified judgements.

Timwi


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: EasyTimeline and WikiHiero enabled on all wikis

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:

> EasyTimeline by Erik Zachte

Shouldn't it be called WikiTimeline? ;-)


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: EasyTimeline and WikiHiero enabled on all wikis


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Klingon resurrected

body:
Andre Engels wrote:

> I find this a rather disappointing compromise.

I sure hope that it is temporary. If after a year the Klingon Wikipedia
does turn out to be a real success, I'm pretty sure nobody will mind if
we add inter-wiki links then. If by then the Klingon Wikipedia is quite
obviously dead, nobody will mind getting rid of it again.

> And I also want to reiterate that if we would find Klingon not worthy
> of a Wikipedia, then this should be doubly so for Tokipona.

I was indeed assuming that the compromise of disallowing inter-wiki
links to it would also apply to Toki Pona. After all, my entire goal in
this discussion was not to have a Klingon Wikipedia, but to have Klingon
and Toki Pona be treated equally.

Timwi


subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Re: SIL Ethnologue vs. ISO codes for determination of
 language inclusion

body:
Jay Bowks wrote:

> The Ethnologue lists
> http://www.ethnologue.com/show_family.asp?subid=827
> Esperanto, Europanto, and Interlingua.
[...]
> It also claims that Esperanto is a language
> of France, and that it has "200 to 2,000 people who
> speak it as first language". If so it would be a
> natural and non-artificial language for them
> wouldn't it, those French native speakers of
> Esperanto.... Highly irregular!

OK, I have no idea why it claims Esperanto to be a language of France,
but the information about native speakers is as accurate as is known
(though of course not all of them, in fact probably very few of them,
live in France).

There being native speakers obviously doesn't change the fact that
Esperanto is constructed, not natural.

Timwi


from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [Wikitech-l] Root pw for Jerome

body:
I've granted root access on the machines to Jerome Jamnicky (jeronim on
IRC), he's done good work on the servers in recent weeks. I hope that's
OK.

Regards,

Erik


from_name: Lee Pilich

body:
Geoff Burling wrote (in reply to "Jim Kork"):
 >Also, you made 3 reversions to the [[Kemal Atatuerk]] article within 24
hours,
 >which -- even if you had an account -- would result in having your account
 >blocked.

This is not true. Please take a look at [[Wikipedia:Wikipedia:How to revert
a page to an earlier version#Revert wars considered harmful (the three
revert guideline)]]. Basically, it's *more* than three times, not three
times, and the guideline is not enforced by a block (some people might like
it to be, but as things stand it isn't, and quite a few people are against
the idea). It used to be that reverting more than thrice could result in a
quickpoll to block, but this is rather controversial (see
[[Talk:Quickpolls]]), and hasn't been done in practice for over a month.

That's not to take away from the rest of your post, nor to legitimize Mr
Kork's actions in any way (I agree that blocking him in this case was
fine). I just wanted to comment on this one point because there's a lot of
misinformation about this "rule" floating about.

Regards
Lee (Camembert)


subject: [Wikitech-l] Bug in categorisation system

body:
Moving a page doesn't update the relevant category with the new title.

Thanks,
Timwi


body:
Ivan Krstic wrote:

> Marc Williams wrote:
>
>> I am in love with Wikipedia.  What I, as a fairly new Wikipedia user,
>> would find terribly helpful would be a Wikipedia Lookup Button for my
>> browser similar to what Merriam Webster has:
>
> Here is a proof-of-concept, sans icon (and with 'EN' hardcoded):
>
> http://www.kdb.hr/~ike/wikibutton.htm

The dialog that pops up talks about Merriam-Webster. ;-)


from_name: Angela

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: [Wikitech-l] Re: Klingon resurrected

body:
 --- Timwi <timwi at gmx.net> wrote:
> I was indeed assuming that the compromise of
> disallowing inter-wiki
> links to it would also apply to Toki Pona.

I wasn't assuming the compromise applied to toki pona.
If there is going to be a policy to remove all
existing links to it, then you need to show there is
consensus to do that. Wikitech-l is not the place to
discuss such a policy so I'm moving this thread to
wikipedia-l.

I don't feel the policy on Klingon should necessarily
apply to toki pona. I don't have any strong feeling on
whether that wikipedia should exist, but while it
does, please stop removing links to it on the
assumption that Klingon policies can be applied
retroactively to any other controversial languages.

Angela.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Angela

____________________________________________________________
Yahoo! Messenger - Communicate instantly..."Ping"
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subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Klingon resurrected


from_name: Toby Bartels

body:
Daniel Mayer (maveric149) wrote:

>Toby Bartels wrote:

>>Suppose that there are two free documents that I like,
>>one of which uses the GNU FDL licence, one of which uses CC-by-sa.
>>I want to combine these two free documents into a single modified one.
>>Even though both of them are supposed to be free, I can't do this!
>>But if either of these documents uses the noncopyleft CC-by instead,
>>then I am able to do what I want to do with the documents.
>>The CC-by licence is more free; it gives me more freedoms.

>Yes, but that deals with the freedom of your use, not the freedom of the
>content

The ''only'' issue in the freedom of content
is the freedom of people to ''use'' that content.
It may well be that this limitation on freedom is justified,
given the substandard world of incompatible licences
(and the even more fundamentally substandard world
where proprietary control is possible at all),
but we're only deluding ourselves if we pretend
that it's not any limitation on freedom whatsoever.

>Fixing the compatibility issue is a major problem that must be
>corrected, however.

>Correcting that is my plan A since it has the largest payoff in the end
>(a world in which the best representation of knowledge is not controllable).

I certainly agree that this plan has the largest pay off,
but I worry that your talk of "plan A" and a superlative comparison
may introduce a false dichotomy.  One may be able to pursue
both a plan A and a plan B at the same time.
In particular, there's no conflict with doing both plans
if plan B inolves:

>Using
>a license of convenience in the interim would be a bad idea since works under
>that license will not be copyleft, thus making derivative works of them
>susceptible to proprietary control.

Is this a serious issue with Wikinews?
I'm not at all convinced that it will be,
while a complicated licence like GNU FDL
has potential problems in getting used
like AP and Reuters are used by news sources.

I don't know if that problem is significant,
and we certainly don't have to decide Wikinews now.
But remember why this conversation started (this time):
the Wikimedia Foundation is supposed to have a policy
requiring that Wikimedia works be covered by a "free" licence
"like the GNU FDL".  We need to decide what "free" means here.
And the last thing that you've said about that in this thread
is that you want to use "free" in the nonstandard sense
that includes ?copyleft? in addition to ?free? in the sense of GNU.

I don't believe that we should rule out a priori
the possibility that a project like Wikinews might not want copyleft.
It's one thing to argue, when Wikinews policy discussions are beginning,
that it too will best be served by a copyleft licence.
It's quite another thing to insist on that as a matter of policy.
If it were up to me, I'd keep the language "free" that we have,
while clarifying that we mean in the sense of the Free Software Foundation,
nothing more.

-- Toby


body:
Daniel Mayer (maveric149) wrote:

>Andre Engels wrote:

>>It's [a CC-by document] NOT free, you say? So, I may not use it freely?
>>You DO have a strange definition of 'free'.

>Not libre, which in this context means it is only half free.
>Yes, you can *use* it freely, but the content itself is not free.

Here, mav is using the word "free" in a nonstandard sense
(which Andre might fairly call a "strange definition").
According to most people that use the term, like the FSF and Debian,
a CC-by document, a BSD-licensed document, and a PD document are all free.
In the absence of a copyleft, however, derivative works may become non-free.
(The original work, however, will ''always'' be free.)

>>By restricting how it may be used. What other way could there be to decrease
>>freedom?

>Those restrictions are designed to ensure the freedom of the content, meaning
>it can not be controlled.

And thus, arguably, the restrictions are justified for the cause of freedom.
Nevertheless, they remain restrictions on freedom.

Also, you don't need a copyleft to keep "it" -- the original document --
from being controlled.  A PD document is always PD, a CC-by document
is (assuming that the original licensor indeed had the right to license it)
always CC-by, and so on.  Only derivative works may be controlled.
Thus for example, the PD Grimm fairy tale Schneewittchen remains free,
even though the Disney movie Snow White (a derived work) is not free.

I believe that mav, Andre, and I all have slightly different opinions
about what is important in regards to freedom and how to safeguard it.
But it's very difficult to discuss these things with imprecise language.
That's why Richard Stallman makes such a big deal out of terminology,
even to the point that he annoys people.  I use RMS's terminology,
even though I disagree with him on some points as well.

-- Toby


from_name: Jerome Jamnicky

body:
On Mon, 31 May 2004 22:20, Christian List wrote:
> On the danish Wikipedia we have already localized everything into danish on
> the new MediaWiki 1.3, but a couple of hours ago all the newly introduced
> translations disappeared. Please, whoever deleted them, put them back ASAP.
>
> Regards
> Christian List

I don't know exactly what went on, but it appears that a buggy script damaged
entries in the Mediawiki: namespace, and they had to be restored from an
earlier backup.  So you'll have to re-do the translations you've recently
done.  Tim Starling knows what happened, and he should reply to your mail
later, when he wakes up

-Jerome