body:
I think the biggest problem is that a certain group of Dutch moderators take
decisions for example to block someone for a long time, without being
interested in the opinion of the community. Something there is some admin
power abuse done by that specific group of moderators. Now the case is that
most members of that specific group of moderators are active in the
foundation. The processes to form the foundation are very unclear and most
of the important decisions have been taken during IRL meetings. Only people
who visited those meetings had any influence at the forming of the
foundation and the association.

Now the danger is that members of the Dutch foundation take certain
decisions, maybe under pressure of a Dutch judge or organisation or maybe
just there own POV. And then they use there power to force their decision.
Abuse like that will be a serious risk when de foundation would get any
power.

A lot of Dutch Wikipedians feel that de Dutch foundation is trying to take
over the power at our Wikipedia and they are grumbling about it.

Greetings,

Johan Bos

----- Original Message -----
From: "Anthere" <Anthere9 at yahoo.com>
To: <foundation-l at wikimedia.org>
Sent: Tuesday, April 18, 2006 10:48 PM
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Fwd: [Wikipedia-l] Dutch chapter

> Hi
>
> Which are the reasons why the Foundation and the association have little
> support ? People ? Bylaws ? Goals ?
>
> Ant
>
> Johan Bos wrote:
>> I agree with Andre. Nor the Dutch foundation, nor the Dutch association
>> has
>> a broad support in Dutch community. The community has hardly any
>> influence
>> to the foundation and the association. A lot of users are complaining.
>>
>> The foundation and the association could do a great job for our project,
>> but
>> as soon as they get any special power to the encyclopedia, there will
>> come
>> troubles.
>>
>> So, I have no problem with the foundation and the association, but they
>> shouldn't have any power to the Wikimedia Projects and they shouldn't
>> have
>> any official position within WMF.
>>
>> Johan Bos (nl:Jcb)
>>
>> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "Erik Moeller" <eloquence at gmail.com>
>> To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List" <foundation-l at wikimedia.org>
>> Sent: Tuesday, April 18, 2006 8:29 PM
>> Subject: [Foundation-l] Fwd: [Wikipedia-l] Dutch chapter
>>
>>
>>
>>>I'm forwarding this to foundation-l as it seems to be the more
>>>relevant list. Thread so far at:
>>>http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2006-April/thread.html#44205
>>>
>>>Erik
>>>
>>>---------- Forwarded message ----------
>>>From: Andre Engels <andreengels at gmail.com>
>>>Date: Apr 18, 2006 4:52 PM
>>>Subject: [Wikipedia-l] Dutch chapter
>>>To: wikipedia-l at wikimedia.org
>>>
>>>
>>>I think I speak for most of the Dutch Wikipedians if I say:
>>>* Neither the Dutch Wikimedia Foundation (Stichting Wikimedia
>>>Nederland) nor the Dutch Wikimedia Association (Vereniging Wikimedia
>>>Nederland) has the right to influence the content and procedures of
>>>the Dutch Wikipedia
>>>* The board of neither has any formal special position on the Dutch
>>>Wikipedia
>>>* At least the Dutch Wikimedia Foundation should not be allowed to
>>>speak in name of the Dutch Wikipedia
>>>* The Wikimedia Foundation is hereby requested not to give the Dutch
>>>Wikimedia Foundation the status of chapter or any similar status
>>>
>>>Thank you.
>>>
>>>--
>>>Andre Engels, andreengels at gmail.com
>>>ICQ: 6260644  --  Skype: a_engels
>>>_______________________________________________
>>>Wikipedia-l mailing list
>>>Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
>>>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>>>_______________________________________________
>>>foundation-l mailing list
>>>foundation-l at wikimedia.org
>>>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>>>
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>


list: wikimedia-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Johan Bos

subject: [Foundation-l] Fwd: [Wikipedia-l] Dutch chapter


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: John Stowers

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Parsing Extensions in Templates

body:
Hello All,

I have a wiki, currently running the GeSHi syntax highlighting extension[1].
I wish to use this from within a template page (Template:HF). This template
page contains the following wikitext

Click [http://john.greenbirdsystems.com/files/{{{1}}} here] to download this
file.
<bash-file>/var/www/john.greenbirdsystems.com/files/{{{1}}}</bash-file>

According to the extension, the file between the <bash-file> tags should be
parsed and displayed inline when I call

{{HF|test.sh}}

from another page.

But because the order that extensions and templates are processed all I get
is

Click here to download this file.
Could not load /var/www/john.greenbirdsystems.com/files/{{{1}}}

See how the template var is not expanded. The extension gets called first.
Can anyone suggest a solution to my conumdrum?

When not in template form the plugin works great. Its source code is
available at [1]. I have done quite a bit of research trying to get tis to
work but couldnt find anywhere that said anything about this situation. Help
would be appreciated.

Cheers

John

[1] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Ajqnic:GeSHiHighlight


list: commons-l

from_name: Brianna Laugher

subject: [Commons-l] an idea for a commons help tool

body:
Since there are some really good tools being written lately, I thought
I'd throw up a request for one. :) This one would be quite easy to
make, I think. Just saves some typing. (I would like it for en.wp but
I think it would be pretty easy to make for any language.wp.)

Articles on Commons frequently have no contextual information - just a
heading and images. Sometimes this is OK but usually short description
blurbs and interwiki links would be better. The easiest way to make
these is to find the en.wp article, copy the list of interwiki links,
add the English interwiki link, then convert these to description tags
and either leave just the article name as the description, or add the
first sentence from the article.

e.g. today I fixed up this:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Arthur%27s_Seat&oldid=1728248

The description tags look like this:

{{en|This is where the first line of the article would go.}}

not a far leap from [[en:article name]] at all, really. You can also
link to the WP article in the description tag, or bold the subject, or
do neither.

Typically I only put the full description for English because I'm
usually fixing up other people's articles, then I just put the article
name for the other interwiki links _if it differs to the English
name_. For example with species, quite a few wikis put them at the
Latin binomial name (as does Commons), so I don't think it's necessary
to list 50 "translations" of a word that already appears on the page.

as an example see http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Alaskan_Malamute ,
where I have only translated the labels that are not 'Alaskan
Malamute' (in this case they are different scripts).

Anyway does what I've described make sense? Basically I'd like to put
in the name of the relevant en.wp article, and get out the description
tags and interwiki links that I can paste right into my Commons
article.

Not at all urgent, of course...

cheers,
Brianna

--
"Mathematicians do it with Nobel's wife."


list: foundation-l

from_name: GerardM

body:
Hoi,
With some suprise I have seen from a distance a situation arise by
people who did not involve themselves during the setup of the Dutch
chapter. If anything I can vouch for the fact that one of the guiding
principles during the setup of the chapter was to maximise the
community aspect.

This idea of there being a group that secretly decide on "everyting
and the kitchen sink" is odd. The meetings have all been public. They
were all announced in advance and this suggestion is without a basis.
I am in an excellent position to vouch for this. I have been at
several of these meetings.

The cool thing is, a "vereniging" and even a "stichting" have been set
up. The preparations are being done so that there will be a
bank-account and that there can be members of the "vereniging". There
will be a meeting where members can do the member thing. I sincerely
hope that this will be an opportunity for people to meet in a
reasonable way and most definetly to start doing what a chapter is
ment for. Have an organisational background for the activities that we
want to do.

Thanks,
    GerardM

On 4/18/06, Johan Bos <skatinghacker at hotmail.com> wrote:
> I think the biggest problem is that a certain group of Dutch moderators take
> decisions for example to block someone for a long time, without being
> interested in the opinion of the community. Something there is some admin
> power abuse done by that specific group of moderators. Now the case is that
> most members of that specific group of moderators are active in the
> foundation. The processes to form the foundation are very unclear and most
> of the important decisions have been taken during IRL meetings. Only people
> who visited those meetings had any influence at the forming of the
> foundation and the association.
>
> Now the danger is that members of the Dutch foundation take certain
> decisions, maybe under pressure of a Dutch judge or organisation or maybe
> just there own POV. And then they use there power to force their decision.
> Abuse like that will be a serious risk when de foundation would get any
> power.
>
> A lot of Dutch Wikipedians feel that de Dutch foundation is trying to take
> over the power at our Wikipedia and they are grumbling about it.
>
> Greetings,
>
> Johan Bos
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Anthere" <Anthere9 at yahoo.com>
> To: <foundation-l at wikimedia.org>
> Sent: Tuesday, April 18, 2006 10:48 PM
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Fwd: [Wikipedia-l] Dutch chapter
>
>
> > Hi
> >
> > Which are the reasons why the Foundation and the association have little
> > support ? People ? Bylaws ? Goals ?
> >
> > Ant
> >
> > Johan Bos wrote:
> >> I agree with Andre. Nor the Dutch foundation, nor the Dutch association
> >> has
> >> a broad support in Dutch community. The community has hardly any
> >> influence
> >> to the foundation and the association. A lot of users are complaining.
> >>
> >> The foundation and the association could do a great job for our project,
> >> but
> >> as soon as they get any special power to the encyclopedia, there will
> >> come
> >> troubles.
> >>
> >> So, I have no problem with the foundation and the association, but they
> >> shouldn't have any power to the Wikimedia Projects and they shouldn't
> >> have
> >> any official position within WMF.
> >>
> >> Johan Bos (nl:Jcb)
> >>
> >> ----- Original Message -----
> >> From: "Erik Moeller" <eloquence at gmail.com>
> >> To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List" <foundation-l at wikimedia.org>
> >> Sent: Tuesday, April 18, 2006 8:29 PM
> >> Subject: [Foundation-l] Fwd: [Wikipedia-l] Dutch chapter
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>>I'm forwarding this to foundation-l as it seems to be the more
> >>>relevant list. Thread so far at:
> >>>http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2006-April/thread.html#44205
> >>>
> >>>Erik
> >>>
> >>>---------- Forwarded message ----------
> >>>From: Andre Engels <andreengels at gmail.com>
> >>>Date: Apr 18, 2006 4:52 PM
> >>>Subject: [Wikipedia-l] Dutch chapter
> >>>To: wikipedia-l at wikimedia.org
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>I think I speak for most of the Dutch Wikipedians if I say:
> >>>* Neither the Dutch Wikimedia Foundation (Stichting Wikimedia
> >>>Nederland) nor the Dutch Wikimedia Association (Vereniging Wikimedia
> >>>Nederland) has the right to influence the content and procedures of
> >>>the Dutch Wikipedia
> >>>* The board of neither has any formal special position on the Dutch
> >>>Wikipedia
> >>>* At least the Dutch Wikimedia Foundation should not be allowed to
> >>>speak in name of the Dutch Wikipedia
> >>>* The Wikimedia Foundation is hereby requested not to give the Dutch
> >>>Wikimedia Foundation the status of chapter or any similar status
> >>>
> >>>Thank you.
> >>>
> >>>--
> >>>Andre Engels, andreengels at gmail.com
> >>>ICQ: 6260644  --  Skype: a_engels
> >>>_______________________________________________
> >>>Wikipedia-l mailing list
> >>>Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> >>>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
> >>>_______________________________________________
> >>>foundation-l mailing list
> >>>foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> >>>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
> >>>
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > foundation-l mailing list
> > foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
> >
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>


list: wikien-l

from_name: Steve Bennett

subject: [WikiEN-l] Bounties for editors

body:
On 18/04/06, Philip Welch <wikipedia at philwelch.net> wrote:
> On Apr 18, 2006, at 8:40 AM, MacGyverMagic/Mgm wrote:
>
> > You're absolutely right. People on a tight budget like me would be
> > very much interested in financial compensation for certain jobs. As
> > long as it results in articles following policy, I don't see the
> > problem.
>
> My concern is getting Wikipedia written faster and better. If people
> make money along the way, more power to them. It's worked on Deutsche
> Wikipedia and it can work here.
>
> If we reject this policy, incidentally, we'd also have to reject all
> of Larry Sanger's contributions--he was a paid editor-in-chief during
> his tenure.

I think rejecting any policy on the grounds that it may produce POV
edits is flawed. Quite simply, the value of POV edits is not
particularly high to anyone, unless they're being paid to maintain
them. Any article will, over time, represent the POV of all its
contributors, not just one. So, just as one NPOV crimefighter working
on a Pokemon fan article (with apologies) will eventually see his work
completely eroded, a nefarious POV pusher working on an otherwise
neutral article will see his evil deeds go to waste. Wikipedia works
because overall most articles have mostly more or less neutral
contributors mostly contributing. (I couldn't get any more hedges into
that sentence...)

Steve


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject:
[Foundation-l] Stewards are ignoring requests for
	CheckUser	information?

body:
Birgitte SB wrote:

>The main difference as I see is this.  Wikipedia is
>creating content.  WP could chose to make it's content
>free or not; they chose to make it free.  Wikisource
>has no control on whether our content is free or where
>it is free.  We can only choose whether or not to make
>it available.  Downstream users are going to have to
>evaluate whether they are free to use Wikisource
>contect individually unless they are in the United
>States.  Our material is under various licenses as
>well as public domain (as applicable in the US).  We
>cannot give anyone a blanket guarantee the content is
>free for them to use whether we include non-commercial
>or not.  They are still going to have to evaluate each
>license category and judge based on the laws they must
>abide by.
>
Absolutely.  It's important to have broad principles like NPOV to guide
all projects, but it's also important to recognize that not all projects
will have the same priorities as Wikipedia.  For most of Wikisource NPOV
is meaningless, as is the ability of downstream users to modify the
material.  If the material is modified it is no longer the same
material.  We can permit editing, translating and other commentary, and
that will be subject to the usual rules for NPOV and modifiability, but
unless there is a clear recognition of an inviolable source text it is
all meaningless.  When a vandal wanted change a string of digits in the
middle of "Pi to 1,000,000 places" on Wikisource I suppose it could be
explained in terms of the right to modify, but the result was no longer pi.

It's also important to trust the leadership in each project.   Those who
have taken on leadership roles in established projects are going to be
known quantities who are not going to rush headlong into radical stands.
(This may be different in newer or smaller projects, but even there as
time goes on trust can be built.)  Trusted leaders are not about to
allow others to recklessly ignore copyrights, but at the same time they
are not going to take such disadvantageously narrow interpretations of
copyright that would bar any material with a mere suggestion of a
violation.  Removing the Security Council Resolutions would be a clear
act of copyright paranoia.  I have heard of no complaint from the United
Nations about it, and I'm sure that an understanding could be reached if
they did complain.  The concern of governmental or quasi-governmental
bodies about the republication of such documents has nothing to do with
the loss of revenue, but with a belief that they might be reproduced
inaccurately.

Going out of our way to ensure that downstream users will be able to
copy this material is ultimately an untenable position.  People must
accept responsibility for their own actions.  We do well to warn them of
possible problems, but we should have no obligation to hold their hands
in the way that we would hold those of a child.  We can say that we have
reasonable and supportable grounds for saying that a given document is
in the public domain, or that it is covered by fair use (or dealing) in
the server jurisdiction, and that we cannot vouch for its legal status
in some other jurisdiction.  In saying this I make a specific statement
that I do not consider public interest alone to be grounds for
publishing most documents.

Too little attention has been paid to the perils of Wikipedia's success,
a success that has also dragged the rest of the projects along with it.
Protecting the Foundation from legal liability is a fine ideal, but the
tone of that protection has changed in the 4+ years that I have
participated.  An operation with a $1,000,000 annual hardware budget is
not the same as one with a $10,000 annual hardware budget.  The
willingness to take risks is replaced by the fear that we really could
lose something, and that stiffles innovation.  The corporate world often
protects itself through a series of corporate structures that would have
the effect of creating firewalls between divisions to protect the others
from collateral damage when any one of them runs into trouble.  Perhaps
it's something the Foundation should be thinking about.

>I think new languages should be supported if they seem
>likely to suceed establishing an active community.
>Before we can judge that or set up any guidelines we
>really need more information.  I would very much like
>to take the first step in this.  Which I believe is
>analizing what has worked or not in the past.  But
>right now some of the stats pages are months old and
>Wikisource has none at all for individual languages.
>I don't know that the information I can get from any
>updated stats would really tell what makes a community
>sucessfull.  However it should allow us to see what
>communities have a certain level of activity.  Then I
>think we should ask people from various communities to
>fill out a survey about the beginings of their
>community and maybe we can find some indicators we can
>use to answer your points.
>
I don't know that a survey will accomplish anything.  I still think that
dividing Wikisource into separate language communities was a big
mistake; that's the one issue that most influenced me to drift away from
it and back to where most of my time is now spent dealing with Wiktionary.

The leader in a project, as you now appear to be in Wikisource, needs
vision.  That person needs an instinct to recognize what would divert
the project into unproductive paths.  Of course, it takes great skill to
shape an army of dilletentes into a productive force.

Formats can be a big time waster.  Some people are obsessed with the
sense of order that clearly defined formats can bring into a project.
For them having the world well ordered brings them a sense of
professionalism, forgetting at the same time that we are all amateurs
here.  For the most part that really doesn't matter.  The substantive
content and information are what matter; a format is nothing more than a
tool for making that information more accessible.  If the format fails
in that mission it's not much good.

Ec


list: wikitech-l

from_name: brion at pobox.com

subject: [Wikitech-l] MediaWiki automated test run failure 2006-04-19

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

Running test Table security: embedded pipes (http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2006-April/034637.html)... FAILED!
Running test Magic Word: {{NUMBEROFFILES}}... FAILED!
Running test BUG 1887, part 2: A <math> with a thumbnail- math enabled... FAILED!

Passed 300 of 303 tests (99.01%) FAILED!


subject: [WikiEN-l] Another tricky "acceptable source" question

body:
Yeah, that probably works quite well with <ref> tags. Then you can put
the quote in and it becomes a footnote, without breaking up the text
of thearticle.

Steve

On 18/04/06, Jesse W <jessw at netwood.net> wrote:
> On Apr 18, 2006, at 12:00 PM, Steve Bennett wrote:
> > On 18/04/06, Guettarda <guettarda at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> If it's published, it should count.  "Easily available" isn't a
> >> criterion.
> >> Is it likely to be in university libraries?  Is it something that
> >> professionals in the field are likely to have?  Then it easily meets
> >> WP:V,
> >> IMO
> >
> > Likely? I'm not sure. They could probably track down a copy with a bit
> > of effort. But yeah, I suppose it is "verifiable", with full citation
> > details.
> And quotes!  Don't forgot about quoting the bits that back up what you
> are claiming.  While this is nice for web pages, it's particularly
> important for less accessible sources; it lets the job of verification
> be divided between subject experts - who can judge if the provided
> quotes back up what they claim to back up, and wiki gnomes who can
> verify that the provided quotes do actually exist in the cited sources
> and are not mistyped or fake.  Quotes are your friends! ;-)
>
> Jesse Weinstein
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


list: textbook-l

from_name: Piotr "Derbeth" Kubowicz

subject: [Textbook-l] Vandalism at en.wikibooks

body:
Dnia Mon, 17 Apr 2006 05:02:15 +0200, Kernigh napisa?(a):

> List of recent vandals at en.wikibooks:
>http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikibooks/Socks
>I have posted a link to this Meta page from
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_term_abuse/Willy_on_Wheels
>I am not mentioning this list on en.wikibooks itself. However, I have protected
> Template:WoW which other users are using on en.wikibooks. I give my thanks to
> everyone who helped revert, report, or block these vandals.
>Feel free to update the page: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikibooks/Socks

I don't see much sense in maintaining such list, we just block such accounts infinitely and can't do anything else.

--
Piotr 'Derbeth' Kubowicz
Derbeth Site <http://derbeth.glt.pl>
Jabber id: derbeth at jabber.wp.pl

Pom?? Wikibooks stworzy? najwi?kszy zbi?r otwartych podr?cznik?w! http://pl.wikibooks.org/

Opera - the fastest browser on Earth! http://www.opera.com/


from_name: John Lee

subject: [WikiEN-l] Deprecating {{qif}}

body:
It has been proposed to officially deprecate the mother of
meta-templates, qif. Please contribute to the discussion:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:MFD/QIF

John


from_name: Walter Vermeir

body:
Johan Bos schreef:
> I think the biggest problem is that a certain group of Dutch moderators take
> decisions for example to block someone for a long time, without being
> interested in the opinion of the community. Something there is some admin
> power abuse done by that specific group of moderators. Now the case is that
[cut]

The Dutch Wikipedia is not paradise. But you give the impression that
there is a group of admins on the Dutch Wikipedia who are behaving
strongly against the wishes of the community. And that those are now
also controlling those new chapters.

This is highly incorrect.

The Dutch Wikipedia is probably the only Wikipedia who has such easy and
extensive procedures who makes it nearly impossible for a group of
sysops to behave strongly against the wishes of the community.

There is a de-sysop procedure who every user can start against a sysop.
And this lead to vote of confidence where the sysop needs at least 75%
in favor to stay sysop.

Besides this is there also the reconfirmation procedure. *Every* sysop
needs to be re-confirmed every year. When there is objection made
against a sysop that sysop needs to survive a vote where the need also
to get 75% in favor.

Currently on the Dutch Wikipedia the 2th round of the re-confirmation
procedure of the 2th quarter the year is active.

Those are the sysops where there was made objections against in the 1th
round. The include "Oscar" and "Galwaygirl" who are key-members of the
board of those new Dutch Wikimedia chapters.

You can see in this vote the have large support from the community;
http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Regelingen_rond_moderatoren/Bevestiging_moderatorstatus

--
Contact: walter AT wikizine DOT org
Wikizine.org - news for and about the Wikimedia community


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] New SVN committers

body:
yurik: Yuri Astrakhan (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Yurik)
* bots & maintenance stuff

proes: Peter-Jan Roes
* contractor working on WiktionaryZ/Wikidata

There will be a couple more guys coming soon on Wikidata-related stuff; they're
under Eloquence's jurisdiction.

(Public service message: when asking me or Tim for an account on the SVN server,
let us know what username you want. Otherwise you'll get first initial + last
name if you don't have a wiki username that we know. :)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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from_name: Alphax (Wikipedia email)

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Why Wikipedia should not be a random collection of
 facts

body:
Phil Boswell wrote:
>
> Alphax (Wikipedia email) wrote:
>> Science is facts; just as houses are made of stones, so is science made
>> of facts; but a pile of stones is not a house and a collection of facts
>> is not necessarily science.
>>                 -- Henri Poincaire
>>
>> Now apply this to Wikipedia:
>>
>> s/science/article/
>>
>> QED.
>>
> ...and your point is?
>
> If this is yet another attempt to have fictional entities booted off
> Wikipedia, I'm sure I'll not be alone in getting rather annoyed.

Actually I was thinking more along the lines of "Why trivia sections
need to die"... not the stuff in them, but the existence of them as
"piles of unsorted facts".

--
Alphax - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax
Contributor to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia
"We make the internet not suck" - Jimbo Wales
Public key: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax/OpenPGP

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from_name: Anthere

subject: [Foundation-l] new checkuser policy

body:
You may find a new version of the checkuser access policy here

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:CheckUser_Policy#Access_.28new_version.29

the main differences are
* it takes into account the fact some local communities with arbcom do
not necessarily want to delegate appointement of checkusers to their arbcom
* any local project may choose at least 2 people amongst the already
approved checkusers, with localized requirement (the local community
choose itself percentage of support, minimum number of votes etc...)

Which would allow to make Essjay and Karynn checkuser on en.wikibooks if
the en.wikibooks is happy with this.

Warning : the idea is not that all checkusers be selected by wikipedias
and later imposed on other projects. The idea is rather that generally,
a person widely supported in one project to do a job... is some one we
generally trust to do the job properly anywhere.

So, if wikicommons wants to appoints 5 checkusers from 5 different
languages, all those 5 may serve on various other projects. The one
requirement to keep though : always at least 2 checkusers per project.

Opinion ? Please comment on the meta page. Trolls not welcome. I do not
have the time this week :-)

ant


subject: [Foundation-l] new checkuser policy


from_name: Lars Aronsson

subject: [Wikitech-l] What is required to "fix search"?

body:
On April 14, Evan Martin wrote:

> To answer your specific proposal:
> 1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Recentchanges has a meta tag:
> <meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow" />
> which indicates it's explicitly disallowed from being crawled.

As far as I understand the robots meta tag, "noindex,follow" tells
robots that they are welcome to fetch the page, that they can find
links to other pages here (= follow), but they should never show
this page among the search hits (= noindex).

Words such as crawl and index are somewhat fuzzy here.  Does
"index" mean fetch or does it mean store in an index, to be
returned to users as a search hit?  I found no clear answer. Of
course, the crawler/robot/spider is already fetching the page when
it sees the meta tag.  And it must fetch the page again to see if
the meta tag has changed.

The Pipermail software that is used for the wikitech-l archive
sets "noindex,follow" for the overview sorted by date, e.g.
http://mail.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2006-April/date.html
but for the individual posting, it sets "index,nofollow", e.g.
http://mail.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2006-April/034969.html

I believe that "noindex,follow" is used for many "sitemap" pages,
and this is my idea of how search robots should use RecentChanges.

Indeed, the front page of any newspaper website is also similar to
a sitemap.  Its content changes so often that it becomes useless
to index it under any specific word found there.  If people search
for "hurricane katrina", they don't want the front page of the
Washington Post, which will have changed by the time they arrive.
But they might be interested in the news article about this topic,
and the front page was the way to harvest the link to that
article.

The main difference, then, between the newspaper and Wikipedia is
that the newspaper uses their RecentChanges as their front page.
Plus the fact that Wikipedia isn't covered by Google News.

--
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se


from_name: Birgitte SB

subject:
[Foundation-l] Stewards are ignoring requests for CheckUser
	information?

body:
--- Andre Engels <andreengels at gmail.com> wrote:

> 2006/4/19, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net>:

> > Going out of our way to ensure that downstream
> users will be able to
> > copy this material is ultimately an untenable
> position.  People must
> > accept responsibility for their own actions.  We
> do well to warn them of
> > possible problems, but we should have no
> obligation to hold their hands
> > in the way that we would hold those of a child.
> We can say that we have
> > reasonable and supportable grounds for saying that
> a given document is
> > in the public domain, or that it is covered by
> fair use (or dealing) in
> > the server jurisdiction, and that we cannot vouch
> for its legal status
> > in some other jurisdiction.  In saying this I make
> a specific statement
> > that I do not consider public interest alone to be
> grounds for
> > publishing most documents.
>
> And here I disagree. The right to re-publish is at
> the heart of the
> Wikimedia philosophy. It's very nice that you ensure
> you have the
> right to republish (although I think "they haven't
> complained yet"
> isn't exactly 'ensuring a right' - I strongly advise
> you to take
> stricter guidelines), but Wikimedia was made for
> free material. Which
> means that others have the right to republish. That
> that is under
> different licenses - Wikipedia allows changing, but
> requires it to be
> under the same license, Wikisource only requires
> that it may be copied
> unchanged - is no problem. But if your material may
> not be reproduced
> by others at all, I think you are not following the
> spirit of
> Wikimedia.

First off I want to say that the English Wikisource
does not take anything under fair use/dealing.
Although I think that making information available is
the true heart of Wikimedia, the ability to freely
disseminate it right up there.  And I would never want
to accept material where an author gave permission for
publication on Wikisource without giving any
distribution rights.  However I believe it is not
possible to guarantee worldwide that the downstream
user can just take Wikimedia information without
looking into their local laws.  Even with GFDL.  Some
countries simply do not have provisions for
recognising a license like the GFDL.  Right now
Wikisource only has material that we believe is freely
distributable for commercial use somewhere.  I cannot
guarantee it is freely distributable *everywhere* but
I do not believe that would be possible no matter how
restrictive we are. I feel we just need to stress the
importance of keeping everything properly tagged so
downstream users can sort it out.  We have been told
no non-commercial and we got rid of that. My concern
is that the thinking behind non-commercial was that we
need to be able to give such a blanket guarantee.
Also there are odds and ends that I do not understand
where they fit in to copyright at all.

BTW we are not talking about any licenses here that
are not used at WP and Commons (mainly various PD
reasons).  Whether the people there do not see the
issues I do or simply never looked very far into it, I
do not know.

Birgitte SB

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


from_name: Ryan Dabler

body:
On 4/19/06, Andre Engels <andreengels at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I don't think the difference with Wikipedia is as large as you state
> here. Sure, one can rewrite a Wikipedia article and still have an
> encyclopedia article, but one can also easily make small changes that
> are simply incorrect. Someone who changes the digits of pi in
> wikisource isn't that much different from someone who changes an
> article on Wikipedia to state that Hitler was born in China. Do they
> have the right to do that? I'm not sure. But someone is definitely
> allowed to take a Wikipedia article, change it to say that Hitler was
> born in China, and publish that under the GNU/FDL. Likewise, they have
> the right to take the value of Pi from Wikisource, change it, and put
> that on their website.

 I think the point of Ec's argument was missed.  I believe he was getting at
a slightly more fundamental point--something more along the lines of the
"purpose" (kind of a bad term, I know) of the two projects: the fact that
one project's personal goals might not fit another project's personal
goals.  In the case of Wikipedia, there is always a sense of
"incompleteness" about the articles; there's always something that can be
added to a Wikipedia article that can make it better.  But, at some point in
the evolution of a text at Wikisource, there is a point where this
completeness is reached: the point in time when the text matches a
previously published version of that work.  Once this point is reached,
there is no need to edit the text anymore, for no more modifications could
be made that would leave it the same text that was previously published.

Sure, a person always has the right to edit any work on Wikisource, but the
matter at stake is that remodification is not one of our goals, for after a
certain point in time, Wikisource would not see anymore modifications
necessary.  Let's say Wikisource published a few of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Maybe the scrolls have spelling errors in them.  How important is it to be
able to fix those spelling mistakes?  Wikisource would say it's important
NOT to fix them, since those mistakes are present in the original text and
should be faithfully reproduced for any person who wants to closely study
the scrolls without having to handle them in person.

Sorry about the length of this.  What I'm trying to say, is that
Wikisource's main goal is archiving, which Wikipedia's is not.  Because of
this difference, Wikipedia's goals will not work with Wikisource and
Wikisource's won't work with Wikipedia.  This illustrates that fact that a
set of broad, kind of vague, group of over-arching goals is needed for every
project to follow while each project still has the freedom to custom-tailor
its immediate goals to its own aims.

And here I disagree. The right to re-publish is at the heart of the
> Wikimedia philosophy. It's very nice that you ensure you have the
> right to republish (although I think "they haven't complained yet"
> isn't exactly 'ensuring a right' - I strongly advise you to take
> stricter guidelines), but Wikimedia was made for free material. Which
> means that others have the right to republish. That that is under
> different licenses - Wikipedia allows changing, but requires it to be
> under the same license, Wikisource only requires that it may be copied
> unchanged - is no problem. But if your material may not be reproduced
> by others at all, I think you are not following the spirit of
> Wikimedia.

This philosophy is one which causes no small amount of grief for many
editors and contributors at Wikisource.  Many times we've been approached by
people who had excellent documents that have great value in and of
themselves, but we must turn away those works because of licensing problems
(maybe they're released under a non-commercial license or Wikisource could
get the permission to display them on the web yet not allow other people to
mercilessly copy and redistribute those texts).  I will agree, republication
is a great idea, but it's come at a fair price, and for the archivists at
Wikisource that price is infuriating.

Why couldn't the Wikimedia philosophy be tweaked a bit to allow some works
to explicitly not be redistributable?  The text would of course be freely
accessible to all, but no one can go put it on their own website without
proper permission.  The blanket statement of ensuring total, absolute
freedom drastically cuts down the amount of things that can be presented to
the world on the Wikimedia projects.  But what's more important: allowing
third parties to freely distribute our own works or being able to share
valuable information that would have otherwise gone unbeknownst to the rest
of the world with the stipulation that it can only be presented on a
Wikimedia project?


from_name: Matt R

subject: [WikiEN-l] Bounties for editors

body:
Elisabeth Bauer <elian at djini.de> wrote:
> > The following link:
> >
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Miscellany_for_deletion/Wikipedia:Now_Hiring
>
> What's the difference to
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bounty_board ? It seems like a
> duplicate.

en:'s "Bounty Board" is strictly only for bounties which result in a donation to the Wikimedia Foundation, rather than to the editor, on completion. It's raised a little over US$100 to date.

-- Matt
[[User:Matt Crypto]]


subject: [Wikitech-l] Cross-namespace templates

body:
On 19/04/06, Jay R. Ashworth <jra at baylink.com> wrote:
> If I correctly understand both a) what you mean, and b) how it works,
> the new INCLUDEONLY/NOINCLUDE stuff will permit that (you can create a
> template which causes the page into which you include it to be placed
> in a category, that is).

Yep, and that works to an exent. But all it can really store is
membership, and the title of the page as it should appear on the
category page. That's apparently insufficient, because pages like
wp:copyvio still exist. To replace pages like that, it would need at a
minimum the date that the template was added, and a text comment.

INCLUDEONLY/NOINCLUDE is definitely very cool, and I can't believe we
got by without it before ;) It's only a pity that they NOINCLUDE's
cant actually be included...some cute template documentation templates
could be produced otherwise.

And to make this email about three separate things at once, it would
be really nice if MediaWiki could be changed so that special variables
displayed differently on template pages than on the page where the
template is included. For example, if PAGENAME actually rendered as
PAGENAME, rather than fa or welcome or whatever. Similarly, {{{1}}}
could rendered as PARAMETER1... that might make templates a little
easier to use and understand for novices.

Steve

Steve


subject: [WikiEN-l] Georgia/Victoria

body:
On 19/04/06, Mark Gallagher <m.g.gallagher at student.canberra.edu.au> wrote:
> When creating disambigs or redirects, I often use myself as the Model
> Searcher (because my memory is lousy).  There's plenty of times when
> I've been looking for an article with an utterly unambiguous name, but
> only been able to remember part of the name ... fortunately, there's
> usually a helpful disambig around to remind me ...

Me too. Or (and I expect flames for this :)) if I see a redlink to an
article that actually exists, I generally create the redlink and make
it redirect, rather than simply fixing the link. I figure that no
mistake is original enough that it won't be repeated, possibly with
more serious consequences, like duplicate articles getting created...

Steve


subject: [Foundation-l] stats ?

body:
Birgitte SB wrote:

> I think new languages should be supported if they seem
> likely to suceed establishing an active community.
> Before we can judge that or set up any guidelines we
> really need more information.  I would very much like
> to take the first step in this.  Which I believe is
> analizing what has worked or not in the past.  But
> right now some of the stats pages are months old and
> Wikisource has none at all for individual languages.
> I don't know that the information I can get from any
> updated stats would really tell what makes a community
> sucessfull.  However it should allow us to see what
> communities have a certain level of activity.  Then I
> think we should ask people from various communities to
> fill out a survey about the beginings of their
> community and maybe we can find some indicators we can
> use to answer your points.
>
> BirgitteSB

I wrote something about this, but the mail appeared to get lost.
I'll do it again then :-)

I know not if stats might help to define such guidelines, but it is
always worth analysing data. It may provide ideas.

The author of these stats is Erik Zachte.
What about contacting him to see why stats of down ?
Is it because he left the project ?
Or did not find the time ?
Or did not find the motivation ?
Or was his tool broken by a software modification ?
Does he need help or can someone else take care of stats from now on ?

... would you explore this Birgitte ?

Ant


subject: [Foundation-l] stats ?


subject: [WikiEN-l] Georgia/Victoria

body:
Justin Cormack wrote:

>On 18 Apr 2006, at 00:03, Ray Saintonge wrote:
>
>
>>Justin Cormack wrote:
>>
>>
>>>learn about the lesser known [[Claude L?vi-Strauss]].
>>>
>>>
>>Lesser known?  The anthropologist is clearly better known.
>>
>>
>Its an old joke. Perhaps from a novel by David Lodge. Or Malcolm
>Bradbury. Who may be the same person, according to graffiti at
>the University of East Anglia. Or my memory is failing.
>
Ahhh!  Since I'm not familiar with either of these authors it's not
surprising that I'm also unfamiliar with the Claude L?vi-Strauss that
appears as a character in their novels.

Ec


body:
Phil Boswell wrote:

>Alphax (Wikipedia email) wrote:
>
>
>>Science is facts; just as houses are made of stones, so is science made
>>of facts; but a pile of stones is not a house and a collection of facts
>>is not necessarily science.
>>                -- Henri Poincaire
>>
>>Now apply this to Wikipedia:
>>
>>s/science/article/
>>
>>QED.
>>
>>
>...and your point is?
>
>If this is yet another attempt to have fictional entities booted off
>Wikipedia, I'm sure I'll not be alone in getting rather annoyed.
>
>
As a mathematician Poincar? would have been familiar with reasoning
divorced from fact.  See [[Henri Poincar?#Philosophy]].  Unlike other
scientists mathematicians are not mere fact-wallahs. They sit at the
soul of science fiction.

Ec


from_name: Elisabeth Bauer

subject: [WikiEN-l] Bounties for editors

body:
Matt R schrieb:
> The following link:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Miscellany_for_deletion/Wikipedia:Now_Hiring
>
> is to a deletion debate on a page for bounties (cash etc) for bits of
> work on the project. I believe such a page would be a good thing.
> Arguments in favour follow:

What's the difference to
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bounty_board ? It seems like a
duplicate.

> It's worked fine, as far as I can tell, on the German edition since
> last July, and in a number of free software/open source communities.

Some notes about the efficiency of the german variant: When the page
(http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Auftragsarbeiten) was set up
there was a lot of activity on the page, especially in the tit for tat
category  ("offer exchange of one featured article about an animal for
one featured article about" etc). This went on for a while until the
initial storm calmed down and now the page is almost unused. It seems
that such pages work better as temporary special events than as durable
institutions.

greetings,
elian
PS: the german page was on Vfd as well...


subject: [WikiEN-l] wikitruth.info (Slashdot story)

body:
geni wrote:

>On 4/18/06, Ben Yates <bluephonic at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>>I don't agree with wikitruth, but there doesn't seem to be anything
>>particularly ironic about them using a wiki: they're anti-wikipedia,
>>not anti-wiki or anti-free-software.
>>
>>
>It's not so much that they are using a wiki. It is that they are using
>software they it primarily designed to run Wikipedia and Wikipedia
>projects. Thus they accept our developers at least know what they are
>doing.
>
Sounds as if they have been flattened on their own irony board.

Ec


from_name: Andre Engels

body:
2006/4/19, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net>:

> Absolutely.  It's important to have broad principles like NPOV to guide
> all projects, but it's also important to recognize that not all projects
> will have the same priorities as Wikipedia.  For most of Wikisource NPOV
> is meaningless, as is the ability of downstream users to modify the
> material.  If the material is modified it is no longer the same
> material.  We can permit editing, translating and other commentary, and
> that will be subject to the usual rules for NPOV and modifiability, but
> unless there is a clear recognition of an inviolable source text it is
> all meaningless.  When a vandal wanted change a string of digits in the
> middle of "Pi to 1,000,000 places" on Wikisource I suppose it could be
> explained in terms of the right to modify, but the result was no longer pi.

I don't think the difference with Wikipedia is as large as you state
here. Sure, one can rewrite a Wikipedia article and still have an
encyclopedia article, but one can also easily make small changes that
are simply incorrect. Someone who changes the digits of pi in
wikisource isn't that much different from someone who changes an
article on Wikipedia to state that Hitler was born in China. Do they
have the right to do that? I'm not sure. But someone is definitely
allowed to take a Wikipedia article, change it to say that Hitler was
born in China, and publish that under the GNU/FDL. Likewise, they have
the right to take the value of Pi from Wikisource, change it, and put
that on their website.

> Going out of our way to ensure that downstream users will be able to
> copy this material is ultimately an untenable position.  People must
> accept responsibility for their own actions.  We do well to warn them of
> possible problems, but we should have no obligation to hold their hands
> in the way that we would hold those of a child.  We can say that we have
> reasonable and supportable grounds for saying that a given document is
> in the public domain, or that it is covered by fair use (or dealing) in
> the server jurisdiction, and that we cannot vouch for its legal status
> in some other jurisdiction.  In saying this I make a specific statement
> that I do not consider public interest alone to be grounds for
> publishing most documents.

And here I disagree. The right to re-publish is at the heart of the
Wikimedia philosophy. It's very nice that you ensure you have the
right to republish (although I think "they haven't complained yet"
isn't exactly 'ensuring a right' - I strongly advise you to take
stricter guidelines), but Wikimedia was made for free material. Which
means that others have the right to republish. That that is under
different licenses - Wikipedia allows changing, but requires it to be
under the same license, Wikisource only requires that it may be copied
unchanged - is no problem. But if your material may not be reproduced
by others at all, I think you are not following the spirit of
Wikimedia.

> I don't know that a survey will accomplish anything.  I still think that
> dividing Wikisource into separate language communities was a big
> mistake; that's the one issue that most influenced me to drift away from
> it and back to where most of my time is now spent dealing with Wiktionary.

I find this a weird remark, because I think the decision to split
Wiktionary was even worse than the one to split Wikisource...

--
Andre Engels, andreengels at gmail.com
ICQ: 6260644  --  Skype: a_engels


subject: [WikiEN-l] Bounties for editors

body:
On 19/04/06, Elisabeth Bauer <elian at djini.de> wrote:
> What's the difference to
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bounty_board ? It seems like a
> duplicate.

Bounties are paid to the Foundation. "Now Hiring" pays the editors.
Also "Now Hiring" allows a wider range of tasks (taking photos, for
example).

Steve


subject: [Wikitech-l] Outage

body:
Another power failure at the colo today. I'm not too sure of details yet as this
happened in the middle of the night for me.

Admin log:
https://wikitech.leuksman.com/view/Server_admin_log#April_19

PowerMedium is very very very very very very sorry and blames the equipment
manufacturer; the defective equipment is apparently being replaced.

Note that the server that carries the data dump files is currently offline. If
we don't have it back real soon now I'll restart them on another server.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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from_name: Guy Chapman aka JzG

body:
On Tue, 18 Apr 2006 09:52:19 -0700, you wrote:

>Notice that WikiTruth is reprinting an attack article written about my
>little girl, and then ask yourself if this is good faith criticism or
>trollng.

I think that says all we need to know about them.  Since when has it
been appropriate to use pre-school children as a tool to attack their
parents?
Guy (JzG)
--
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG


from_name: Jay R. Ashworth

subject: [Wikitech-l] Cross-namespace templates

body:
On Wed, Apr 19, 2006 at 09:45:20AM +0200, Steve Bennett wrote:
> And to make this email about three separate things at once, it would
> be really nice if MediaWiki could be changed so that special variables
> displayed differently on template pages than on the page where the
> template is included. For example, if PAGENAME actually rendered as
> PAGENAME, rather than fa or welcome or whatever. Similarly, {{{1}}}
> could rendered as PARAMETER1... that might make templates a little
> easier to use and understand for novices.

I do want to toss my oar in on this one: would it be possible -- and
what would the pitfalls be -- to make the rendered version of the page
for a template's definition *not* render the template?

I can see that you'd have to put it on another page to see how it
rendered: perhaps the parser could special case it and show both the
code and the render?

Cheers,
-- jra
--
Jay R. Ashworth                                                jra at baylink.com
Designer                          Baylink                             RFC 2100
Ashworth & Associates        The Things I Think                        '87 e24
St Petersburg FL USA      http://baylink.pitas.com             +1 727 647 1274

     A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
     Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?

     A: Top-posting.
     Q: What is the most annoying thing on Usenet and in e-mail?


subject: [Wikitech-l] broken documentation links

body:
Ashar Voultoiz wrote:
> Brion Vibber wrote:
>> FYI, I tried running phpdoc over the current code and found it breaking the
>> memory limit of 256 megabytes I have set on my server.
>>
>> We might want to consider a new documentation parser that can handle our code. :)
>
> Hello,
>
> r13740 migrated trunk from phpdoc to doxygen, I even updated the
> mwdocgen.php.

Neat! Now being autogenerated daily at http://svn.wikimedia.org/doc/

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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from_name: Philip Welch

subject: [WikiEN-l] Indefinite block and desysopping by User:Danny

body:
On Apr 19, 2006, at 11:56 AM, Erik Moeller wrote:

> I have been a Wikipedian since 2001 and a MediaWiki developer since
> 2002. I was Chief Research Officer of the Foundation from May to
> August 2005....

Clearly a trusted good faith user...

> I have just been indefinitely blocked from the English Wikipedia, and
> desysopped, by user Danny, under the new nickname "Dannyisme", as an
> "Office Action" for alleged "reckless endangerment" which was not
> specified further. I have called Danny on the phone, but he said that
> he was not willing to discuss the issue, and that I should instead
> talk to the Foundation attorney instead. To my knowledge, this is the
> first time office authority has been used to indefinitely block and
> desysop a user.

Who has been kicked off Wikipedia due to an office action...

> ...There was no mention of WP:OFFICE in the edit summary or on the
> talk
> page. Danny did not apply the special Office template, {{office}}, nor
> did he use the "Dannyisme" account that he created for Foundation
> purposes, nor did he list the page on WP:OFFICE. Instead, he applied
> the regular {{protected}} template.
> Given that Danny has now more explicitly emphasized this distinction
> between his role as a Foundation employee and a regular wiki user, I
> assumed he was acting here as a normal sysop and editor, and
> unprotected the two pages...

...due to interfering with an office action that was not adequately
stated as such.

> I apologize if this action was perceived as "reckless", but I must
> emphasize that I was acting in good faith, and that I would much
> appreciate it if all office actions would be labeled as such.

Agreed. This seems like a simple misunderstanding, and I advise that
if the facts that Eric provides are correct, that he be reinstated in
full.

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


from_name: Jesse W

body:
As much as I don't want to get into this, and as much as I respect and
appreciate Danny's work answering the phones and handling complaints,
this is not right.

Further explanation *is needed*.

 From what I understand, Danny, wanting to keep things from being
unnecessarily dramatic, did not invoke the WP:OFFICE policy with
regards to [[Newsmax.com]] and [[Christopher Ruddy]], even though, in
fact, that was what was intended - someone had called the office, and
complained about the articles.  This is OK - although it is troubling
that Danny feels the WP:OFFICE policy can't be used whenever it is
needed.

What is not acceptable is to retroactively claim that the WP:OFFICE
policy *was* invoked, and to then desysop and ban Eloquence on that
basis.  That's plainly and simply wrong.  If it is required in some
case that an action by Danny not be reversed, we *have* a policy for
that.  If Danny does not use it, it's a justified assumption that the
action in question *can* be reversed, like any other action on the
'pedia, and immediate banning is not an acceptable response.

I urge that Jimbo, someone else from the Board, and/or Danny further
explain and/or apologize for this apparent mistake.  We have WP:OFFICE
for a reason.

Jesse Weinstein


subject: [Wikitech-l] Outage

body:
William Allen Simpson wrote:
> Also, you seem to have lost all routing and BGP announcements (at least as
> seen from here), although I had no problem getting DNS (presumably outside
> replication).  There's a single point of failure there.  There should have
> been failover to another cluster.

Routing/BGP is the colo's responsibility.

> While the main folks are fixing things (I assume they are very busy now),

Most things were fixed hours ago; nobody bothered to send out a message until I
woke up. :P

> could somebody else point me at documentation about the setup?

Various docs (not all outdated) on our setup:
https://wikitech.leuksman.com/view/Main_Page

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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from_name: geni

body:
On 4/18/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> Ben Yates wrote:
> > Sure, but none of their criticisms are about the developers; they're
> > all about the editors and admins.  Don't get me wrong -- I've read
> > through the site, and sometimes they seem like assholes -- but I think
> > that the question deserves serious thought: are attack sites like this
> > just a product of the huge wikipedia userbase, or are wikipedia's
> > problems severe enough that WikiTruth is an understandable response?
>
> Was me stepping into the Brian Peppers thing and saying that, yes, we
> will follow deletion policy and not have out-of-policy multiple votes
> wrong?

You in no way followed deletion policy. The previous votes applied to
a completely diffierent version. If you have a problem with deletion
policy in this respect take it up with the inclusionists.

--
geni


from_name: Sean Barrett

body:
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Erik Moeller stated for the record:

<snip>

> I have just been indefinitely blocked from the English Wikipedia, and
> desysopped, by user Danny, under the new nickname "Dannyisme", as an
> "Office Action" for alleged "reckless endangerment" which was not
> specified further. I have called Danny on the phone, but he said that
> he was not willing to discuss the issue, and that I should instead
> talk to the Foundation attorney instead. To my knowledge, this is the
> first time office authority has been used to indefinitely block and
> desysop a user.

<snip>

I have unblocked Eloquence on the English Wikipedia.  Blocking him was
clearly inappropriate.  Blocking him indefinitely was astoundingly
stupid.  Desysopping is equally insane, but resysopping him can wait for
the wheels to grind.

- --
 Sean Barrett     | I've had a perfectly wonderful evening.
 sean at epoptic.org | But this wasn't it. --Groucho Marx
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subject:
[Wikipedia-l] [WikiEN-l] Indefinite block and desysopping by
	User:Danny


from_name: Joakim Larsson

body:
maybe quite the same subject, this is a mail that I sent to the person
who have med commonist, but since h* hasn't replaied I maybe can post
my suggestions here to see if anybode can make somthing of it:
I don't know how hard this is to implant but I think it would a really
great function.

let me explain it in a couple of steps..

1. I open up an image list on my Wikipedia.
2. I download a bunch of pictures to a local folder on My computer
3. I load this folder int commonist
4. Now comes the new function, I chose the new alternative, move to commons
4.1 Move to commons ask me what laguage version I'm moving from
4.2 Commonist uses http://magnusmanske.de/wikipedia/commonshelper.php
or an own version of the same thing to fill in the same information
4.3 Commonist tells me if any of the files names exists on commons
(http://ln-s.net/+Sv may help)
5 I upload the files
6 Commonist or myself marks the files with {{NCT}} or {{NowCommms|changed name}}
7 optionally it would be cool if Commonist would know if I have
changed the files name after I loaded it into commonist and then
correct the links on the wikipedia, but I guess the two last functions
would mean that a bot account would be needed in some cases.

What do you say?
Sincerely
[[sv:Gr?n]]

2006/4/18, Brianna Laugher <brianna.laugher at gmail.com>:
> Since there are some really good tools being written lately, I thought
> I'd throw up a request for one. :) This one would be quite easy to
> make, I think. Just saves some typing. (I would like it for en.wp but
> I think it would be pretty easy to make for any language.wp.)
>
> Articles on Commons frequently have no contextual information - just a
> heading and images. Sometimes this is OK but usually short description
> blurbs and interwiki links would be better. The easiest way to make
> these is to find the en.wp article, copy the list of interwiki links,
> add the English interwiki link, then convert these to description tags
> and either leave just the article name as the description, or add the
> first sentence from the article.
>
> e.g. today I fixed up this:
> http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Arthur%27s_Seat&oldid=1728248
>
> The description tags look like this:
>
> {{en|This is where the first line of the article would go.}}
>
> not a far leap from [[en:article name]] at all, really. You can also
> link to the WP article in the description tag, or bold the subject, or
> do neither.
>
> Typically I only put the full description for English because I'm
> usually fixing up other people's articles, then I just put the article
> name for the other interwiki links _if it differs to the English
> name_. For example with species, quite a few wikis put them at the
> Latin binomial name (as does Commons), so I don't think it's necessary
> to list 50 "translations" of a word that already appears on the page.
>
> as an example see http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Alaskan_Malamute ,
> where I have only translated the labels that are not 'Alaskan
> Malamute' (in this case they are different scripts).
>
> Anyway does what I've described make sense? Basically I'd like to put
> in the name of the relevant en.wp article, and get out the description
> tags and interwiki links that I can paste right into my Commons
> article.
>
> Not at all urgent, of course...
>
> cheers,
> Brianna
>
>
> --
> "Mathematicians do it with Nobel's wife."
> _______________________________________________
> Commons-l mailing list
> Commons-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l
>


from_name: Jakob Voss

subject: [Foundation-l] Lost money

body:
Hi,

"The Wikimedia Foundation servers are currently experiencing technical
difficulties. [...] If you would like to help, please donate."

Ok, this happens regularly and we can live with it, luckily Wikimedia is
not a commercial company but mostly based on voluntary work, so let's
donate some money...

http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Fundraising

Unable to connect to 207.142.131.213

Uhm, the problem that people may like to donate when servers are down
but cannot do so when servers are down is known for ... years? Why is
wikimediafoundation.org still hosted at Wikimedia's own server
farm? It's only a small website isn't it? I bet the costs of moving to a
reliable, independent webhoster will easily pay off.

Maybe it's that Wikimedia Foundation does not need the money?

with a shake of the head,
Jakob


subject: [Foundation-l] Lost money


from_name: Tomer Chachamu

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Fund-raising suggestion

body:
On 4/18/06, Ian Tresman <it at knowledge.co.uk> wrote:
> At 20:49 18/04/2006, you wrote:
> >2006/4/18, Tomer Chachamu <the.r3m0t at gmail.com>:
> > > How can we prevent the advocate from knowing which side contained
> > the donor?
> > >
> > > Do we really want people to be able to pay to get an "express service"
> > > in the dispute resolution process?
> >
> >I don't think we do... At least I would not want anything that looks
> >like sponsor influence on content.
>
>
> I'm just saying that I would; and I guess that it doesn't matter if
> the advocate knows who the sponsor is, as it doesn't matter if an
> administrator or arbitrator knows who brings a regular case to their attention.

[Private chat with WikipeDian]
<R3m0t> hey, I heard you had a dispute - can you recommend an
advocate? I'm sick of this crackpot on [[Time Cube]]
<WikipeDian> well, Angela doesn't have any cases at the moment
([[WP:AVL]]) but you certainly shouldn't pick [[User:YAA]]
<WikipeDian> I heard that in the last ten cases, she only ruled in
favour of the sponsor four times!
<R3m0t> seriously? that's ridiculous

The advocate has a financial incentive to rule in favour of the
sponsor, even if the actual money is kept by Wikimedia.

> I just feel that my time can be better spend editing articles, rather
> than having spent 80% of my time arguing over them.

Maybe you can find some quieter articles. :)

Besides, does the advocate really get editorial control? That's very
unusual for us.

> And it can't hurt to try it out?

I think it could.


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Foundation-l] Lost money

body:
Jakob Voss wrote:
> Uhm, the problem that people may like to donate when servers are down
> but cannot do so when servers are down is known for ... years? Why is
> wikimediafoundation.org still hosted at Wikimedia's own server
> farm?

Because it will take a million years to get permission from the board to get
additional hosting. ;)

About the donation form issue, please see prior messages about the squid error
message.

> It's only a small website isn't it? I bet the costs of moving to a
> reliable, independent webhoster will easily pay off.

Ah, but if Wikipedia is down, the traffic requirements for it will be HUGE. So
you can't think of it as a "small website". When we previously tried mirroring
the donation page on Angela's site it simply collapsed under the weight very
shortly afterwards.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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subject: [Foundation-l] Lost money

body:
Jakob Voss wrote:
> Uhm, the problem that people may like to donate when servers are down
> but cannot do so when servers are down is known for ... years? Why is
> wikimediafoundation.org still hosted at Wikimedia's own server
> farm?

Because it will take a million years to get permission from the board to get
additional hosting. ;)

About the donation form issue, please see prior messages about the squid error
message.

> It's only a small website isn't it? I bet the costs of moving to a
> reliable, independent webhoster will easily pay off.

Ah, but if Wikipedia is down, the traffic requirements for it will be HUGE. So
you can't think of it as a "small website". When we previously tried mirroring
the donation page on Angela's site it simply collapsed under the weight very
shortly afterwards.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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subject: [Foundation-l] Lost money

body:
Jakob Voss wrote:
> Uhm, the problem that people may like to donate when servers are down
> but cannot do so when servers are down is known for ... years? Why is
> wikimediafoundation.org still hosted at Wikimedia's own server
> farm?

Because it will take a million years to get permission from the board to get
additional hosting. ;)

About the donation form issue, please see prior messages about the squid error
message.

> It's only a small website isn't it? I bet the costs of moving to a
> reliable, independent webhoster will easily pay off.

Ah, but if Wikipedia is down, the traffic requirements for it will be HUGE. So
you can't think of it as a "small website". When we previously tried mirroring
the donation page on Angela's site it simply collapsed under the weight very
shortly afterwards.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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subject: [Foundation-l] Lost money

body:
Jakob Voss wrote:
> Uhm, the problem that people may like to donate when servers are down
> but cannot do so when servers are down is known for ... years? Why is
> wikimediafoundation.org still hosted at Wikimedia's own server
> farm?

Because it will take a million years to get permission from the board to get
additional hosting. ;)

About the donation form issue, please see prior messages about the squid error
message.

> It's only a small website isn't it? I bet the costs of moving to a
> reliable, independent webhoster will easily pay off.

Ah, but if Wikipedia is down, the traffic requirements for it will be HUGE. So
you can't think of it as a "small website". When we previously tried mirroring
the donation page on Angela's site it simply collapsed under the weight very
shortly afterwards.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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from_name: Matt Brown

subject:
[WikiEN-l] [Foundation-l] Indefinite block and desysopping by
	User:Danny

body:
On 4/19/06, SPUI <drspui at gmail.com> wrote:
> None of this explains why the action that Eloquence was blocked for
> undoing was not marked as an office action.

I would presume simple human error until shown otherwise.

In fact, the whole affair smacks of error and misunderstanding, and I
would be surprised if there were much else in the way of motives
behind all of this.

-Matt


body:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
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John Lee stated for the record:

> Sean Barrett wrote:
>>
>>I have unblocked Eloquence on the English Wikipedia.  Blocking him was
>>clearly inappropriate.  Blocking him indefinitely was astoundingly
>>stupid.  Desysopping is equally insane, but resysopping him can wait for
>>the wheels to grind.
>>
>
> Danny reverted the block, but didn't use the OFFICE account (Dannyisme).
> This is getting interesting...
>
> John

I will not wheel-war, so I will not re-un-block Eloquence, but I firmly
stand by my characterizations of this action.  Regardless of any
WP:OFFICE issues involved, Eloquence is not a danger to the project;
blocking him and refusing to communicate is a stupid thing to do.

I eagerly wait an explanation of why Eloquence was indefinitely blocked.

- --
 Sean Barrett     | I've had a perfectly wonderful evening.
 sean at epoptic.org | But this wasn't it. --Groucho Marx
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from_name: MacGyverMagic/Mgm

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Why Wikipedia should not be a random collection of
	facts

body:
On 4/18/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:
> Actually I was thinking more along the lines of "Why trivia sections
> need to die"... not the stuff in them, but the existence of them as
> "piles of unsorted facts".

Piles of unassorted facts need to be sorted.


subject:
[Wikipedia-l] [Foundation-l] Indefinite block and desysopping
 by User:Danny

body:
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Patrick, Brad stated for the record:

> Greetings:
>
> I am the attorney for the Wikimedia Foundation in the US.  I work for
> the Board.  Among my responsibilities is keeping the Foundation out of
> legal trouble and responding to lawsuits, actual and threatened.  I have
> had a long chat with Eric Moeller about the circumstances that resulted
> in his ban (since reverted by someone Being Bold).  I also believe that
> the misunderstanding, although in good faith, still presented a risk to
> the Foundation.
>
> The issue of blocked articles is a complex one, and in many instances
> can be the visible result of careful consideration on the part of
> Foundation board members, staff, and other admins/bureaucrats/sysops who
> have knowledge of the facts and circumstances.  Often the community at
> large will not have any idea what the facts and underlying
> considerations are.  Not everything that involves Wikipedia is public,
> nor should it be.  The typical user or admin doesn't have all the pieces
> of the puzzle.  Don't let hubris get the better of you.
>
> There may be those of you who have yet to experience the American legal
> system in any fashion, save for a movie or two.  Dealing with lawsuits
> is what I do for a living.  Avoiding them is also what I do for a
> living.  My job is to make sure that the Foundation has the best legal
> advice and best options open to it to keep things running smoothly, and
> to not land in court unless all other avenues have been exhausted.
>
> The WP:OFFICE policy is still in its infancy.  People will challenge it
> through their words and actions.  Everyone is entitled to his or her
> opinion.  But I believe everyone who believes in the future success and
> sustainability of the project must also recognize the need for judicious
> use of confidentiality at the Foundation level.  The Foundation officers
> and Board members have a fiduciary obligation to the organization, as I
> do as a lawyer for my client.
>
> Certain members of the community (and notably, not Mr. Moeller) have
> expressed dissatisfaction about WP:OFFICE and its use.  There is a
> healthy debate yet to be had about it.  We can have that debate, but I
> also have to make clear that the Foundation's obligations are greater
> than loyalty to any one user.  Even someone with the history of
> contributions to Mr. Moeller.
>
> -BradPatrick

Thank you for your explanation.  As an Arbiter, I have some slight idea
of how ... interesting ... situations can become, and I full support of
the OFFICE policy as a tool to use in handling those situations.

Can you explain the reasons why Eloquence must be prohibited from ever
editing the English Wikipedia again?  Danny is apparently using OFFICE
to justify what looks like a lifetime ban (something even the
Arbitration Committee cannot impose) that he refused to explain.

I can understand that the Foundation's obligations are greater than
loyalty to any one user.  Is it the case that the Foundation cannot
explain why this one user is being permanently banned with no
explanation of why he must be sacrificed?

- --
 Sean Barrett     | I've had a perfectly wonderful evening.
 sean at epoptic.org | But this wasn't it. --Groucho Marx
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body:
On Apr 19, 2006, at 1:47 PM, Katefan0 wrote:
> I think that lately Danny has not been using the OFFICE tag because
> people
> tend to raise a fuss over things protected under this specific policy,
> and
> more publicity to/furor over an issue that's already very sensitive is
> a
> thorny thing to deal with.  My guess, anyway.

Something that needs to be clarified.  *Editing an article*, even
removing most of it, is something that any editor can do, and certainly
something that Danny, if he gets a phone call that requires it, should
feel free to do without involving WP:OFFICE.  *Protecting an article*
is *NOT*.  We have a specific set of reasons why an article can be
protected, and NPOV issues *are not one of them*.  If responding to a
phone call requires that an article be protected for NPOV issues -
Danny or whoever does it needs to cite a policy, for example,
WP:OFFICE.

Protection is listed on a central log for a reason.  It's *not* a
quiet, insignificant action to take - it should be assumed that
protecting a page will generate some amount of publicity/furror -
that's the nature of it.

Unless Jimbo or the Board wish to amend the Office Actions policy to
state that anytime Danny protects a page it is an OFFICE action,
protection without citing the OFFICE policy is simply wrong,
"sensitive" situations or not.  Fix the policy.

Jesse Weinstein


subject: [Wikitech-l] SVN problem - Same folder twice

body:
Platonides wrote:
> Here it is. At the tags folder
> svn://svn.wikimedia.org/svnroot/mediawiki/tags there are two folders with
> the same name. initial (from revision 8115) and Initial (from r1082).

Those are different names.

> The way it's now blocks checkouts to cas insensitive FS.

Don't check out the entire repo, that's a waste of time, disk space, etc. Check
out specific bits.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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from_name: Ben Garney

subject: [Wikitech-l] broken documentation links

body:
On 4/19/06, Rob Church <robchur at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 19/04/06, Tels <nospam-abuse at bloodgate.com> wrote:
>
> > It doesn't say what it is for, or what values it could have, or whatever.
> > Almost every member or class definition I looked at looks like this,
> > circulare references between files but nowhere any real doc beyond "it
> > exist and is called foo".
> >
> > Since at least for members there are usually comments (like for mTitle),
> > should't the autogenerated doc pick them up and display them somehow?
>
> As Avar said in a previous message; the documentation is limited in
> terms of the original code; if the comments to document it were not
> there, then the generated documentation will be sparse.
>

In my experience, this is a good time to mention that one of the best
ways to learn a codebase is to go in and document it, so if there are
any wanna-be MediaWiki masters out there... :)

(It is also possible that doxygen isn't picking up the member
comments, though. Running doxygen locally and consulting the log it
generates should give some clues, as will making sure that the
comments are formatted in a way that will get picked up, although
phpDoc and dOxygen are pretty friendly towards documetation styles.)

--
Ben Garney
Torque Technologies Director
GarageGames.Com, Inc.


from_name: Fruggo

body:
I believe Walter is right when he contradicts that there is a group of
admins that act against the wishes of the community. When the first plans of
a Dutch Wikimedia organisation were made I contributed to the discussions on
the Dutch Wikimedia website and I went to a (the first?) meeting of people
who were interested. It soon occurred to me that some people had very strong
opinions on forming an organisation, and there was not many room for
dissident opinions. I got the impression that many people thought that the
organisation could/should have a say about the Dutch Wikipedia. I didn't
like the way some people (who were intent on becoming a board member) seemed
to force their opinion on others, so I backed out of the development of the
organisation. I believe that the way dissident opinions were handled is now
an important source of the fear of many Dutch Wikipedians that the Dutch
foundation and association (but mostly the foundation, since that is the
least democratic) will not listen to the Dutch community.

-Fruggo

Walter Vermeir schreef:

>
> > I think the biggest problem is that a certain group of Dutch moderators
> take
> > decisions for example to block someone for a long time, without being
> > interested in the opinion of the community. Something there is some
> admin
> > power abuse done by that specific group of moderators. Now the case is
> that
> [cut]
>
> The Dutch Wikipedia is not paradise. But you give the impression that
> there is a group of admins on the Dutch Wikipedia who are behaving
> strongly against the wishes of the community. And that those are now
> also controlling those new chapters.
>
> This is highly incorrect.
>


from_name: Ilmari Karonen

subject: [WikiEN-l] Georgia/Victoria

body:
Steve Bennett wrote:
>
> Me too. Or (and I expect flames for this :)) if I see a redlink to an
> article that actually exists, I generally create the redlink and make
> it redirect, rather than simply fixing the link. I figure that no
> mistake is original enough that it won't be repeated, possibly with
> more serious consequences, like duplicate articles getting created...

Or, in some cases better yet, create the redirect and _then_ fix the link.

It really depends on the type of the mistake. Simple typos and obvious
spelling mistakes I just fix.  Arguably _not_ having redirects for these
is better, since that way the red link makes the typo stand out.

For less obvious mistakes, like missing diacritics, capitalization or
pluralization errors, missing or superfluous "the", or wrong regional
spelling of words in official titles, I create the redirect and then
possibly fix the link.  This involves deciding whether the redirect is
actually incorrect, or just a reasonable if nonstandard alternative.
Sometimes I even proactively create redirects for variants no-one has
tried yet, but which someone some day might.

The same goes for unusual spellings where it's clear the person making
the link didn't know the correct spelling.  One often finds these on new
pages patrol when someone creates a duplicate article because they
either saw the redlink or, perhaps more commonly, tried to search for
the incorrect spelling.  (One that sticks to my mind is "Inagodadavida",
which I successfully caught and redirected to [[In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida]].)

--
Ilmari Karonen


from_name: Julian Rodriguez

subject: [Foundation-l] WikiTimeLine

body:
Hi, I'm new here. I was trying to develop an idea on the spanish
wikipedia discussions, but they sent me here, stating that this could be
the best medium for such idea.
So, please check out http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiTimeLine and
tell me what you think!


subject: [Foundation-l] WikiTimeLine


body:
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Kelly Martin stated for the record:

> Danny has a talk page, he has email, and he has a phone number, all
> well published.  USE THEM.
>
> Kelly

- From Eloquence's original message: "I have called Danny on the phone,
but he said that he was not willing to discuss the issue, and that I
should instead talk to the Foundation attorney instead."

"'Shut up,' he explained" should be the punchline of a joke, not
standard operating procedure.

- --
 Sean Barrett     | I've had a perfectly wonderful evening.
 sean at epoptic.org | But this wasn't it. --Groucho Marx
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from_name: William Allen Simpson

subject: [Wikitech-l] Outage

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:
> Another power failure at the colo today. I'm not too sure of details yet as this
> happened in the middle of the night for me.
>
> Admin log:
> https://wikitech.leuksman.com/view/Server_admin_log#April_19
>
> PowerMedium is very very very very very very sorry and blames the equipment
> manufacturer; the defective equipment is apparently being replaced.
>
> Note that the server that carries the data dump files is currently offline. If
> we don't have it back real soon now I'll restart them on another server.
>
Happened in the middle of the night for me, too, but I happened to be
editing at the time.  (When I'm making template changes, I try to do them
at the lowest load, so they don't interfere.)

 From outside, it appeared to be on the hour (within seconds)!  What task are
they doing that might have tripped the circuit?

Also, you seem to have lost all routing and BGP announcements (at least as
seen from here), although I had no problem getting DNS (presumably outside
replication).  There's a single point of failure there.  There should have
been failover to another cluster.

While the main folks are fixing things (I assume they are very busy now),
could somebody else point me at documentation about the setup?


subject: [Foundation-l] Lost money

body:
Walter Vermeir wrote:
> Is it really necessary to provide the normal donation form? Just put on
> the error-page itself ( PayPal: donation at wikipedia.org ) and if that is
> possible make from the email address a link to the website of PayPal to
> a page where the can donate to the Wikimedia Foundation.

Please see prior discussion on this subject.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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subject: [Foundation-l] Lost money

body:
Walter Vermeir wrote:
> Is it really necessary to provide the normal donation form? Just put on
> the error-page itself ( PayPal: donation at wikipedia.org ) and if that is
> possible make from the email address a link to the website of PayPal to
> a page where the can donate to the Wikimedia Foundation.

Please see prior discussion on this subject.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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subject: [Foundation-l] Lost money

body:
Walter Vermeir wrote:
> Is it really necessary to provide the normal donation form? Just put on
> the error-page itself ( PayPal: donation at wikipedia.org ) and if that is
> possible make from the email address a link to the website of PayPal to
> a page where the can donate to the Wikimedia Foundation.

Please see prior discussion on this subject.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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subject: [Foundation-l] Lost money

body:
Walter Vermeir wrote:
> Is it really necessary to provide the normal donation form? Just put on
> the error-page itself ( PayPal: donation at wikipedia.org ) and if that is
> possible make from the email address a link to the website of PayPal to
> a page where the can donate to the Wikimedia Foundation.

Please see prior discussion on this subject.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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from_name: Patrick, Brad

body:
Greetings:

I am the attorney for the Wikimedia Foundation in the US.  I work for
the Board.  Among my responsibilities is keeping the Foundation out of
legal trouble and responding to lawsuits, actual and threatened.  I have
had a long chat with Eric Moeller about the circumstances that resulted
in his ban (since reverted by someone Being Bold).  I also believe that
the misunderstanding, although in good faith, still presented a risk to
the Foundation.

The issue of blocked articles is a complex one, and in many instances
can be the visible result of careful consideration on the part of
Foundation board members, staff, and other admins/bureaucrats/sysops who
have knowledge of the facts and circumstances.  Often the community at
large will not have any idea what the facts and underlying
considerations are.  Not everything that involves Wikipedia is public,
nor should it be.  The typical user or admin doesn't have all the pieces
of the puzzle.  Don't let hubris get the better of you.

There may be those of you who have yet to experience the American legal
system in any fashion, save for a movie or two.  Dealing with lawsuits
is what I do for a living.  Avoiding them is also what I do for a
living.  My job is to make sure that the Foundation has the best legal
advice and best options open to it to keep things running smoothly, and
to not land in court unless all other avenues have been exhausted.

The WP:OFFICE policy is still in its infancy.  People will challenge it
through their words and actions.  Everyone is entitled to his or her
opinion.  But I believe everyone who believes in the future success and
sustainability of the project must also recognize the need for judicious
use of confidentiality at the Foundation level.  The Foundation officers
and Board members have a fiduciary obligation to the organization, as I
do as a lawyer for my client.

Certain members of the community (and notably, not Mr. Moeller) have
expressed dissatisfaction about WP:OFFICE and its use.  There is a
healthy debate yet to be had about it.  We can have that debate, but I
also have to make clear that the Foundation's obligations are greater
than loyalty to any one user.  Even someone with the history of
contributions to Mr. Moeller.

-BradPatrick

Bradford A. Patrick, Esq.
Fowler White Boggs Banker
501 E. Kennedy Blvd.
Suite 1700
Tampa, FL  33602-5239
bpatrick at fowlerwhite.com

-----Original Message-----
From: foundation-l-bounces at wikimedia.org
[mailto:foundation-l-bounces at wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Erik Moeller
Sent: Wednesday, April 19, 2006 2:57 PM
To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List; English Wikipedia;
wikipedia-l at wikimedia.org
Subject: [Foundation-l] Indefinite block and desysopping by User:Danny

I have been a Wikipedian since 2001 and a MediaWiki developer since
2002. I was Chief Research Officer of the Foundation from May to August
2005. I initiated two of Wikimedia's projects, Wikinews and the
Wikimedia Commons, and have made vital contributions to both. I have
made roughly 15,000 edits to the English Wikipedia, and uploaded about
15,000 files to Wikimedia Commons. A list of my overall contributions
can be found at

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Eloquence

and the linked to pages; this does not include my numerous international
activities such as conference speeches, as well as my book and articles
about Wikipedia. I have never been blocked before, nor have I ever been
subject to an Arbitration Committee ruling (in fact, I was one of
Jimmy's original suggestions for the first ArbCom, and one of the people
who proposed that very committee).

I have just been indefinitely blocked from the English Wikipedia, and
desysopped, by user Danny, under the new nickname "Dannyisme", as an
"Office Action" for alleged "reckless endangerment" which was not
specified further. I have called Danny on the phone, but he said that he
was not willing to discuss the issue, and that I should instead talk to
the Foundation attorney instead. To my knowledge, this is the first time
office authority has been used to indefinitely block and desysop a user.

What happened?

Yesterday, Danny radically shortened and protected two pages,
[[Newsmax.com]] and [[Christopher Ruddy]]. The protection summary was
"POV qualms" (nothing else), and there was only the following brief
comment on Talk:NewsMax.com:

"This article has been stubbed and protected pending resolution of POV
issues. Danny 19:26, 17 April 2006 (UTC)"

There was no mention of WP:OFFICE in the edit summary or on the talk
page. Danny did not apply the special Office template, {{office}}, nor
did he use the "Dannyisme" account that he created for Foundation
purposes, nor did he list the page on WP:OFFICE. Instead, he applied the
regular {{protected}} template.

Given that Danny has now more explicitly emphasized this distinction
between his role as a Foundation employee and a regular wiki user, I
assumed he was acting here as a normal sysop and editor, and unprotected
the two pages, with a brief reference to the protection policy. I also
asked Danny, on [[Talk:NewsMax.com]], to make it explicit whether the
protection was under WP:OFFICE. I would not have reprotected, of course,
if he had simply said that they were, and left it at that.

I apologize if this action was perceived as "reckless", but I must
emphasize that I was acting in good faith, and that I would much
appreciate it if all office actions would be labeled as such. I was
under the impression that this was the case given past actions. In any
case, I think that the indefinite block and desysopping is very much an
overreaction, and would like to hereby publicly appeal to Danny, the
community and the Board (since Danny's authority is above the
ArbCom) to restore my editing privileges as well as my sysop status. I
pledge to be more careful in these matters in the future.

Thanks for reading,

Erik
_______________________________________________
foundation-l mailing list
foundation-l at wikimedia.org
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

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subject: [Foundation-l] Indefinite block and desysopping by User:Danny


subject:
[Wikipedia-l] [Foundation-l] Indefinite block and desysopping
	by User:Danny


from_name: Conrad Dunkerson

body:
* Sean Barrett wrote:

> I have unblocked Eloquence on the English Wikipedia.  Blocking him was
> clearly inappropriate.  Blocking him indefinitely was astoundingly
> stupid.  Desysopping is equally insane, but resysopping him can wait for
> the wheels to grind.

Oi!

Before this gets any uglier could everyone agree to stop making nasty
comments and pointing fingers?

One 'bad action' (if it was such) should not merit an indefinite block and
de-sysoping without discussion.

One 'unwarranted de-sysoping and block' (if it was such) should not merit
insults about "stupid" and "insane".

Somewhere along the line tempers frayed and questionable action or actions
were taken. Making more snap judgements and nasty comments can only cause
the situation to get worse.

I'd like to hear from 'the office' / 'board' / 'Jimbo' / 'Danny' / whoever
what the rationale behind the initial block / de-sysoping was.