from_name: Sheldon Rampton

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Known Trolls

body:
Peter Jaros wrote:

>One problem with bringing up a person's pre-Wikipedia history is that a
>reformed troll is likely to be, shall we say, tact-impaired.  Such a
>person is *more* likely to be falsely accused of trolling (remembering
>that trolling includes intent).  On the other hand, this history can
>greatly help arbitrators to decide how to deal with a user.  Many
>people are simply bad at garnering sympathy for their point; it's a
>skill not everyone has.  Simply accusing such people of trolling is
>likely to make matters worse and make the arbitrators' job harder.

The difference between being a troll or "tact-impaired" is minor
enough that for most practical purposes it isn't worth considering.

Personally, I think Wikipedia should try to move away from deterrence
strategies like bans, IP blocks and arbitration committees, and
toward a reputation-management system like they have at Slashdot or
Kuro5hin or eBay. A reputation-management system combines rewards
with punishments. What's missing from Wikipedia's system is any kind
of reward for GOOD behavior. Suppose, for example, we had a system
where other users could rate our contributions, and the more positive
your cumulative rating, the less scrutiny your edits are likely to
receive from vandal-watchers. If we had that sort of system, we could
focus monitoring for vandalism on people with low ratings. This would
also give users an incentive to keep their ratings high so they
wouldn't get hassled by others. Perhaps there could be other
incentives as well, e.g., a high rating automatically makes you a
sysop.

I think it would also be a good idea to set some kind of limit on the
number of contributions accepted per day from each anonymous IP
number -- a fairly small number, such as 5. Five contributions is
enough for someone to get a feel for how Wikipedia works. After that,
the software should tell them to register if they want to make
further contributions. This way the Wikipedia would remain inviting
to newbies but would add encouragement to enter the
reputation-tracking system. It wouldn't entirely stop anonymous
vandalism, but it would make it more difficult and would probably
eliminate most of it.

--Sheldon Rampton


list: wikitech-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Gabriel Wicke

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: test.wikipedia.org

body:
On Mon, 09 Feb 2004 14:35:35 +0000, Timwi wrote:

> Gabriel Wicke wrote:
>
>> Test.wikipedia.org isn't updated at them moment  [...]

> However, you have disabled the MediaWiki namespace stuff, so I can't test
> it with {{msg:}}. In order to enable it, set $wgUseDatabaseMessages to
> true.

Hm, i don't really want to do this in my wiki. test.wikipedia.org/
larousse.wikimedia.org work now, i'm not sure about their update status.
--
Gabriel Wicke


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Switching servers - Tuesday?

body:
On Sun, 08 Feb 2004 23:48:09 -0800, Brion Vibber wrote:

> Suda's got a full database up and seems to be maintaining synchronization
> with the master. Logins for the developers should be set up, and most of
> the infrastructure is there or ready to be put in place.

I would propose to do some more tests before switching:

* overload tests of the load balancing setup to determine icp queries
on/off
* heart beat takeover tests for the Squids
* NFS/ DB server heart beat setup

These things are harder or impossible to test in production without
disrupting the service. The current setup holds up good enough to allow
for a day or so of additional testing, and if there are problems it should
be an advantage to discover them now.
--
Gabriel Wicke


from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [Wikitech-l] MediaWiki Documentation and the GFDL

body:
Evan-
> One possibility might be having another namespace (ANOTHER
> NAMESPACE!?!) along the lines of "Documentation:" or such. Such a
> namespace might be hardwired to be always under the GFDL, with a
> special gnunote area.

That separate namespace [[Help:]] is already planned. And it would
probably best to put all documentation in the public domain. When we
launch the Help: namespace, maybe we should start the documentation from
scratch, and do it under these conditions:

1) Only add text which you yourself are the author of, or
2) which you have permission to put in the public domain.

Regards,

Erik


list: wikien-l

from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Known Trolls

body:
Sheldon Rampton wrote:
> Personally, I think Wikipedia should try to move away from deterrence
> strategies like bans, IP blocks and arbitration committees, and
> toward a reputation-management system like they have at Slashdot or
> Kuro5hin or eBay. A reputation-management system combines rewards
> with punishments. What's missing from Wikipedia's system is any kind
> of reward for GOOD behavior.

Well, there's no mechanized system, but there certainly is old
fashioned human "reputation".

I'm not opposed, in the abstract, to reputation management systems of
the type that you're talking about, other than to say that they are
notoriously difficult to design well, notoriously easy to game-play,
and generally lack the subtlety that old-fashioned human reputation
has.

Different people do different things and gain positive reputation in
many different ways.  Some spend a lot of time writing original
material on uncontroversial subjects.  Some spend a lot of time
writing here, about policy.  Some do a lot of copy editing.  Some sit
on VotesForDeletion.  Some look out for vandalism.  Some spend a lot
of time writing original material on *controversial* subjects, a risky
and dangerous avocation for reputation.  :-)

It's hard to imagine any sort of mechanized system which could begin
to capture all the nuances.

On the other hand, reputation management systems can scale to a much
larger size than the human system.  Maybe.

There are sysops who I don't even know, who I've never spoken to, not
in private email, not on the wiki, not on the mailing list.

A couple of people wrote to me with probably justified complaints
about my appointments to the committees that I overlooked some very
good people who I don't happen to know.

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Problems accessing Wikipedia using LWP::UserAgent

references:
<c091nd$gl6$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<C0436EDD-5B50-11D8-AE32-000A95DAA284@pobox.com>
	<c092qu$j8b$1@sea.gmane.org>

body:
Timwi wrote:
> Well, your robots.txt seems to disallow access to /w/ for all
> User-Agents. This would mean I would disrespect robots.txt if I were to
> submit edits, right?
>
> Then I would humbly like to ask to be allowed to run my little script on
> your server.

Of course we know you and trust you, and can you tell a bit more about
what your script does?  What is it written in?  Can you share the
source?

> The sole purpose of the script is to replace occurrances of one text
> with another. Most of the time, I use it for common spelling
> corrections, or fixing links like [[Kurt Godel]] where someone
> omitted the diacritic marks.  So what User-Agent string should I
> use? "Timwiscript"? (I don't like calling it a bot, it really
> isn't... it still requires a great deal of manual interaction, and
> doesn't wildly do stuff automatically.)  Timwi

You could give it a User-Agent string that's exactly the same as any
popular browser, and we'd never know the difference.  So it's good of
you to ask.  :-)  I't say Timwiscript is a good one, so that if anyone
does notice it doing anything strange, we can ask you about it.

--Jimbo


from_name: Geoff Burling

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Known Trolls

body:
On Tue, 10 Feb 2004, Daniel Mayer wrote:

> Sheldon Rampton wrote:
> >Personally, I think Wikipedia should try to
> >move away from deterrence strategies like
> >bans, IP blocks and arbitration committees,
> >and toward a reputation-management
> >system like they have at Slashdot or Kuro5hin
> >or eBay.
>
> Oh god no!  Slashdot and *especially* Kuro5hin are a haven for trolls, rude
> behavior, and giving the feeling to newbies that the deck is stacked against
> them. We don't want to replicate that!
>
Having  been a long-time member of /. (I have a 4-digit ID number, FWIW)
I agree. Heck, the feeling I've gotten from /. is that the people running it
have lost interest in the project, that it has been coasting along on its
reputation for the last 2-3 years, & that there is no way to effect any kind
of change in the system.

I hope none of us want Wikipedia to have this feeling.

[snip]
>
> But anons and new users do have a tendency to save without first previewing. I
> would therefore support the removal of the Save button from the initial edit
> screens presented to anons. Only after they previewed once would they be
> presented with the save button.
>
That is such a simple & brilliant solution that I wonder why no one else
has thought of it until now. Such a change would not be a serious barrier
to someone who wanted to make the contribution without logging in: the
forum on Linux Weekly News requires a preview step for its members to
submit input, & I'd say that place has a high signal-to-noise ratio.
It would also encourage the creation of more accounts, which would draw
more people in.

Geoff


from_name: Poor, Edmund W

subject: [WikiEN-l] Tact, and its lack (was: Known Trolls)

body:
Sheldon pointed out:

> The difference between being a troll or "tact-impaired"
> is minor enough that for most practical purposes it isn't
> worth considering.

Certainly. You're a case in point. Of all our sysops and respected
contributors, you are easily the least tactful. You bully everyone who
dares to disagree with you (even Jimbo). But we generally ignore your
tactlessness, because of the honor of having a best-selling, published
author in our ranks. And, oh yes, because once in a while you come up
with a good idea.

But the only reward for good behavior, as you put it, is a thank you
note from another contributor. You might get a barnstar, a pat on the
back via e-mail, public accolades on the mailing list or your user talk
page.

By the way, I think you're an outstanding writer, Sheldon. (You're just
wrong about global warming, but, hey, no one's perfect! ;-)

Rating systems simply don't work. Any system devisable can be "worked"
by clever and devious people with nothing better to do. Hackers (ahem,
"Real hackers" call these folks 'script kiddies' or 'crackers').

Some might even say that the Western journalism system (the "media") can
be cracked -- say, by unethical manipulation of statistics, just to
mention one way of "stacking the deck". I believe you have a lot of
professional knowledge about how the unscrupulous do this, Sheldon.

Ed Poor


subject: [WikiEN-l] The word 'terrorist' (was: User HectorRodriguez)

body:
There's nothing wrong with removing the word "terrorist". It's a loaded
word, and probably doesn't belong in the plain text of any article other
than [[terrorism]] itself.

On the other hand, if a prominent figure or body has a relevant quote,
and a user suppresses that quote for no other purpose than to eliminate
the word "terrorist", then this is censorship and shouldn't be
encouraged.

We can say:

* Clinton called the 9/11 hijackings "terrorism" and helped provide
bi-partisan support for a military campaign to punish the "terrorists"
responsible.

This way, it's not the Wikipedia which says that the hijackings or
crashes or civilian deaths are acts of terror, but a particular,
well-known spokesman for a large and influential group.

Ed Poor
Ancient Wikipedian
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body:
It's not a "personal attack" to chide someone for making personal
attacks. If it were, you would have been wrong just now for chiding ME!
:-)

/ducks and covers/

Uncle Ed


subject: [WikiEN-l] The Justification Issue

body:
Based even on a the short interchange among me, Delirium, Viajero, who I
think I know pretty well by now -- plus OneVoice :-) ...

I would say that the key issue is whether a given act is "justified" or
should be "condemned". Some people use the word "racism" to mean
unjustifiable race discrimination (as when an evil majority exploits an
innocent minority) -- as opposed to justifiable race discrimination (as
when an exploited innocent minority gets extra goodies like preference
in being hired for a job or admitted to a college (see affirmative
action). Likewise, some people used the word "terrorism" to mean
unjustifiable violence against civilians -- as opposed to justifiable
violence against a "legitimate military target".

For the racism issue, it hinges on whether the discrimination is
justified. For terrorism, it hinges on whether the violence is
justified.

We Wikipedians need to step back far enough from these articles and
discussions to be able to identify and distinguish our own opinions and
judgments from those of others. In particular, we'll have to avoid
assuming that any one of us is in touch with the Universal Standard of
Judgment. (Okay, everyone but me, heh, heh :-)

No, even I have to do this: it's the promise we all make when we click
that "Save page" button!

Uncle Ed

Original rant at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Violence_in_the_Israeli-Palestinian_co
nflict_2004#The_Justification_Issue

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from_name: Timwi

references:
<c091nd$gl6$1@sea.gmane.org>	<C0436EDD-5B50-11D8-AE32-000A95DAA284@pobox.com>	<c092qu$j8b$1@sea.gmane.org>	<0D540420-5B54-11D8-AE32-000A95DAA284@pobox.com>	<c0977b$sgu$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<opr24ozzw2thl5ts@localhost>

body:
Ivan Krstic wrote:

> it seems like you've coded your toolkit in Perl (unlike the existing
> Python toolkit). If so, I'm sure there are more than a few people that
> would like to have it available; would you be willing to post your
> source somewhere?

Sure. http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useless_Perl_Scripts

But, your terminology "toolkit" is an exaggeration. :-p It's really not
that big, nor is it particularly useful. I tend to write quick & short
scripts for extremely specific purposes.

See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:List_of_Disney_characters :-)

Greetings,
Timwi


from_name: Christopher Mahan

subject: [WikiEN-l] Feature request: hide "Save" button for newbies

body:
--- "Poor, Edmund W" <Edmund.W.Poor at abc.com> wrote:
[Re: hiding save button]
> We can try the experiment for a couple of weeks, and see if it has
> good
> effects. What do you say?

I'm not sure about that one. The purpose of the preview button is to
preview, not a step toward saving.

I don't think bots will like it.

I don't think trolls will be put off by it. For example, slashdot has
that 15 (or is it 20) seconds posting rule, yet it is a real cave.

Not all anon login people are new or inexperienced users.

Trolls live in caves, remember, and hate sunlight. Don't give them
any place to hide and shine the light everywhere.

=====
Christopher Mahan
chris_mahan at yahoo.com
818.943.1850 cell
http://www.christophermahan.com/

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Finance: Get your refund fast by filing online.
http://taxes.yahoo.com/filing.html


from_name: Ray Saintonge

body:
Christopher Mahan wrote:

>--- "Poor, Edmund W" <Edmund.W.Poor at abc.com> wrote:
>[Re: hiding save button]
>
>>We can try the experiment for a couple of weeks, and see if it has
>>good
>>effects. What do you say?
>>
>I'm not sure about that one. The purpose of the preview button is to
>preview, not a step toward saving.
>
I confess that I often save without preview.

>I don't think bots will like it.
>
Bots only remain newbies for a very short time.  In less than a minute
they can acquire enough edit history to graduate them from newbydom. :-)

>Trolls live in caves, remember, and hate sunlight. Don't give them
>any place to hide and shine the light everywhere.
>
It depends what derivation of troll your using.  In their most common
usages the noun and verb have completely different etymologies.  When we
refer to the verb their work is done on the open ocean.

The two etymologies do have another point of convergence  The Nordic
troll through the Germanic gave rise to the word "trull"; the Old
English sense of turning, revolving or even the musical singing of
successive parts of a drinking song eventually gave rise to the word
"trollop".

This is trolling at its most feminized. ;-)

Ec


from_name: Imran Ghory

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Known Trolls

body:
On Tue, 10 Feb 2004, Sheldon Rampton wrote:
> of reward for GOOD behavior. Suppose, for example, we had a system
> where other users could rate our contributions, and the more positive
> your cumulative rating, the less scrutiny your edits are likely to
> receive from vandal-watchers.

I think an automated system like that is going to be vulnerable to people
working out ways to do it. Another possibility is to use a web of trust,
that is each user builds a list of users that they personally trust on
which they could include users directly (saying I trust this user) or
indirectly (I trust everyone who user X trusts), and then people could
filter recent changes removing only those that they trust.

The obvious downside is that it would take a lot of processing which is
probably something we want to avoid at least in the immediate future.

Imran
--
http://bits.bris.ac.uk/imran


from_name: McCoy, Wanda

subject: [WikiEN-l] Image Use Permission

body:
Dear Sir:

I am a researcher for Accelerated Christian Education, a publisher of K-12
curriculum and educational materials for Christian schools and home schools
worldwide.  We are updating our State Studies program and are interested in
using an image from your http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Moses web page
in our curriculum.  We will be publishing about 2,500 copies of the State
History workbook in 2004.

The image we are interested in is:  Robert Moses

 We would appreciate any information on how to obtain permission for usage
in our published curriculum, and the appropriate credit line you would like
for us to use.

Thank you for your time and considerations.

Wanda McCoy

Administrative Assistant, Graphic Research
wmccoy at aceministries.com

Accelerated Christian Education
8200 Bryan Dairy Rd, Suite 100
Largo, FL  33777
727-319-0700, ext. 2211


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Feature request: hide "Save" button for newbies

body:
Poor, Edmund W wrote:

> Sheldon and Geoff suggest:

> > > But anons and new users do have a tendency to save without first
> > > previewing. I would therefore support the removal of the Save button

> > > from the initial edit screens presented to anons. Only after they
> > > previewed once would they be presented with the save button.

> > That is such a simple & brilliant solution that I wonder why no
> > one else has thought of it until now. Such a change would not be a
> > serious barrier to someone who wanted to make the contribution
> > without logging in: the forum on Linux Weekly News requires a preview
> > step for its members to submit input, & I'd say that place has a high
> > signal-to-noise ratio. It would also encourage the creation of more
> > accounts, which would draw more people in.

> Developers, please hide the "Save" button for newbies (like IP users and
> those recently signed-in) -- thus requiring them to PREVIEW each page
> submitted. (Un-hide the button, of course on the preview page :-)

First, I thought I was agreeing with Mav.

Second, I meant to say we should do this *only* for anon contributors. I'm
not in favor of doing this for "newbies".

Clarifying,
Geoff


body:
Sheldon and Geoff suggest:

> > But anons and new users do have a tendency to save without first
> > previewing. I would therefore support the removal of the Save button

> > from the initial edit screens presented to anons. Only after they
> > previewed once would they be presented with the save button.

> That is such a simple & brilliant solution that I wonder why no
> one else has thought of it until now. Such a change would not be a
> serious barrier to someone who wanted to make the contribution
> without logging in: the forum on Linux Weekly News requires a preview
> step for its members to submit input, & I'd say that place has a high
> signal-to-noise ratio. It would also encourage the creation of more
> accounts, which would draw more people in.

Developers, please hide the "Save" button for newbies (like IP users and
those recently signed-in) -- thus requiring them to PREVIEW each page
submitted. (Un-hide the button, of course on the preview page :-)

We can try the experiment for a couple of weeks, and see if it has good
effects. What do you say?

Ed Poor
Wikien-l Admin


subject: [Wikitech-l] Feature request: hide "Save" button for newbies


subject: [Wikitech-l] Friday?

body:
Jason has made a hotel reservation Friday night in San Diego on the
assumption that he'll be headed down there Friday to decommission
geoffrin and gunther and pliny and whatever.

He's going to (most likely) send geoffrin back to Penguin for them to
either repair or replace.  He's sending gunther (which is on loan from
bomis) to me so that we can start migrating some Bomis stuff here.
And Bomis is going to borrow whatever else belongs to Wikimedia for a
little bit before sending it along, also as part of that migration.

Should I ask him to wait?  Can we get moved by then?

--Jimbo


from_name: Daniel Ehrenberg

body:
> From: "Poor, Edmund W" <Edmund.W.Poor at abc.com>
> Subject: [WikiEN-l] The word 'terrorist' (was: User
> HectorRodriguez)
> Date: Tue, 10 Feb 2004 09:13:41 -0500
> To: "English Wikipedia" <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
>
> There's nothing wrong with removing the word
> "terrorist". It's a loaded
> word, and probably doesn't belong in the plain text
> of any article other
> than [[terrorism]] itself.
>
> On the other hand, if a prominent figure or body has
> a relevant quote,
> and a user suppresses that quote for no other
> purpose than to eliminate
> the word "terrorist", then this is censorship and
> shouldn't be
> encouraged.
>
> We can say:
>
> * Clinton called the 9/11 hijackings "terrorism" and
> helped provide
> bi-partisan support for a military campaign to
> punish the "terrorists"
> responsible.
>
> This way, it's not the Wikipedia which says that the
> hijackings or
> crashes or civilian deaths are acts of terror, but a
> particular,
> well-known spokesman for a large and influential
> group.
>
> Ed Poor
> Ancient Wikipedian

Remember, NPOV isn't about making every sentence
completely indisputable and wishy-washy, it's about
making the article as a whole unbiased. Censoring the
word "terrorist" from Wikipedia would be very
destructive to it as an encyclopedia. We can use the
word "terrorist" and even say that someone is a
terrorist without using quotes; all we have to do is
present both sides in the article. Here's my example
of the same thing:

According to most Americans, the 9/11 attacks were
terrorism.
[later in the article] Clinton helped provide
bipartisan support for a military campaign to punish
the terrorists responsible.
[even later in the article] Some people said that the
9/11 terrorist attacks weren't terrorism and...

Otherwise your article has sentences two times longer
than they need to be and with a feeling strong of
skepticism that they were terrorists.

Daniel Ehrenberg

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Finance: Get your refund fast by filing online.
http://taxes.yahoo.com/filing.html


from_name: Gareth Owen

body:
"Poor, Edmund W" <Edmund.W.Poor at abc.com> writes:

> Certainly. You're a case in point. Of all our sysops and respected
> contributors, you are easily the least tactful.

I don't think so.  Two or three considerably less tactful respected
contributors spring to mind.

> You bully everyone who dares to disagree with you (even Jimbo).

Whatever happened to the Poor Creed of "no personal attacks."
--
Gareth Owen


from_name: Edward Senft

subject: [WikiEN-l] michael?

body:
Is this the work of Michael?
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=MediaWiki:Opentask&dummy=1&diff=2359225&oldid=2359160

I thought not until I read the message on the talk
page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=MediaWiki_talk:Opentask&dummy=1&diff=2359237&oldid=2359226

Thanks,
Ed Senft
(Sennheiser)

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Finance: Get your refund fast by filing online.
http://taxes.yahoo.com/filing.html


from_name: Peter Bartlett

subject: [WikiEN-l] HI

body:
-----Original Message-----
From: wikien-l-bounces at Wikipedia.org
[mailto:wikien-l-bounces at Wikipedia.org] On Behalf Of Ray Saintonge
Sent: 09 February 2004 21:41
To: English Wikipedia
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] HI

Jimmy Wales wrote:

>I didn't come from me, I'm quite sure.  I don't use any email system
>that's remotely vulnerable to such stuff.
>
>Peter Jaros wrote:
>
>>On Feb 9, 2004, at 3:20 AM, jwales at bomis.com wrote:
>>
>>>The message cannot be represented in 7-bit ASCII encoding and has
>>>been
>>>sent as a binary attachment.
>>>
>>><doc.pif>
>>>
>I've received quite a high number of  messages with this and other
>similar messages inviting me to open the attachment.  I've also
received
>messages from people to whom I've never written saying that I sent it
to
>them.  When I look at the page source I find that they were sent from
>somebody else who has said that they were from me, but has a different
>IP address.  It will pick up your name from somebody else's files and
>send this worm on your behalf.

>Ec

Our article on this worm is at [[MyDoom]].

Pete


body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:

>>Then I would humbly like to ask to be allowed to run my little script on
>>your server.
>
> Of course we know you and trust you,

Wow, thanks! Makes me feel all honoured and stuff :)

> and can you tell a bit more about
> what your script does?  What is it written in?  Can you share the
> source?

Yeah, http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useless_Perl_Scripts
That page has both my scripts and a short explanation on what they do.
global_replace.pl is the only one that actually modifies articles, and
whoami.pl is the only other one that downloads stuff, so they are the
only ones that need a UserAgent. I've put in 'Timwiscript' now.

Thanks,
Timwi


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: test.wikipedia.org

body:
Gabriel Wicke wrote:

> On Mon, 09 Feb 2004 14:35:35 +0000, Timwi wrote:
>
>>However, you have disabled the MediaWiki namespace stuff, so I can't test
>>it with {{msg:}}. In order to enable it, set $wgUseDatabaseMessages to
>>true.
>
> Hm, i don't really want to do this in my wiki. test.wikipedia.org/
> larousse.wikimedia.org work now, i'm not sure about their update status.

Apparently test.wikipedia.org is not up to date.

Please could someone update it?

Thanks,
Timwi


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] Mail problems

body:
Just FYI, I've been having a lot of trouble with the list kicking me
for "excessive bounces". I'm trying to get it resolved, but in the
meantime I'm not receiving all mails to the lists.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: The Cunctator

body:
On 2/10/04 9:07 AM, "Poor, Edmund W" <Edmund.W.Poor at abc.com> wrote:

> Sheldon pointed out:
>
>> The difference between being a troll or "tact-impaired"
>> is minor enough that for most practical purposes it isn't
>> worth considering.
>
> Certainly. You're a case in point. Of all our sysops and respected
> contributors, you are easily the least tactful. You bully everyone who
> dares to disagree with you (even Jimbo). But we generally ignore your
> tactlessness, because of the honor of having a best-selling, published
> author in our ranks. And, oh yes, because once in a while you come up
> with a good idea.
>
Heh. This is amusing in so many ways.


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Sean Barrett

subject: [Wikipedia-l] An idea. What do you think about this?

body:
> The idea is to create new language, based on most popular languages
> from all over the world. This language would not be a human
> language, but a language to store information.

Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.


from_name: Magnus Manske

subject: [Wikitech-l] Pages with lots'o images

body:
I have recently seen several pages with many images on them, in a way
that, even thumbnailed, the pages seem cluttered and hard to read.

In (unsaved) experiments, I found that it is possible to align several
thumbnailed images on a single page on the right side by doing this:

{| align=right
|[[image:1.jpg|thumb|right|first image]]
[[image:2.jpg|thumb|right|second image]]
[[image:3.jpg|thumb|right|third image]]
|}

This is best done with thumbnails of similar size, which can be achieved
easily enough.

IMHO this could greatly improve "the flow" on some pages. Any technical
or aesthetic reason *not* to do this?

Magnus


from_name: Delirium

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Thumbnails, varying connection speeds

body:
Daniel P.B.Smith wrote:

> I'm not sure that thumbnails are the ideal answer, though, because
> they're very annoying for those who _do_ have high-speed connections.
> I wonder whether it would be unreasonable to request that Wikipedia
> support two (or three?) flavors of delivery, chosen in
> Preferences--high graphics, thumbnail graphics, and perhaps no graphics?

Perhaps an additional possibility would be to have things be more
relative.  Right now there is a default size, but it's not usually used,
because it seems to be smaller than what most people are using.  But
hard-coding pixel values is a bad idea, because peoples' monitors and
preferred reading sizes and so on vary, so they really should be
relative somehow.  And once we have a relative coding scheme, it's easy
to add an option that says "show me all images 50% smaller".

The main problem I see with making thumbnails smaller all around is that
really small thumbnails are often pretty useless, often not any better
than simply a text link to the full-sized picture, because you can't see
anything on the tiny thumbnail.

-Mark


from_name: talthen at wp.pl

body:
Hello,
Wikipedia's database is quite huge. But is not widening so fast. But it
would be changed when all the Wikipedians started creating common database.
The main problem is the difference of languages, but... I have an idea! :) I
know my idea will not be so easy to realize, but I would be very usefull.

The idea is to create new language, based on most popular languages from all
over the world. This language would not be a human language, but a language
to store information.

Today we have some language translating applications, but they are not
perfect, because two things:
1. Some languages differ too much
2. Some words have many meanings, and theprogram doesn't know which one
shoulb be chosen.
By creating new language we would solve first problem. (I think we do not
have to create entirely new language, maybe modifying Esperanto would be
just enough). The second problem could be chosen by listing all the meanings
of words. For example for english language we could create file like this:
word number    word    meaning
--------------------------------
1                       mind    intellect
2                       mind    thoughts
3                       mind    a head
4                       mind    to object to

The translating would look like this:
I have written a sentence: "The study of logic trains the mind". Application
scans my sentence and asks in which meaning I used word "mind". Then I
choose from all "mind" meanings word "intellect". After explaining allthe
meanings by the writer the application saves it in it's own language in a
structure like this:
116117 6322 987672 1 312312
Where the numbers means word numbers.

Decompression would look like this:
I have asked the program to display the message in Polish. The application
loads file "polish.txt" and is looking for words with these numbers.
As a fourth word it loads word from line one (because word "mind" with
meaning "intellect" is in line 1 in all the languages, not only in English).
It finds all the words and displays them.

I know that writing down all the meanings of words is not easy. But if all
Wikipedians write just a few we would finish it very fast.
The hardest thing is to make the language, that describes in which time is
the sencence, what the order of words should be after translating to
language X and what after diplaying in Y, etc.
But I think this is possible and would make for eg. building the database of
Wikipedia much easier.
And not only this. There will be many applications for it.

Hope you understood what I mean. I know I may have made some mistakes (both
gramatically and logically)...

So- how do you like my idea? Do you think it's worth realizing?

Regards,
            Talthen
      (talthen at wp.pl)


from_name: Fred Bauder

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Known Trolls

body:
I'm afraid this has to be learned the hard way.

Fred

> From: Peter Jaros <rjaros at shaysnet.com>
> Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Date: Tue, 10 Feb 2004 20:40:28 -0500
> To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Re: Known Trolls
>
> If a person really is a troll, they should be
> treated differently than someone who has suffered from a lapse in tact.
> It should (may) be possible to reason with the latter; reasoning with
> the former is a complete waste of time.
>
> In short, I think that off-Wikipedia evidence can be very useful to
> arbitrators in deciding how to work with a disputant.


body:
--- Delirium <delirium at rufus.d2g.com> wrote:
> Daniel P.B.Smith wrote:
>
> > I'm not sure that thumbnails are the ideal answer,
> though, because
> > they're very annoying for those who _do_ have
> high-speed connections.
> > I wonder whether it would be unreasonable to
> request that Wikipedia
> > support two (or three?) flavors of delivery,
> chosen in
> > Preferences--high graphics, thumbnail graphics,
> and perhaps no graphics?
>
> Perhaps an additional possibility would be to have
> things be more
> relative.  Right now there is a default size, but
> it's not usually used,
> because it seems to be smaller than what most people
> are using.  But
> hard-coding pixel values is a bad idea, because
> peoples' monitors and
> preferred reading sizes and so on vary, so they
> really should be
> relative somehow.  And once we have a relative
> coding scheme, it's easy
> to add an option that says "show me all images 50%
> smaller".
>
> The main problem I see with making thumbnails
> smaller all around is that
> really small thumbnails are often pretty useless,
> often not any better
> than simply a text link to the full-sized picture,
> because you can't see
> anything on the tiny thumbnail.
>
> -Mark
>

Well users can always disable photographs in their
browser settings.  I think it would be hard to
administer a system with different size images for
different people.  (another thing is that people on
dialup would try to format the article to look good on
their version with the small image, and people on
broadband would revert, and many edit wars might result)

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Finance: Get your refund fast by filing online.
http://taxes.yahoo.com/filing.html


from_name: Alfio Puglisi

body:
On Tue, 10 Feb 2004 talthen at wp.pl wrote:

>[...]
>The idea is to create new language, based on most popular languages from all
>over the world. This language would not be a human language, but a language
>to store information.
>[...]
>just enough). The second problem could be chosen by listing all the meanings
>of words. For example for english language we could create file like this:
>word number    word    meaning
>--------------------------------
>1                       mind    intellect
>2                       mind    thoughts
>3                       mind    a head
>4                       mind    to object to

Sorry if I sound harsh, but human languages don't work this way at all.
There are way too many words that you cannot translate in other languages,
different structures, tenses, multiple meanings, etc.

If it was so easy, wouldn't you think that automatic translations would
work much better? What you are proposing is basically automatic
translation between any two languages, with a common step in the middle.
To have this work in an acceptable fashion, your database needs to extend
to cover all possible word combinations: basically, every sentence that
could be uttered by anyone, complete of previous context. And not even a
computer the size of the Universe will cope with that.

Alfio


from_name: Tomasz Wegrzanowski

body:
On Tue, Feb 10, 2004 at 07:29:14PM +0100, talthen at wp.pl wrote:
> Hello,
> Wikipedia's database is quite huge. But is not widening so fast. But it
> would be changed when all the Wikipedians started creating common database.
> The main problem is the difference of languages, but... I have an idea! :) I
> know my idea will not be so easy to realize, but I would be very usefull.
>
> The idea is to create new language, based on most popular languages from all
> over the world. This language would not be a human language, but a language
> to store information.
>
> Today we have some language translating applications, but they are not
> perfect, because two things:
> 1. Some languages differ too much
> 2. Some words have many meanings, and theprogram doesn't know which one
> shoulb be chosen.
> By creating new language we would solve first problem. (I think we do not
> have to create entirely new language, maybe modifying Esperanto would be
> just enough). The second problem could be chosen by listing all the meanings
> of words. For example for english language we could create file like this:
> word number    word    meaning
> --------------------------------
> 1                       mind    intellect
> 2                       mind    thoughts
> 3                       mind    a head
> 4                       mind    to object to
>
> The translating would look like this:
> I have written a sentence: "The study of logic trains the mind". Application
> scans my sentence and asks in which meaning I used word "mind". Then I
> choose from all "mind" meanings word "intellect". After explaining allthe
> meanings by the writer the application saves it in it's own language in a
> structure like this:
> 116117 6322 987672 1 312312
> Where the numbers means word numbers.
>
> Decompression would look like this:
> I have asked the program to display the message in Polish. The application
> loads file "polish.txt" and is looking for words with these numbers.
> As a fourth word it loads word from line one (because word "mind" with
> meaning "intellect" is in line 1 in all the languages, not only in English).
> It finds all the words and displays them.
>
> I know that writing down all the meanings of words is not easy. But if all
> Wikipedians write just a few we would finish it very fast.
> The hardest thing is to make the language, that describes in which time is
> the sencence, what the order of words should be after translating to
> language X and what after diplaying in Y, etc.
> But I think this is possible and would make for eg. building the database of
> Wikipedia much easier.
> And not only this. There will be many applications for it.
>
> Hope you understood what I mean. I know I may have made some mistakes (both
> gramatically and logically)...
>
> So- how do you like my idea? Do you think it's worth realizing?

First, choose some small area of knowledge. It doesn't matter what would it be,
but it must be non-trivial for the experiment to be any meaningful.
Then, try to implement something that works with this area and just a few languages.

Natural Language Processing is one of the most difficult parts of the Computer
Science, where lot of really promising ideas failed in practice.
Obviously, we'd love to use anything that'd make our work easier,
but it would be very hard to get something like the thing you describe working.


from_name: Peter Jaros

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Known Trolls

body:
On Feb 10, 2004, at 1:53 AM, Sheldon Rampton wrote:

> Peter Jaros wrote:
>
>> One problem with bringing up a person's pre-Wikipedia history is that
>> a
>> reformed troll is likely to be, shall we say, tact-impaired.  Such a
>> person is *more* likely to be falsely accused of trolling (remembering
>> that trolling includes intent).  On the other hand, this history can
>> greatly help arbitrators to decide how to deal with a user.  Many
>> people are simply bad at garnering sympathy for their point; it's a
>> skill not everyone has.  Simply accusing such people of trolling is
>> likely to make matters worse and make the arbitrators' job harder.
>
> The difference between being a troll or "tact-impaired" is minor
> enough that for most practical purposes it isn't worth considering.

There is a major difference which I failed to bring up explicitly if
the first post.  Obviously inflammatory content is inflammatory,
intended or not.  But the second half of arbitration is resolution.
Arbitrators are granted a certain amount of authority by Jimbo for the
purposes of resolution.  If a person really is a troll, they should be
treated differently than someone who has suffered from a lapse in tact.
  It should (may) be possible to reason with the latter; reasoning with
the former is a complete waste of time.

In short, I think that off-Wikipedia evidence can be very useful to
arbitrators in deciding how to work with a disputant.

Peter

                                  -- ---<>--- --
                        A house without walls cannot fall.
           Help build the world's largest encyclopedia at Wikipedia.org
                                  -- ---<>--- --


body:
On Feb 10, 2004, at 1:29 PM, <talthen at wp.pl> wrote:

> The idea is to create new language, based on most popular languages
> from all
> over the world. This language would not be a human language, but a
> language
> to store information.

Ah.  After my own heart.  But I doubt you'll have much luck.  Still, if
you're willing to go through with it, develop a proof-of-concept.  Even
if it fails, it'll still be a good experiment.

BTW, while you're at it, work out how you'd encode "After my own heart"
to make sense in other languages. :)

Peter (Spikey)

                                  -- ---<>--- --
                        A house without walls cannot fall.
           Help build the world's largest encyclopedia at Wikipedia.org
                                  -- ---<>--- --


from_name: Caroline Ford

subject: [WikiEN-l] User HectorRodriguez

body:
Rick wrote:

>
> User HectorRodriguez has gone onto a rampage to remove the word
> "terrorist" in all September 11 related pages, causing a massive
> spaghetti-ing of the pages which I tried to revert, but have probably
> made more of a mess of things.  Can somebody look at his contributions
> and help me to fix things?
>
> Please note that Wik has now jumped on the bandwagon and is reverting
> my revrsions.  One wonders of Hector might not be Wik in a new role.
>
> Rick K
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Do you Yahoo!?
> Yahoo! Finance: Get your refund fast by filing online
> <http://us.rd.yahoo.com/evt=22055/*http://taxes.yahoo.com/filing.html>
>
>------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>_______________________________________________
>WikiEN-l mailing list
>WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>
>
I think the main problem here is that you have very different politics.
I guess you also find criticism of the US difficult.

I don't think you were correct to bring this straight to the mailing list.

If we are ever to write NPOV articles on political topics then we have
to find ways of working through this. Some of Hector's criticism of the
East Germany article was valid and the article has been edited. We are
discussing the rest on the talk page.

People have very strong feelings on political topics. I find dealing
with things calmly and factually works well.

Name calling never works. He seems to be a fairly orthodox communist. I
think you accused him of being Al-Qaida.

Caroline (Secretlondon)


from_name: Timwi

subject: [WikiEN-l] Worrying trend: Size of thumbnails

body:
Hello,

do thumbnails really have to be this large?
http://en.wikipedia.org/upload/thumb/a/a1/350px-Nyc-un-building.jpg

The main purpose of thumbnails is, of course, to prevent full-size
images from cluttering an article. My perception is that another purpose
is to spare visitors with slow connections from having to download large
images if they're really only interested in the text of an article.

It seems that a lot of people have begun to make thumbnails excessively
large. For visitors with low resolutions, 350px is a *lot* -- especially
if their browser window isn't full-screen. 350 more than half of 640 --
add to that the sidebar, and there's not much left for the actual text.
Purpose #1 is therefore not fulfilled.

Also, it makes the files pretty large. 14KB doesn't sound large to DSL
people, but on ISDN it would take 2 seconds to download on maximum
speed. Add to that the fact that Wikipedia isn't always at maximum
speed, and that many people don't even have ISDN! Purpose #2 is
therefore not fulfilled.

Arguments I have often heard regarding this are that you can't see a lot
of detail on thumbnails that are too small. I fail to see how that has
any relevance to *thumbnails* -- thumbnails are supposed to give a quick
glance of an image. People who want the details are supposed to click on
the thumbnail to see the full-size picture with all its details.

Please consider making the thumbnails smaller.

Thanks,
Timwi


from_name: Daniel P.B.Smith

body:
> From: Timwi <timwi at gmx.net>

[snippages]

> It seems that a lot of people have begun to make thumbnails excessively
> large. For visitors with low resolutions, 350px is a *lot* ...

[snippages]

> Also, it makes the files pretty large. 14KB doesn't sound large to DSL
> people, but on ISDN it would take 2 seconds to download on maximum
> speed. Add to that the fact that Wikipedia isn't always at maximum
> speed, and that many people don't even have ISDN!

This is a good point. It's astonishing how quickly one forgets. Just
four years ago I was still on dialup and was using a machine with an 80
megabyte hard drive, and was just flabbergasted when people would
casually suggest sending me an .mp3 file that was "only" three
megabytes.  When I barely had ten megabytes to spare on my hard drive,
and didn't really feel like spending half an hour on a download. I also
remember the Apple Worldwide Developers' Conference in 1996, when
Apple, and many companies, were on T1 lines--and many people and
companies were not. The answer to every question was "oh, we have that
on the web." I was stewing, because my _home_ machine was 56 kbps--and
at _work_ the only Internet connection was a 28 kbps dialup. I didn't
say anything, but finally someone raised his hand and said "Please
remember that in Japan most of our modems are only 2400 bps and we pay
about $20 per hour to connect."

A few weeks ago we helped a friend install the critical security
patches--just the CRITICAL security patches--for her Windows XP laptop
over a dialup connection. Jeez, what _could_ Microsoft be thinking of?
They probably think everyone is on a T1.

I've had DSL for about three years afraid I've gotten in the habit of
thinking that 30K to 50K is a reasonable size for pictures. Once I've
have had (a GUI/a high-speed connection/a CD-R drive/whatever) for a
few years, I begin to feel that everyone really ought to have them and
I stop taking the needs of those with less technology seriously.

I'm not sure that thumbnails are the ideal answer, though, because
they're very annoying for those who _do_ have high-speed connections. I
wonder whether it would be unreasonable to request that Wikipedia
support two (or three?) flavors of delivery, chosen in
Preferences--high graphics, thumbnail graphics, and perhaps no
graphics?

> --
Daniel P. B. Smith, dpbsmith at world.std.com 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 Carlson

subject: [Wikitech-l] "Powered by MediaWiki"

body:
I was doing a little bit of fiddling around with my site's layout this
evening, and I had an idea that someone more involved in the MediaWiki
development might be interested -- a couple of little "powered by"
badges that people can add to their site layout to show their support
for this excellent software.

I've quickly tossed together some ideas based on a couple of images I
"borrowed" from the MediaWiki SourceForge page -- they're just a rough
idea, so if anyone wants to develop the idea further, they're welcome
to it.  I can pass on the original Fireworks .png files, though it
might be better to use the original source files, 'specially since I
don't have the exact font used for the word "MediaWiki" and had to
approximate to create the "Powered By" part.

Let me know what you think!

Dan Carlson

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from_name: John C. Penta

body:
----- Original Message -----
From: "Daniel P.B.Smith" <dpbsmith at verizon.net>
Date: Tuesday, February 10, 2004 10:24 pm
Subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Thumbnails, varying connection speeds

> This is a good point. It's astonishing how quickly one forgets.

I can't forget. I go home to a dialup at the end of every semester.:-(

[snip good story]

> A few weeks ago we helped a friend install the critical security
> patches--just the CRITICAL security patches--for her Windows XP
> laptop
> over a dialup connection. Jeez, what _could_ Microsoft be thinking
> of?
> They probably think everyone is on a T1.

They do.

[moresnip]

> I'm not sure that thumbnails are the ideal answer, though, because
> they're very annoying for those who _do_ have high-speed
> connections. I
> wonder whether it would be unreasonable to request that Wikipedia
> support two (or three?) flavors of delivery, chosen in
> Preferences--high graphics, thumbnail graphics, and perhaps no
> graphics?

Thumbnails as default, no graphics for really low bandwidth (and perhaps those w/ screen readers and other adaptive technology?), and high bandwidth for those with T1s and such?


from_name: Gregory Pietsch

body:
Peter Jaros wrote:

> On Feb 10, 2004, at 1:29 PM, <talthen at wp.pl> wrote:
>
>> The idea is to create new language, based on most popular languages
>> from all
>> over the world. This language would not be a human language, but a
>> language
>> to store information.
>
>
> Ah.  After my own heart.  But I doubt you'll have much luck.  Still,
> if you're willing to go through with it, develop a proof-of-concept.
> Even if it fails, it'll still be a good experiment.
>
> BTW, while you're at it, work out how you'd encode "After my own
> heart" to make sense in other languages. :)
>
> Peter (Spikey)
>
>
Well, we already have Lojban, which more or less is an attempt to do
just that. ;-)

Gregory Pietsch


from_name: Ray Saintonge

body:
Sean Barrett wrote:

>>The idea is to create new language, based on most popular languages
>>from all over the world. This language would not be a human
>>language, but a language to store information.
>>
>
>Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.
>
Hmm! A Marxist analysis of the problem! :-)


body:
Timwi wrote:

> I'm not sure I can follow you. Why is a 100px thumbnail more annoying
> than a 350px thumbnail if the full-size picture is >800px anyway?

Well, mostly because in the 100px thumbnail you can't actually *see*
anything. =]

-Mark


from_name: Evan Prodromou

body:
>>>>> "t" ==   <talthen at wp.pl> writes:

    t> The idea is to create new language, based on most popular
    t> languages from all over the world. This language would not be a
    t> human language, but a language to store information.

[[en:pasigraphy]]

~ESP

--
Evan Prodromou <evan at wikitravel.org>
Wikitravel - http://www.wikitravel.org/
The free, complete, up-to-date and reliable world-wide travel guide


body:
Timwi wrote:

> Delirium wrote:
>
>>> I'm not sure I can follow you. Why is a 100px thumbnail more
>>> annoying than a 350px thumbnail if the full-size picture is >800px
>>> anyway?
>>
>>
>> Well, mostly because in the 100px thumbnail you can't actually *see*
>> anything. =]
>
>
> I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "anything". Certainly you
> can see whether the picture depicts a person, a building, a bridge, or
> whatever. Together with the thumbnail caption, it should give you an
> idea of what it is (e.g. "Alan Turing", "Golden Gate Bridge", "UN
> Headquarters", etc.). So if you're interested in it, you click it to
> see the big picture.

Yeah, I hadn't really thought of that.  That serves a different function
then.  In the 350px case it serves the function of an accompanying image
illustrating the article, which you could optionally click on to get a
much higher-quality image if you desired, but in most cases don't need
to unless you have a particular interest in that picture's contents.  In
the 100px case you pretty much have to click on it if you really want to
see it.

-Mark


body:
talthen at wp.pl wrote:

>Sure, but have you ever heard about anybody who tried it as an Open project?
>Microsoft spend many years and cash on creating its Windows OSes, but Linux
>is so better...
>I think my idea may be realized, but I can't do this just by myself...
>
>
Well, I'm not going to say it's in principle impossible, but I think you
do need to realize just how hard it is. =]

There's been various attempts in various research fields to do something
of that sort.  Some branches of logic work on codifying knowledge in
terms of formal logical systems; clearly standard logic is too
restrictive, but there's plenty of attempts to overcome that.  Many
areas of automated translation attempt to construct at least partial
intermediate abstract representations to assist.  And many areas of
linguistics attempt to come up with generic explanatory and
classification frameworks, at least ones that are applicable to certain
subsets of languages.  There's lots of stuff out there, but the main
thing it has in common is that it's all pretty far from perfect.  Which
is not to say that it's not possible to create something that's at least
useful; it's just hard.

-Mark


body:
Daniel P.B.Smith wrote:

> I'm not sure that thumbnails are the ideal answer, though, because
> they're very annoying for those who _do_ have high-speed connections.

I'm not sure I can follow you. Why is a 100px thumbnail more annoying
than a 350px thumbnail if the full-size picture is >800px anyway?

Timwi


from_name: uninvited at nerstrand.net

subject: [WikiEN-l] Arbitration: Case of Theresa Knott and Mr. Natural Health

body:
The arbitration committee has issued these findings in the matter of Theresa knott and Mr-Natural-Health:

* we find that Mr-Natural-Health has behaved inappropriately on a consistent and excessive basis
* we find that Mr-Natural-Health has made personal attacks in violation of Wikipedia's policy
* we find that Mr-Natural-Health has misused edit summaries in an effort to intimidate other editors
* therefore, Mr-Natural-Health?s privilege to edit Wikipedia be revoked for a period of 30 days, effective beginning 11 Feb 2004 00:25
* This revocation to include all Wikimedia wikis, and enforced using technical measures only if necessary.
* Further, all editors are encouraged to revert any questionable edits made by Mr-Natural-Health without discussion or concurrence of the community for a period of 30 days following his return to the community at the end of the revocation period.

This, together with the discussion history and vote tally, is available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_arbitration

Respectfully submitted

UninvitedCompany


from_name: brian suda

subject: [Wikitech-l] wiktionary

body:
this is a message based on a conversation about revamping the wiktionary
service so that it contained more structured data. In it's current form it is
a Wiki about words. This does not allow for easy connections to be made
between Thesarus words, translations, etc.

Hopefully, with some help, brainstorming, and experience we can hammer out a
better system to store, look-up, and access dictionary words.

I've got loads of ideas about how to implement some of this, but others know
more about how to include rollbacks, versioning, and deletion, of material.

If people are interested in can post some more indepth ideas about what (i
think) would need to be built and get some feedback about planning for other
languages, special cases, migration, and future additions.

-brian


from_name: dpbsmith at verizon.net

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Thumbnails considered annoying

body:
> From: Timwi <timwi at gmx.net>
>
> Daniel P.B.Smith wrote:
>
> > I'm not sure that thumbnails are the ideal answer, though, because
> > they're very annoying for those who _do_ have high-speed connections.
>
> I'm not sure I can follow you. Why is a 100px thumbnail more annoying
> than a 350px thumbnail if the full-size picture is >800px anyway?

Not to advocate, just to explain what I meant.

There is a pretty good visual correspondence between a halftone color printed
image and a screen image. The screen image is about 80 dpi, a color halftone
image is often rendered with a screen of around 133 lpi. Same ballpark, and
closer in quality than the numbers might indicate because of moire effects in
the halftone, superiority of additive (screen) vs. subtractive (printed)
color mixing--but I digress.

What I'm saying is that a 300-pixel-wide image is frequently good enough to
serve as a satisfying encyclopedia article, and is a good match for (say) a
three-inch-wide image in a print encyclopedia, both in page layout and in
amount of visual detail. For a lot of purposes, e.g. portraits of authors,
Presidents, etc. 300 pixels wide seems "about right". 100 pixels is too small
to serve as a reasonable illustration. And a picture that's say, 800 pixels
wide is likely to be around 600 to 1200 pixels high and take up a lot of the
screen... it's the screen equivalent of a full-page plate, to be used rarely.

So, I'm asserting that if you were just going by screen appearance alone, and
weren't considering download speeds, you'd probably end up making most
pictures around 300 pixels wide.

Now, I'm viewing this all very selfishly, from the point of view of a DSL
users. DSL has the curious characteristic that, compared to dialup, download
speeds are fast, but turnaround speeds aren't that much faster than dialup.
And there are other latencies, maybe in Wikipedia's servers, maybe elsewhere.
What this means is that a) if I download two typical Wikipedia pages, one
with a 300-pixel-wide image and one without, the time it takes me to get the
page is a) distinctly nonzero for either page, b) about the same for both
pages. That is, it takes a noticeable, slightly annoying time to get the
page, and _I'd just as soon get the full image at the same time as I get the
page_ because it doesn't change the speed noticeably.

On the other hand, with a thumbnail, I have to click on it, I have experience
a _short but annoying delay_, I experience a sort of interruption in the
ludic flow of the reading experience, and I see the image separately, no
longer in the context of the article.

I'm sure this is far, far less annoying than it is for a dialup user to watch
an image that he/she doesn't particularly care about seeing paint slowly from
top to bottom.

I'm just saying that what's optimum for a low-speed user creates a slightly
degraded experience for the higher-speed user.

One size does fit all--but not comfortably.


from_name: Dan Miller

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: WikiEN-l Digest, Vol 7, Issue 19

body:
[snip]
I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "anything".
Certainly you
can
see whether the picture depicts a person, a building,
a bridge, or
whatever. Together with the thumbnail caption, it
should give you an
idea of what it is (e.g. "Alan Turing", "Golden Gate
Bridge", "UN
Headquarters", etc.). So if you're interested in it,
you click it to
see
the big picture.
[endsnip]

I disagree.  People (myself included) are lazy
readers; most won't bother to take the time to click
on an image.  I understand the complaints of dialup
users, but I think the suggestion about different
preferences (e.g. "graphics" vs. "no graphics", if
thumbnails aren't an option) would work better.  There
are plenty of times when it's_useful_to look at the
picture, but I won't bother to click on a separate
link.
Meelar

__________________________________
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Yahoo! Finance: Get your refund fast by filing online.
http://taxes.yahoo.com/filing.html


from_name: Dave Caroline

subject: [Wikitech-l] wiktionary and spelling

body:
At 12:14 11/02/2004 +0000, you wrote:
>this is a message based on a conversation about revamping the wiktionary
>service so that it contained more structured data. In it's current form it is
>a Wiki about words. This does not allow for easy connections to be made
>between Thesarus words, translations, etc.

I am interested as I am writing a spellchecker and the data should come
from wiktionary

>Hopefully, with some help, brainstorming, and experience we can hammer out a
>better system to store, look-up, and access dictionary words.
>
>I've got loads of ideas about how to implement some of this, but others know
>more about how to include rollbacks, versioning, and deletion, of material.
>
>If people are interested in can post some more indepth ideas about what (i
>think) would need to be built and get some feedback about planning for other
>languages, special cases, migration, and future additions.
I currently have 266K en words and am proposing that the spellchecker is
part php module to increase the speed.

Along with this the parser for wiki markup could also be in the module

Dave Caroline aka archivist usually hanging about on irc


subject: [Wikitech-l] wiktionary and spelling

body:
> I am interested as I am writing a spellchecker and the data should come
> from wiktionary

--- the only problem with pulling data from the wiktionary is how trustworth
is it? i spell stuff wrong all the time, and if i put an incorrect spelling
of 'sincerly' into the wiktionary the spellchecker would consider it to be
correct? I do like the idea thought, i know loads about web services and
eventually would like to write some plug-ins for other applications that can
search the wiktionary for thesarus words, definitions, translations, etc.

the other question about the spellchecker would be, should you be able to
download 'spellcheck' files so it can be run locally? this might be an option
so that smaller devices like PDA's can leverage the wiktionary and run local
look-ups?

The spellchecker could also be used in reverse, so when people mis-type words
they are searching for, the spellchecker could give you something like ' NO
RESULTS FOUND, DID YOU REALLY MEAN: ...'

-brian

--
brian suda
http://suda.co.uk


from_name: Geoff Burling

subject: [Wikitech-l] A Second Request for Help with Mediation

body:
I asked this question a few days ago, & since it is vital, I am
bothering all of you once again with it.

I have an idea of a possible way to settle part of a dispute, which I
know in theory is possible, but I don't know if it also is in
practical terms.

What I would like to do is find the IP addresses for several people
who made changes to Wikipedia, then do an reverse lookup in order to
determine whether these people come from the same subnet. This might
be convincing enough to the two people I'm working with to settle
the matter. (I could then also show whether or not these people have made
edits while not logged in, as one party claims.)

Can this be done?

Geoff


body:
Delirium wrote:

>> I'm not sure I can follow you. Why is a 100px thumbnail more annoying
>> than a 350px thumbnail if the full-size picture is >800px anyway?
>
> Well, mostly because in the 100px thumbnail you can't actually *see*
> anything. =]

I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "anything". Certainly you can
see whether the picture depicts a person, a building, a bridge, or
whatever. Together with the thumbnail caption, it should give you an
idea of what it is (e.g. "Alan Turing", "Golden Gate Bridge", "UN
Headquarters", etc.). So if you're interested in it, you click it to see
the big picture.

Timwi


from_name: James Rosenzweig

subject: [WikiEN-l] Wik & Anthony

body:
This post is not intended to suggest whether Wik,
Anthony DiPierro, or both are in the wrong.  This is
only to say that four pages have had to be protected
from edit wars by these two individuals _today_.  I
protected two of them.

Should those of us who've been following the pair
around and protected pages in their wake log off,
someone please take up the banner.  Whomever ought to
be notified about this kind of behavior, I hope this
constitutes notification.  Whatever the solution is, I
believe it ought to be expedited before Wik and
Anthony get half the Wikipedia under temporary
protection from their reversions.

I don't know Wik at all, but Eloquence seems to have
dropped him a note.  My one conversation with Anthony
is visible on his talk page...given the success (lack
thereof) I found several days ago, I hope I will be
forgiven not making another attempt to reason with him
today.  Thanks,

James Rosenzweig (Jwrosenzweig)

__________________________________
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Yahoo! Finance: Get your refund fast by filing online.
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from_name: talthen at wp.pl

body:
> Ah.  After my own heart.  But I doubt you'll have much luck.  Still, if
> you're willing to go through with it, develop a proof-of-concept.  Even
> if it fails, it'll still be a good experiment.
Concept? List all the words and their meanings + list all the idioms with
their meanings.
Next step while translating to THE language writer will be asked which time
it is, what he/she wanted to say with these words, what are the meanings
etc.
This should translate from imperfect human language to a perfect computer
language with just a bit of help from human. Then translating from perfect
language to any human language shouldn't be hard for program.

> BTW, while you're at it, work out how you'd encode "After my own heart"
> to make sense in other languages. :)
Make a list of al English idioms and theirs equivalents in other languages.
Forst the program will check if in the sentence to translate are any idioms
from the list. If not then it will translate just the words.

I started writing the translation application, but I am not a good
programmer, so I don't know when will I be able to show you smth that
works...

Regards,
Talthen


subject: [Wikitech-l] test.wikipedia.org

body:
Hi,

how long does it take for someone to update test.wikipedia.org?

Thanks,
Timwi


body:
Delirium wrote:

> Timwi wrote:
>
>> Delirium wrote:
>>
>>>> I'm not sure I can follow you. Why is a 100px thumbnail more
>>>> annoying than a 350px thumbnail if the full-size picture is >800px
>>>> anyway?
>>>
>>> Well, mostly because in the 100px thumbnail you can't actually *see*
>>> anything. =]
>>
>> I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "anything". Certainly you
>> can see whether the picture depicts a person, a building, a bridge, or
>> whatever. Together with the thumbnail caption, it should give you an
>> idea of what it is (e.g. "Alan Turing", "Golden Gate Bridge", "UN
>> Headquarters", etc.). So if you're interested in it, you click it to
>> see the big picture.
>
> Yeah, I hadn't really thought of that.  That serves a different function
> then.  In the 350px case it serves the function of an accompanying image
> illustrating the article, which you could optionally click on to get a
> much higher-quality image if you desired, but in most cases don't need
> to unless you have a particular interest in that picture's contents.  In
> the 100px case you pretty much have to click on it if you really want to
> see it.

Well, most of the images are 200px, and it seems that the thumbnail
feature uses about 200px as a default. So let's talk about that, rather
than 100px which I guess is indeed quite small. Is 200px large enough
for you? I can certainly see the pictures of the UN Headquarters well
enough at that size.

Timwi


from_name: Tomasz Wegrzanowski

body:
On Wed, Feb 11, 2004 at 01:34:30PM +0100, talthen at wp.pl wrote:
> This should translate from imperfect human language to a perfect computer
> language with just a bit of help from human. Then translating from perfect
> language to any human language shouldn't be hard for program.

The idea that such "perfect language" is possible to create is very intuitive.
Yet, nobody have made it so far, so it's probably much harder than it seems.


body:
> The idea that such "perfect language" is possible to create is very
intuitive.
> Yet, nobody have made it so far, so it's probably much harder than it
seems.
Sure, but have you ever heard about anybody who tried it as an Open project?
Microsoft spend many years and cash on creating its Windows OSes, but Linux
is so better...
I think my idea may be realized, but I can't do this just by myself...

Regards,
Talthen


subject: [WikiEN-l] The word 'terrorist'

body:
zero 0000 wrote:

>--- Delirium <delirium at rufus.d2g.com> wrote:
>
>>I suppose my position on this is that I'd rather use the words
>>"terrorist" and similarly-loaded words like "murder" as little as
>>possible, because they add only opinionated connotation, and not
>>really any factual information.
>>...
>>I think we ought to just present facts, and in many cases the
>>facts alone are enough to damn those people who many of us would
>>like to condemn, so we don't need to do so explicitly.
>>...
>>I do think we can use "terrorist" especially when it's informative,
>>just not when we're trying to make it descriptive.  For example,
>>it should be
>>mentioned that the Sept. 11 attacks touched off large-scale fear of
>>terrorism in the US, and a "war on terrorism", and so on.
>>
>
>Agree with Delerium 100%.
>
I too support this.  People often fail to realize how much implicit POV
is implied by one's choice of words.

Ec


from_name: Delirium

subject: [WikiEN-l] The word 'terrorist'

body:
Eric Demolli wrote:

>I'm for a very careful use of the word "terrorist" :
>"X is a a terrorist"...
>"X was a terrorist" is more acceptable IMO.
>The 9/11 hijackings is terrorism, no doubt about it.
>Having wrote this we can spend a long time arguing about Hiroshima and
>Nagasaki or even Dresden.
>
>
I suppose my position on this is that I'd rather use the words
"terrorist" and similarly-loaded words like "murder" as little as
possible, because they add only opinionated connotation, and not really
any factual information.

Consider:
* A group of Al-Qaeda terrorists crashed a plane into the World Trade
center, murdering 3500 civilians.
* Members of the Islamic militant group Al-Qaeda crashed a plane into
the World Trade center, killing 3500 civilians.

They contain the same information, but the second one is much more
neutral, IMO, without being at all conciliatory.  I think we ought to
just present facts, and in many cases the facts alone are enough to damn
those people who many of us would like to condemn, so we don't need to
do so explicitly.

I think we should even apply this to cases like concentration camps.
Most of our concentration camp articles talk about how many people were
"murdered" there, which reads strangely to me.  It reads like the author
was trying to make a point, not neutrally imparting information.  I'd
prefer to say how many people were "killed" there, which hardly condones
the killings either.

I do think we can use "terrorist" especially when it's informative, just
not when we're trying to make it descriptive.  For example, it should be
mentioned that the Sept. 11 attacks touched off large-scale fear of
terrorism in the US, and a "war on terrorism", and so on.

-Mark


from_name: zero 0000

subject: [WikiEN-l] The word 'terrorist'

body:
--- Delirium <delirium at rufus.d2g.com> wrote:

> I suppose my position on this is that I'd rather use the words
> "terrorist" and similarly-loaded words like "murder" as little as
> possible, because they add only opinionated connotation, and not
> really any factual information.
>...
> I think we ought to just present facts, and in many cases the
> facts alone are enough to damn those people who many of us would
> like to condemn, so we don't need to do so explicitly.
>...
> I do think we can use "terrorist" especially when it's informative,
> just not when we're trying to make it descriptive.  For example,
> it should be
> mentioned that the Sept. 11 attacks touched off large-scale fear of
> terrorism in the US, and a "war on terrorism", and so on.

Agree with Delerium 100%.

-- Zero

__________________________________
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Yahoo! Finance: Get your refund fast by filing online.
http://taxes.yahoo.com/filing.html


body:
On Wed, Feb 11, 2004 at 10:12:40PM +0800, Ruimu wrote:
> > >>>>> "t" ==   <talthen at wp.pl> writes:
> >
> >     t> The idea is to create new language, based on most popular
> >     t> languages from all over the world. This language would not be a
> >     t> human language, but a language to store information.
> >
> > [[en:pasigraphy]]
>
>     See also... Chinese language! Leibniz himself was hoping that Chinese
> would be a perfect universal language. In fact, most Chinese characters
> (around 80% I guess) are both phonograms and ideograms (one part gives an
> idea of the sound, one part gives an idea of the meaning, and phonetic part
> can be chosen according to the meaning) but the core and might of this
> language still is its lack of grounding on phonetics. Therefore, Chinese
> people from different provinces can communicate despite their strongly
> different dialects... with the finger (writing characters in the air or on
> the palm). Because of the phonetic "rift", languages grounded on phonetics
> are less stable in time and space (for example, French written language is
> very far from the spoken one and you often have to learn 1) how to write a
> word, 2) how to prononce it).
>
>     Chinese is not this perfectly logical language Leibniz was hoping for,
> but it's remain one of the best candidates for deaf people, if one wish to
> reach universality.

Don't confuse the Chinese language with the Chinese writing system.
The former is just another language - no more and no less logical than Polish,
Latin or Swahili. It's only the writing system that's any special.
If you used Han characters for any other language, you'd be no less "logical"
than with Chinese.


subject: [Wikitech-l] wiktionary

body:
Nikola Smolenski wrote:

>Though I am not active in Wiktionary, I am thinking about this for a while. I
>think that MediaWiki software, great as it is, is not adequate enough for
>creating a dictionary and that new software has to be made from scratch. I
>call this kind of software WikiBase - a database in which (more or less) each
>field acts like a wiki page - it could be changed anytime, has an edit
>history, could be discussed etc...
>
>In its simplest form, the database of a dictionary might have four tables:
>
>words: ID|word
>concepts: ID|concept
>languages: ID|language
>meanings: wordID|languageID|conceptID
>
>They could be connected like this:
>
>words:
>1|egg
>2|jaje
>
>concepts:
>1|Something laid by a hen
>
>languages:
>1|English
>2|Serbian
>
>meanings:
>1|1|1
>2|2|1
>
>That is, the word "egg" in language called "English" has the meaning of
>"Something laid by a hen", and the word "jaje" in language called "Serbian"
>has the same meaning. Now, this has obvious flaws, but I have not envisioned
>the database to be so simple. To cut to the point, I think that following
>structure would be enough for satisfying all needs of a dictionary (WARNING:
>long and sometimes confusing text ahead):
>
>writings: ID|spelling
>readings: ID|reading
>languages: ID|language|dialect|place|time|group
>basics: ID|basic
>words: ID|languageID|writingID|readingID
>grammar: wordID|relation|wordID
>concepts: basicID|relation|basicID
>meanings: wordID|basicID
>
>Now, how would all this work. I will use as an example english word "hair" for
>which three Serbian words exist: "kosa" (hair on one's head), "dlaka" (a
>hair) or "malja" (a hair on body).
>
>Table "writlings" contain exact words as written on paper:
>
>writings:
>1|hair
>2|kosa
>3|dlaka
>4|malja
>5|hairs
>
>Table "readings" contains readings of the words. I guess that it might be the
>easiest to use an internal format for this, which could be externally
>represented as IPA or SAMPA. Of course, for some languages, the readings
>could be autogenerated.
>
>readings:
>1|hejr
>2|kosa
>3|dlaka
>4|malja
>5|malje
>
>(Note that here some IDs are the same; this of course need not be the case.)
>
>Table "languages" contains data about languages. I was thinking big and
>allowed for ability of defining various dialects, regions, exact (or not
>exact) time at which a word was in use, and slang (of a certain social
>group). Perhaps this table needs a bit more work, but the basic idea is
>there. In this example, I'll use only the language name and forget about the
>rest:
>
>languages:
>1|English
>2|Serbian
>
>The last of basic tables, "basics", describes basic concepts.
>
>basics:
>1|A bunch of hairs on someone's head
>2|A ceratinous outgrowth that covers human body
>3|A single hair on someone's head
>4|A single hair that is not on someone's head
>
>Rest of the tables shows relations among IDs of these tables. Table "words"
>shows which writing has which spelling in which language.
>
>words:
>1|1|1|1
>2|2|2|2
>3|2|3|3
>4|2|4|4
>5|1|5|NULL
>6|2|NULL|5
>
>I'll expand the table:
>
>1|English|hair|hejr
>2|Serbian|kosa|kosa
>3|Serbian|dlaka|dlaka
>4|Serbian|malja|malja
>5|English|hairs|NULL
>6|Serbian|NULL|malje
>
>Note that how English word "hairs" is read is currently not known and how a
>certain Serbian word is actually written is also currently not known. It
>doesn't matter.
>
>Now, table "grammar" explains grammatical relations between the words:
>
>1|root|1
>2|root|2
>3|root|3
>4|root|4
>5|plural|1
>6|plural|4
>
>Expanded:
>
>hair|root|hair
>kosa|root|kosa
>dlaka|root|dlaka
>malja|root|malja
>hairs|plural|hair
>malje|plural|malja
>
>I will explain what this "root" property means later when I explain how to
>actually query the database.
>
>Table "concepts" is similar, except that it explains relations of the
>basic concepts:
>
>1|mass/root|1
>2|root|2
>3|root|3
>4|root|4
>2|includes|3
>2|includes|4
>
>I will not expand the table but rather show the table "basics" again.
>
>basics:
>1|A bunch of hairs on someone's head
>2|A ceratinous outgrowth that covers human body
>3|A single hair on someone's head
>4|A single hair that is not on someone's head
>
>FINALLY, table "meanings" attaches words to concepts.
>
>1|1
>2|1
>2|2
>3|3
>4|4
>5|5
>
>Now, how to read the dictionary. Suppose that you want to know what the word
>"hairs" means in English language. You go to the table "writings" and find
>"hairs" which has an ID of 5. Then you go to the table "languages" and find
>"Englihs" with an ID of 1. You go to the table "words" and see that ID for
>this word is 5 (along the way you might pick up reading of a word). Now you
>go to the table "grammar" and see that the word 5 is actually plural form of
>the word 1. In the same table you examine the word 1 and see that it is a
>root word; that is, one attached to a concept. Now, when you have found out
>that, search in "meanings" what concepts are attached to the root word 1 and
>you will see that there are two: concept 1 and 2. In the table "concepts" you
>search for them and find out that concept 2 is a root concept and concept 1
>is also a root concept, but one of a mass concept; that is, of a thing that
>comes in an undistinguished mass. Finally you have:
>
>'''hairs''':
>1. ((rarely) plural denoting different kinds of) A bunch of hairs on someone's
>head
>2. (plural) A ceratinous outgrowth that covers human body
>
>Want to get Serbian translation? You go back through the tables, starting from
>basic concepts 1 and 2. You see in table "concepts" that concept 2 includes
>in itself concepts 3 and 4. You to the table "meanings" and see that concepts
>1, 2, 3 and 4 correspond to words meanings 1, 2, 3, and 4; grammar is now not
>important, and in tabke "words" you see that only words 2, 3 and 4 are of
>Serbian language, and in "writings" that they are "kosa", "dlaka" and
>"malja". You now may go back and get their exact meanings and find exact
>translation that you need - more then usual dictionary has to offer.
>
>This database system allows for much more then current free-form Wiktionary or
>the usual dictionaries. It would be easy to create a aoftware suited to
>specific needs that would browse the database on or off line. All gramaticall
>forms of a word are noted and it is easy to make basic machine translation
>from one language to another. It is easy to look up a word in unknown
>language when you don't know its root (this is often a problem, especially
>with electronic dictionaries).I have not shown in this example, but table
>"concepts" would include .. which would enable searching for them and
>creation of basic thesaura for all languages. It would also be possible to
>extract separate professional subdictionaries etc. etc.
>
>Now, if you have bothered to read all this, you might as well spend just a bit
>more time to tell me what do you mean about it. I would be especially
>grateful if someone could find something that cannot fit into this kind of a
>dictionary. I already see a possible flaw; that is, that concept 1 in some
>cultures is not a mass concept; but I am certain that this could be overcome.
>
Respectfully, may I call this scheme hair-brained, though I know that
"hair" in that expression is a common error when "hare" should be used.
 At least it's na?ve.  People don't read instructions except as an
absolute last resort. When they would need to have such complicated
instruction to understand a difference in meaning focused on one concept
in only 2 languages they would put the explanation down and do something
else. Serbian and Croatian are much more closely related, but I'm sure
that the subtleties that make them different to explain, especially to
an English speaker who doesn't know much about either one.

Among the expressions which use hair in English we have
    The gun has a hair trigger = The trigger mechanism is very sensitive
to the slightest pressure
    He's got him by the short hairs = he's got him in a difficult
position that is equal to pulling on his pubic hairs
    I had some of the hair of the dog that bit me = I had some of what I
drank last night to help relieve the hangover.
How's that for examples to start with? :-)

The point is that language structure is extremely complicated, and in
much of what matters there is rarely a simple one-to-one correspondence
between languages.  That's often why machine translations look so much
like they came from a machine.

>Final note: I think that the dictionary should not be under GFDL; rather,
>under a similar licence which would allow full copyright of a work derived
>from the subset of a database, but not one derived from it superset; in other
>words, it would be possible for someone to take this dictionary, lays the
>word on the paper, print it, and sell it, and noone would have the right to
>photocopy or reprint it; but if that someone wants to add some words to the
>dictionary, he must add them to the database first, which would then enable
>anyone else to add them to their dictionaries.
>
Copyrights on dictionaries are highly disputable.  They are often a
combination of material that may be both in and out of copyright.  The
1913 Webster which is being used as a starting point for many of the
English words is well out of copyright.  Single definitions can always
be considered fair use.  Claiming copyrights as you suggest may be more
complicated than it's worth.

Ec


subject: [Wikitech-l] test.wikipedia.org

body:
Hi Timwi.

I've updated test with the latest from HEAD now. I'm sorry about the
delay. I made an attempt after your first mail, but sourceforge didn't
want to cooperate just then, and then I forgot about it. I also imported
all "B" articles from en to have something to play with, but I haven't
gotten around to rebuilding the links yet, so any link related
strangeness may be due to that.

// E23

Timwi timwi-at-gmx.net |wikipedia| wrote:

>
> Hi,
>
> how long does it take for someone to update test.wikipedia.org?
>
> Thanks,
> Timwi
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l


from_name: A

from_email: A

subject: [WikiEN-l] 168 must be desysoped

body:
168 has again violated the rules of sysophood. He has
now reverted [[nucleic acid]], despite the page's
protected status.

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Nucleic_acid&diff=0&oldid=2366605

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Finance: Get your refund fast by filing online.
http://taxes.yahoo.com/filing.html


subject: [Wikipedia-l] An FDL test case: McFly

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:

>We have to determine whether Wikipedia as a whole is "the document" or
>whether individual articles are. In my opinion, the English Wikipedia is
>no more a single document than the combined English and German Wikipedias
>are -- the English Wikipedia is an aggregation of separately FDL-licensed
>articles. This is clear because each document has a separate "history"
>section, a separate license footer, and most documents have different
>contributors.
>
>
On the other hand, we've indicated intent to publish a paper version of
the encyclopedia, which would very clearly be a single document.  Or are
we claiming it wouldnt' be?  If each Wikipedia article is a separate
document, any paper version we produce would have to have a list of five
authors and the "history" section on *every single* article, which would
take up a pretty large percentage of the total encyclopedia.

-Mark


from_name: Andrew Smith

body:
Hi Talthen,

Another problem you may have is the ability of people to be able to tell
your program exactly what their prose actually means. At least here in the
UK, grammar is barely taught in schools anymore so relying on British people
to be able to codify their writing correctly might not be possible. For
example, I'd hazard a guess that a reasonable proportion of the population
wouldn't even be able to define what a pronoun is, let alone tell you
whether they were using the word 'me' as a direct or indirect pronoun (which
your program would need to know).

I'm not trying to discourage you, I'd love for this to be achieved, just
mentioning something else you might want to think about.

Andrew (Ams80)

----- Original Message -----
From: <talthen at wp.pl>
To: <wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org>
Sent: Wednesday, February 11, 2004 1:33 PM
Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] An idea. What do you think about this?

> > The idea that such "perfect language" is possible to create is very
> intuitive.
> > Yet, nobody have made it so far, so it's probably much harder than it
> seems.
> Sure, but have you ever heard about anybody who tried it as an Open
project?
> Microsoft spend many years and cash on creating its Windows OSes, but
Linux
> is so better...
> I think my idea may be realized, but I can't do this just by myself...
>
> Regards,
> Talthen
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


from_name: Camille Constans

subject: [Wikitech-l] Mail problems

body:
On Tue, 10 Feb 2004 17:40:18 -0800
Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:

> Just FYI, I've been having a lot of trouble with the list kicking me
> for "excessive bounces". I'm trying to get it resolved, but in the
> meantime I'm not receiving all mails to the lists.
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

I reactive your account on fr each time i have this excessive bounces. I know, it's not your most important list :)


from_name: Ruimu

body:
----- Original Message -----
From: "Evan Prodromou" <evan at wikitravel.org>
To: <wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org>
Sent: Wednesday, February 11, 2004 2:58 PM
Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] An idea. What do you think about this?

> >>>>> "t" ==   <talthen at wp.pl> writes:
>
>     t> The idea is to create new language, based on most popular
>     t> languages from all over the world. This language would not be a
>     t> human language, but a language to store information.
>
> [[en:pasigraphy]]

    See also... Chinese language! Leibniz himself was hoping that Chinese
would be a perfect universal language. In fact, most Chinese characters
(around 80% I guess) are both phonograms and ideograms (one part gives an
idea of the sound, one part gives an idea of the meaning, and phonetic part
can be chosen according to the meaning) but the core and might of this
language still is its lack of grounding on phonetics. Therefore, Chinese
people from different provinces can communicate despite their strongly
different dialects... with the finger (writing characters in the air or on
the palm). Because of the phonetic "rift", languages grounded on phonetics
are less stable in time and space (for example, French written language is
very far from the spoken one and you often have to learn 1) how to write a
word, 2) how to prononce it).

    Chinese is not this perfectly logical language Leibniz was hoping for,
but it's remain one of the best candidates for deaf people, if one wish to
reach universality.


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] Webwasher User-Agent should be allowed

body:
On Feb 12, 2004, at 04:36, Andre Engels wrote:
> "Axel Boldt" <axelboldt at yahoo.com> schrieb:
>> Do we forbid certain spiders access to the site based on User-Agent? A
>> user in a German forum reported recently that he couldn't access
>> Wikipedia at all, always receiving a "Forbidden" message. It turned
>> out
>> that his webwasher proxy was to blame (an ad banner block). The proxy
>> sends the User-Agent
>>
>>    "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows 98; DigExt) WebWasher
>> 3.0"

I can access pages on de.wikipedia.org using the above user-agent
string, but don't have WebWasher to test with.

>> Webwasher cannot be used to spider and download sites.
>
> We forbid spiders based on User Agent, but WebWasher seems not to be
> in the list. according to http://www.wikipedia.org/robots.txt, the
> following User-Agents are disallowed:

robots.txt isn't based on user-agent. It works on the honor system; if
the client doesn't obey robots.txt, there is no blocking caused by
robots.txt.

Here's the current user-agent block list:

# we don't like these user-agents:
acl stayaway browser ^Iala
acl stayaway browser ^Teleport
acl stayaway browser ^WebStripper
acl stayaway browser ^Snoopy
acl stayaway browser grub
acl stayaway browser ZyBorg
acl stayaway browser linko
acl stayaway browser FAST
acl stayaway browser HTTrack
acl stayaway browser Microsoft.URL.Control
acl stayaway browser ^Xenu
acl stayaway browser LARBIN
acl stayaway browser efp at gmx.net
acl stayaway browser larbin
acl stayaway browser ^LWP
acl stayaway browser libwww-perl
acl stayaway browser Python-urllib
acl stayaway browser ^WorQmada
acl stayaway browser ^TorQmada
acl stayaway browser ^k2spider
acl stayaway browser fetch.api.request
acl stayaway browser Zealbot
acl stayaway browser dloader
acl stayaway browser NaverRobot
acl stayaway browser Exalead
acl stayaway browser Fetch
acl stayaway browser Offline.Explorer
acl stayaway browser WWW-Mechanize
acl stayaway browser Downlad.Ninja
acl stayaway browser Web.Downloader
acl stayaway browser HTTrack
acl stayaway browser Sister.Site
acl stayaway browser WebReaper

> Furthermore I know that any request without a User Agent is refused.
> There might be others, but someone who knows more about it than me
> should check that.

That hasn't been true for a week or so.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [Wikipedia-l] An FDL test case: McFly

body:
Erik wrote:
>Under this interpretation, Anthony is clearly in violation.
>If he refuses to make the necessary changes I strongly
>recommend taking legal action as otherwise this could
>easily become a precedent for third parties to use
>Wikipedia content without giving proper credit. We should
>probably send a warning letter anyway because of the
>"this license extends solely .."  part.

Yes. I agree this is a violation since our copyright policy page clearly
indicates what actions need to be done to satisfy the GNU FDL requirements.
Each article is headed by its own history section and is thus a separate work.
But I don't think legal action will be needed if Anthony uses an ISP to host
his website. All we need is a takedown letter sent to the ISP if Anthony
refuses.

>The way I know Anthony he won't listen to anyone without
>legal standing. I therefore would like to ask Alex in particular
>to take a look at this case and help in preparing the necessary
>letter.

IANAL and this is only my opinion, but I no longer trust what Alex has to say
about copyright law. He has on several occasions now indicated that Wikipedia
is not a copyrightable work! I think such a position is outrageous, but that is
just my opinion and not a statement of fact.

Alex wrote:
http://meta.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Do_fair_use_images_violate_the_GFDL%3F&diff=26034&oldid=26012

Excerpt:
|The fact is that words in a dictionary are not subject to copyright
|and if an encyclopedia is the conceptual extension of a dictionary
|applied to concepts, theories, facts, historical developments then
|if Wikipedia is truly collaborative writing then the work that is
|created will be so generic as to be beyond the powers of copyright.

I for one find it offensive to imply that what we do here is not sufficiently
creative to warrent copyright protection.

Delirium wrote:
>On the other hand, we've indicated intent to publish a paper
>version of the encyclopedia, which would very clearly be a
>single document.  Or are we claiming it wouldnt' be?  If each
>Wikipedia article is a separate document, any paper version
>we produce would have to have a list of five authors and the
>"history" section on *every single* article, which would take
>up a pretty large percentage of the total encyclopedia.

I don't think so. Just print out the network location of the original. If that
is not enough then we would eventually have to develop a bot that would extract
top 5 author info from each article and place it, along with the article's URL,
in the footer on each page in a small font. It would take one, maybe two lines
at the bottom of every page.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Finance: Get your refund fast by filing online.
http://taxes.yahoo.com/filing.html


subject: [Wikipedia-l] An FDL test case: McFly

body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:

>I don't think so. Just print out the network location of the original. If that
>is not enough then we would eventually have to develop a bot that would extract
>top 5 author info from each article and place it, along with the article's URL,
>in the footer on each page in a small font. It would take one, maybe two lines
>at the bottom of every page.
>
>
According to the GFDL that's expicitly not enough: all the required
materials must be distributed as part of the work, in the same format
(i.e., on paper).  Just pointing to the original isn't enough.
Actually, even with other websites pointing to the original isn't
enough, we're just being nice and letting them do so as a courtesy.

-Mark


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Server swapping soon

body:
There may be some brief downtime or odd behavior over the next few
hours as we try swapping the new servers into production. Hopefully
everything will go pretty smoothly.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [Wikitech-l] Server swapping soon

body:
There may be some brief downtime or odd behavior over the next few
hours as we try swapping the new servers into production. Hopefully
everything will go pretty smoothly.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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