from_name: Luiz Augusto

subject: [Foundation-l] board candidacies

body:
My English is very very very poor to write something, but I really need to
try it here. The point ins't the expenses for boarders. The point is what is
Wiki>>>M<<<edia (and not only Wikipedia, Wikipedia is only the most famous
project) is. Please, forgive the expenses question, Wikimedia ins't a travel
agency, Wikimedia is a Foundation devoted to Free Culture movement.

Some candidates in yours presentations appear to be in that election only to
give some important position in a famous website. Wiki>>>M<<<edia is so much
more than it and the boarder position is so much more than it. Please, read
again the full message from Anthere.

P.S.: Portuguese Wikipedia (my home wiki) periodically need to ask stressing
subjects to boarders (a community with 300 editor that don't have a
ArbCom committee).
I'm doubt if at least 50% of current candidates are ready to apply to a
position that lot's of anothers wikis need to listen periodically about lots
of subjects.

On 8/10/06, Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> Hello all,
>
> Being back from Wikimania, I have a look at the list of candidates and
> here is what I see:
>
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Election_candidates_2006
>
> I'd like to make a very serious appeal for candidates.
> I would hate to discourage some of you, but rather to be frank.
>
> Being on the board is not a game.
> It is not about changing the policies on the english wikipedia.
> It is not about improving welcome templates for newbies on wikipedia
> either.
> And it is not even about pushing the use of the german userboxes.
>
> What we need (desperately need) is people who understand what the
> Foundation is, what our needs are, where the challenges are located.
>
>
> I listed some of the challenges in my presentation at Wikimania;
> (http://wikimania2006.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proceedings:FD1). I have no
> idea when the audio will be accessible, but I think any candidate should
> at least have a look/ear to it.
>
> What would be best are people who already know and participate to
> Wikimedia Foundation issue. I could cite dozen, many of whom were at
> wikimania. A couple candidated, but I also know they are controversial
> so might end up not being in the top.
>
> I would like that non english editors take the chance to run. Not being
> english is certainly an handicap due to the huge number of english
> voters. Naturally, if you are mostly known in one community, you'll get
> a disadvantage. But if you are also a meta participant, the word can be
> disseminated that you are a high quality person. Because meta people
> know you and can tell about you in the local communities. You have a
> chance !
>
>
> I will not hide the fact that being on the board is highly frustrating.
> It is a lot of work. It costs personal money. It is little rewarded. It
> carries its generous load of humiliation.
>
> But... if you care about the projects, if you care about their future,
> if you care about giving a chance to the content to stay free for real,
> if you care about the risk of being "adopted" by a commercial firm, if
> you care about the risk of seeing the freedom being reduced to protect
> what is merely a legal entity, if you care about us being an
> international entity rather than being a pure american business and
> professional foundation, please, do help.
>
> Please.
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>


list: wikimedia-l

source: pipermail-mbox

subject: [Foundation-l] board candidacies


list: wikien-l

from_name: Nathaniel

subject: [WikiEN-l] Permissions email?

body:
Sorry, I can't remember--anyone know the wikimedia email address for
confirming that an image is released under a free license by its creator
when it's uploaded by someone else?  Is it permissions at wikimedia.org or
permission at wikimedia.com or what?  I've looked around on various image
policy pages on en and commons and can't find the address anywhere.

Thanks.

Nathaniel


list: foundation-l

from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [Foundation-l] board candidacies

body:
Erik Zachte wrote:

>Walter van Kalken:
>
>
>>I personally feel that one of the big issues is that people are required
>>to spend their own money for things. This means that if you life outside
>>of the US, even outside of Florida that your costs will be prohibitively
>>high. I personally find that one of the most prohibitive requirements.
>>Many people whom would have the time and the enthousiasm do not have a
>>bankaccount for that. And that is one of the reasons I have a lot of
>>respect for Angela and Anthere. They are willing to spend their personal
>>savings for the betterment of the projects. People should realize that
>>the next time they start complaining with them.
>>
>>
>I concur with this entirely. We have enough dot com millionaires on the
>Board, and the Advisory Board might add some.
>This is not personal to anyone, those concerned probably just got their
>priorities right.
>
>What 'saddens' me however is the way Anthere was treated during the Board
>session last Sunday when the issue of paying board members was brought up.
>Jimbo made a casual remark to the effect of "(I'm not sure) we want to pay
>board members, besides it is not allowed by the bylaws" (paraphrasing here).
>Easy to say in his position. Then someone made a witty but badly timed joke
>about the situation, the chairman of the Board might have intervened at that
>moment. I feel it was humiliating for Anthere. Maybe the bylaws allow other
>board members than Jimmy to accept well paid invitations for keynote
>speeches?
>
I recently sat on a committee of a local unrelated organization that
dealt with the compensation issue on a much smaller scale.  There too,
one of the borderline issues had to do with babysitting.  It can be a
very tricky issue that needs to be approached with a great deal of
sensitivity.  Before answering I made a point of reviewing the
transcript
http://wikimania2006.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Board_Panel

There is a clear distinction between paying a salary to a board member,
and reimbursing him for out-of-pocket expenses.  The specific quote from
Jimbo is "I have no interest in being paid."  I would not extrapolate
from that comment an inference that no-one should be paid.  On the other
hand paying the airfare for key people to travel halfway around the
world is perfectly acceptable.

Anthere, IMHO, has a reputation for taking principled positions.  If she
felt that it was unethical to be reimbursed for her babysitting expenses
I need to respect that position.  I am certainly not prepared to
prejudge what would have happened if she had asked for a reimbursement
of that expense.  Very few of us need to deal with that specific
expense.  I can also look at the joke in the spirit in which it was
intended, and not as a real criticism of anybody.  Anyone there who
actually saw the tiny baby in the gentle hands of a gorilla would have
laughed.

If someone wants to generously pay a board member to give a keynote
speech that board member is entitled to keep it.  This is not a matter
for our by-laws.  I don't think that Jimbo is the only one giving
speeches, though I did think that the criticism of Brad for accepting a
speaking engagement when he "should be in the office" was somewhat petty.

Ec


subject: [Foundation-l] board candidacies


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Steve Summit

subject: [Wikitech-l] Break out links-How are they done?

body:
Steve Bennett wrote:
> On 8/11/06, Steve Summit <scs at eskimo.com> wrote:
>> One of the fundamental original principles of the web was that
>> links were cheap and could take you anywhere.  People understood
>
> Yeah, back in 1984 or whatever.

Yup. :-)

> Things changed a lot. I notice that now we have very different styles
> of link behaviour, and what you expect from a link changes a lot...

Indeed.

It really is an imponderable.  Mediawiki already treats external
links significantly differently from internal ones, proving
(even to the 80's-vintage troglodytes among us) that there *is*
a difference.  And if mediawiki were to start adding "target=new"
to the list of other ways it distinguishes external links, that
would be arguably perfectly appropriate in the context of today's
Web.  There would be some few who would spit nails and/or rage
against the dying of the light, but they would be comparatively
few (though *very* vocal :-) ).

I haven't looked at the code, but I would guess that making this
a site-configurable option would be very easy, and I'd think it
ought to be pretty noncontentious, too (at least until someone
tried enabling it on the Wikimedia sites...)


from_name: Steve Bennett

subject: [WikiEN-l] Are TV screencaps reputable sources?

body:
On 8/11/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:
> While the TV shows are canonical (as are the movies (except where
> continuity fails, cf. /Enterprise/)), using a screencap is close to
> original research and on dangerous ground wrt. using "fair use" as an
> excuse for copyright infringement.

I would put it like this: relying exclusively on primary sources
doesn't give you much room to move without straying into original
research. A good secondary source (they must exist for this topic)
would give this article a solid base to stand on.

Steve


from_name: Jay R. Ashworth

body:
On Fri, Aug 11, 2006 at 07:25:17PM +0200, Steve Bennett wrote:
> On 8/11/06, Steve Summit <scs at eskimo.com> wrote:
> > One of the fundamental original principles of the web was that
> > links were cheap and could take you anywhere.  People understood
>
> Yeah, back in 1984 or whatever. Things changed a lot. I notice that
> now we have very different styles of link behaviour, and what you
> expect from a link changes a lot. On a blog, I expect every second
> word to be randomly linked to some random site. On a corporate site, I
> expect 95%+ of links to be internal. It's gotten pretty much to the
> stage that unannounced external links are surprising to me.

I think it's *specifically* corporate sites.

Some 'designer' told them that off-site linking would rape their small
children, or something.

> > The related notions of
> >
> >         * I must control my user and not let him leave My Domain.
> >
> >         * It is easy for someone new to computers to head to a.
> >           new link and forget what they originally were looking for.
> >           Then they leave our wiki.
> >
> >         * When I send someone to an external link, I am not
> >           responsible for the content of that external site.
> >           Sometimes newbies may think that I created the external
> >           pages, too.
> >
> > are all comparatively recent, and although mechanisms like
>
> I'm dying to see the word "newfangled" in this discussion somewhere...

Five miles.  In the snow.  Uphill.  Both ways.

> > (On the other hand, though, I have to confess that a well-chosen
> > target=new can be really handy sometimes, when a page designer
> > "got it right" in terms of using it just where I would have
> > wanted a new window anyway...)
>
> It may just be the way I browse the web, but I don't have any gripes.
> I tend to open *every* link in a new tab, so it doesn't make much
> difference whether they were planning for a new window or not.

Certainly a matter of taste.

The reason this whole thread got started was because browsers don't
have reasonable facilities for *overriding* Target=_new for those who
prefer not to.

And don't get me started on people gratuitously locking window sizes,
and turning off chrome and scroll bars.

On my 1400x1050 monitor.

With Ctrl-+ up 2 notches.

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

	The Internet: We paved paradise, and put up a snarking lot.


from_name: George Herbert

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Invited by admin to leave en if concerned about free
	reusability

body:
On 8/11/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 11/08/06, jkelly at fas.harvard.edu <jkelly at fas.harvard.edu> wrote:
>
> >   It seems that I was recently invited by an admin to leave the
> en:wikipedia
> > project...
> >
> http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia_talk%3ARequests_for_comment%2FKelly_Martin2&diff=68969013&oldid=68968296
>
>
> Let's read and quote what it actually says there, shall we?
>
> "If you're here to do other things than make the best possible free
> encyclopedia, then -- to borrow a nauseatingly common theme from the
> other side's advocates -- the door's right over there."
>
> I think every word of that is the case and needs to be drummed into
> people's heads, myself.
>
> Note also it's an if-then. Your offence at the statement implies you
> meet the condition, and hence are here for some other reason. Is that
> what you meant?

The sentence before that is the problematic one.

Hero's full comment was:
*"We are largely still operating as if most people here are working to give
away a free, reusable encyclopedia, as if most editors here think of
themselves as part of the open
source<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source>/ free
culture movement <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_culture_movement>"* We
are? Maybe "we" better wake up. *It's supposed to be an encyclopedia*, not
some la-di-da "free culture movement" love-in. I'd say that many, many
editors think that the free-image-only policy is asinine -- which it is,
obviously, *if you want to build a first-rate encyclopedia.* If you're here
to do other things than make the best possible free encyclopedia, then -- to
borrow a nauseatingly common theme from the other side's advocates -- the
door's right over there.
Herostratus<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Herostratus>06:02, 11
August 2006 (UTC)

I would love to be able to use random professional copyrighted images for WP
articles; there are plenty of great images out there which we won't get
permission to use.

The impact on Wikipedia's redistributability - hence the "is this project
still free or not?" question - is significant if we change the image policy
much.

Is this policy subject to evolving consensus (and legal changes, etc?).
Sure.  Is it appropriate to ask people to leave just because they happen to
agree with current consensus, that the legal implications of non-free images
are much worse than what using them would bring to WP?  No.

Copyright law sometimes causes freely redistributable things all sorts of
pain and suffering.  If you want to work to change the law, feel free,
either through lobbying or court cases or whatnot.  Taking a too-free
interpretation of existing copyright law right now, though, could easily get
Wikipedia in a world of hurt.  There have been copyright cases with damages
and legal fees which exceed the net value of WMF.

--
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com


from_name: Christiaan Briggs

subject: [Wikitech-l] Apple's Wiki Server brings WYSIWYG to wiki

body:
Yeah, fair points. Couldn't agree more.

Christiaan

On 11 Aug 2006, at 1:30 PM, Steve Bennett wrote:

> On 8/11/06, Christiaan Briggs <christiaan at yurkycross.co.uk> wrote:
>> On 11 Aug 2006, at 11:51 AM, mboverload wrote:
>>
>>> What does Wikipedia need WYSIWYG?  We already have noobs writing
>>> POV articles, now you want ...
>>
>> And there's an example of the attitude I was talking in my first
>> post. It's curious in that it accepts that wiki markup is barrier
>> to participation but that this is somehow a good thing.
>
> Sometimes barriers to participation *are* a good thing. Various
> online communities have noticed that the harder you make it to
> participate, the better quality participants you get.
>
> OTOH, Wikipedia explicitly wants contributions from *everyone*,
> even if they are 14 and have trouble spelling Pok?mon...


body:
On 8/11/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 11/08/06, George Herbert <george.herbert at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Copyright law sometimes causes freely redistributable things all sorts
> of
> > pain and suffering.  If you want to work to change the law, feel free,
> > either through lobbying or court cases or whatnot.  Taking a too-free
> > interpretation of existing copyright law right now, though, could easily
> get
> > Wikipedia in a world of hurt.  There have been copyright cases with
> damages
> > and legal fees which exceed the net value of WMF.
>
>
> OTOH, that doesn't mean shy away from specious examples like the
> National Portrait Gallery's specious legal threats.

No, it would be silly to assume that any copyright violation claim is
inherently legally valid or morally valid.  People make legally questionable
legal threats all the time.

But that doesn't invalidate the general reasons why current policy is what
it is.

--
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com


body:
Jay Ashworth wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 11, 2006 at 12:27:08PM -0400, Steve Summit wrote:
>> ...The concept of an integrated web "site" that you either wandered
>> around within, or made some kind of a conscious decision to "break out"
>> of, hadn't been developed yet.
>
> Is that really true?  I've been using the web since, like, 1995 or so,
> and I don't recall...

Hey!  Whose side you on?  Let one of the skeptics question my
blatant assertions... :-)

> I liken it to people having to understand how roads and signs work to
> be able to drive.  Why we enable such people who proudly decline to
> learn how to use their tools completely eludes me.

It's a tough call, though, because is it the right analogy to
compare back-button-challenged web surfers to illiterate drivers
who can't read signs and maps, or to ordinary drivers who aren't
able to perfectly prevent accidents, and on whose behalf we
therefore invent (and require) seat belts and air bags?

Be that as it may, if the current generation of users (of any
technology) is for whatever reason all complaining about some
particular annoying problem, the vendors who denounce those users
as dumb idiots who just need some education tend to have their
lunch eaten by the savvier vendors who pander to those users,
right or wrong.  (But that's an argument for another day.)


from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject: [Foundation-l] board candidacies

body:
Erik Zachte wrote:
> I really should have gone to bed a few hours earlier and have postponed any
> reaction to after a good night sleep. Too late, damage done.
>
>
No damage. :)

> Still I Anthere could have gotten a more cordial answer, instead of Jimbo's
> factual remark and a joke by someone else.
>
>

Yes.

> I suppose you mean the US law. We could have an interesting discussion of
> what the consequences are of the foundation being based in the US, but I
> suppose it would confuse matters now.
>
>
I think it is much worse in other countries.  I know that it is not
possible to be both an employee and a
board member at a UK charity, and I think it is the same for a Verein in
Germany.  In the US, it is possible that
someone could be a board member (for which they can not be paid, as far
as I know), and also have a different job
in the organization.  (For example, a programmer, community manager,
press liason, whatever.)

I thought that the question, as posed at the board panel, was absolutely
excellent, by the way.  I think it would be a
grand thing for board diversity if we could pay people at least something.

What we *can* do, and what we *will* do, is be generous within the
bounds of the law in terms of covering
legitimate expenses of board members related to their service.  For sure.

Also, as we are growing as an organization, it may well be that the
right solution to this is to have some excellent community
members as employees, and a much larger board of directors which acts
like a more traditional board of directors so that it can be a part-time
commitment.

--Jimbo


subject: [Foundation-l] board candidacies


list: commons-l

from_name: Samuli Lintula

subject: [Commons-l] Deletion of still-used images

body:
On Fri, 11 Aug 2006 13:04:00 +0300, Alphax (Wikipedia email)
<alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:

> What we really need are links on local projects to the deletion log on
> Commons for the "no such image" pages... there's nothing like a redlink
> to make people ask "Whoa! What happened to that image?", but unless they
> can find a reason (cf. the deletion record on Commons saying that
> something was a copyvio) they're going to get angry.

The red link behaviour is quote awful in my opinion, too. I'd like to
mention, just in case, that CommonsTicker also tells a reason why an image
was deleted. So it's always a good idea to tell the reason when deleting
as file.

--
Yst?v?llisin terveisin,
Samuli Lintula


from_name: MacGyverMagic/Mgm

body:
A source doesn't have to be canonical to be a good secondary source.
For example, Harry Potter articles could cite the Harry Potter Lexicon as
their source instead of the books by Rowling herself. The Lexicon editors
did all the research for us and no original research would be required.

Mgm

On 8/11/06, Joe Anderson <computerjoe.mailinglist at googlemail.com> wrote:
>
> Cool Cat recently created an article called Starfleet
> Uniforms<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starfleet_Uniforms>,
> and it was nominated for deletion as cruft and OR.
>
> The screencaps/promo photos in the article, IMO, acted as a reputable
> source. I mean, how else (canonically) are you going to know about the
> uniform switch between TOS and TNG? Using a book is not canonical, and
> therefore is surely not [[WP:V]].
>
> As for fancruft, how is an article about Starfleet uniforms fancruft. In
> some people's opinion, any article to do with any fictional is fancruft.
> But
> is the article on Jean-Luc Picard fancruft? I think not.
>
> Your thoughts?
>
> --
> Joe Anderson
>
> [[User:Computerjoe]] on en, fr, de, simple, Meta and Commons.
> _______________________________________________
> 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: Gregory Maxwell

subject: [Wikitech-l] Wysiwyg debate

body:
On 8/11/06, Aerik Sylvan <aerik at thesylvans.com> wrote:
[snip]
>  The experience of editing a well developed page
> can be like looking at source code:  if you don't know the language, there's
> an awful lot of gobbledygook in there, and I'd think it intimidates some
> people.
>
> So... it would just be an interesting figure, to hold up next to other
> figures, like completed edits.

I'd be especially interested to know how the number of failed edits
relates to page edits on pages with infoboxes at the top.

In my experience wikitext markup isn't frightening to many people
until you are faced with templates.... which are, unfortunately, the
first bit of wikitext source that many editors see.

Once we're sampling views it wouldn't be too hard to sample edit pages. :)


body:
On 8/11/06, Christiaan Briggs <christiaan at yurkycross.co.uk> wrote:
> On 11 Aug 2006, at 11:51 AM, mboverload wrote:
>
> > What does Wikipedia need WYSIWYG?  We already have noobs writing
> > POV articles, now you want ...
>
> And there's an example of the attitude I was talking in my first
> post. It's curious in that it accepts that wiki markup is barrier to
> participation but that this is somehow a good thing.

Sometimes barriers to participation *are* a good thing. Various online
communities have noticed that the harder you make it to participate,
the better quality participants you get.

OTOH, Wikipedia explicitly wants contributions from *everyone*, even
if they are 14 and have trouble spelling Pok?mon...

Steve


from_name: Simetrical

subject: [Wikitech-l] Where are the Extensions

body:
On 8/11/06, tim at greenscourt.com <tim at greenscourt.com> wrote:
> I fixed the link that had me looking in the wrong place. Not sure if
> there are other bad links out there or not...

There are 161 still on enwiki:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ALinksearch&target=cvs.sourceforge.net.
 Anyone who wants to fix them can go ahead.  (Meta doesn't have
Linksearch installed.  :( )


from_name: Nick Jenkins

subject:
[Wikitech-l] 404 on en.wikipedia.org: Server-side HTTP header
	instead of client-side meta-refresh?

body:
> I nixed that because then you've got scary unstable URLs being linked to. The
> URL system may change, potentially dramatically so, and they'll no longer work.
> (But I'm a bit of a stickler about stable URLs on articles.)

Well if http://en.wikipedia.org/XYZ redirects to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XYZ , and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XYZ either is
the real content (or a redirect to the real content in the future event of a URL system change, so as to maintain stable URLs), then
wouldn't that be okay?

> The PHP manual example is particularly dangerous because they don't even issue
> an HTTP redirect, it just spits the content right back. Bad for caching and for
> linking.

I agree (and I should have said as much in the original mail). Their implementation seems wrong (bad to echo content, should
redirect instead), but the principle (IMHO) of doing something nice with the input is pretty sound. i.e. I was thinking more a HTTP
30x redirect header.

All the best,
Nick.


body:
On 8/11/06, MacGyverMagic/Mgm <macgyvermagic at gmail.com> wrote:
> A source doesn't have to be canonical to be a good secondary source.
> For example, Harry Potter articles could cite the Harry Potter Lexicon as
> their source instead of the books by Rowling herself. The Lexicon editors
> did all the research for us and no original research would be required.

Oh, I interpreted the "using a book is not canonical" to mean "using a
Star Trek novel is not describing the same universe as the TV series".
What you said is definitely correct.

Steve


from_name: Timwi

subject: [Wikitech-l] Where are the Extensions

body:
Jens Frank wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 07, 2006 at 02:53:25PM -0700, tim at greenscourt.com wrote:
>
>>I am looking for the "Reviews" extension which I believe was written by
>>Magnus Manske and feel lost in a maze.
>>
>>Several messages posted to the MediaWiki-L mailing list refer to updates
>>to this code as follows:
>>  Update of /cvsroot/wikipedia/extensions/Review
>>  In directory sc8-pr-cvs1.sourceforge.net:/tmp/cvs-serv22161
>>
>>The page at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_extensions links to
>>http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/wikipedia/extensions/#dirlist, but
>>this location just times out for me.
>>
>>I've tried going to http://sourceforge.net/projects/wikipedia/ but I
>>can't seem to find where the extensions are hiding there.
>
> We don't use sourceforge's CVS any more. Check our SVN repository at
> http://svn.wikimedia.org/viewvc/mediawiki/trunk/extensions/

Maybe someone should actually fix the links then? :-p


subject: [WikiEN-l] Technical solution to bad fair use

body:
On 8/11/06, Ed Sanders <ejsanders at gmail.com> wrote:
> On the subject of the technical solutions to bad fair use,
> http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6880 may be of interest to
> some. It was born out of discussion at the URL provided there
> (WikiProject Fair Use).

I would be opposed to implementing this feature until we demonstrate
that we can make good use of it.

We could make such a list on-wiki and use a bot for enforcement. The
software feature would only speed up enforcement. You could start
today.. get tagging!

There was some movement about a year ago to require fair use images to
name their used pages in their justification claims, but this was
opposed by folks advocating boilerplate fair use statements.


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] New SVN committer

body:
Added Peter Danenberg (peterchd), to update the WikiTeX extension.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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body:
On 8/11/06, mboverload <mboverload at gmail.com> wrote:
> What does Wikipedia need WYSIWYG?  We already have noobs writing POV
> articles, now you want
>
> * Large red text
> * tons of bold
> * Large purple text
>
> ?

Nobody said what buttons will be available.  A "color" button is not
available now, and should never be available . . . but the markup will
still be available to those who know how to enter it, however that
will be, just as it's available now.

The goal is to increase accessibility as much as possible.

On 8/11/06, Jay R. Ashworth <jra at baylink.com> wrote:
> But the data is completely anecdotal: we have people who complain about
> it.  Great.  But we have *hundreds of thousands* of editors who have
> created, literally, millions of pages on Wikipedia.

Pfft.  That's equally anecdotal.

> And I rather strongly suspect that you'd find that *lots* of the
> editors we have now would much prefer to stay in wikitext.  I'm damned
> sure I would.

If the WYSIWYG editor were actually good, and actually displayed
*exactly* what the end result would be, I think you'd find that you'd
acclimate to it extremely quickly.  I agree that most existing WYSIWYG
editors are obnoxious in various ways; this plan is contingent upon
making one that is not.  If you would still prefer to edit it
directly, hey, XML is meant to be human-readable.

On 8/11/06, Jay R. Ashworth <jra at baylink.com> wrote:
> Wikitext is one of the simplest markup schemata -- for it's power --
> that I have *ever* seen, in 20 years of staring at markup languages.

In terms of easiness to learn and type, yes.  In terms of the backend
syntax, it's hell, especially when prefab syntaxes are available that
will serve the purpose just as well.  Some people are currently
struggling to put together a grammar so that a decent parser can be
compiled, effort that's completely pointless when we could just use
XML.

On 8/11/06, Jay R. Ashworth <jra at baylink.com> wrote:
> But you remain correct: an overlay WYSIWYG editor, perhaps within the
> contstraints Steve mentioned in an earlier message, will serve the
> requirements you have, without requiring much (if any) underlying
> modification.

If one can be written that doesn't show up massive discrepancies with
the actual displayed text . . . if the Wikiwyg programmers didn't have
to deal with the crazy syntax, they could work on stuff like
displaying templates properly instead of getting weird mixes of
varying numbers of apostrophes to mimic the behavior of our
labrynthine parser.


from_name: Mei Wu

subject: [Wikitech-l] thumbnail conversion

body:
Hi all,

I'm running Mediawiki 1.6.7 on Windows XP.
The thumbnail conversion doesn't work properly. Did anyone encounter
the same problem? Is there a way to resolve this problem?

Thanks so much in advance.

Best regards,
Mei


references:
<NABBJGECPILFNLFEAPIKOEGEIKAA.nickpj@gmail.com>
	<44DBFB21.9050609@pobox.com>
	<f1c3529e0608110152t78a10babpde43b8fe8443bd27@mail.gmail.com>
	<44DCA33F.40906@pobox.com>
	<f1c3529e0608111008i713ab8e0n99105ff93cbcf1e1@mail.gmail.com>

body:
On 8/11/06, Steve Bennett <stevage at gmail.com> wrote:
> The one suggestion I might make would be adding a *forward* link as
> well as a backward link. So, when you get soft-redirected like that,
> you would end up with a link to the actual page (without the backwards
> redirect. Maybe that's what I'm missing. It'd just be convenient if
> there was a way to get to the actual page, in order to bookmark it or
> copy the URL or something. Currently I end up copy-pasting the title
> into the navigation box.

Click the "article" tab.


from_name: stevertigo

body:
--- Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
> Also, some people are twats.

I think the proper term is "twits," but I often use
the mispelled version myself.

:)

-SV

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
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body:
--- Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
> Quoting you-know-who, "Twat is a vulgar term for the human vagina,
> which can also be used as a derogatory epithet."

Aye, but amended to that should be "...toward women."

 "The term carries a connotation of or allusion to a ''difference''
 between men and women with regard to their effective "twittiness"
 (patent pending), based on their particular anatomies and the
 understood effects thereof." (Quoth myself.)

-SV

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


body:
> No, because then people get used to entering it like that . . . and
> they happily go on entering it like that . . . and then one day,
> they're interested in looking up info about the Robot Exclusion Policy
> Protocol and type in http://en.wikipedia.org/robots.txt . . . and WTF?

I knew someone would make that argument, but I really don't find it a very compelling reason to not do something.

Firstly, how do you know this isn't happening already? There's a meta redirect, so how do you know people aren't just using that?
And how do you know that right now someone isn't looking at http://en.wikipedia.org/robots.txt and going "Huh? Where's my Wikipedia
article?" ?

Secondly, if someone wants to read an article about the gory details of the robot exclusion policy, it seems a stretch to suggest
that they will have no idea about HTTP redirects or that there's a file called robots.txt. (I.e. if the robot exclusion policy
required us using a file called http://en.wikipedia.org/Cabbage_Patch_Doll then I agree, that would be a real problem, but
"robots.txt"? Come on!)

Thirdly, of the one-point-something million article pages, there's a handful which have real content in the web root. It's like 10
files (equivalent to 0.001% of the article space), and some of them are like http://en.wikipedia.org/COPYING (i.e. they're not doing
anything particularly useful).

Look, I'm not trying to be obtuse, but I sincerely think that a redirect is better, and pointing to corner-cases as a reason not to
make things better in the general-case doesn't make much sense to me.

All the best,
Nick.


body:
Yeah, I think that's what Steve was saying Tim.

Christiaan

On 11 Aug 2006, at 2:43 PM, tim at greenscourt.com wrote:

> At the recent Wikimania Conference, Jimmy Wales said that, contrary to
> some opinions, barriers to participation are *not* good. We still get
> vandals, but we're probably missing out on some really good content
> creators who are not technologically savvy. This is one reason why WM
> is now working with SocialText to integrate Wikiwyg.
>
> Tim
>
>
>> -------- Original Message --------
>> Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] Apple's Wiki Server brings WYSIWYG to wiki
>> From: Christiaan Briggs <christiaan at yurkycross.co.uk>
>> Date: Fri, August 11, 2006 7:58 am
>> To: Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l at wikimedia.org>
>>
>> Yeah, fair points. Couldn't agree more.
>>
>> Christiaan
>>
>> On 11 Aug 2006, at 1:30 PM, Steve Bennett wrote:
>>
>>> On 8/11/06, Christiaan Briggs <christiaan at yurkycross.co.uk> wrote:
>>>> On 11 Aug 2006, at 11:51 AM, mboverload wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> What does Wikipedia need WYSIWYG?  We already have noobs writing
>>>>> POV articles, now you want ...
>>>>
>>>> And there's an example of the attitude I was talking in my first
>>>> post. It's curious in that it accepts that wiki markup is barrier
>>>> to participation but that this is somehow a good thing.
>>>
>>> Sometimes barriers to participation *are* a good thing. Various
>>> online communities have noticed that the harder you make it to
>>> participate, the better quality participants you get.
>>>
>>> OTOH, Wikipedia explicitly wants contributions from *everyone*,
>>> even if they are 14 and have trouble spelling Pok?mon...
>> _______________________________________________
>> Wikitech-l mailing list
>> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
>> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l


subject: [WikiEN-l] Fakes and people who cant tell the difference

body:
--- Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 8/7/06, Fastfission <fastfission at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Looks like a lithograph or some related process -- adds a hazy, drawn
> > quality to photographs. Very common way of processing photos for
> > reprinting in news sources amongst countries with less developed
> > printing presses. The Soviet Union used this extensively throughout
> > the 1950s; I don't know if it was ever very popular in the United
> > States, and certainly hasn't been used there much in the 20th century.
> > At least, this is what I recall reading somewhere, a long time ago,
> > cobbled together with my own experience with old newspapers. I might
> > be wrong many points, but it resembles a lot of the Soviet-era
> > photographs I have seen, at the very least.
>
> Ah, so you start with a photo, then trace around the broad shapes by
> hand, to reproduce by printing press? Makes sense. You end up with a
> sharper image, but less actual detail.

(Cough!) Um, I dont think that was the case in that case. At all.
Hence I now make an ironic point of my finger to the title I gave
this thread. ;)

The Soviet process of photo retouching strived for realism, or at least
what passed for convincingness in contemporary totalitarian society. There
are some good books on the subject. It was used mostly used to erase people from
history, or at least in official photographs of historical people: 'Comrade Bukharin? I
dont remember any "Bukharin." You have "photos," you say? Hrmph!'

-SV

__________________________________________________
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Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
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body:
> On 8/11/06, jkelly at fas.harvard.edu <jkelly at fas.harvard.edu> wrote:
> > ... Is en a project where free
> > culture advocates should expect to be mocked and invited to leave?  Would there
> > be any interest in creating a fork of en that uses unfree content only when
> > absolutely necessary and in a way that such content could be easily stripped
> > out for reusers?  Is this local to en?  Where is people's comfort level with
> > emphatic disagreement over the issue?
> >
> >  I think that there is plenty of room for contributors to wikimedia projects
> > who aren't interested in the potential for reuse of those projects, but I am
> > wondering where en is at if admins are actively dissuading contributors who
> > value it.

 Way too... conceptual.

 Could you please rephrase the entire question only
 simplified to something based on just the concepts
 of "deletionism" and "inclusionism?"

 :}

-SV

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


from_name: Matt Brown

body:
On 8/11/06, stevertigo <vertigosteve at yahoo.com> wrote:
> --- Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Quoting you-know-who, "Twat is a vulgar term for the human vagina,
> > which can also be used as a derogatory epithet."
>
> Aye, but amended to that should be "...toward women."

Not in my experience; it is used as a degoratory epithet towards both
genders.  It is probably used /more/ towards men, in fact; perhaps
because the tone of it is percieved as different directed towards a
woman, who would possess the body part in question.  Whether it is
more offensive towards a man or towards a woman is beyond my
giving-a-damn to determine; I'd imagine, like many similar insults,
the difference is in nature rather than degree.

(returning to your regularly scheduled programming ...)

-Matt


subject: [Foundation-l] board candidacies

body:
Anthere wrote:
> I am currently required to spend my own money to go and give speeches.
> This has been the case for over 2 years now.
The board passed a budget for your expenses and to my knowledge, you
have never used it all up, nor have you asked
for an increase, nor have you ever submitted any claim for expenses
which has been denied.  Standard policy has always
been that board members should be reimbursed upon request for reasonable
travel expenses.

> This said, Michael wrote yesterday that I should ask for my child care
> costs to be covered. Does that need a resolution ?
>
>
No, it just requires you to submit your request.  As always.

--Jimbo


subject: [Foundation-l] board candidacies


subject: [Wikitech-l] Wikipedia Suggest

body:
Hi Julien,

One more patch for the suggestion searching, this time to add experimental "autocomplete" searching.

It works like this:
* If there is only one matching result, then the rest of the search term is automatically filed in.
* If the top two searches agree on the next X letters, then the next X letters are automatically filled in.

In both cases, any automatically filled in text is kept highlighted / selected. This way, the user can either:
* Press the right arrow key if the autocomplete is correct (thus accepting the autocomplete).
* Or keep typing normally, thus overwriting the highlighted autocomplete.

In other words, you shouldn't in theory lose anything from the autocomplete, but you may well gain (in that we can be lazier because
of it). For example, you can specify the word "australia", and instead of the usual 9 key presses, you can do it with 4 ("au", right
arrow, "a"); "Los Angeles Aqueduct" instead of the usual 20 key presses is just 9 ("los a" + right arrow + " aq"); and so forth.

Patch (against 0.2) is here: http://files.nickj.org/MediaWiki/WSuggest-js-autocomplete-diff.txt

Currently there are two known problems with the autocomplete functionality (hence the 'experimental' status):
* The main one is if the user types fast, the highlighting/selection will stuff up. For example, if you type "new" quickly, then it
autocompletes to "new York" (which is fine), but the " York" bit is not highlighted (which is definitely not fine). I'm currently
not sure why this happens (maybe a race condition between the sequential query requests?) - but if anyone knows how to prevent this,
please sing out and/or send patches!
* Gets redirects wrong (fills in too much detail). For example if the user types "formula we" it will autocomplete to "Formula
Weight → Atomic mass", which simply won't work. It's possible to have the JavaScript search for " → " and stop any string
at that point, but it feels a bit ugly, so I have omitted that. Might it be slightly neater to have sendRes return 5 fields instead
of 4? E.g. "sendRes(query, res, freqs, urls, redirectTargets)", where the new "redirectTargets" field would be an array that
contained a NULL/empty entry when there was no redirect, or the redirect target when it was a redirect? That way 'res' could contain
just the article's name, and the redirect target functionality could be kept in a logically separate field.

All the best,
Nick.


subject: [Foundation-l] board candidacies

body:
George Herbert wrote:
>
> That is not to minimize the question - if we generalize, if Joe Random
> Billionare comes to the WMF with a million dollar donation check and asks
> for a board seat in return, it's still a completely valid policy question.
> And could well be a realistic problem.
>
>
>
Well, for us today, $1 million is not very much money.


subject: [Foundation-l] board candidacies


from_name: jkelly at fas.harvard.edu

body:
  Hi,

  It seems that I was recently invited by an admin to leave the en:wikipedia
project...

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia_talk%3ARequests_for_comment%2FKelly_Martin2&diff=68969013&oldid=68968296

...over my apparantly too-conservative approach to unfree content or my
understanding of Wikipedia as part of the free culture movement.  The comment
was strangely phrased, because it ended with "If you're here to do other things
than make the best possible free encyclopedia..." while the rest of it was
railing against "some la-di-da free culture movement love-in", so I may be
misunderstanding (but it is more likely that this is a "free as in beer"
usage).  In any case, I'm not taking the suggestion all that seriously, but I
do wonder what this says about where we are.  Is en a project where free
culture advocates should expect to be mocked and invited to leave?  Would there
be any interest in creating a fork of en that uses unfree content only when
absolutely necessary and in a way that such content could be easily stripped
out for reusers?  Is this local to en?  Where is people's comfort level with
emphatic disagreement over the issue?

  I think that there is plenty of room for contributors to wikimedia projects
who aren't interested in the potential for reuse of those projects, but I am
wondering where en is at if admins are actively dissuading contributors who
value it.

                                  Jkelly


from_name: Eric Astor

subject: [Wikitech-l] Wikipedia Suggest

body:
> -----Original Message-----
> From: wikitech-l-bounces at wikimedia.org [mailto:wikitech-l-
> bounces at wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Julien Lemoine
> Sent: Friday, August 11, 2006 3:18 PM
> To: Wikimedia developers
> Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] Wikipedia Suggest
>
...
> Do you know how to get the target of redirections in the sql database ?
...
> Julien Lemoine

Julien, I've been working on a project that's required me to both resolve
links and get the target of redirections for the whole summer. Let me see if
I can combine the SQL commands I've found, and come up with one to give you
the target of all redirects in the database...

Here we go:

SELECT from_page.page_title AS from_title, to_page.page_title AS to_title
FROM page from_page
INNER JOIN pagelinks pl ON pl.pl_from = from_page.page_id
INNER JOIN page to_page ON to_page.page_namespace = pl.pl_namespace
AND to_page.page_title = pl.pl_title
WHERE from_page.page_is_redirect=1;

I hope that helps!

Sincerely,
Eric Astor

P.S. My original SQL commands follow.

To resolve links:

CREATE TABLE resolvedlinks (
	rl_from INT(8) UNSIGNED NOT NULL,
	rl_to INT(8) UNSIGNED NOT NULL,
	PRIMARY KEY (rl_from, rl_to)
)
SELECT from_page.page_id AS rl_from, to_page.page_id AS rl_to
FROM pagelinks INNER JOIN page from_page ON from_page.page_id=pl_from
	       INNER JOIN page to_page ON
to_page.page_namespace=pl_namespace AND
to_page.page_title=CONCAT(UPPER(SUBSTRING(pl_title,1,1)),SUBSTRING(pl_title,
2));

To re-resolve the links to their actual targets (eliminating one level of
redirects):

DROP TEMPORARY TABLE IF EXISTS dl;
CREATE TEMPORARY TABLE dl (
	dl_from INT(8) UNSIGNED NOT NULL,
	dl_to INT(8) UNSIGNED NOT NULL
)
SELECT rl_from AS dl_from, rl_to AS dl_to FROM resolvedlinks;
UPDATE dl INNER JOIN page ON page.page_id=dl.dl_to
	  INNER JOIN resolvedlinks links ON links.rl_from=dl.dl_to
SET dl.dl_to=links.rl_to
WHERE page.page_is_redirect=1;
DROP TABLE IF EXISTS directlinks;
CREATE TABLE directlinks (
	dl_from INT(8) UNSIGNED NOT NULL,
	dl_to INT(8) UNSIGNED NOT NULL,
	PRIMARY KEY (dl_from, dl_to)
)
SELECT DISTINCT dl_from, dl_to FROM dl;

--
No virus found in this outgoing message.
Checked by AVG Free Edition.
Version: 7.1.405 / Virus Database: 268.10.9/416 - Release Date: 8/10/2006


body:
On Fri, Aug 11, 2006 at 02:00:59PM -0400, Steve Summit wrote:
> Jay Ashworth wrote:
> > On Fri, Aug 11, 2006 at 12:27:08PM -0400, Steve Summit wrote:
> >> ...The concept of an integrated web "site" that you either wandered
> >> around within, or made some kind of a conscious decision to "break out"
> >> of, hadn't been developed yet.
> >
> > Is that really true?  I've been using the web since, like, 1995 or so,
> > and I don't recall...
>
> Hey!  Whose side you on?  Let one of the skeptics question my
> blatant assertions... :-)

Oh, oops.  Sorry.

;-)

> > I liken it to people having to understand how roads and signs work to
> > be able to drive.  Why we enable such people who proudly decline to
> > learn how to use their tools completely eludes me.
>
> It's a tough call, though, because is it the right analogy to
> compare back-button-challenged web surfers to illiterate drivers
> who can't read signs and maps, or to ordinary drivers who aren't
> able to perfectly prevent accidents, and on whose behalf we
> therefore invent (and require) seat belts and air bags?

Hmmm...

> Be that as it may, if the current generation of users (of any
> technology) is for whatever reason all complaining about some
> particular annoying problem, the vendors who denounce those users
> as dumb idiots who just need some education tend to have their
> lunch eaten by the savvier vendors who pander to those users,
> right or wrong.  (But that's an argument for another day.)

Yeah, the Tragedy of the Commons is pretty tragic, isn't it?

For our current purposes, though, "all" is still highly in question.

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

	The Internet: We paved paradise, and put up a snarking lot.


from_name: Ed Sanders

body:
On the subject of the technical solutions to bad fair use,
http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6880 may be of interest to
some. It was born out of discussion at the URL provided there
(WikiProject Fair Use).

Ed.


body:
On 11 Aug 2006, at 3:53 PM, Jay R. Ashworth wrote:

> But we have *hundreds of thousands* of editors who have created,
> literally, millions of pages on Wikipedia.

And all possibly with a systemic bias built in, based on the type of
people they are, and hence the reason Wikimedia attempts to broaden
participation.

You've pointed out to me that our discussion won't amount to much at
the end of the day, and I guess you're right because from what people
have already said efforts are already being made in this direction.

> And I rather strongly suspect that you'd find that *lots* of the
> editors we have now would much prefer to stay in wikitext.  I'm
> damned sure I would.

A self-fulfilling prophecy doesn't prove much.

Christiaan


from_name: Jay R. Ashworth

body:
On Fri, Aug 11, 2006 at 02:51:43PM -0400, Simetrical wrote:
> On 8/11/06, Jay R. Ashworth <jra at baylink.com> wrote:
> > But the data is completely anecdotal: we have people who complain about
> > it.  Great.  But we have *hundreds of thousands* of editors who have
> > created, literally, millions of pages on Wikipedia.
>
> Pfft.  That's equally anecdotal.

No it's not.  It's statistical.

> > And I rather strongly suspect that you'd find that *lots* of the
> > editors we have now would much prefer to stay in wikitext.  I'm damned
> > sure I would.
>
> If the WYSIWYG editor were actually good, and actually displayed
> *exactly* what the end result would be, I think you'd find that you'd
> acclimate to it extremely quickly.  I agree that most existing WYSIWYG
> editors are obnoxious in various ways; this plan is contingent upon
> making one that is not.  If you would still prefer to edit it
> directly, hey, XML is meant to be human-readable.

Really, no.  It's long since been scientifically tested and proven that
people who keep their hands on the keyboard can accomplish tasks much
faster than those who have to move them to the mouse.

> On 8/11/06, Jay R. Ashworth <jra at baylink.com> wrote:
> > Wikitext is one of the simplest markup schemata -- for it's power --
> > that I have *ever* seen, in 20 years of staring at markup languages.
>
> In terms of easiness to learn and type, yes.  In terms of the backend
> syntax, it's hell, especially when prefab syntaxes are available that
> will serve the purpose just as well.  Some people are currently
> struggling to put together a grammar so that a decent parser can be
> compiled, effort that's completely pointless when we could just use
> XML.

I hereby sentence you to type your entries in XML.

Since, y'know, that's what you're doing to *me*.

> On 8/11/06, Jay R. Ashworth <jra at baylink.com> wrote:
> > But you remain correct: an overlay WYSIWYG editor, perhaps within the
> > contstraints Steve mentioned in an earlier message, will serve the
> > requirements you have, without requiring much (if any) underlying
> > modification.
>
> If one can be written that doesn't show up massive discrepancies with
> the actual displayed text . . . if the Wikiwyg programmers didn't have
> to deal with the crazy syntax, they could work on stuff like
> displaying templates properly instead of getting weird mixes of
> varying numbers of apostrophes to mimic the behavior of our
> labrynthine parser.

Evolutionary change.

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

	The Internet: We paved paradise, and put up a snarking lot.


body:
On 8/11/06, Jay R. Ashworth <jra at baylink.com> wrote:
> No it's not.  It's statistical.

It's anecdotal, because it's not controlled.  Something does not
become statistical evidence just because the numbers are big.  It must
be statistically analyzed with respect to whatever you're gathering
evidence for, which requires some kind of baseline to compare it to.

> Really, no.  It's long since been scientifically tested and proven that
> people who keep their hands on the keyboard can accomplish tasks much
> faster than those who have to move them to the mouse.

Ever heard of keyboard shortcuts?

> Evolutionary change.

Is sometimes not the best solution.


subject: [Foundation-l] board candidacies

references:
<44DC5C85.7030405@wikia.com>	<NMENLBGDKAFGBDHEPOBNKEKPDCAA.erikzachte@infodisiac.com>	<44DCD134.5030800@yahoo.com>
	<38a7bf7c0608111207j5f37fd52h6847e3e2d87a196f@mail.gmail.com>
	<44DCE1B4.5020101@wikia.com>

body:
Let me clarify, that did not say what I wanted it to say.

Jimmy Wales wrote:
> George Herbert wrote:
>>
>> That is not to minimize the question - if we generalize, if Joe Random
>> Billionare comes to the WMF with a million dollar donation check and
>> asks
>> for a board seat in return, it's still a completely valid policy
>> question.
>> And could well be a realistic problem.
>>
>>
>>
> Well, for us today, $1 million is not very much money.

In the early days of Wikipedia, I worried a lot about how we might
survive.  It seemed to me that if someone came
and offered $1 million, then of course we would offer them a seat on the
board.  Nowadays, we are strong, we are strong because
we have broad support from the general public and from ourselves, our
own community.  We do not fear about surviving.  Therefore, to give
up any of our independence for $1 million would be a bad decision.

I did not mean to imply that $1 million is not a lot of money.
Obviously it is. :)  But our principles are worth more.

--Jimbo


subject: [Foundation-l] board candidacies


subject: [Wikitech-l] Wikipedia Suggest

body:
Hi Julien,

> Might it be slightly neater to have sendRes return 5 fields instead of 4?
> E.g. "sendRes(query, res, freqs, urls, redirectTargets)", where the new "redirectTargets" field would be an array that
> contained a NULL/empty entry when there was no redirect, or the redirect target when it was a redirect? That way 'res' could
> contain just the article's name, and the redirect target functionality could be kept in a separate field.

Actually, even better would be to:
* change to JSON format ( http://www.json.org/ )
* omit the "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/" bit (and let the web UI add this instead)
* use a different array for each element, rather than 3 different arrays for the different fields (thus grouping all the fields for
one element together).
* use the [] notation instead of array notation (which is part of the JSON spec anyway).

In other words, using a real example, if the TcpQuery results for a search on "cat" were changed from this current result:

sendRes("cat", new Array("Catholics → Roman Catholic Church", "Catholic Archibishop → Bishop", "Catholic", "Catholic Pope
→ Pope",
"CATV → Cable television", "Catalogue astrographique → Star catalogue", "Catholic Encyclopedia", "Catalonia", "Cattle",
"Catholicism"),
new Array("7505", "4484", "4200", "3269", "2347", "2095", "1956", "1740", "1604", "1527"), new
Array("http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Catholic_Church",
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bishop", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope",
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cable_television", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_catalogue",
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Encyclopedia",
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalonia", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cattle", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholicism"));

To this:

["cat",
["Catholics", 7505, "Roman Catholic Church"],
["Catholic Archibishop", 4484, "Bishop"],
["Catholic", 4200, ],
["Catholic", 3269, ],
["CATV", 2347, "Cable television"],
["Catalogue astrographique", 2095, "Star catalogue"],
["Catholic Encyclopedia", 1956, ],
["Catalonia", 1740, ],
["Cattle", 1604, ],
["Catholicism", 1527, ]
]

Then it would have the following benefits:
* Less data is transmitted (by my count approximately 840 bytes versus 322 bytes, or a saving on 62%).
* The data can still be passed to an JS eval() to evaluate it.
* The redirects are in a different field, instead of merged into the first field.
* It's in a standard data format, so if other services wanted to talk to TcpQuery, this would make that easier.
* To me, the second of those data formats seems simpler (but this may just be my personal preference).

All the best,
Nick.


from_name: Daniel Schwen

subject: [Wikitech-l] Wysiwyg debate

body:
> >From the "don't scare the user" point of view, the best is a template
> substition that hides *everything*, like if the first thing you see
> is:
>
> {{Paris infobox}}
> '''Paris''' is a city in France that...
>
> Of course, many purists hate this apparent abuse of one-use templates...

Wouldn't that be a great use for subpage-templates? Have the Infobox at
Paris/infobox and just include it as a template.


from_name: Kirill Lokshin

body:
On 8/11/06, jkelly at fas.harvard.edu <jkelly at fas.harvard.edu> wrote:
> ... Is en a project where free
> culture advocates should expect to be mocked and invited to leave?  Would there
> be any interest in creating a fork of en that uses unfree content only when
> absolutely necessary and in a way that such content could be easily stripped
> out for reusers?  Is this local to en?  Where is people's comfort level with
> emphatic disagreement over the issue?
>
>  I think that there is plenty of room for contributors to wikimedia projects
> who aren't interested in the potential for reuse of those projects, but I am
> wondering where en is at if admins are actively dissuading contributors who
> value it.

I don't think that en: -- or any Wikimedia project, for that matter --
should be a place where *any* good-faith contributor is "mocked and
invited to leave."  That the level of discussion here has descended to
that -- and, in particular, that some of our admins seem to revel in
driving people off the project -- can only be described as a disgrace.

--
Kirill Lokshin


from_name: Brianna Laugher

body:
On 11/08/06, Samuli Lintula <samuli at samulilintula.net> wrote:

> Brianna Laugher:
>
> "One way which might help a bit, would be to create a tag (possibly
> invisible) that would trigger a notice on CTs that said, 'please delink
> this image now or risk redlinks!'"
>
> Me:
>
> This already exists. From simple: "+VfD Conscious puts deletion marker
> Duplicate on Image:IC_(400x).jpeg" and "+VfD Wikipeder puts deletion
> marker Copyvio on Image:H?siode.jpg". CommonsTickers should have
> instructions on what to do in these cases. And some do:

Yes... I meant for images that are already marked for deletion, but
for some reason the projects haven't delinked it yet. This happens
more often than you might think. Weird.

> Brianna Laugher:
>
> "So on one hand we have local projects upset at us for deleting images in
> use and on the other we have projects who seem not to even care when we
> notify them. It is a difficult balance to walk."
>
> Me:
>
> On the third, the largest, hand we have projects that are just fine. I've
> never heard a complaint from most of the wikis and not even from fi-wiki -
> although they have had the opportunity. And do we have projects upset at
> us, or just induhviduals from them?

Well, it is true that most projects are quite silent. Whether or not
they are happy, it is impossible to tell.  I don't see a big
difference between having an individual and a project angry at us --
in that, if we can neutralise the individual's anger, we can possibly
stop them from spreading it inside their project. That would be a good
outcome, I think, rather than dismissing them and having them go and
find "backup support" :).

I actually find it very strange that
> some users (like two ever) come to Commons to blame the admins. They
> should go yell at the person who uploaded an image or who took it in use
> in a local project.

To some extent, yes. But many contributors, including image
contributors, are anonymous or fly-by-night. If someone hasn't edited
for 2 years, berating them's just not as satisfying as berating a
currently active user. ;)

If someone complains and we find out they were fair use/no source
images, they were warned, etc etc, then we will not apologise for
following our policies, which have good reasoning behind them and not
just a spirit of killjoy. And that has happened, I recall, a few
months ago on the Village pump. But equally, if someone complains and
their complaint is legitimate, our admins have made mistakes or acted
rashly etc etc, then I'm not going to defend us or our actions.

Both situations happen. We make mistakes and they make mistakes. We
can only do something about the former.

cheers,
Brianna


body:
On 11/08/06, Erik Moeller <eloquence at gmail.com> wrote:
As for checking usage, in obvious
> copyvio cases, it's a nice thing to do, but IMHO not the admin's
> responsibility -- someone will remove the red link soon enough.

There is some vehement disagreement on this point, though. It does not
seem like something that should be left to the whim of the
administrator, to me.

Brianna


list: wiktionary-l

from_name: An el

subject: [Wiktionary-l] Mediawiki search is not finding parts of words

body:
Hi,

our problem is we have 2 articles in our mediawiki one contains ...intranet... in the title and the other one ...intranets... in the title.

If I enter "intranet" into the search I will only recieve the first article as a result but not the second on although "intranet" is a part of "intranets".

I would like to recieve both articles as a result even if i just type "intra" please tell me how that is possible with the Mediawiki version 1.7.1. Do I have to configure something or do i need a plugin???

Please Help!
Thanx
Tim
--

Der GMX SmartSurfer hilft bis zu 70% Ihrer Onlinekosten zu sparen!
Ideal f?r Modem und ISDN: http://www.gmx.net/de/go/smartsurfer


from_name: Cyril Buttay

body:
Hi all,

Just a quick question on this topic. Is it really the wiki syntax that
people have difficulties to use (I mean the fact that you need to enter
keywords and delimiter instead of clicking on "title1") or is it the
semantic (not sure of the term) approach?

I mean, most word beginners only use direct formatting command (bold,
font size), whereas wikipedia encourages a more advanced solution (well,
not as much as it should be) where you define that something is a level
3 title, not the way it should be displayed.

Maybe I'm completely wrong (I come from the LaTeX world), but I wouldn't
be surprised if the main difficulty for newcomers was this semantic
approach more than the lack of GUI.

What do you think?

Cyril


from_name: Lars Aronsson

subject: [Wikitech-l] Alphabetic browsing

body:
Here's a loose idea if anybody wants to implement it.

In my Firefox web browser, the back and forward buttons let me go
back and forth in my browsing history and they also serve as
drop-down menus for the nearest 10 pages.

In MediaWiki, the [[Special:Allpages/Ijkl]] page lets me see the
article names immediately following Ijkl in alphabetic order.
Unfortunately, there seems to be no easy way to get the previous
page of alphabetically arranged article names, i.e. those
immediately before Ijkl. When I'm looking for articles about
Sweden, Swedes, Swedish, ... I often go to Special:Allpages/Swed
to get an overview (by typing that URL in my browser).

What if every article page served by Mediawiki contained a
previous and next arrow that let me browse the site in alphabetic
order, and where the arrow buttons also served as drop-down menus
for the nearest 10 entries.  This could be especially useful for
pages that don't yet exist, e.g. [[Ijkl]], because they would link
to pages that do exist.

I realize there can be all kinds of issues with implementing such
a function, including runtime performance, caching, and the exact
definition of alphabetic order for various languages, but I don't
want to make this any more complicated than the Special:Allpages.

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


from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [Foundation-l] board candidacies

body:
--- Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> So rrrrright, so much for the false assumptions. The expenses of Board
> members relating to Foundation work are not entirely covered by the
> Foundation. That's not a false assumption. That's a fact.

As far as I know (and I should know a thing or two about this), being reimbursed for
Wikimedia-related expenses is just a matter of requesting reimbursement and providing the
necessary documentation where needed.

If you have been denied reimbursement for Wikimedia-related expenses after submitting a
reimbursement form, then PLEASE tell me (for the form, see
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Reimbursement_request_form.xls ).

Setting up an explicit per diem policy to cover food/lodging/transit would only make such requests
easier (no need to get many small receipts).

> This said, Michael wrote yesterday that I should ask for my child care
> costs to be covered. Does that need a resolution ?

It seems perfectly reasonable to be reimbursed for child care obtained to cover times you are
traveling on Wikimedia-related business. I don't see why reimbursement of that expense would need
a resolution.

-- mav

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


subject: [Foundation-l] board candidacies


from_name: Nick Jenkins

subject: [Wikitech-l] Wikipedia Suggest

body:
> > It's possible to have the JavaScript search for " → " and stop any string
> > at that point, but it feels a bit ugly, so I have omitted that.
>
> What would happen if someone was genuinely looking for
> http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=%E2%86%90%E2%86%93%E2%86%91%E2%86%92&redirect=no
>
> :P

I knew there was a reason it felt a bit wrong, and that example is probably it! ;-)

And by the way, if I copy and paste in the "????" (i.e. the 4 arrow symbols in case an email system munges it), then the search suggest does give the "Dance Dance Revolution" redirect as it's suggestion ;-)

All the best,
Nick.


from_name: Christiaan Briggs

body:
On 11 Aug 2006, at 4:33 PM, Jay R. Ashworth wrote:

> Christiaan had merely made that point separately, and I was replying.

Actually it was probably the main point of my initial post: that is
that wiki markup is a barrier to participation and that this is a
good thing, is an attitude that needs to be overcome before genuine
efforts can be made toward a WYSIWYG-variant for Wikimedia. Turns out
I was wrong because genuine efforts are already afoot.

Christiaan


body:
  David,

> Let's read and quote what it actually says there, shall we?
>
> "If you're here to do other things than make the best possible free
> encyclopedia, then -- to borrow a nauseatingly common theme from the
> other side's advocates -- the door's right over there."

  Free as in speech, or free as in beer?  Did you read the actual thread?

                        Jkelly


from_name: Jean-Denis Vauguet

subject: [Foundation-l] board candidacies

references:
<ebfkoi$bup$1@sea.gmane.org>	<ebflq6$fkg$1@sea.gmane.org>	<44DB66B3.8010205@wolfmountaingroup.com>	<44DB659D.5020407@typhon.org>
	<44DB70A5.8030102@wolfmountaingroup.com>

body:
It's now live, a nice, simple system of templates which streamline
translation process. Many candidates created a Talk page on Meta for the
elections.

If you find something broken, write on my Talk page and I'll fix it.

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subject: [Foundation-l] board candidacies

body:
It's now live, a nice, simple system of templates which streamline
translation process. Many candidates created a Talk page on Meta for the
elections.

If you find something broken, write on my Talk page and I'll fix it.

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subject: [Foundation-l] board candidacies

body:
It's now live, a nice, simple system of templates which streamline
translation process. Many candidates created a Talk page on Meta for the
elections.

If you find something broken, write on my Talk page and I'll fix it.

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subject: [Foundation-l] board candidacies

body:
It's now live, a nice, simple system of templates which streamline
translation process. Many candidates created a Talk page on Meta for the
elections.

If you find something broken, write on my Talk page and I'll fix it.

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body:
Judging from my own experience I find it far less taxing to click on
a button that says "bold" or "list" etc. than to learn (and often
relearn) a special language that I need to mix in with the text in
order to achieve the same thing. For me, to click on a button that
says "list" is far more intuitive than adding some arbitrary
characters in amongst my content. I also find it quite taxing looking
at a sea of monospaced text intermixed with arbitrary characters that
have nothing to do with my content.

Christiaan

On 11 Aug 2006, at 4:43 PM, Cyril Buttay wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> Just a quick question on this topic. Is it really the wiki syntax that
> people have difficulties to use (I mean the fact that you need to
> enter
> keywords and delimiter instead of clicking on "title1") or is it the
> semantic (not sure of the term) approach?
>
> I mean, most word beginners only use direct formatting command (bold,
> font size), whereas wikipedia encourages a more advanced solution
> (well,
> not as much as it should be) where you define that something is a
> level
> 3 title, not the way it should be displayed.
>
> Maybe I'm completely wrong (I come from the LaTeX world), but I
> wouldn't
> be surprised if the main difficulty for newcomers was this semantic
> approach more than the lack of GUI.
>
> What do you think?
>
> Cyril


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [Foundation-l] board candidacies

references:
<ebfkoi$bup$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<ebflq6$fkg$1@sea.gmane.org>	<71cd4dd90608101016y80834albe8cb906c2bc5c@mail.gmail.com>
	<71cd4dd90608101041l328551b7kf6241ab2b458c5c6@mail.gmail.com>

body:
Anthony wrote:

>On 8/10/06, Anthony <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:
>
>
>>As for project representation, I don't think board members should be
>>representing individual projects in the first place.  Wikipedia is by
>>far the largest and most successful project, so it doesn't surprise me
>>that board candidates use that project for their discussion pages.
>>
>>
>By the way, I also think this has a lot to do with the fact that this
>election appears to be a winner-takes-all election of a single seat
>Having representatives from different languages/projects doesn't
>make sense when there are only two elected members.
>
Of course, but for now we have to live with that and hope for better in
the by-law revisions that are yet to come

>Almost all the discussion on this very list takes place in English.  I
>don't know what percentage of people who discuss on this list
>participate primarily on Wikipedia, but I'd guess it's at least a
>simple majority.  Changing that, I believe, would require a major
>overhaul of the entire organizational structure of Wikimedia.  But I
>suppose I shouldn't make such comments without first knowing what that
>percentage really is.
>
It's not just a matter of the English language.  Angela was elected
despite the fact that she is from England.  The simple fact that 60% of
the current board is from the same country may be more significant.
That carries with it a lot of unwanted political baggage.  Redressing
these imbalances in a way that will be fair to all concerned calls for a
lot of careful consideration that does not fit into the heat of an
election compaign.

Ec


subject: [Foundation-l] board candidacies


from_name: Peter Danenberg

subject: [Wikitech-l] New SVN committer

body:
> Added Peter Danenberg (peterchd), to update the WikiTeX extension.

     Thanks,  Brion;  I'm  just  about  done with the chroot
iteration (v1.1), and will be transitioning to a client-dae-
mon in v1.2 for isolation and ease of end-user-setup.

Best, Peter


body:
Just found this:
http://www.socialtext.com/node/90

this:
http://ross.typepad.com/blog/2006/08/jimmy_wales_kic.html

and this:
http://wikiwyg.wikia.com/

Includes:
> Wikiwyg is a joint venture between Socialtext and Wikia to bring
> WYSIWYG to MediaWiki..  Release date uncertain, but both wikia and
> Socialtext are devoting full time development resources towards
> it.  My anticipation is that this is a big part of wiki editing and
> free culture.  My friend who when to Harvard to study Chinese
> history spent the last 16 years looking at the 8th century.  Read
> about Wikipedia and was excited to contribute.  Looked up articles
> on what she knew (read like an elderly chinese man in san francisco
> who loved the old poets).  She never edited.  She clicked on edit
> and saw some scary markup.  Some think this was a good thing, a
> barrier to entry, but it keeps out some smart people, and it
> doesn't keep out idiots (they are highly motivated).  Wikiwyg, in
> some shape or form is the future of the internet.


from_name: Simetrical

subject: [Wikitech-l] Wysiwyg debate

body:
On 8/11/06, Ligulem <ligulem at pobox.com> wrote:
> Looking at the plain table wiki-code is sure more frightening than the
> clean abstraction presented by an infobox template call.

Probably, but infoboxes are a) much more common, and b) almost
invariably at the very top of articles, making them the first thing
most users see.  *Anything* that isn't very similar to what's
displayed is scary to technophobes.  The technically-inclined can
comfortably look at it and say "Hmm, it must somehow generate the box
there, or something", then ignore it, but someone like my mother would
become instantly uncomfortable and worried that they might break
something if they tried to edit.  She wouldn't try to decipher what it
actually meant, if all she was thinking of doing was correcting a date
or something; she wouldn't want to put in the effort.


subject: [Foundation-l] board candidacies

body:
Walter van Kalken wrote:

>I personally feel that one of the big issues is that people are required
>to spend their own money for things. This means that if you life outside
>of the US, even outside of Florida that your costs will be prohibitively
>high. I personally find that one of the most prohibitive requirements.
>Many people whom would have the time and the enthousiasm do not have a
>bankaccount for that. And that is one of the reasons I have a lot of
>respect for Angela and Anthere. They are willing to spend their personal
>savings for the betterment of the projects. People should realize that
>the next time they start complaining with them.
>
Being a volunteer can be costly, and many of us deal with those costs
cheerfully.  I'm sure there is a level of participation where subsidy is
warranted, but I would be hard-pressed to define that level.  Do you
think that you could put your concerns in more concrete terms.  Who
should be subsidized, and when?

Ec


subject: [Foundation-l] board candidacies


from_name: Gregory Maxwell

subject: [Wikitech-l] Wysiwyg debate

body:
On 8/11/06, Ligulem <ligulem at pobox.com> wrote:
> Until one of us if proven to be wrong, let me claim the opposite ;)

Ahh the power of discussion to improve the clarity of our statements...

I think tables are just as bad as infoboxes, okay fine.. a concession:
they are indeed worse. The point I was trying to make was more along
the lines of "when someone wants to edit the intro and they get
something which is not the intro it leads to confusion".


subject: [WikiEN-l] MyWikiBiz

body:
On 8/11/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
> I don't like this middle ground at all. We need to be firmly either
> *for* or *against* paid editing. If we equivocate as we currently do,
> then you'll have people figuring out which articles are coming through
> this process and AfDing them all "because Jimmy said it was a conflict
> of interest". Either welcome it or ban it - where the hell do we stand
> right now?

Whats so hard about "we welcome text which is good, no matter who or
how it was created and we reject or repair text which is bad."?

For or against paid editing? Paid editing is an orthogonal issue. I
wish all of our contributors could be better compensated for their
fantastic contributions.

If we can't cope with bias coming from known-interested sources then
we have no hope... most biased sources do not announce their
intentions.


from_name: Filip Maljkovic

subject: [Foundation-l] Emergency on Wiktionary

body:
Kelly Martin wrote:
> I have long been concerned about srwiki, ever since I had one of their
> admins try to get me deadminned on English for refusing to support the
> "consensus of admins on srwiki" with regard to a content issue on
> enwiki.
I wonder who that might be. Seriously, who was it?
> It disturbs me that srwiki's admins act as judge and jury on
> content, and especially since (to my untrained eye) they seem to be
> acting to push a pro-Serbian point of view.  Perhaps the situation is
> not as unsavory as my brief encounter suggests, but I do think that it
> is unacceptable for ANY language edition of Wikipedia to abrogate
> NPOV, especially in the interest of nationalistic politics.
>
> Kelly
>
That is not entirely true. There are some nationalistic things here and
there as there are in every Wikipedia, but admins do not dictate POVs.
There are many political differences between the admins, but still the
project is pretty NPOV if you ask me. On the other hand, political and
whatnot flamewars can emerge if there are trolls that ignite them and
unfortunately, we've had a couple of them recently.
All in all, I wouldn't be concerned :D

Filip


subject: [Foundation-l] Emergency on Wiktionary


from_name: Sabine Cretella

subject:
[Wiktionary-l] [Fwd: [words & more] Piedmontese - Venetian -
 Ukrainian in WiktionaryZ now]

body:
FYI

-------- Original-Nachricht --------
Betreff: 	[words & more] Piedmontese - Venetian - Ukrainian in
WiktionaryZ now
Datum: 	Fri, 11 Aug 2006 08:48:48 -0700 (PDT)
Von: 	Sabine Cretella <sabine_cretella at yahoo.it>
An: 	sabine_cretella at yahoo.it

Yesterday evening three more languages were added to WiktionaryZ. Now it
is also possible to add terminology in Piedmontese
<http://wiktionaryz.org/Portal:pms>, Venetian
<http://wiktionaryz.org/Portal:vec>and Ukrainian
<http://wiktionaryz.org/Portal:ukr>.

I hope people who read this will pass on the message, also to the
relevant beer parlours.

Have fun! :-)

--
Posted by Sabine Cretella to words & more
<http://sabinecretella.blogspot.com/2006/08/piedmontese-venetian-ukrainian-in.html>
at 8/11/2006 04:42:00 PM
Chiacchiera con i tuoi amici in tempo reale!
 http://it.yahoo.com/mail_it/foot/*http://it.messenger.yahoo.com


subject: [Foundation-l] board candidacies

references:
<ebfkoi$bup$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<ebflq6$fkg$1@sea.gmane.org>	<71cd4dd90608101016y80834albe8cb906c2bc5c@mail.gmail.com>	<453b6e50608101058p518c54dcg1a84b8efa8615c33@mail.gmail.com>
	<71cd4dd90608101157n5465cf51n7e5886e07cda7cb@mail.gmail.com>

body:
Anthony wrote:

>On 8/10/06, Delphine M?nard <notafishz at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>>I sincerely hope that the international and cross project community
>>will get organized and vote on this election, so as to balance the
>>natural weight of the English Wikipedia and make sure that the person
>>elected on the board has the skills necessary to the position.Whether
>>they are or not from the English Wikipedia is indeed, irrelevant.
>>
>>
>If it's irrelevant, then why is it being brought up?
>
Maybe it's just because many people do feel concerned about this.

>With only one seat up for grabs, I don't really think it matters what
>project the board member winds up spending most of his or her time on.
>
Fair enough.

>As for whether or not they speak English, I frankly don't think it's
>possible for someone who doesn't read and write English well to be an
>effective board member - unless maybe they have the money to hire
>their own personal translator.
>
Facetious eventualities aside, English has indeed been the lingua franca
at both Wikimanias, both for official proceedings and casual
conversations.  This ubiquitous practical reality does not imply any
acquiescence to the superiority of English.  A simple recognition by
native English speakers that language is not just language goes a long
way toward bridging this divide.

Ec


subject: [Foundation-l] board candidacies


from_name: Steve Bennett

body:
On 8/11/06, Jay R. Ashworth <jra at baylink.com> wrote:
> Ok; I just synthesized that now from things lots of other, smarter
> people than me have said.  But it's still true.  People have a tendency
> to try to make things easier for 'dummies' :-) while make much more
> important things much harder for 'smart people'.

In the context of Wikipedia, we don't so much have "dummies" as we
have "passers-by". You can't train someone who is only willing to
spend 5 minutes of their life on your site. Your comments may be
appropriate for contexts such as business wikis etc.

> On balance, it's probably much better for the entire audience to *train
> the non-savvy users*.  If they can't be bothered to learn, then they're
> not *entitled* to have everyone else's work made more difficult on
> their behalf.

That's kind of a commitment-heavy long-term approach. You're basically
advocating forcing people to commit to your software for the long term
before the software has done anything for them. You're more likely to
succeed if the software gives them immediate warm fuzzy feelings.
"Wow, I just clicked that, and that, and that, and look what I've got!
I can't wait to find out how to other cool stuff!"

>
> > 3. FYI... I am a Mac user using FireFox. To make a break out link, all I
> > have to do is hover over the link, press lightly and choose "Open link
> > in new window".
>
> Mac mice have click-*pressure* sensors?  Wow!

Time-sensitive.

> <pedant>
> "listserv" is a registered trademark of a mailing list software company
> whose products we aren't using.  :-)
>
> http://www.lsoft.com/corporate/legal.asp
> </pedant>

I'm strongly in favour of abusing trademarks wherever possible.
[[Trademark genericization]] is totally in the interests of the
consumer. But noone seems to grasp the fact that it's only the company
itself who stands to benefit by stamping TM or (R) around
everything...

(anyway.)
...
Steve


body:
On 8/11/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> Let's read and quote what it actually says there, shall we?
>
> "If you're here to do other things than make the best possible free
> encyclopedia, then -- to borrow a nauseatingly common theme from the
> other side's advocates -- the door's right over there."
>
> I think every word of that is the case and needs to be drummed into
> people's heads, myself.
[snip]

Tisk tisk David, have you forgotten that context counts.

In the cited thread the argument is made that we can not accept a
proliferation of unlicensed content merely because by violating
copyright we can obtain a temporary increase in article quality.

The quoted diff is making the counter argument that being a high
quality encyclopedia is all that counts and that being perpetually
free for all applications isn't a goal of the project.

If there is anything highlighted here that needs to be drummed into
anyone's head it is that the importance of free content in our mission
is no less than the importance of being a quality encyclopedia.

I hope that this is just a case of you failing to read before running
your mouth.


subject: [Foundation-l] board candidacies

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:

>Erik Zachte wrote:
>
>
>>I concur with this entirely. We have enough dot com millionaires on the
>>Board, and the Advisory Board might add some.
>>
>>
>>
>? We do not have any dot com millionaires on the board.
>
>
>>What 'saddens' me however is the way Anthere was treated during the Board
>>session last Sunday when the issue of paying board members was brought up.
>>Jimbo made a casual remark to the effect of "(I'm not sure) we want to pay
>>board members, besides it is not allowed by the bylaws" (paraphrasing here).
>>
>>
>Well, it is not allowed, not just by our bylaws as I understand it, but
>by the law.  This is not a matter of anyone treating Anthere in any bad way.
>
>She mentioned specific expenses, expenses which the foundation can and
>should reimburse.  She should request reimbursement for those.
>
We fundamentally agree here, but I would be hesitant to frame it in
terms of "The Law".  There are places where the compensation for Board
participation is an unusually high per diem for attendance at meetings.
This can effectively circumvent the legal concept that a non-profit
organization is not there for the financial benefit of its members.

It is much more effective when policies of this kind reflect deeply held
beliefs instead of the law.

Ec


subject: [Foundation-l] board candidacies


from_name: jkelly at fas.harvard.edu

body:
  David,

> Whoops, looks like it was. My apologies to jkelly. I was wr- wr- that word.

  There's no need to apologise; I'm a lot less interested in any potential
slight than I am in the larger question of where en is at in terms of being
"free as in speech".  It seemed to me that you might be agreeing that it would
make sense to fork en for those people who really value the "giving away
freely" part of the project.

  I'll admit that I do spend a lot of time replacing unfree content with free
content, so there is some degree of investment for me, at least in terms of how
much that might be valued.

                            Jkelly


subject: [Foundation-l] board candidacies

body:
daniwo59 at aol.com wrote:

>I am confused by this thread. It is starting with false assumptions (Board
>members are required to spend their own money for things) and builds on that to
> create further false assumptions (we have enough dot com millionaires on the
> Board).
>
>To the best of my knowledge:
>1. The expenses of Board members relating to Foundation work are covered by
>the Foundation. They do not come from the individual Board members' "personal
>savings."
>2. We currently have no dot com millionaires on the Board.
>3. Paying Board members for Board-related activities can be perceived  as a
>potential conflict of interests.
>4. In many non-profit organizations in the US--but not the WMF--Board
>membership is actually contingent upon making a significant donation to the
>organization.
>
>Please get the facts right when complaining about the Board and its  members.
>
Absolutely!  But the kind of false assumptions expressed by Erik are out
there, and they will continue to be out there whether any of us like it
or not.  Nevertheless, I feel more comfortable when those with the
concerns can express them openly where the situation can be peacefully
and patiently clarified ... even if it means being repetitious.

Ec


subject: [Foundation-l] board candidacies


from_name: Erik Zachte

subject: [Foundation-l]   board candidacies

body:
My remark about any board members being dot com millionaires was entirely
unsubstantiated. I haven't seen anyones tax form. In fact I had no factual
information whatsoever that this is the case, and I now know it is not, as
Danny told us. I realize now that this remark was insensitive by itself,
something I accuse others of, and not helping to improve any situation. I
also haven't seen how much anyone earned on keynote speeches, so that was a
suggestive remark as well.

I really should have gone to bed a few hours earlier and have postponed any
reaction to after a good night sleep. Too late, damage done.

So I sincerely apologize for any remarks about the financial situation of
others than Anthere on he board.

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

Still I Anthere could have gotten a more cordial answer, instead of Jimbo's
factual remark and a joke by someone else.

In my opinion Anthere is extremely valuable to the organisation. I, and many
others I'm sure, are proud of the prominent role of women in the
organisation. She, Angela and many others function as a role model.

Anthere quit/lost (no idea which) her job while being a board member, as she
professed publicly some time ago, so I can quote that. She also told she
works nearly full time on the project and given her omnipresence, this might
well be an understatement. I think we should be grateful she is putting so
much time in the project. And I am sure everyone is. But maybe we ought to
taken a moment to discuss the consequences.

If I remember correctly Anthere responded to a question from the audience.
Candid as she always is, she explained her financial situation (again). So I
feel I can comment on that some more.

I don't know many mothers with three young children who can afford to spend
so much time pro bono. Of course there must be more Wikimedians in a similar
situation, who show as much commitment. Still I feel the organisation has a
special obligation towards its official representatives. If only people who
are financially independent can afford to work for the organisation in
central positions, and others do it to their own detriment, I think the
organisation (not on purpose but still) puts a bias on its central workforce
which is unwanted. These issues have been discussed before. But we have
grown from a small village to a large city, and our budget has increased
with it. We can even afford to delay fundraisers so it is not that we are
entirely unable to even discuss this due to lack of funds. Brad commented to
this effect.

I have no idea how other non profit organisations handle this, but frankly I
think we should make up our own mind.

Jimmy:
> Well, it is not allowed, not just by our bylaws as I understand it, but by
the law.  This is not a matter of anyone treating Anthere in any bad way.

I suppose you mean the US law. We could have an interesting discussion of
what the consequences are of the foundation being based in the US, but I
suppose it would confuse matters now.

Danny:
> Paying Board members for Board-related activities can be perceived as a
potential conflict of interests.

If someone would get rich of it, sure. And people will complain, no doubt.
If the allowance was something close to the minimum wage of the country of
residence (at least for countries that have a decent minimum wage policy,
which if difficult to objectify) I'm not sure many would complain though.

Danny:
> In many non-profit organizations in the US--but not the WMF--Board
membership is actually contingent upon making a significant donation to the
organization.

One of the reasons I have my reservations about the US leading the world by
example is how they often seem to fail to separate money and politics.
Should I comment on how a US presidential candidate also has little change
to serve his country if not backed up by millions of dollars to get his
message across? The world can learn a lot from some of their core values,
but they could learn from those of others. The notion that people would have
to buy into non-profits is pretty detrimental and extreme to me. I would
expect rich people who give a generous donation to be honoured for it. I
would not expect in most cases they are the experts per se on how to spend
it well for the cause at hand.

Brad:
> If your life circumstances are such that you can make ends meet, the most
demanding issue for your involvement in Wikimedia issues is time, not money.

I agree, but who draws the line of what is needed to make ends meet? A
tricky question. Should we leave it to the foundation to deal with this
discretely?

Erik Zachte


subject: [Foundation-l]   board candidacies


from_name: Walter van Kalken

subject: [Foundation-l] board candidacies

body:
I am pretty damn sure there was a version which mentioned the
requirement to be able to spend money yourself. I am going through the
revision history's later to see where it was.

Waerth

>
>I am confused by this thread. It is starting with false assumptions (Board
>members are required to spend their own money for things) and builds on that to
> create further false assumptions (we have enough dot com millionaires on the
> Board).
>
>To the best of my knowledge:
>1. The expenses of Board members relating to Foundation work are covered by
>the Foundation. They do not come from the individual Board members' "personal
>savings."
>2. We currently have no dot com millionaires on the Board.
>3. Paying Board members for Board-related activities can be perceived  as a
>potential conflict of interests.
>4. In many non-profit organizations in the US--but not the WMF--Board
>membership is actually contingent upon making a significant donation to the
>organization.
>
>Please get the facts right when complaining about the Board and its  members.
>
>Danny
>
>
>In a message dated 8/11/2006 1:25:49 AM Eastern Daylight Time,
>erikzachte at infodisiac.com writes:
>
>Walter  van Kalken:
>
>
>>I personally feel that one of the big issues is that  people are required
>>to spend their own money for things. This means  that if you life outside
>>of the US, even outside of Florida that your  costs will be prohibitively
>>high. I personally find that one of the  most prohibitive requirements.
>>Many people whom would have the time  and the enthousiasm do not have a
>>bankaccount for that. And that is  one of the reasons I have a lot of
>>respect for Angela and Anthere.  They are willing to spend their personal
>>savings for the betterment of  the projects. People should realize that
>>the next time they start  complaining with them.
>>
>>
>
>I concur with this entirely. We have enough dot  com millionaires on the
>Board, and the Advisory Board might add  some.
>This is not personal to anyone, those concerned probably just got  their
>priorities right.
>
>What 'saddens' me however is the way Anthere  was treated during the Board
>session last Sunday when the issue of paying  board members was brought up.
>Jimbo made a casual remark to the effect of  "(I'm not sure) we want to pay
>board members, besides it is not allowed by  the bylaws" (paraphrasing here).
>Easy to say in his position. Then someone  made a witty but badly timed joke
>about the situation, the chairman of the  Board might have intervened at that
>moment. I feel it was humiliating for  Anthere. Maybe the bylaws allow other
>board members than Jimmy to accept  well paid invitations for keynote
>speeches?
>
>Erik  Zachte
>
>
>
>
>_______________________________________________
>foundation-l mailing list
>foundation-l at wikimedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>
>
>


subject: [Foundation-l] board candidacies


subject: [Wikitech-l] Wikipedia Suggest

body:
> But the url need to be
> added since it is different of the title

Yep, but you can work out the url from the title:
------------------------------
function titleToUrl(title) {
  var chr, url = "";
  for (var i=0; i<title.length; i++) {
     chr = title.charCodeAt(i);
     url += (chr == 32 ? "_" : escape(String.fromCharCode(chr)));
  }
  return url;
}

// quick test:
var test_data = ["Roman Catholic Church", "cat (disambig)", "\"!@$^&*))(_--{}"];
for (var i=0; i<test_data.length; i++) {
   document.write(test_data[i] + " equals: " + titleToUrl(test_data[i]) + "
\n");
}
------------------------------

Output is:
------------------------------
Roman Catholic Church equals: Roman_Catholic_Church

cat (disambig) equals: cat_%28disambig%29

"!@$^&*))(_--{} equals: %22%21@%24%5E%26*%29%29%28_--%7B%7D

------------------------------
(which seems identical to what the Wikipedia gives too).

Don't have to do it this way though, and if you'd prefer to do it on the server side, then do that.

I just thought that transmitting less data and potentially storing less data might help.

> Did you used json in EMCAsript/javascript ?

Nah, I just make this stuff up as I go along. ;-)

Should work fine though:
------------------------------
var json_data = eval("[\"cat\",[\"Catholics\", 7505, \"Roman Catholic Church\"],[\"Catholic Archibishop\", 4484,
\"Bishop\"],[\"Catholic\", 4200, ],[\"Catholic\", 3269, ][\"CATV\", 2347, \"Cable television\"],[\"Catalogue astrographique\", 2095,
\"Star catalogue\"],[\"Catholic Encyclopedia\", 1956, ],[\"Catalonia\", 1740, ],[\"Cattle\", 1604, ],[\"Catholicism\", 1527, ]]");
alert("length: " + json_data.length + " data: " + json_data);
------------------------------

I.e. you may have to get rid of the newlines in the data stream.

All the best,
Nick.