body:
Phil Boswell wrote:
> "grm_wnr" <grmwnr at gmail.com> wrote in message
> news:43DEE795.7070101 at gmail.com...
>
>> Bryan Derksen wrote:
>>
>>>  DRV is only particularly useful for retrieving deleted stuff since you
>>> can't make an AfD nomination for an article that doesn't exist.
>>>
>> Question: Why not? If DRV is so poisonous, why not make it so that someone
>> unhappy with a deleted article just has to convince one of the ~800 admins
>> to give the matter the benefit of the doubt and undelete, then list on AFD
>> again.
>>
>
> Because then the admin who did that would receive a sh*tst*rm of complaint
> about "going against process", be listed for "de-adminning", have screeds of
> hate written about them on [[WP:AN/I]]...and might even be blocked for
> [[WP:POINT]] and multitudinous other "sins"...whilst the offending article
> was torn down and the earth under it salted and radiated to prevent anything
> like it ever sullying the face of the Wikipedia again.
>
> Need I go on?
>
I didn't put tis forward as an enticement to IAR. I think it would be a
better process than we currently have. Why not make it one? Frankly, if
you really mean this, we can stop this discussion right now because that
would mean that any change whatsoever is impossible.

grm_wnr

P.S. What's so offensive about "storm"?


list: foundation-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Foundation-l] Re: [Wikitech-l] Password security

body:
Robert Scott Horning wrote:
> For those users who do have e-mail addresses for their accounts, were
> there any provisions done to try and send a simple e-mail to those users
> asking them to update their accounts with stronger passwords? Especially
> sysops?

For sysops I could track down, yes.

> While I support the actions of Brian to try and strengthen the passwords
> for user accounts, some internal notice should have been given in more
> widely read forums, of which Wikitech-l and Foundation-l are not really
> widely read forums for the typical Wikimedian.  Actually, I don't know
> of a good place, although there are several places that would work to at
> least notify a few more people than simply the e-mail lists.

I can't predict every possibly place people might read on hundreds of wikis,
hence my announcement on three mailing lists and the English Wikipedia Village
Pump. From there people are, I assume, still copying relevant announcements to
their local haunts.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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body:
Robert Scott Horning wrote:
> For those users who do have e-mail addresses for their accounts, were
> there any provisions done to try and send a simple e-mail to those users
> asking them to update their accounts with stronger passwords? Especially
> sysops?

For sysops I could track down, yes.

> While I support the actions of Brian to try and strengthen the passwords
> for user accounts, some internal notice should have been given in more
> widely read forums, of which Wikitech-l and Foundation-l are not really
> widely read forums for the typical Wikimedian.  Actually, I don't know
> of a good place, although there are several places that would work to at
> least notify a few more people than simply the e-mail lists.

I can't predict every possibly place people might read on hundreds of wikis,
hence my announcement on three mailing lists and the English Wikipedia Village
Pump. From there people are, I assume, still copying relevant announcements to
their local haunts.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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list: wikimedia-l

body:
Robert Scott Horning wrote:
> For those users who do have e-mail addresses for their accounts, were
> there any provisions done to try and send a simple e-mail to those users
> asking them to update their accounts with stronger passwords? Especially
> sysops?

For sysops I could track down, yes.

> While I support the actions of Brian to try and strengthen the passwords
> for user accounts, some internal notice should have been given in more
> widely read forums, of which Wikitech-l and Foundation-l are not really
> widely read forums for the typical Wikimedian.  Actually, I don't know
> of a good place, although there are several places that would work to at
> least notify a few more people than simply the e-mail lists.

I can't predict every possibly place people might read on hundreds of wikis,
hence my announcement on three mailing lists and the English Wikipedia Village
Pump. From there people are, I assume, still copying relevant announcements to
their local haunts.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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body:
Robert Scott Horning wrote:
> For those users who do have e-mail addresses for their accounts, were
> there any provisions done to try and send a simple e-mail to those users
> asking them to update their accounts with stronger passwords? Especially
> sysops?

For sysops I could track down, yes.

> While I support the actions of Brian to try and strengthen the passwords
> for user accounts, some internal notice should have been given in more
> widely read forums, of which Wikitech-l and Foundation-l are not really
> widely read forums for the typical Wikimedian.  Actually, I don't know
> of a good place, although there are several places that would work to at
> least notify a few more people than simply the e-mail lists.

I can't predict every possibly place people might read on hundreds of wikis,
hence my announcement on three mailing lists and the English Wikipedia Village
Pump. From there people are, I assume, still copying relevant announcements to
their local haunts.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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list: wikien-l

from_name: Tony Sidaway

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Being able to see an article whose undeletion is being
	actively discussed

body:
On 1/31/06, Tony Sidaway <f.crdfa at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 1/31/06, Tony Sidaway <f.crdfa at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I've also relisted an article on Gazeebow Unit, a Newfoundland rap
> > group.  The article was deleted in a previous nomination on a very low
> > vote, despite the fact that the sole delete voter gave ample evidence
> > of national notability.
>
> I meant, of course, the sole "keep" voter.
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Gazeebow_Unit_%28second_nomination%29
>

As I expected, despite there being no consensus to delete in the
second AfD, that AfD was prematurely deleted and the AfD was closed
prematurely.

DRV is out of control.  They're now interfering with open deletion
discussions on AfD.


body:
On 1/31/06, Tony Sidaway <f.crdfa at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 1/31/06, Tony Sidaway <f.crdfa at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On 1/31/06, Tony Sidaway <f.crdfa at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > I've also relisted an article on Gazeebow Unit, a Newfoundland rap
> > > group.  The article was deleted in a previous nomination on a very low
> > > vote, despite the fact that the sole delete voter gave ample evidence
> > > of national notability.
> >
> > I meant, of course, the sole "keep" voter.
> >
> >
> >
>
> As I expected, despite there being no consensus to delete in the
> second AfD, that AfD was prematurely deleted and the AfD was closed
> prematurely.

The AfD was prematurely *closed*, I meant to say.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Gazeebow_Unit_%28second_nomination%29


subject: [WikiEN-l] Policy on putting email addresses on wiki pages

body:
On 1/31/06, Tom Steinberg <tom at tomsteinberg.co.uk> wrote:
>
> Is it permissable to put email addresses on wikipedia, if they're
> already public?
>

Of course it is! How on earth are people to be able to communicate
with one another if their email addresses are hidden?

I profess profound distaste for the practice of concealing, mangling,
and distorting email addresses.  I myself have had an email address on
my userpage for well over a year and can count the amount of spam that
has gotten though on the fingers of one hand, so there's no excuse.


from_name: Steve Bennett

subject: [WikiEN-l] The deletion paradox

body:
Ok, I agree that "deletion" is not really what we want to do. But
somehow we want to separate these stubs from the good stuff. Lots of
proposals have been made on how to do this - I suggest we actually
implement one.

For example, we could hide stubs from the "outside world" and only
have them appear when a user tries to create an article on the topic.
Or we could just implement a change in wording: "There is no article
on this topic. However there is a stub, which we invite you to expand
if possible."

Please don't think I'm knocking our content. If out of a million
articles we have half a million useful ones, we're doing very well.
But we do a disservice to ourselves if we claim publicly to have a
million articles.

Hmm.

Steve

On 1/31/06, Tony Sidaway <f.crdfa at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 1/30/06, Steve Bennett <stevage at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Anyway, the vastness of crap on Wikipedia
>
> In order to test the truth of the above assertion, I pressed "random
> article" ten times and wrote about what I saw.
>
> The results were as I expected.  Out of ten articles, not one that I
> would be completely happy about deleting.  They could all use
> improvement, some more than others.  I contend that the phrase "the
> vastness of crap on Wikipedia" is extremely misleading.  We have a
> quality product and the world is beating a path to our door to sample
> it.  Enough breastbeating! We should be proud.
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AirTrain_JFK
>
> Rather nice article about a rapid transit system in Queens.
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claycomo%2C_Missouri
>
> Article about a small village in Missouri.  Extensive use of census information
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_J._Skorton
>
> Biography of the President of the University of Iowa.
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jatayu
>
> Disambiguation page.  Leads to two good short articles and one
> single-sentence stub.  I added an appropriate stub template to the
> stub.
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/544
>
> A historical link page about the year 544 AD. Sadly it is lacking in
> any information about what was happening outside Europe and the
> Northern Mediterranean area.
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantis_Pattern
>
> A well written and compendiuous article about a feature of the
> Japanese cartoon series: Transformers
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narail_District
>
> A stub about a district of Bangladesh
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Clemens
>
> A brief biographical article about a professional basketball player
> who retired in 1976.
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Naples
>
> It does what it says on the tin.
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volksmusik
>
> An article about a German folk music form.
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


subject: [WikiEN-l] Here's an interesting one

body:
On 1/30/06, Rob <gamaliel8 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> If someone disagrees with a deletion result, then lists it on DRV, this is
> generally (with the exception of vanity self-promoters, trolls, and the
> like) accepted as a good faith effort to improve the encyclopedia.
>
> If someone disagrees with a keep result, then lists it on DRV, this is seen
> by many as an "abuse of process" and an effort to "get the result he
> wanted".

I don't think there's any problem with that, although I'd prefer to
see such a discussion take place inn a second noimination, on AfD, not
DRV.  The reason for this is that DRV is not consensus-based;
discussions are effectively votes and a tally is made.  At the end,
the decision is overturned if there is a 75% vote to overturn it.  The
AfD process, by contrast, is much more in keeping with the way we try
to run Wikipedia.

There are other problems with DRV, but I am addressing those with some success.


subject: [WikiEN-l] The deletion paradox

body:
On 1/31/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
>
> In many many cases there is a reason to delete a 2-sentence unverified
> stub.  We need to be extremely aggressive about doing so when the
> article in question contains negative claims about any living person or
> existing company.

Actually that has long been one of our criteria for speedy deletion,
and I believe that it has always been implemented aggressively.


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Angela

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] requisites for opening wikipedia in a language not
	listed

body:
> I would like to know which are the pre-requisites for opening a wikipedia in
> a language not covered yet.

Not pre-requisites exactly, but there is a proposed policy on this at
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposed_policy_for_wikis_in_new_languages

Angela.


subject: [WikiEN-l] The deletion paradox

body:
On 1/31/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:

> I am always dismayed when I see a good editor wikifying and tagging an
> absolute crap article, rather than blanking/radically stubbing it (at a
> minimum) or deleting it (often would be better).

It can be really hard to tell the difference when you're not familiar
with the subject matter. Another reason why chants of "don't just
report the bad articles, fix them!" aren't helpful - if you assume
that whatever is in the article is mostly correct but just needs
reformatting, you end up making matters worse.

In my recent sample, I changed an "External Links" section to
"Sources". Then something bothered me, I ended up checking out the
links, and realised that the whole article was a puff piece for a
probably non-notable Indian journalist. But I really have no expertise
in determining whether someone is notable, or whether writing for the
Times in India is significant or not. So I tagged the thing
{{POV-check}} and left it.

I wouldn't have felt comfortable blanking/deleting the article.
Assuming that the guy *was* notable, all it really needed was a slight
de-POV tweak and some misleading statements removed.

Steve


from_name: David Gerard

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: note David Gerard's just placed on [[WT:AFD]]

body:
>> Now to comment on your suggestion: I think this is fundamentally
>> unworkable. Articles can change rapidly,

>Yes, some articles do change rapidly.  Some articles change *very
>slowly* (like one substantive edit per 6 months, or even slower).  This
>method is not appropriate for articles which are not stable.  But the
>vast majority of Wikipedia articles *are* stable.  When we've got all
>the stable articles fully referenced, we can work out a way to handle
>the last 2% or so that change quickly.  This is not a issue of
>feasibility, just a ~2% limit on the domain for which this applies.

Yes. We have the numbers to prove this (see earlier posts to this
list). Almost all articles are uncontroversial. (A large proportion of
articles don't even have a talk page yet.)

Although intense discussion focuses on the small percentage of
troublesome articles, we must always keep in mind that these are the
*exceptions*. And that edge cases make bad law.

(The last is the problem with AFD - almost all deletions are
uncontroversial, it's the rest that make it troublesome.)

- d.


body:
Does bad faith matter for deleting or keeping an article? I mean,
regardless of what awful motives someone has, at the end of the day
we should just delete articles we don't want, and keep articles we do,
right?

This is my naive, un-AfD-contaminated optimism here :)

Steve

On 1/31/06, Tony Sidaway <f.crdfa at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 1/31/06, Tony Sidaway <f.crdfa at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I've also relisted an article on Gazeebow Unit, a Newfoundland rap
> > group.  The article was deleted in a previous nomination on a very low
> > vote, despite the fact that the sole delete voter gave ample evidence
> > of national notability.
>
> I meant, of course, the sole "keep" voter.
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Gazeebow_Unit_%28second_nomination%29
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


subject: [WikiEN-l] Here's an interesting one

body:
On 1/30/06, Rob <gamaliel8 at gmail.com> wrote:
> If someone disagrees with a keep result, then lists it on DRV, this is seen
> by many as an "abuse of process" and an effort to "get the result he
> wanted".
>
> It seems that if one type of result can be reviewed and possibly overturned,
> what's wrong with reviewing another type of result?  What's the difference?

Wikipedia suffers more from an incorrect deletion than from an
incorrect keep. Sort of how society suffers more from the execution of
an innocent person than the incorrect non-execution of a guilty one.

More specifically: Wikipedia suffers from having vast numbers of crap
articles. It doesn't suffer a great deal from having a single crap
article, if that article is not a copyvio or libel.

Steve


from_name: Vijay

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Error while imporing wikipedia en dump file

body:
Hello there,

First off pardon me if this is not the right list for posting this question.
I am new to wikipedia mailing list.

I have just downloaded the wikipedia en dump and am trying to cofigure
wikipedia on my local server. I have mysql and php on windows 2003 server. I
installed mediawiki and have extracted the wikipedia en dump file which gave
me an xml file (4 GB).

When I tried importing the dump to mysql using importDump.php, the process
started fine. But when the record count reached 18600, the process stopped
with the following error. I wonder what could be the problem? Any help in
this regard is highly appreciated.

By the way, the wikipedia dump file is the current version and not the
complete one. The zip file is around 900 MB in size.

Here are the last few lines from the output
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
18400 (23.2640009615 pages/sec 23.2614722657 revs/sec)
18500 (23.2941692512 pages/sec 23.2916509627 revs/sec)
18600 (23.3273356919 pages/sec 23.3248273763 revs/sec)
Content-type: text/html
X-Powered-By: PHP/4.3.9

XML import parse failure at line 1672638, col 154 (byte 145084928; ""): no
eleme
nt found
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Thanks,
Az


from_name: jkelly at fas.harvard.edu

subject: [WikiEN-l] Update: Floricic vs Wikimedia Deutschland e.V.

body:
  English Google search results for "Allen Floricic" (825 hits)

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=%22Alen+Floricic%22

  English Google search results for "Franck Floricic" (105 hits)

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=%22Franck+Floricic%22&btnG=Search

Quoting Mathias Schindler <neubau at presroi.de>:

> There is one question left and I would love to see some research from
> you. Ivo Floricic, the owner of the trademark "Tron" and father of Boris
> Floricic (aka. [[en:Tron (hacker)]] claims that he thinks that he is the
> only one with the name "Floricic" in Germany and these special
> circumstances would somehow violate his rights if wikipedia is
> mentioning the full name of Tron.
>
> Does anyone know any other person by the name of Floricic?
>
> According to Google, there is an artist "Alen Floricic" from Croatia who
> might be notable (if he is notable, it would be nice to consider taking
> the CV from certain sites and write an article about him). There is also
> a professor of linguistics, Franck Floricic from France.


from_name: SCZenz

subject: [WikiEN-l] Here's an interesting one

body:
On 1/31/06, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 1/31/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> > Steve Bennett wrote:
> > > Wikipedia suffers more from an incorrect deletion than from an
> > > incorrect keep. Sort of how society suffers more from the execution of
> > > an innocent person than the incorrect non-execution of a guilty one.
> >
> > I don't agree with your perception of the balance.  An incorrect
> > deletion of an article is nearly nothing to us -- it can be undeleted
> > instantly by any admin.
>
> No it can't. Or do you wish to rethink the entire role of admins?

If it's a clearly incorrect deletion, it can be undone by any admin.
In my humble opinion this should be accompanied with a notice
somewhere so the decision can be reviewed, but that's different from
saying it can't be done.

SCZenz


from_name: sannse

body:
Tony Sidaway wrote:

> I profess profound distaste for the practice of concealing, mangling,
> and distorting email addresses.  I myself have had an email address on
> my userpage for well over a year and can count the amount of spam that
> has gotten though on the fingers of one hand, so there's no excuse.

I, on the other hand, get vast amounts of spam despite using "at" on my
user page, rather than @

Maybe the spammers just look for different things nowadays

--sannse


body:
On 1/31/06, sannse <sannse at tiscali.co.uk> wrote:
>
>
> I, on the other hand, get vast amounts of spam despite using "at" on my
> user page, rather than @
>
> Maybe the spammers just look for different things nowadays
>

Do you process incoming email?  I use a challenge-reponse method on
the account I use for my Wikipedia userpage.  This account on the
other hand is used for mailing lists and uses the gmail spam filter.
Some accounts that I used for other purposes are filtered using
spamassassin on my home system. All three methods are very efficient.
I have been contactable by internet email since 1995 and, with the
exception of a brief experiment with my usenet address, lasting a few
days, I have never had to mangle my email address.

It is never necessary to mangle email addresses, and doing so makes
you harder for people who want to contact you to do so.


body:
On 1/31/06, Ryan Delaney <ryan.delaney at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 1/31/06, Kelly Martin <kelly.lynn.martin at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Wikipedia is not an address book.  Email addresses are not biographical.
>
>
> I agree with this comment.
>

That's probably about right.  As someone else suggested, the homepage
may be more appropriate.


from_name: Tim Starling

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: US Congress Staff Editing Wikipedia

body:
Michael Snow wrote:
> Bryan Derksen wrote:
>
>> My secret dream is to see the United States Congress hauled up before
>> the Arbitration Committee. Maybe we could get them to pass clearer
>> fair-use legislation as part of their parole.
>
>
> Clearer fair use legislation is not likely to do us any good. What we
> want is *more generous* fair use legislation.

US fair use legislation is already among the most generous in the world. Coupled with US-centric
Wikipedia policy, this has the effect that anyone attempting to distribute Wikipedia offline outside
the US risks being sued for copyright infringment. I'd prefer it if US fair use legislation was
brought into line with the rest of the world, i.e. made more restrictive not less.

The US government certainly can help our cause in other ways, such as by encouraging grant
recipients and private contractors to release their documents into the public domain, or to license
them under a copyleft license.

Or, you know, they could just give us money. Whatever.

-- Tim Starling


subject: [WikiEN-l] question about undeletion

body:
>A user with a legitimate interest in the subject has asked me to undelete
>one of the incarnations of 'Gang Stalking.' It had been recreated as a
>subpage of 'Conspiracy theory' and I speedily deleted it. Can I just
>undelete it so he can have a look, or can I email him the text from the
>page, or should he list it somewhere requesting temporary undeletion?

If there's no copyright violation or libel issue, I see no problem
with emailing him the text. I'd do the same if asked.

(If he then uses it to recreate the deleted page, it'll be speedyable
again, but that's his problem :-)

- d.


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Jonathan Daugherty

subject: [Wikitech-l] OpenID Support

body:
# I've uploaded the patch to the ticket at
#
#   http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3060

I noticed that the earlier thread with Dan Libby pointed out that
using dots to identify identity URLs will break over 12,000 WikiPedia
accounts.  I've added a newer version of the patch that fixes this and
lets local authentication precede OpenID auth, unless a scheme is
present in the username (in which case a local auth wouldn't be
allowed, anyway).  Please check it out and let me know what you think.

http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/attachment.cgi?id=1337&action=view

Thanks!

--
  Jonathan Daugherty
  JanRain, Inc.


from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject: [WikiEN-l] Here's an interesting one

body:
Steve Bennett wrote:
> Wikipedia suffers more from an incorrect deletion than from an
> incorrect keep. Sort of how society suffers more from the execution of
> an innocent person than the incorrect non-execution of a guilty one.

I don't agree with your perception of the balance.  An incorrect
deletion of an article is nearly nothing to us -- it can be undeleted
instantly by any admin.  And most incorrect deletions will be of
marginal topics anyway.

And it's better to have nothing on a marginal topic than to have
something that is embarassing to us in any way at all.

> More specifically: Wikipedia suffers from having vast numbers of crap
> articles. It doesn't suffer a great deal from having a single crap
> article, if that article is not a copyvio or libel.

Right, but lurking copyvio and libel stuff is exactly what the core
problem is.

--Jimbo


from_name: MacGyverMagic/Mgm

body:
Link to their website. If they want to communicate by email, they'll put it
up.
Users are free to include their email address on their userpage (it's their
choice), but mail programs of article subjects may not be that adaptable at
filtering spam.

Mgm


from_name: Gregory Maxwell

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Password security

body:
On 1/31/06, Rob Church <robchur at gmail.com> wrote:
> Tough. Besides, I fear it would be all too simple to reclaim ownership
> of an account that wasn't yours by doing a nice little email exchange,
> as described. How would you prove that you were that person? Too many
> what-ifs.

By simply knowing that you had a blank password you 'prove' that you
had access prior to the lockout (since Brion didn't post a list)..
Of course if we get a bunch of requests for sysop accounts without
blank passwords...


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: OpenID Support

body:
# Maybe they should be asked to give a local "alias" for this purpose?

The OpenID used to log in should be tied to a real wikidb account (and
I assume that your "alias" is the wikidb.user record's "username"
value).  We explored implementing it this way, but the current patch
requires no database changes and we figured that would be a nice
migration selling point.  But you're definitely right: using OpenID
auth alongside normal auth in this way *does* effectively sidestep
problems with trying to overlap username and OpenID namespace
formatting rules.

--
  Jonathan Daugherty
  JanRain, Inc.


from_name: Neil Harris

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Password security

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:
> Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
>
>> Could you elaborate on the "temporarily" part ?
>>
>
> Until I finish the force-user-to-change-password-on-next-login code. (Probably
> tomorrow.)
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
>
>
I agree, that's probably the right thing to do for non-sysop accounts.
(Although we should perhaps zap any that are not re-activated within
say, three months from now?)

Please keep the _sysop_ accounts with empty/trivial passwords blocked
indefinitely -- now people know they exist, they can easily be searched
for by any potential cracker, with potentially disastrous effects.

Perhaps some of these trivial-password sysop accounts could be
re-activated manually on request, if they have an E-mail address that
can be manually or automatically verified by an E-mail exchange with the
purported owner? Otherwise, it's going to be quite difficult ever to
verify ownership for these accounts, and they should probably remain
locked indefinitely.

-- Neil


from_name: Peter Mackay

subject: [WikiEN-l] Sorry, David!

body:
> -----Original Message-----
> From: wikien-l-bounces at Wikipedia.org
> [mailto:wikien-l-bounces at Wikipedia.org] On Behalf Of Geoff Burling
> >
> For the first couple of years I contributed to Wikipedia (up
> to about the time David Gerard came on board)

Ah yes, the good old days!

Pete, hoping someone is writing a history of this marvellous enterprise


subject: [Wikitech-l] OpenID Support

body:
Just FYI, I'm not even going to think about external identification wackiness
like OpenID  until we've finished the Wikimedia single-login system (my big
project for February). So don't get discouraged if I don't comment. ;)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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subject: [WikiEN-l] Organizing AfD List

body:
Excellent suggestion. Even broad categories like popular culture,
science etc would reduce the likelihood of Pokemon-lovers getting
distracted and voting to delete an article on a physicist they'd never
heard of.

Steve

On 1/30/06, Sue Reed <sreed1234 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Is there anyway to organize the AfD list by subject matter
> or general topic? I think part of the problem with the
> listings are that they are huge, and people like me would
> rather spend time working on new articles, updating
> articles, etc. versus reading through a huge laundry list
> of articles up for deletion.
>
> However, if the list were more organized, I think you would
> get a better representation in the vote and discussion as
> people would be better able to find the articles they had
> actual thoughts on.
>
> Sue Anne
> sreed1234
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


body:
On 1/31/06, Tony Sidaway <f.crdfa at gmail.com> wrote:
> Do you process incoming email?  I use a challenge-reponse method on
> the account I use for my Wikipedia userpage.  This account on the
<snip>
> It is never necessary to mangle email addresses, and doing so makes
> you harder for people who want to contact you to do so.

Just to get off topic, nothing puts me off contacting someone faster
than a challenge-response. It's only happened to me twice, but both
times I was reporting problems I found on people's webpages. It's
really nice to be accused of being a spammer and being forced to visit
a webpage in such a case...

On the other hand, I've found that on my webpage a simple javascript
that inserts my email address after the page has loaded is an
effective and transparent way of mangling my address.

Steve


subject: [OT] Re: [WikiEN-l] Policy on putting email addresses on wiki pages

body:
On 1/31/06, Sam Fentress (Asbestos) <asbestos999 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 1/31/06, Fastfission <fastfission at gmail.com> wrote:
> As for replacing the '@' in an email address with the word "at", this does
> basically nothing. Spammer's spiders aren't so stupid that

Shh, there are 1.6 million people who don't know that! Google for "at
gmail dot com" :)

Steve


from_name: Andrew Gray

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: [Wikitech-l] Password security

body:
On 31/01/06, Tomasz Wegrzanowski <taw at users.sourceforge.net> wrote:

> A lot of people have just lost their account because of this,
> and it wasn't even announced that it was coming.
> This part of the problem could be reduced if the change was
> announced in advance.

It strikes me that announcing in advance "Hey, guys, a number of
accounts INCLUDING n SYSOPS have blank passwords and can easily be
taken over..", then not fixing it for a while, is a recipe for
disaster. It's not that hard to generate a list of users with admin
privileges, and presumably neither is it impossible to write a short
script to try 800 logins...

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


from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [Foundation-l] Insulting the islam is allowed on nl: wikipedia

body:
Hello Waerth,

this sounds like a case for an Arbitration Committee or other dispute
resolution processes within the Dutch Wikipedia. Do such processes exist?

Best,

Erik


from_name: Tony Sidaway

subject: [WikiEN-l] Can a deleted page be used in an RfC?

body:
The safest option is to undelete and userfy.  I'm unsure of the backup
status of the archive tables, which hold deleted revisions, but I
believe that they have been regarded historically as disposable, and
their entire contents  have been at different times in Wikipedia
history both purged and lost in a database crash.

If you undelete and userfy the content will be out of project space
but still inside the revisions table, hence publicly backed up.


body:
On 1/31/06, Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen at shaw.ca> wrote:
>
> Is this "Gazeebow Unit" thing a good article to have on Wikipedia or
> not?

Historically only AfD has ever shown willingness to consider that
question. DRV tends to avoid discussing content.  Hence my decision to
take the question to AfD.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Here's an interesting one

body:
On 1/31/06, SCZenz <sczenz at gmail.com> wrote:
> I think this loophole is a clear argument for WP:DRV to make decisions
> based only on process, not on content.  If it's not consensus-based,
> we can't have the decision to delete be made there.

Yes, perhaps the solution is for appeals on process to go to DRV, and
appeals on content to be moved to AfD if the process appeal fails.
The intervening time could be used as a reprieve period during which
those who believe the content to be of potential value could work on
it.


from_name: J Apple

subject: [Wikitech-l] RE: Using MWdumper

body:
Thanks for the message...
Some even more basic stuff.
iv'e tried running MWdumper on several machines with
win XP and Mac OS X. Nothing happens when I double
click the executable .jar file. I've tried instaling
JRE 1.5, but still can't get the file to run... on
some machines I see a couple folders with .class files
in them, but don't know what to do with those. On
others I see an executable .jar file.

I see that MWdumper is a command line interface, BUT,
where would I type the commands in.

What exactly does using MWdumper accomplish? does
MWdumper simply create an SQl file from the XML dump??
OR does it connect my local machine to my webhost so I
can import the DB file?

IF it doesn't connect to my webhost, then how would I
upload this massive DB into mySQl, since phpmyAdmin
has a limit on file size that is much smaller than the
DB size?

THANKS!!

Message: 1
Date: Mon, 30 Jan 2006 21:33:01 +0100
From: Doro?y?ski Janusz <dorozynskij at poczta.onet.pl>
Subject: RE: [Wikitech-l] 2. Re: How to use Mwdumper?
(Brion Vibber)
To: "'Wikimedia developers'"
<wikitech-l at wikimedia.org>
Message-ID:
<20060130203311Z6215677-6647+2 at ps6.test.onet.pl>
Content-Type: text/plain;	charset="iso-8859-2"

| -----Original Message-----
| From: ... J Apple
| Sent: Monday, January 30, 2006 6:31 PM
/
| The READ Me is not very newbie friendly...

:-))

| Don't even know what to do with the .jar file.
| WHen I double click it nothing happens on my
machine.

Any details about your machine OS? But anyway mwdumper
have not GUI
front-end yet, but works as command-line. So use shell
 or open your
command-line tool, write and execute command like

java -jar proper-path-to/mwdumper.jar
--output=file:your-wiki-dump.sql
--format=sql:1.5 --progress=10000 your-wiki-dump.xml

Of course "proper-path-to", "/", "your-wiki-dump" are
only for example
and
you must replace them with your really names/symbol.
Next, you must
have JRE
1.4 or preferable 1.5 installed in your OS. And
remember, that the
--output
argument must be before the --format argument if
--format is used.

Reg.

 Janusz "Ency' Dorozynski

------------------------------

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


from_name: Alphax (Wikipedia email)

body:
Michael Snow wrote:
> Tim Starling wrote:
>
<snip stuff about US congress>
>> Or, you know, they could just give us money. Whatever.
>>
>>
> Now there's a question - if the US government offered us money, no
> strings attached, how would people respond?
>

They'd accuse us of being Americentric, of course.

And to a certain extent (at least in terms of the "popular culture"
stuff, which we would be better off without), we are.

--
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: Delirium

subject: [WikiEN-l] The deletion paradox

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:

>Delirium wrote:
>
>
>>There's no reason to *delete* a 2-sentence unverified stub, merely to
>>make clear to our readers that it is in fact a 2-sentence unverified
>>stub, and so ought to be read accordingly.  Of course, an intelligent
>>reader already ought to be able to recognize that for themselves, but we
>>can help the rest along.
>>
>>
>
>In many many cases there is a reason to delete a 2-sentence unverified
>stub.  We need to be extremely aggressive about doing so when the
>article in question contains negative claims about any living person or
>existing company.   Such articles may be examples of people using our
>site to attempt to libel others or they may just be hurtful to someone
>who is non-notable for no good purpose.
>
>I am always dismayed when I see a good editor wikifying and tagging an
>absolute crap article, rather than blanking/radically stubbing it (at a
>minimum) or deleting it (often would be better).
>
>
That's not "in many cases"; that's "in almost no cases".  Take a look
through our multiple hundreds of thousands of stubs; almost none of them
are negative claims.  The vast majority are simple matter-of-fact but
unsourced things, like "[x] is a commune in the French departement [y]".

I would accept a policy of "delete unverified claims that seem like they
might be non-neutral, non-factual, or at least controversial", but
that's quite different from "delete all unreferenced stubs".

-Mark


from_name: Dorożyński Janusz

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Error while imporing wikipedia en dump file

body:
| -----Original Message-----
| From: ... David Gerard
| Sent: Tuesday, January 31, 2006 10:57 AM
/
| > When I tried importing the dump to mysql using importDump.php, the
| > process started fine. But when the record count reached 18600, the
| > process stopped ...

importDump.php, or even Kate's importDump.phps is useless, you must use
mwdumper - see http://meta.wikimedia.org/Data_dumpsDump and
http://download.wikimedia.org/tools/

Rgrds, Janusz "Ency" Dorozynski


subject: [WikiEN-l] The deletion paradox

body:
MacGyverMagic/Mgm wrote:

>The whole point being that if it remains unverifiable for other editors that
>particular stub will never be expanded, which basically robs the stub of its
>only function.
>
>
Oh I agree; deleting *unverifiable* articles is fine.  That's quite
different from deleting all articles that simply don't yet have references.

-Mark


subject: [WikiEN-l] Here's an interesting one

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:

>And it's better to have nothing on a marginal topic than to have
>something that is embarassing to us in any way at all.
>
>
I strongly disagree with that; eventually producing a good encyclopedia
ought to take precedence over immediately gaining good PR (or avoiding
bad PR).

-Mark


from_name: jayjg

subject: [WikiEN-l] Deletion proposal

body:
On 1/31/06, Steve Bennett <stevage at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>   Ok, so recently I suggested that there were three categories of
> deletion - inappropriate topics (non-notables etc), overly-prominent
> articles (fancrufts deserving of merging) and bad contents (copyvios,
> libel etc). It now seems to me that the second category should never
> end up in AfD at all, as it can be dealt with by any user, simply by
> merging the content and redirecting the original page.
>
> Hence, I would like to propose that AfD be split into two quite
> separate problems: Topic blocking and content wiping.
>
> Topic blocking would be a request to remove the content for a page (in
> the normal Wiki way, so that it still shows in history), and then
> protect the page. The goal is to say "The Wiki community has decided
> that the Garage Mops are not sufficiently notable to warrant a place
> in our encyclopaedia. Please do not create an article about them." An
> admin in the future could of course unprotect the page if the band
> becomes notable, or the community changes its mind.
>
> Content wiping would be a request to permanently wipe the content of
> page. It would be used primarily for copyvios, libel and other
> *content* we really just don't want in Wikipedia. The history would be
> erased, then the content reduced to a stub (or blank).
>
>
> Two separate problems, two separate processes, two separate solutions.
>
> Thoughts, anyone?

I like this idea;  it would help in particular in sorting out article
re-creation issues.

Jay.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Here's an interesting one

body:
On 1/30/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> Rob wrote:
>
> >If someone disagrees with a deletion result, then lists it on DRV, this is
> >generally (with the exception of vanity self-promoters, trolls, and the
> >like) accepted as a good faith effort to improve the encyclopedia.
> >If someone disagrees with a keep result, then lists it on DRV, this is seen
> >by many as an "abuse of process" and an effort to "get the result he
> >wanted".
> >It seems that if one type of result can be reviewed and possibly overturned,
> >what's wrong with reviewing another type of result?  What's the difference?
>
>
> The difference is that keeping and deleting are not symmetrical. It' s
> like innocent until proven guilty - it's *supposed* to be keep unless
> deletable. So the first is appealing a "guilty", the second is double
> jeopardy.
>

There is a lot of investment in the process on DRV, to the extent that
they regard those who don't want to bother with the process thank you
very much and would far rather take their chances on AfD as abusers.
Which I suppose wouldn't be such a bad thing if the process were a
good one. Instead it's a rather mysterious thing run on the assumption
that the content of an article is immaterial. and that what matters is
counting numbers and ensuring that the closing admin dotted all the
i's and crossed all the t's.  And needless to say, it tends to attract
the kind of person who is obsessive about dotting i's and crossing
t's.


from_name: oscar

body:
fyi i have removed the inadmissable remark and issued an official warning
now.

oscar

ps let us no longer use this list for issues to be dealt with in the
nl-community, ok?

On 1/31/06, Walter van Kalken <walter at vankalken.net> wrote:
>
> Erik Moeller wrote:
>
> > Hello Waerth,
> >
> > this sounds like a case for an Arbitration Committee or other dispute
> > resolution processes within the Dutch Wikipedia. Do such processes
> exist?
> >
> > Best,
>
> That is a problem they do not, They are being discussed for a year now.
>
> Waerth/Walter
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] RE: Using MWdumper

body:
J Apple wrote:
> Thanks for the message...
> Some even more basic stuff.

Short answer: if you can't understand the README you probably won't be able to
make it work.

> iv'e tried running MWdumper on several machines with
> win XP and Mac OS X. Nothing happens when I double
> click the executable .jar file. I've tried instaling
> JRE 1.5, but still can't get the file to run... on
> some machines I see a couple folders with .class files
> in them, but don't know what to do with those. On
> others I see an executable .jar file.
>
> I see that MWdumper is a command line interface, BUT,
> where would I type the commands in.

You'll need some basic command-line computer literacy to operate the current
version of MWDumper. This means knowing how to start a command-line terminal on
your operating system, how to type commands and run them, etc.

Some sample command lines with parameters are in the README; again if you have
difficulty understanding this documentation, you probably will have trouble
operating it. That's not an insult; it's just a command-line program with lots
of scary options, which is inherently a bit intimidating because it's designed
to do several somewhat complicated things.

> What exactly does using MWdumper accomplish? does
> MWdumper simply create an SQl file from the XML dump??
> OR does it connect my local machine to my webhost so I
> can import the DB file?

For SQL output, MWDumper can either produce a text file full of SQL statements,
or it can make a direct connection to a MySQL server (under ideal conditions)
and send commands directly there. This of course requires being able to contact
the server; if it's remote this may be difficult (eg requiring a SSH tunnel).

> IF it doesn't connect to my webhost, then how would I
> upload this massive DB into mySQl, since phpmyAdmin
> has a limit on file size that is much smaller than the
> DB size?

If you have no other direct access to your MySQL server than phpMyAdmin, you
probably are not in a good position to work with this kind of large data dump.

Incidentally, I've uploaded a new version of mwdumper.jar. This doesn't yet
include a GUI frontend, but does:
* bundle the Xerces XML library so it works on Java 1.4
* bundle the MySQL connector, so it _might_ work to connect to a database
directly without fetching a separate driver jar (not tested)
* should run through our dumps on the default heap size

http://download.wikimedia.org/tools/mwdumper.jar

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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from_name: Jamie Bliss

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: OpenID Support

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

Jonathan Daugherty wrote:
> I noticed that the earlier thread with Dan Libby pointed out that
> using dots to identify identity URLs will break over 12,000 WikiPedia
> accounts.  I've added a newer version of the patch that fixes this and
> lets local authentication precede OpenID auth, unless a scheme is
> present in the username (in which case a local auth wouldn't be
> allowed, anyway).

Maybe they should be asked to give a local "alias" for this purpose?
(ie, they login with their OpenID, but edits and other portions of the
code use their alias.)

- -- Jamie
- -------------------------------------------------------------------
http://endeavour.zapto.org/astro73/
Thank you to JosephM for inviting me to Gmail!
Have lots of invites. Gmail now has 2GB.
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from_name: Tels

subject: [Wikitech-l] Happy Birthday, Graph extension

body:
Moin,

as the subject says: happy birthday.[0]

I'd like to announce a new update, which can be found on CPAN:

	http://search.cpan.org/~tels/wikimedia-graph/

The online manual also got updated:

	http://bloodgate.com/perl/graph/manual/

I try to summarize the changes and new features in brief below, a full
revision history can be found in the changelogs for the involved Perl
modules.

If you have any problem, do not hesitate to open a bug at
http://rt.cpan.org or just send me an email.

Happy graphing,

Tels

 Notable changes

 * The wikimedia integration can output graphviz code, which means you can
   use dot/neato/fdb/whatever to render the graph as PNG file
 * align: left|right|center for all labels possible
 * invisible edges
 * enforcing a minlen for edges
 * joints: edges can join other edges, or split up on the way to their
   target node
 * support for image-based nodes (e.g. use an icon/png as a node)
 * local (per-node, per-edge) and global flow that lets you define how the
   graph should "flow", e.g. in which direction the edges are laid out.
   This even works with relative flow (relative to the current node) *and*
   absolute flow (relative to the orientation of the, well, global world)
 * autosplit nodes are much improved - they had quite a few bugs,
   especially when setting attributes on them
 * improved layouter, can handle groups/autosplit nodes and joints much
   better
 * improved HTML output, all implemented features work now on major
   browsers (IE; FF, Opera and Konqueror, except for very small nits)
 * Links in SVG now work correctly on Firefox (workaround FF bug)
 * many, many bugfixes, improved handling of syntax and documentation

0: The first version of Graph::Easy was released 27.12.2004, but it wasn't
actually usable until very late Januar, possible later.

--
 Signed on Tue Jan 31 18:45:58 2006 with key 0x93B84C15.
 Visit my photo gallery at http://bloodgate.com/photos/
 PGP key on http://bloodgate.com/tels.asc or per email.

 "The flow chart is a most thoroughly oversold piece of program
 documentation." -- Frederick Brooks, 'The Mythical Man Month'

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from_name: geni

subject: [WikiEN-l] Organizing AfD List

body:
On 1/30/06, Sue Reed <sreed1234 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Is there anyway to organize the AfD list by subject matter
> or general topic? I think part of the problem with the
> listings are that they are huge, and people like me would
> rather spend time working on new articles, updating
> articles, etc. versus reading through a huge laundry list
> of articles up for deletion.
>
> However, if the list were more organized, I think you would
> get a better representation in the vote and discussion as
> people would be better able to find the articles they had
> actual thoughts on.
>
> Sue Anne
> sreed1234

you mean something like this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Geni/test
--
geni


body:
On 1/31/06, Tony Sidaway <f.crdfa at gmail.com> wrote:
> Historically only AfD has ever shown willingness to consider that
> question. DRV tends to avoid discussing content.  Hence my decision to
> take the question to AfD.

DRV can and has discused content. Listing a deleted article on AFD is
a mildly amuseing form of rule lawering but not really very helpful.

--
geni


subject:
[WikiEN-l] Re: Being able to see an article whose undeletion is
	beingactively discussed

body:
On 1/31/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:
> Wikipedia is a neutral and unbiased compilation of notable, verifiable
> facts. "When the best sort of sysop has to break the law to do what
> everyone knows is right, there's something wrong with the law.
> --JimboWales" (from Elian's userpage again...)
>

Of course the problem kicks in when people start to confuse "wants to"
with "Has to".

--
geni


from_name: Daniel R. Tobias

body:
On 31 Jan 2006 at 13:04, Tony Sidaway <f.crdfa at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 1/31/06, Tom Steinberg <tom at tomsteinberg.co.uk> wrote:
> >
> > Is it permissable to put email addresses on wikipedia, if they're
> > already public?
>
> Of course it is! How on earth are people to be able to communicate
> with one another if their email addresses are hidden?
>
> I profess profound distaste for the practice of concealing, mangling,
> and distorting email addresses.  I myself have had an email address on
> my userpage for well over a year and can count the amount of spam that
> has gotten though on the fingers of one hand, so there's no excuse.

Me too... I've got a strong dislike of all the various types of
address munging used online, which I find extremely bothersome and
unaesthetic; and I haven't changed this opinion despite getting spam
by the ton (metric or imperial).  This includes the whole panoply of
techniques from turning it into an image, spelling it out in
increasingly creative ways (people seem to find "user at something
dot net" too simple, so they come up with ever more convoluted ways
of saying it, like "username 'user' with an at sign followed by the
hostname in the top level domain 'net' of 'something'), or messed-up
addresses where they have to tell you to "Remove the NOSPAM", and so
on.

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


from_name: Mathias Schindler

body:
Hi,

today there was a hearing at the Amtsgericht Charlottenburg, Berlin
(municipal court) about the preliminary injunction against the German
Verein. The injunction was prohibiting Wikimedia Deutschland e.V. to
redirect wikipedia.de to the German Wikipedia as long as the full civil
name of a dead hacker ([[en:Tron (hacker)]]) is shown at de.wikipedia.org.

In the hearing, the judge gave more than just a hint that he does not
agree with the argument from Tron's parents that telling a (already
publicly known) civil name is violating the post-mortem
Pers?nlichkeitsrecht (right of personality).

The decision, whether the preliminary injunction is withdrawn will be
announced on thursday at 9 a.m. (CET).

Here are two reports from the court hearing:

http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/69056 (the author was present at
the hearing)

http://www.golem.de/0601/43060.html (I am not sure if he was there)

There is one question left and I would love to see some research from
you. Ivo Floricic, the owner of the trademark "Tron" and father of Boris
Floricic (aka. [[en:Tron (hacker)]] claims that he thinks that he is the
only one with the name "Floricic" in Germany and these special
circumstances would somehow violate his rights if wikipedia is
mentioning the full name of Tron.

Does anyone know any other person by the name of Floricic?

According to Google, there is an artist "Alen Floricic" from Croatia who
might be notable (if he is notable, it would be nice to consider taking
the CV from certain sites and write an article about him). There is also
a professor of linguistics, Franck Floricic from France.

Greetings,
Mathias


body:
jkelly at fas.harvard.edu wrote:
>   English Google search results for "Allen Floricic" (825 hits)
>
> http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=%22Alen+Floricic%22
>
>   English Google search results for "Franck Floricic" (105 hits)
>
> http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=%22Franck+Floricic%22&btnG=Search

Franck is also in the linguistic branch of Roman languages, so there are
some Italian sources who refer to a "Franco Floricic". Google is (as of
early 2006) incapable of dealing with localisation of first names.

AFAIK, Italians would write my name Matteo.

Mathias


subject: [WikiEN-l] Here's an interesting one

body:
On 31 Jan 2006 at 15:13, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:

> I don't agree with your perception of the balance.  An incorrect
> deletion of an article is nearly nothing to us -- it can be undeleted
> instantly by any admin.

...and then likely re-deleted by yet another admin, and then
precipitate a big, acrimonious battle between proponents and
opponents of keeping the article, possibly with attempted action
taken against the undeleting admin as being a "rogue" who
disrespected rules and process.

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


subject: [WikiEN-l] Here's an interesting one

body:
On 1/31/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> Steve Bennett wrote:
> > Wikipedia suffers more from an incorrect deletion than from an
> > incorrect keep. Sort of how society suffers more from the execution of
> > an innocent person than the incorrect non-execution of a guilty one.
>
> I don't agree with your perception of the balance.  An incorrect
> deletion of an article is nearly nothing to us -- it can be undeleted
> instantly by any admin.

No it can't. Or do you wish to rethink the entire role of admins?

--
geni


from_name: Rob Church

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Password security

body:
> Please keep the _sysop_ accounts with empty/trivial passwords blocked
> indefinitely -- now people know they exist, they can easily be searched
> for by any potential cracker, with potentially disastrous effects.

Agreed.

> Perhaps some of these trivial-password sysop accounts could be
> re-activated manually on request, if they have an E-mail address that
> can be manually or automatically verified by an E-mail exchange with the
> purported owner? Otherwise, it's going to be quite difficult ever to
> verify ownership for these accounts, and they should probably remain
> locked indefinitely.

Tough. Besides, I fear it would be all too simple to reclaim ownership
of an account that wasn't yours by doing a nice little email exchange,
as described. How would you prove that you were that person? Too many
what-ifs.

Rob Church


from_name: Michael Snow

body:
Tim Starling wrote:

>Michael Snow wrote:
>
>
>>Tim Starling wrote:
>>
>>
>>>Michael Snow wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>>Bryan Derksen wrote:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>>My secret dream is to see the United States Congress hauled up before
>>>>>the Arbitration Committee. Maybe we could get them to pass clearer
>>>>>fair-use legislation as part of their parole.
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>Clearer fair use legislation is not likely to do us any good. What we
>>>>want is *more generous* fair use legislation.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>US fair use legislation is already among the most generous in the
>>>world. Coupled with US-centric
>>>Wikipedia policy, this has the effect that anyone attempting to
>>>distribute Wikipedia offline outside
>>>the US risks being sued for copyright infringment. I'd prefer it if US
>>>fair use legislation was
>>>brought into line with the rest of the world, i.e. made more
>>>restrictive not less.
>>>
>>>
>>You mean this seriously? You'd rather make fair use in the US more
>>restrictive than make fair use/dealing/practice/whatever in other
>>countries less restrictive?
>>
>>
>We were talking about what we'd like the Congress to do, not WIPO. Come to think of it, there's a
>step Congress could take towards harmonization that would be more useful for us: to reduce the term
>of copyright to the Berne Convention minimum of life + 50 years.
>
>
Indeed, that I could go for, even if it isn't hardly enough. We could
really do without Sonny Bono's legacy.

--Michael Snow


from_name: Peter Mackay

body:
> From: wikien-l-bounces at Wikipedia.org
> [mailto:wikien-l-bounces at Wikipedia.org] On Behalf Of Alphax
> (Wikipedia email)

> Michael Snow wrote:
> > Tim Starling wrote:

> > Now there's a question - if the US government offered us money, no
> > strings attached, how would people respond?
>
> They'd accuse us of being Americentric, of course.
>
> And to a certain extent (at least in terms of the "popular culture"
> stuff, which we would be better off without), we are.

This is not going to change any time soon, because the pool of editors is
drawn from those with access to the Internet, and the Internet is mainly in
the U.S., especially when you consider that we are working on the
English-language version. I see this as self-correcting in the long term,
with other nations increasing their access, though I'm not sure about the
contribution to be expected from Nigeria's Internet pool.

Peter (Skyring)


from_name: Sam Korn

body:
On 1/31/06, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> Of course the problem kicks in when people start to confuse "wants to"
> with "Has to".

And the next problem arrives when people want a fifteen-archive, five
megabyte discussion on whether "has to" is correct.

--
Sam


from_name: Andrew Gray

body:
On 31/01/06, Mathias Schindler <neubau at presroi.de> wrote:

> There is one question left and I would love to see some research from
> you. Ivo Floricic, the owner of the trademark "Tron" and father of Boris
> Floricic (aka. [[en:Tron (hacker)]] claims that he thinks that he is the
> only one with the name "Floricic" in Germany and these special
> circumstances would somehow violate his rights if wikipedia is
> mentioning the full name of Tron.
>
> Does anyone know any other person by the name of Floricic?

Judging by various other mentions, it may possibly be an Istrian
placename (Floricici?), from whence the surname comes. Any Croatians
have an idea? "Mario Flori?i?" also gets a handful of different hits
in Croatian; I suspect there's more.

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


body:
On 1/31/06, Sam Korn <smoddy at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 1/31/06, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Of course the problem kicks in when people start to confuse "wants to"
> > with "Has to".
>
> And the next problem arrives when people want a fifteen-archive, five
> megabyte discussion on whether "has to" is correct.
>
> --
> Sam

That one can be short circeted. If the admin isn't sure they "have to"
then the don't makes life a lot less complex.

--
geni


from_name: Andreas Vilén

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Insulting the islam is allowed on nl: wikipedia

body:
1) Wikipedia has no moderators.

2) Block destructive users.

/Grillo

On 1/31/06, Walter van Kalken <walter at vankalken.net> wrote:
> On nl: wikipedia we have a user (Torero) who under him quoting the
> rights of freedom of speech is insulting the islam and everyone who
> doesn't think like him on a regular basis.
>
> Today he wrote:
>
> http://nl.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Overleg:DemoCrates.net&diff=3011551&oldid=3011315
>
> Allah Akbar is almost the same as Heil Hitler.
>
> This is not the first time he did this. He has insulted the islam and
> muslims on multiple occasions. Also he constantly accuses people of
> being leftwing etc.
>
> Unfortunately this is "tolerated" on nl: by the mods and anyone else who
> do not dare to pose an opposition against these kind of users. And
> everytime he apologises some time later. But what does an apology count
> for if he keeps on repeating himself time and time again. And again a
> user who happens to be muslim is going on wikibreak because of this.
>
> Freedom of speech ?????
>
> Waerth/Walter
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


from_name: Giuseppe DAngelo

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: nl problem

body:
It's an absolute disgrace that it should be allowed to continue.  It's been clear to me for a while that the large wikipedias are as much about furthering western hegemony as anything else.  NPOV generally means making western civilisation look like the absolute pinnacle, POV is when one dares challenge this hegemony.  Write about vikings or celts and you can say anything you want without ever being challenged, dare suggest that something originated in the mediterranean, and all hell breaks loose.  Basic premise of NPOV?  Civilisation flows from north to south and west to east, don't you ever dare suggest that it has been in the reverse in the past!
  You think I am exaggerating - for starters try checking out the article on race and IQ, to me it looks like a gathering point for white supremists - but hey, who am I to question that?  Add a graph, quote the odd looney tune scientist, and presto, you have an idiotic article that absolutely crashes through the POV barrier.  It laughably suggests that as a matter of course, the average monolingual, barely literate, uncultured Homer Simpson has on average a 50% greater IQ than the average sub-saharan African - let's get real people! NPOV indeed.
  pippu d'angelo

Message: 10
Date: Tue, 31 Jan 2006 22:59:23 +0700
From: Walter van Kalken
Subject: [Wikipedia-l] Insulting the islam is allowed on nl: wikipedia
To: wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org, Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List

Message-ID: <43DF895B.90409 at vankalken.net>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed

On nl: wikipedia we have a user (Torero) who under him quoting the
rights of freedom of speech is insulting the islam and everyone who
doesn't think like him on a regular basis.

Today he wrote:

http://nl.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Overleg:DemoCrates.net&diff=3011551&oldid=3011315

Allah Akbar is almost the same as Heil Hitler.

This is not the first time he did this. He has insulted the islam and
muslims on multiple occasions. Also he constantly accuses people of
being leftwing etc.

Unfortunately this is "tolerated" on nl: by the mods and anyone else who
do not dare to pose an opposition against these kind of users. And
everytime he apologises some time later. But what does an apology count
for if he keeps on repeating himself time and time again. And again a
user who happens to be muslim is going on wikibreak because of this.

Freedom of speech ?????

Waerth/Walter

---------------------------------
Yahoo! Mail: gratis 1GB per i messaggi, antispam, antivirus, POP3


subject: [WikiEN-l] Here's an interesting one

body:
On 1/31/06, SCZenz <sczenz at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 1/31/06, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On 1/31/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> > > Steve Bennett wrote:
> > > > Wikipedia suffers more from an incorrect deletion than from an
> > > > incorrect keep. Sort of how society suffers more from the execution of
> > > > an innocent person than the incorrect non-execution of a guilty one.
> > >
> > > I don't agree with your perception of the balance.  An incorrect
> > > deletion of an article is nearly nothing to us -- it can be undeleted
> > > instantly by any admin.
> >
> > No it can't. Or do you wish to rethink the entire role of admins?
>
> If it's a clearly incorrect deletion, it can be undone by any admin.
> In my humble opinion this should be accompanied with a notice
> somewhere so the decision can be reviewed, but that's different from
> saying it can't be done.
>
> SCZenz

If through process the community decides to delete something then it
is understandable that you should have to go through process to get it
undeleted. If it was speedied you can do whatever you like with it.

--
geni


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: nl problem

body:
Repeat: Block.

/Grillo

On 1/31/06, Giuseppe DAngelo <pippudoz at yahoo.it> wrote:
> It's an absolute disgrace that it should be allowed to continue.  It's been clear to me for a while that the large wikipedias are as much about furthering western hegemony as anything else.  NPOV generally means making western civilisation look like the absolute pinnacle, POV is when one dares challenge this hegemony.  Write about vikings or celts and you can say anything you want without ever being challenged, dare suggest that something originated in the mediterranean, and all hell breaks loose.  Basic premise of NPOV?  Civilisation flows from north to south and west to east, don't you ever dare suggest that it has been in the reverse in the past!
>   You think I am exaggerating - for starters try checking out the article on race and IQ, to me it looks like a gathering point for white supremists - but hey, who am I to question that?  Add a graph, quote the odd looney tune scientist, and presto, you have an idiotic article that absolutely crashes through the POV barrier.  It laughably suggests that as a matter of course, the average monolingual, barely literate, uncultured Homer Simpson has on average a 50% greater IQ than the average sub-saharan African - let's get real people! NPOV indeed.
>   pippu d'angelo
>
>
>
> Message: 10
> Date: Tue, 31 Jan 2006 22:59:23 +0700
> From: Walter van Kalken
> Subject: [Wikipedia-l] Insulting the islam is allowed on nl: wikipedia
> To: wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org, Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
>
> Message-ID: <43DF895B.90409 at vankalken.net>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed
>
> On nl: wikipedia we have a user (Torero) who under him quoting the
> rights of freedom of speech is insulting the islam and everyone who
> doesn't think like him on a regular basis.
>
> Today he wrote:
>
> http://nl.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Overleg:DemoCrates.net&diff=3011551&oldid=3011315
>
> Allah Akbar is almost the same as Heil Hitler.
>
> This is not the first time he did this. He has insulted the islam and
> muslims on multiple occasions. Also he constantly accuses people of
> being leftwing etc.
>
> Unfortunately this is "tolerated" on nl: by the mods and anyone else who
> do not dare to pose an opposition against these kind of users. And
> everytime he apologises some time later. But what does an apology count
> for if he keeps on repeating himself time and time again. And again a
> user who happens to be muslim is going on wikibreak because of this.
>
> Freedom of speech ?????
>
> Waerth/Walter
>
>
>
>
>
> ---------------------------------
> Yahoo! Mail: gratis 1GB per i messaggi, antispam, antivirus, POP3
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


from_name: Fastfission

body:
On 1/31/06, Michael Snow <wikipedia at earthlink.net> wrote:
> Now there's a question - if the US government offered us money, no
> strings attached, how would people respond?

Why, they'd probably hitch up a saddle to their pigs and fly around the city!

FF


from_name: Gerben van der Stouwe

body:
2006/1/31, Andreas Vil?n <andreas.vilen at gmail.com>:
> 1) Wikipedia has no moderators.
> 2) Block destructive users.

1) The dutch has. Moderators are the english sysops. I don't like it
either, it's to easily confused with a "real" moderator (like the ones
on a forum).

2) The current policy is quite clear about blocking registered users,
it basicly cannot be done without a community poll. A vote is in
progress to change this.

Gerben van der Stouwe
[[nl:Gebruiker:Gerbennn]]


from_name: Walter van Kalken

body:
On nl: wikipedia we have a user (Torero) who under him quoting the
rights of freedom of speech is insulting the islam and everyone who
doesn't think like him on a regular basis.

Today he wrote:

http://nl.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Overleg:DemoCrates.net&diff=3011551&oldid=3011315

Allah Akbar is almost the same as Heil Hitler.

This is not the first time he did this. He has insulted the islam and
muslims on multiple occasions. Also he constantly accuses people of
being leftwing etc.

Unfortunately this is "tolerated" on nl: by the mods and anyone else who
do not dare to pose an opposition against these kind of users. And
everytime he apologises some time later. But what does an apology count
for if he keeps on repeating himself time and time again. And again a
user who happens to be muslim is going on wikibreak because of this.

Freedom of speech ?????

Waerth/Walter


from_name: Alphax (Wikipedia email)

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Re: Being able to see an article whose undeletion
	is	beingactively discussed

body:
Phil Boswell wrote:
> "Steve Bennett" <stevage at gmail.com> wrote in
> message news:f1c3529e0601310404pb3284e7o1c0b02a2a172008f at mail.gmail.com...
>
>>Does bad faith matter for deleting or keeping an article? I mean,
>>regardless of what awful motives someone has, at the end of the day
>>we should just delete articles we don't want, and keep articles we do,
>>right?
>>This is my naive, un-AfD-contaminated optimism here :)
>
>
> Take a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Process_is_Important
>

Wikipedia is a neutral and unbiased compilation of notable, verifiable
facts. "When the best sort of sysop has to break the law to do what
everyone knows is right, there's something wrong with the law.
--JimboWales" (from Elian's userpage again...)

--
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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subject: [WikiEN-l] Deletion proposal

body:
On 1/31/06, Steve Bennett <stevage at gmail.com> wrote:
> Two separate problems, two separate processes, two separate solutions.
>
> Thoughts, anyone?
>
> Steve

Copyvios are already seperate.

--
geni


subject: [WikiEN-l] A quick references survey

body:
On 1/31/06, Steve Bennett <stevage at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>   There is of course [[WP:GA]] but it's very painful to nominate an
> article at the moment - you have to add a template to the article talk
> page, edit the GA page, potentially edit a template referenced in the
> GA page, and update the count at the top of GA. Simply to say that
> IMHO this article is "not bad".
>
> Is there a list of reviewing proposals anywhere? I had a thought for
> one today whereby any user with at least 100 edits can add a review to
> any page they have never edited, giving scores out of 5 for
> comprehensiveness, sourcing, NPOV, and MoS adherence. Not a very
> thoroughly thought-through thought though...:)
>
> (wow...what a last sentence...it must be late...)
>
> Steve

Softwear exists. Currently not in use for a number of reasons.

--
geni


body:
Tom Steinberg wrote:
> Hello All,
>
> We've been mulling dumping all the Northern Ireland Assembly member's
> email addresses onto the relevent page on wikipedia, and then writing
> a scraper script to keep our own WriteToThem systems up to date.
>
> This raises a policy question:
>
> Is it permissable to put email addresses on wikipedia, if they're
> already public?
>
> We've noticed that they're *not* featured for most MPs.
>

Please consider the amount of spam that they would receive from
address-scraping scripts that are running around, and the fact that
Wikipedia is one of the 20 most visited sites on the internet...

--
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: Jimmy Wales

subject: [WikiEN-l] The deletion paradox

body:
Steve Bennett wrote:
>>I am always dismayed when I see a good editor wikifying and tagging an
>>absolute crap article, rather than blanking/radically stubbing it (at a
>>minimum) or deleting it (often would be better).
>
> It can be really hard to tell the difference when you're not familiar
> with the subject matter.

It can be, yes.  But as in the Siegenthaler incident, there are cases
where there is an unsourced negative claim that anyone could easily spot
and remove.  You don't need to be an expert in anything to know that
claiming someone was briefly suspected of an involvement in the Kennedy
assassinations requires a source and should be instantly removed if
there is no source.

> Another reason why chants of "don't just
> report the bad articles, fix them!" aren't helpful - if you assume
> that whatever is in the article is mostly correct but just needs
> reformatting, you end up making matters worse.

Totally!  What you do in such a case is give the article an aura of
having been checked or written by real Wikipedians, when it's still the
same crap some anon stuck in there in the first place.

> In my recent sample, I changed an "External Links" section to
> "Sources". Then something bothered me, I ended up checking out the
> links, and realised that the whole article was a puff piece for a
> probably non-notable Indian journalist. But I really have no expertise
> in determining whether someone is notable, or whether writing for the
> Times in India is significant or not. So I tagged the thing
> {{POV-check}} and left it.
>
> I wouldn't have felt comfortable blanking/deleting the article.
> Assuming that the guy *was* notable, all it really needed was a slight
> de-POV tweak and some misleading statements removed.

Right, but this wasn't a "potentially libelous" or negative article, I
assume?  If it says "Such and such is a journalist in India, he worked
here, he worked there" then fine, tag it {{POV-check}} and ask for
sources.  If it says "Such and such is a NeoNazi activist..." or
"Such-and-such was convicted of rape..." then if there is no source,
blank it!

--Jimbo


subject: [WikiEN-l] The deletion paradox

body:
Tony Sidaway wrote:
> On 1/31/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
>
>>In many many cases there is a reason to delete a 2-sentence unverified
>>stub.  We need to be extremely aggressive about doing so when the
>>article in question contains negative claims about any living person or
>>existing company.
>
>
> Actually that has long been one of our criteria for speedy deletion,
> and I believe that it has always been implemented aggressively.

I'll present some counter-examples in a day or two (have to ask other
people to help me remember them), and we can analyze what went wrong.

--Jimbo


from_name: Steve Bennett

subject: [WikiEN-l] Deletion proposal

body:
Hi all,
  Ok, so recently I suggested that there were three categories of
deletion - inappropriate topics (non-notables etc), overly-prominent
articles (fancrufts deserving of merging) and bad contents (copyvios,
libel etc). It now seems to me that the second category should never
end up in AfD at all, as it can be dealt with by any user, simply by
merging the content and redirecting the original page.

Hence, I would like to propose that AfD be split into two quite
separate problems: Topic blocking and content wiping.

Topic blocking would be a request to remove the content for a page (in
the normal Wiki way, so that it still shows in history), and then
protect the page. The goal is to say "The Wiki community has decided
that the Garage Mops are not sufficiently notable to warrant a place
in our encyclopaedia. Please do not create an article about them." An
admin in the future could of course unprotect the page if the band
becomes notable, or the community changes its mind.

Content wiping would be a request to permanently wipe the content of
page. It would be used primarily for copyvios, libel and other
*content* we really just don't want in Wikipedia. The history would be
erased, then the content reduced to a stub (or blank).

Two separate problems, two separate processes, two separate solutions.

Thoughts, anyone?

Steve


body:
Erik Moeller wrote:

> Hello Waerth,
>
> this sounds like a case for an Arbitration Committee or other dispute
> resolution processes within the Dutch Wikipedia. Do such processes exist?
>
> Best,

That is a problem they do not, They are being discussed for a year now.

Waerth/Walter


from_name: Walter Vermeir

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Re: Where ends the responsibility of Wikipedia?
 (personal information of people)

body:
Fred Bauder schreef:
[cut]
> I suspect the same thing  could happen to a Belgium citizen.
>
> Could a person armed with your identity card open up a line of credit
> without you knowing it.? Could they get a "lost" identity card issued
> in your name to them?
>
> Fred

I asked some one who works at the bank about this. It is not as save as
I was thinking.

In Belgium you have now 3 types of ID-cards

- the new electronic ID-cart. Contains a chip with secured information.
With the card and your personal pin code you can identify your self
legally. Used for things like your income tax declaration.

- the old ID-card, plastic. Not electronic. The replacement of all
ID-cards by electronic ID-cards is in progress but it takes time to
replace them all.

- the 19th century-style ID-card ; only paper with a picture physical
attached on it with a seal on it. Used for foreigners en refugees. Those
will also be replaced soon by the electronic ID-card but it is not yet so

Situation in Belgium for KBC (major Belgium bank);

To open a bank account;
- if you use a stolen ID card there no systematical check of that card
is stolen or not. Lists of the ID-numbers of stolen cards exist but are
not normally used to check the status of a ID-card.

- if you have an electronic ID-card the information of the chip is
read-out. This contains your name, date of bight, address, national
registration number and a photo. The function that the card supports to
identify yourself with the pin code is not used. The only benefit that
you with the electronic ID-card is the you can be sure the the card and
the information is valid. Of the person using that card it that person
you can not be sure.

Fake cards; so long the card is made good and is non-electronic the bank
can not check them of the are real. There is not check of the
registration numbers are valid and of those match of those on the card.

But if your able to open a bank account you will not be able to max out
your credit and disappear. New customers do not get credit. And the
system that is common is some countrys that you do not have to pay your
credit card bill at the end of the month but only the interest is not
commonly used and only given if the bank really knows that you can pay
for it. Not for a guy who just opened an account.

If you try to get a loan the bank receives the information of all loans
and credit lines that this person has by any Belgian credit company. And
also of the are paying them back or not. So it is not possible to get
several loans on the same person.

So it is not so good as it could be. The total roll out of the
electronic ID card, and if the function of the pin code is used should
make it safer.

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


subject: [WikiEN-l] Here's an interesting one

body:
geni wrote:
> On 1/31/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
>
>>Steve Bennett wrote:
>>
>>>Wikipedia suffers more from an incorrect deletion than from an
>>>incorrect keep. Sort of how society suffers more from the execution of
>>>an innocent person than the incorrect non-execution of a guilty one.
>>
>>I don't agree with your perception of the balance.  An incorrect
>>deletion of an article is nearly nothing to us -- it can be undeleted
>>instantly by any admin.
>
>
> No it can't. Or do you wish to rethink the entire role of admins?

I think a few people have gotten quite confused about the role of admins
due to the excessive rules lawyering.  Maybe they are the ones who need
to rethink it.

--Jimbo


subject: [WikiEN-l] Here's an interesting one

body:
Delirium wrote:
> Jimmy Wales wrote:
>
>> And it's better to have nothing on a marginal topic than to have
>> something that is embarassing to us in any way at all.
>>
>>
> I strongly disagree with that; eventually producing a good encyclopedia
> ought to take precedence over immediately gaining good PR (or avoiding
> bad PR).

Eventually producing a good encyclopedia is _exactly_ what I'm talking
about.  That's why it's better to delete crap than keep it.  Having tons
and tons of junk articles does not help us create a good quality
encyclopedia; it encourages more of the same.

--Jimbo


subject: [WikiEN-l] A quick references survey

body:
Hi,
  There is of course [[WP:GA]] but it's very painful to nominate an
article at the moment - you have to add a template to the article talk
page, edit the GA page, potentially edit a template referenced in the
GA page, and update the count at the top of GA. Simply to say that
IMHO this article is "not bad".

Is there a list of reviewing proposals anywhere? I had a thought for
one today whereby any user with at least 100 edits can add a review to
any page they have never edited, giving scores out of 5 for
comprehensiveness, sourcing, NPOV, and MoS adherence. Not a very
thoroughly thought-through thought though...:)

(wow...what a last sentence...it must be late...)

Steve

On 1/31/06, SJ <2.718281828 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Nice is right; I love this discussion.  We should start a proper
> article improvement project, run spot checks like this every few
> weeks, highlight 'good articles' and not just FAs, have regular ref
> and stub fixing contests...


from_name: rmFine32 at aol.com

subject: [Wikitech-l] Need help making categorization heading work

body:
Using MediaWiki version 1.5.6

I created [[:category:country]]
and in the page of category a I create a subcategory city
[[:category:country:city]]

In city, there is at the top of the page "Category:country" as text
instead of a link back to the parent category (country). Is this the
proper behavior?  How do I get the automatic top heading be links to
parent categories?

I tried setting $wgUseCategoryBrowser in the defaultsettings.php to
true, but it did not do anything. It did not even show the DMOZ like ..
">" .. headings.

Thanks for any guidance.


from_name: Amgine

subject: [Foundation-l] en.Wikinews Arbitration Committee selection

body:
en.Wikinews has completed the process of selecting its first Arbitration
Committee, and I'd like to take a moment to congratulate the 6 ArbCom
members:

Bawolff
Chiacomo
CSpurrier
Deprifry
Edbrown05
IlyaHaykinson

We have great hopes they've been elected to a sinecure with no duties or
tasks (or pay, so maybe not much of a sinecure), but kudos to them and
the other candidates!

Amgine


from_name: Dariusz Siedlecki

subject: [Foundation-l] New logo for Wikisource

body:
A new page has been created on the international Wikisource wiki for a
vote and a discussion on a new logo for Wikisource.

http://wikisource.org/wiki/Wikisource:New_Wikisource_logo

Please leave any questions on the talk page.

--
Regards,
Datrio


subject: [Foundation-l] New logo for Wikisource


subject: [Wikipedia-l] New logo for Wikisource


from_name: Sherool

subject: [WikiEN-l] Organizing AfD List

body:
On Tue, 31 Jan 2006 17:06:45 +0100, Steve Bennett <stevage at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Excellent suggestion. Even broad categories like popular culture,
> science etc would reduce the likelihood of Pokemon-lovers getting
> distracted and voting to delete an article on a physicist they'd never
> heard of.
>
> Steve
>
> On 1/30/06, Sue Reed <sreed1234 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>> Is there anyway to organize the AfD list by subject matter
>> or general topic? I think part of the problem with the
>> listings are that they are huge, and people like me would
>> rather spend time working on new articles, updating
>> articles, etc. versus reading through a huge laundry list
>> of articles up for deletion.
>>
>> However, if the list were more organized, I think you would
>> get a better representation in the vote and discussion as
>> people would be better able to find the articles they had
>> actual thoughts on.

Well there is/was a "deletion sorting" project. Paralell to the "standard
process". See
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Prefixindex/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Deletion_sorting>
for a list of theyr subpages. Not sure how active or up to date they are
at all times though, but it's a nice idea if somewhat labour intensive in
it's current form.

--
[[User:Sherool]]


from_name: Anthere

subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Update: Floricic vs Wikimedia Deutschland e.V.

body:
Thanks for the update Presroi.

I forward it to the foundation list, whose readers may be interested by
the issue as well.

Ant

Mathias Schindler wrote:
> Hi,
>
> today there was a hearing at the Amtsgericht Charlottenburg, Berlin
> (municipal court) about the preliminary injunction against the German
> Verein. The injunction was prohibiting Wikimedia Deutschland e.V. to
> redirect wikipedia.de to the German Wikipedia as long as the full civil
> name of a dead hacker ([[en:Tron (hacker)]]) is shown at de.wikipedia.org.
>
> In the hearing, the judge gave more than just a hint that he does not
> agree with the argument from Tron's parents that telling a (already
> publicly known) civil name is violating the post-mortem
> Pers?nlichkeitsrecht (right of personality).
>
> The decision, whether the preliminary injunction is withdrawn will be
> announced on thursday at 9 a.m. (CET).
>
> Here are two reports from the court hearing:
>
> http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/69056 (the author was present at
> the hearing)
>
> http://www.golem.de/0601/43060.html (I am not sure if he was there)
>
>
> There is one question left and I would love to see some research from
> you. Ivo Floricic, the owner of the trademark "Tron" and father of Boris
> Floricic (aka. [[en:Tron (hacker)]] claims that he thinks that he is the
> only one with the name "Floricic" in Germany and these special
> circumstances would somehow violate his rights if wikipedia is
> mentioning the full name of Tron.
>
> Does anyone know any other person by the name of Floricic?
>
> According to Google, there is an artist "Alen Floricic" from Croatia who
> might be notable (if he is notable, it would be nice to consider taking
> the CV from certain sites and write an article about him). There is also
> a professor of linguistics, Franck Floricic from France.
>
> Greetings,
> Mathias
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


from_name: Ryan Delaney

subject: [WikiEN-l] Policy on putting email addresses on wiki pages

body:
On 1/31/06, Kelly Martin <kelly.lynn.martin at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 1/31/06, Tom Steinberg <tom at tomsteinberg.co.uk> wrote:
> > Hello All,
> > We've been mulling dumping all the Northern Ireland Assembly member's
> > email addresses onto the relevent page on wikipedia, and then writing
> > a scraper script to keep our own WriteToThem systems up to date.
>
> Wikipedia is not an address book.  Email addresses are not biographical.

I agree with this comment.

Ryan


from_name: Manuel Vázquez Acosta

subject: [Wikitech-l] How to contribute new features

body:
Hi all,

A few weeks ago I was asked to set up a wiki, I choose mediawiki (1.5.3 was
the stable version these days) as the software. As I worked on the
project customers asked me for some modifications. I want to share
those with the comunity. Currently the patch is for version 1.5.3, but
if you think features are worthy I can create a patch for version
1.5.6 (current stable).

The patch is available in
http://www.chasqui.cu/staff/manu/2006/mediawiki/mediawiki-1.5.3-manu.bz2

This a sumary of features:
1.  Added a initTemplate(&$tpl) method in SkinTemplate in order to
give a chance to subclases to initialize QuickTemplates in several ways.
2. Added 2 global vars to keep category pages from displaying the
header "Articles in category XXX" and no articles at all.
3. Added a 'talk' permission to allow wiki admins to restrict
anonymous access to pages in NS_TALK namespace.
4. Added 1 global var to control how firstChar() should behave in
order to create index entries in category page's listings. This, I
think, should be done other way, please read the comments in the
patch.

Files modified:
1. CategoryPage.php
2. DefaultSettings.php (in order to set the introduced permission and
global vars to current default values, this is, as if they never
existed)
3. SkinTemplate.php
4. Title.php (permissions are granted here)
5. Language.php and LanguageUtf8.php  (firstChar mod, see above)
6. LanguageEs.php (disposable)

I would like to hear comments.

Regards,
Manuel.


from_name: STEFAN CLAUDIU TIULEA

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Using material on Wiki with permission,
	but with restrictions

body:
This will be a rather long e-mail and probably boring
to many. I would like to know two things:

1. As I was reading an article about the murder of
Kitty Genovese, I encountered a term called "Prosocial
behavior". This was, supposedly, different from
altruism in the sense that it was the very act of
doing good - unless I misunderstood it wrong.

Anyhow, I wanted to check this on Wiki, but couldn't
find any info. I then googled the term using quotes
and found 117,000 hits and another 23,000 for the
British spelling for "behavior" - with an "u". That
makes it 140,000 hits for the exact term -- and not
the words by themselves.

I decided to create a stub until I came across an
article that described the term in a very detailed
matter. At the end of the article, it said:

"This paper was developed by a student taking a
Philanthropic Studies course taught at the Center on
Philanthropy at Indiana University. It is offered by
Learning To Give and the Center on Philanthropy at
Indiana University. This page may be reproduced for
educational, noncommercial uses only, all other rights
reserved."

I then thought of Wiki that is using articles from
Britannica prior to 1911, or so, but I understood  the
difference being that the material released by
Britannica was released without any copyrights
reservations, whereas this article did reserve their
copyrights. However, this doesn't seem to violate
anything on Wiki per se, because Wiki qualifies as
both non-commercial and educational -- however, other
sites that mirror Wiki and are commercial (Answers,
etc), do not qualify to those terms.

To my ears, this sounds as a dilemma. Can we publish
material that is restricted as non-commercial, but
which will be made "commercial" by other mirror sites,
such as Answers? I know that certain photos are
uploaded on Wiki and which have similar restrictions
on them as this one.

2. Another thing that I would like to know, and which
relates to this case, is whether we can credit the
article to the author who wrote it. I know this is an
unusual procedure, but think of the benefits: it could
encourage great editors, who may want to have their
work publicized, to make their great work available on
Wiki! It would probably come with troubles, too, as
many others would also want recognition for their
articles, but perhaps exceptions can be made? I know,
for instance, that on E. Britannica, they have
articles written by different people which sometimes
are being credited at the end of the article.

Any thoughts?

User:Anittas

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


from_name: geni

subject: [WikiEN-l] The deletion paradox

body:
On 2/1/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> Tony Sidaway wrote:
> > On 1/31/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> >
> >>In many many cases there is a reason to delete a 2-sentence unverified
> >>stub.  We need to be extremely aggressive about doing so when the
> >>article in question contains negative claims about any living person or
> >>existing company.
> >
> >
> > Actually that has long been one of our criteria for speedy deletion,
> > and I believe that it has always been implemented aggressively.
>
> I'll present some counter-examples in a day or two (have to ask other
> people to help me remember them), and we can analyze what went wrong.
>
> --Jimbo

Hmm some historical ones are listed here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Substub&oldid=32649995

--
geni


subject: [WikiEN-l] Here's an interesting one

body:
On 2/1/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> I think a few people have gotten quite confused about the role of admins
> due to the excessive rules lawyering.  Maybe they are the ones who need
> to rethink it.
>
> --Jimbo

The tradition of no big deal was never consistant with capabilities
allowed by the softwear. However process limts how and when those
powers can be used. Take that away and admins become very powerful
indeed.

--
geni