from_name: james duffy

body:
I believe there is overwhelming evidence that this user is not interested in
any way of contributing NPOV content to wikipedia but instead vandalising
articles.

==Examples==

* Inserting a picture of Ariol Sharon on the [[Penis]] page with the summary
''INSERTING PIC OF UGLY DICK SHARON''

* Inserting a picture of Sharon the the [[Feces]] page with the summary
''SHARON IS FECES''

* Inserting a picture of a penis on the [[Ariel Sharon]] page with the
summary ''new pic looks more like him''

* replacing real headlines and texts in [[Israeli-Palestinian conflict]]
with
=== ZIONIST TERROR===

The Zionists are the REAL terrorists.

''and''

The Zionist entity, which the Zionists call "Israel" so that everyone
forgets their crimes against the Arab nation of Palestine, is the world's
biggest terrorist. Like Nazi Germany and bin Laden, this terrorist must be
destroyed so that Palestine can strech from the river to the sea.

He summarised his changes as ''This site is crawling with Zionists''

* In [[Intifada]] he replaced a paragraph with the following
''Both intifadas were originally characterized by civil disobedience by the
[[Palestinians]], which escalated into the use of honorable  armed
insurrection.  Many Palestinians, including women and children, were
martyred due to the Nazi-fascist brutality of the Zionists.'' The summary he
gave was ''This site is crawling with Zionists''.

* redirected [[Israel]] to <nowiki>[[Zionist Entity]]</nowiki>. I deleted
the page and restored it to its proper location, but he reinstated it,
leading to a second deletion.

I do not have any problem with a pro-Palestinian viewpoint on wiki. Indeed I
have been called ''pro-Arab'' and ''anti-semite'' by RK for seeking to stop
his blatent pro-Israeli propagandising of some pages. Personally I do
believe that wiki represents the what outside the US is seen as America's
''Israelophile'' sympathies. But it is crystal clear that this user is not
trying to offer a balancing analysis of the Palestinian analysis of the
Middle East problem. He is simply maliciously trying to vandalise articles.
It is worth noting a similar user appeared on wiki some weeks ago
propagandising articles supposedly from one viewpoint, yet whose
contributions seemed nothing but vandalistic malicious nonsense, not a
serious attempt at offering an alternative viewpoint. It might be worth
someone checking this user's IP and comparing it to that user to see whether
it is the same person. This user here clearly warrants a ban, not for his
opinions but for his malicious vandalism of pages.
[[User:Jtdirl|Fear?IREANN]] 12:19, 4 Aug 2003 (UTC)

BTW 172 summed up this user's contributions with the following, which I
concur with.

I can see that you're a mature and articulate advocate of your cause, laying
out very convincing arguments involving poo poo and wee wees. 172 08:20, 4
Aug 2003 (UTC)

Since I started this page, Pl wrote on the talk page

I will stop messing with pages without permission. I will stop making rules
on my page. However, I still want to be able to have others sign the list
I'm starting agreeing that Zionism is racism.

I agree Zionism = racism

* user Palestine liberator

After changes, that version was posted at 13:02, 4 Aug 2003. He then
followed it up 8 minutes later, at
13:10, 4 Aug 2003 with

*  United States - some in the Palestinian movement and others regard
America as a puppet of the Zionists.

So much for the promised neutrality and stopping messing. This guy is simply
playing games.

I have already had to protect one page that he continually reverted over and
over and over again. I and others have been continually reverting other
pages. A ban is /urgently/ required.

A ban page is at [[User talk:Palestinian liberator/ban]]. Please express
your viewers whether here on the list or there on the page. A decision is
clearly needed quickly before the scale of vandalism gets out of hand.

JT

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list: wikien-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: John Robinson

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Search function (google)

body:
 >A month max, IIRC. At the moment it's just under a week out of date:
the google
 >cached version of [[breakfast]], for example, is from the 29th July.

The google cached version of [[Deng Xiaoping]] on the other hand would
seem to be 32 months out of date (i.e., created 21 Oct 2001, and
apparently never cached by google at all, ever).

 >Nope. You want the "search this site" toolbar button*

This instruction should be in the null-result page, then, as most new
users probably don't subscribe to the mailing list.

Or better yet, we could have a google search box there, as we did last
time local search was turned off.

As it is now, if we're lucky, what happens after someone searches for
"battle of hastings" (lowercase) is that they click on "Edit this page"
and put a short stub in [[Battle of hastings]] which will later have to
be merged, leaving a redirect that will be useless when (if?) the
search function is turned back on, because the search function isn't
case-sensitive.

In not-so-best case scenarios, they fill the page with junk, or click
on the google link, do the same search, go to www.battle1066.com and
never see Wikipedia again.

Yes my original post was sarcastic--it was meant to be.  I had just
read another post which seemed to actually posit that we're just as
well off using google.  And that simply is not the case.  Getting
search turned back should be the number-one coding priority (as an
aside, I notice that the server quite often drags even with it off).

-Hephaestos


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikimedia's first press release

body:
Please, join the fun:

http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia's_first_press_release

--mav


from_name: tarquin

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] 300,000 is a much better milestone (was: Preparing
 for 150,000 articles)

body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:

>tarquin wrote:
>
>
>>Well, actually, I think having a metawiki *just*
>>for the encyclopedia project is perhaps better
>>
>>
>
>Can you back that up with some reasoning to counter my reasoning why we should
>all work together in one place? En.wiki does just fine as an uber
>encyclopedia of encyclopedias with thousands of edits a day - why can't we
>have a metawiki for planning /all/ Wikimedia functions?
>
>Having separate metawikis for every Wikimedia projects is a mistake - there
>simply will not be enough activity on any one to create a viable community.
>
hmm.... okay, point taken.

I think 300,000 is a good milestone.

But one of the things we need to do is make

www.wikipedia.org

lead to a multilingual portal and not the homepage of the english branch.


from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Help! Wikipedia Preferences gone haywire

body:
cwb-
> Hi all,

> I just changed a setting in my Preferences page, and for some reason it
> has set my edit window to 4x4 -- and I can't reset it. Changes now don't
> seem to stick. I am unable to edit pages. Has anyone changed anything?

What's your username, and which language Wikipedia are you referring to?

Regards,

Erik


from_name: Fred Bauder

subject: [WikiEN-l] No comment

body:
on 8/4/03 1:41 PM, Steve Vertigo at utilitymuffinresearch at yahoo.com wrote:

> I recognize that guy. Hes one of our Frisco Bums..
>
> :D
>
> -S-

Nick Nolte lives in San Francisco?
>
> --- Jimmy Wales <jwales at bomis.com> wrote:
>> http://will.edit.wikipedia.articles.forfood.org/
>>
>> No comment on the tastefulness, or lack thereof, of
>> this joke.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Israeli-Palestinian neutrality

body:
on 8/4/03 1:45 PM, Steve Vertigo at utilitymuffinresearch at yahoo.com wrote:

> I suppose a better way to end this thread would be to
> say "Is-Pal neutrality" is a complete oxymoron, just
> as most present controversial issues are.
>
> -S-

I think a few of us really are neutral or really sympathetic to both sides;
but it's an obvious snakepit...

Fred


from_name: Daniel Ehrenberg

subject: [WikiEN-l] Palestine liberator

body:
--- Steve Vertigo <utilitymuffinresearch at yahoo.com>
wrote:
> > Has he made any '''''harmful edits?''''' That's
> all
> that
> > really
> > matters. If we kick him out, it won't make him any
> > less racist. Probably more, actually.
> > -LDan
>
> ROFL.
> You must not have read the previous emails. (like
> JTs)
> Lets just say they werent "technically correct" or
> "factual", and his "counseling sessions" on
> Wikipedia
> were terminated. :)  -S-

I know, and I sent an other email telling you to
disregard this one.
-LDan

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from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [WikiEN-l] CNN

body:
On Mon, 4 Aug 2003 a.crossman at blueyonder.co.uk wrote:
> The article about Wikipedia is now linked to from the front page of
> CNN.com so now is the time for all Wikipedia volunteer firefighters
> to report to duty. :-)

http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/internet/08/03/wikipedia/index.html

"Just minutes after the articles hit the site, they were tweaked and
polished by Wikipedia's cult-like following."

Hrm... At least we're only cult-*like*, not an actual *cult*. ;)

"And suddenly everyone used to an edit every few minutes or every hour on
Wikipedia started seeing this flurry of activity."

Actually, about 3 or 4 edits per minute is typical on the English-language
Wikipedia.

I notice there's also some sort of video clip, but I think you have to pay
them money or something (in addition to installing RealPlayer, which may
not be to your liking).

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Steve Vertigo

subject: [WikiEN-l] Pal Lib - whoops

body:
Whoops! I read my mail oldest to newest and saw your
retraction after I already sent my two-second note.  I
wasnt poking fun at you personally, LD :)
Actually, I made the same mistake -- leaving a little
"helpful" comment on PL's talk page -- without having
read what he was up to.  :}  I guess I was trying to
cool a "small fire" not realizing it was already a big
one.

-S-

--- Daniel Ehrenberg <littledanehren at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> --- Steve Vertigo <utilitymuffinresearch at yahoo.com>
> wrote:
> > > Has he made any '''''harmful edits?''''' That's
> > all
> > that
> > > really
> > > matters. If we kick him out, it won't make him
> any
> > > less racist. Probably more, actually.
> > > -LDan
> >
> > ROFL.
> > You must not have read the previous emails. (like
> > JTs)
> > Lets just say they werent "technically correct" or
> > "factual", and his "counseling sessions" on
> > Wikipedia
> > were terminated. :)  -S-
>
> I know, and I sent an other email telling you to
> disregard this one.
> -LDan
>
> __________________________________
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> Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site
> design software
> http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

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subject: [Wikipedia-l] 300,000 is a much better milestone

body:
Daniel-
> Erik wrote:
>> Yes, I know what you're thinking -- not another
>> "x articles" press release.

> I thought we had well over 200,000 articles... I just checked en.wiki's
> Multilingual statistics page; the number is 270,616 as of July 31. So why
> not wait until we have 300,000 articles?

Good idea, but will we still make a big announcement when en: reaches
150K? From the looks of it, the two will nearly happen at the same time.

> What about a Wikimedia logo? Perhaps one of the runner-ups for the Wikipedia
> logo contest could be voted on.

Well, IMHO all of the logos should be in the same general style. Perhaps
whoever designs the winning logo would like to design one for Wikimedia as
well (especially when motivated by a payment from Wikimeda's funds).

> Wikibooks needs to localize its language.php file and put up at least a
> temporary logo first.

Hopefully Brion's Wikipedia-internal translation interface will make these
things easier.

> In addition, Wikibooks has some fairly important software needs that should
> be addressed before such an announcement and inevitable increase in
> contributors (major need: the porting over of pyWiki's php/GPL WikiGroup
> functionality).

Hmm, not sure this is really essential for the wikibooks project. Perhaps
the template idea could be complemented to support this.

Regards,

Erik


subject: [WikiEN-l] CNN

body:
> Just wait until someone adds == Monopoly concerns =
to [[AOL Time  Warner]].

We should finally add a general article explaining to
grandmothers [[why AOL sucks]]

> > I notice there's also some sort of video clip, but
> I think you have to pay
> > them money or something (in addition to installing

Use Fuzheados download link :
http://edition.cnn.com/ASIA/techwatch/techwatch.wmv
I had some video problems -- a whack on the CPU case
took care of it.

On a last note...Um... is there a Krisy Lu Stout
fanclub yet?  A BBR Feature? :)
-SV

__________________________________
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Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software
http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Template system

body:
Till Westermayer wrote:
>Keep wikipedia simple!

Ahem - Erik was talking about extending the template system he is working on
for use in /Wikibooks/ in order to create wiki books. I agree that such a
mechanism /should not/ be allowed in Wikipedia since having books within
Wikipedia is counter to the non-linear hyperlinked nature of the project.
Having things in a specified sequence /is/ the whole point of Wikibooks,
though. Again, we need a Wikimedia mailing list to discuss these things.

I would like to see how Erik's idea could be used to reuse modules. For
example, different instructors will want to organize our textbooks in
different ways - we should let them do that on Wikibooks without having to
fork modules - only TOC's should be forked as a general rule (we should
maintain one reference TOC edition though ; alternate TOC's can be part of
the instructor's user page).

>Of course a template mechanism could be useful for
>many things -- but it also moves Wikipedias markup
>language further in the direction of a programming
>language, i.e. something most non-techs see as
>complicated.

So,

 == %%Name%% ==

Population	%%Population%%

is less complicated than;

|Country table
|Name => Germany
|Population => 83 million
|____

Sorry, but I don't buy your slippery slope argument.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


from_name: John CRAWFORD

subject: [Wikipedia-l] QUERIES ABOUT A SPECIFIC ENTRY

body:
I have a few queries about an entry in your encyclopaedia.  Is this the
Email address to which I should send them?

Thank you in anticipation.

John.

_________________________________________________________________
Find a cheaper internet access deal - choose one to suit you.
http://www.msn.co.uk/internetaccess


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Template system

body:
> Ahem - Erik was talking about extending the template
> system he is working on
> for use in /Wikibooks/ in order to create wiki
> books. I agree that such a
> mechanism /should not/ be allowed in Wikipedia since
> having books within
> Wikipedia is counter to the non-linear hyperlinked
> nature of the project.

I dont think its a question of sequence -- its a
question of relationships.  A "template project" just
means essentially adding tendons to our beefy muscle
system that eventually will allow some connection to
bones -- these bones will need a backbone of course --
this will still -- despite any calls for absolute
primitivity --  need to be an XML schema.  Regardless
of all my non-techie comments, it looks like the
tinkerers are well on the way to getting us to our
goal of Wiki Nirvana.

-S-

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list: textbook-l

from_name: Karl Wick

subject: [Textbook-l] table of contents feature

body:
Hey, I am loving the fact that the textbook pages have all
the features that are disabled in the main site, but could
we get the table of contents feature ?

Thanks, -- Karl

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list: wikitech-l

subject: [Wikitech-l] Bandwidth usage

body:
Jimbo wrote:
>Bandwidth costs are minor, as far as I'm concerned.
>I've never even bothered to break it out from my overall
>bandwidth bill.  People think Wikipedia is popular, and it
>is in a sense, but on a bandwidth basis, it's a small part of
>what we do overall.

You may be interested in this graph;

http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?&range=6m&size=large&compare_sites=bomis.com&url=wikipedia.org#graph

-- mav (runs and hides)


subject: [Wikitech-l] CIA Factbook Slurping

body:
Evan Prodromou wrote:
>So, hi again, everybody. I'm working on a project to
>create a free, complete, up-to-date and reliable
> _travel_guide_. ....

Already a project for that:

http://www.capitancook.com/

It is GNU FDL and uses some Wikipedia content.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


subject: [Wikitech-l] Bandwidth usage

body:
On Mon, 4 Aug 2003, Daniel Mayer wrote:
> You may be interested in this graph;
>
> http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?&range=6m&size=large&compare_sites=bomis.com&url=wikipedia.org#graph

"Service is unavailable."

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikitech-l] Bandwidth usage

body:
Brion wrote:
>On Mon, 4 Aug 2003, Daniel Mayer wrote:
>> You may be interested in this graph;
>>
>>
>http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?&range=6m&size=large&compare_sites=bomis.com&url=wikipedia.org#graph
>
>"Service is unavailable."

OK, that's weird (it works for me). Try

http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?q=&url=wikipedia.org

and type input bomis.com into the Compare Sites field.

--mav


from_name: Bill at ng3k.com

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Search function [+ Google]

body:
On 3 Aug 2003 at 1:42, John Robinson wrote:

> Try using google.  It's usually months out of date; you have to put
> site:wikipedia.org in there manually to find anything that's actually
> on the Wikipedia; it comes up with gobs of results, many of which are
> in languages you can't read.

Specify "site:www.wikipedia.org" to limit retrieval to the English
Wikipedia.  Also, the google advanced search page lays out the
advanced functionality in any easy-to-use manner:

  http://www.google.com/advanced_search?hl=en

HTH,

Bill


subject: [Wikitech-l] Bandwidth usage

body:
Erik wrote:
>Bomis does other stuff which you are not aware of, Mav :-)
>

Good point - the only time I've ever tried to go to Bomis.com was at work but
I was blocked by the my employers censorware. So there may very well be many
other Bomis-owned websites I'm not aware of.

--mav


subject: [Wikitech-l] Bandwidth usage

body:
For some more interesting Alex.com comparisons see:

http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_is_more_popular_than...

--mav


subject: [Wikitech-l] Bandwidth usage

body:
On Mon, 4 Aug 2003, Daniel Mayer wrote:
> Brion wrote:
> OK, that's weird (it works for me). Try
>
> http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?q=&url=wikipedia.org
>
> and type input bomis.com into the Compare Sites field.

Great, that works.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Rick

subject: [WikiEN-l] Ban Palestinian liberator immediately

body:
james duffy <jtdirl at hotmail.com> wrote:

I believe there is overwhelming evidence that this user is not interested in
any way of contributing NPOV content to wikipedia but instead vandalising
articles.

==Examples==

* Inserting a picture of Ariol Sharon on the [[Penis]] page with the summary
''INSERTING PIC OF UGLY DICK SHARON''

* Inserting a picture of Sharon the the [[Feces]] page with the summary
''SHARON IS FECES''

* Inserting a picture of a penis on the [[Ariel Sharon]] page with the
summary ''new pic looks more like him''

* replacing real headlines and texts in [[Israeli-Palestinian conflict]]
with
=== ZIONIST TERROR===

The Zionists are the REAL terrorists.

''and''

The Zionist entity, which the Zionists call "Israel" so that everyone
forgets their crimes against the Arab nation of Palestine, is the world's
biggest terrorist. Like Nazi Germany and bin Laden, this terrorist must be
destroyed so that Palestine can strech from the river to the sea.

He summarised his changes as ''This site is crawling with Zionists''

* In [[Intifada]] he replaced a paragraph with the following
''Both intifadas were originally characterized by civil disobedience by the
[[Palestinians]], which escalated into the use of honorable armed
insurrection. Many Palestinians, including women and children, were
martyred due to the Nazi-fascist brutality of the Zionists.'' The summary he
gave was ''This site is crawling with Zionists''.

* redirected [[Israel]] to [[Zionist Entity]]. I deleted
the page and restored it to its proper location, but he reinstated it,
leading to a second deletion.

I do not have any problem with a pro-Palestinian viewpoint on wiki. Indeed I
have been called ''pro-Arab'' and ''anti-semite'' by RK for seeking to stop
his blatent pro-Israeli propagandising of some pages. Personally I do
believe that wiki represents the what outside the US is seen as America's
''Israelophile'' sympathies. But it is crystal clear that this user is not
trying to offer a balancing analysis of the Palestinian analysis of the
Middle East problem. He is simply maliciously trying to vandalise articles.
It is worth noting a similar user appeared on wiki some weeks ago
propagandising articles supposedly from one viewpoint, yet whose
contributions seemed nothing but vandalistic malicious nonsense, not a
serious attempt at offering an alternative viewpoint. It might be worth
someone checking this user's IP and comparing it to that user to see whether
it is the same person. This user here clearly warrants a ban, not for his
opinions but for his malicious vandalism of pages.
[[User:Jtdirl|Fear?IREANN]] 12:19, 4 Aug 2003 (UTC)

BTW 172 summed up this user's contributions with the following, which I
concur with.

I can see that you're a mature and articulate advocate of your cause, laying
out very convincing arguments involving poo poo and wee wees. 172 08:20, 4
Aug 2003 (UTC)

Since I started this page, Pl wrote on the talk page

I will stop messing with pages without permission. I will stop making rules
on my page. However, I still want to be able to have others sign the list
I'm starting agreeing that Zionism is racism.

I agree Zionism = racism

* user Palestine liberator

After changes, that version was posted at 13:02, 4 Aug 2003. He then
followed it up 8 minutes later, at
13:10, 4 Aug 2003 with

* United States - some in the Palestinian movement and others regard
America as a puppet of the Zionists.

So much for the promised neutrality and stopping messing. This guy is simply
playing games.

I have already had to protect one page that he continually reverted over and
over and over again. I and others have been continually reverting other
pages. A ban is /urgently/ required.

A ban page is at [[User talk:Palestinian liberator/ban]]. Please express
your viewers whether here on the list or there on the page. A decision is
clearly needed quickly before the scale of vandalism gets out of hand.

JT

I was the first person to write on his Talk page, suggesting that his #REDIRECT of [[Israel]] to [[Zionist entity]] was probably NOT A GOOD THING (TM).  He told he he was only going to make comments on Talk pages, although he did call me a Zionist in the process.

We can see how much his promises are worth.

RickK

---------------------------------
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from_name: Evan Prodromou

subject: [Wikitech-l] CIA Factbook Slurping

body:
So, hi again, everybody. I'm working on a project to create a free,
complete, up-to-date and reliable _travel_guide_. It's similar in
philosophy to Wikipedia or Wiktionary -- providing a Wiki-edited
reference text with a free license -- but has the specific goal of
making a travel guide rather than an encyclopedia.

For example, the Montreal entry for Wikitravel would have lists of
hotels, restaurants, and bars with their addresses and phone numbers,
prices and times for important transportation or sightseeing venues,
etc., etc. All the type of thing that probably wouldn't belong in the
Wikipedia Montreal entry.

Anyway, we're just getting started, and my first task is to slurp up
the CIA factbook 2002 for maps and basic info on countries and get
them into Wikitravel. I've downloaded the factbook, but it's in plain
HTML and doesn't seem to have much semantic markup to make it easy to
figure out what's what in the page.

I know that one of the first tasks for Wikipedia was slurping the
factbook for 2000. I seem to remember seeing a script around in CVS
for doing that, but I might have been mistaking the yearbook/
directory for factbook info.

Any suggestions? Sample code? Pointers to more structured data for the
factbook?

TIA for MIA at the CIA,

~ESP

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


from_name: Robert

subject: [WikiEN-l] False cries of censorship in State of Israel article

body:
For reasons I do not understand, Jtdirl is being dishonest
about my work on Wikipedia. Wikipedia has a good article on
the State of Israel, which has links to many different
sub-topics. However, in recent days a few people have been
trying to start, from scratch, argumentative discussions
about Jewish refugees and Arab refugees within this main
page.  You need to kno that these subjects ALREADY are
discussed in great detail in many other article! The edit
page shows this is already becoming very contentious.

The problem here is that people, such as Jtdirl, are
effectively bypassing our peer review by starting a totally
new discussion on the same topic, without taking into
account the consensus that has already been built. It also
has become inflammatory, with many other people adding text
and deleting text.

Jtdirl's edits, and edits of a few others here, are a
violation of the protocol that we use for all our other
nation/state entries.

Bizarrely, Jtdirl refuses to recognize that Wikipedia
*already* discusses this issue, in depth. When I removed
this inflammatory section, and referred him to the fact
that we *already* have these articles, which have gone
through many rounds of peer review, Jtdirl yelled at me:

"rv yet more RK censorship. Does he ever stop? Does he have
a clue what NPOV means?"

This is a lie. I have never censored this, and in fact I
have worked with many others here in many rounds of
peer-review to hone our articles on precisely these topics.
Here are our articles which ALREADY discuss these topics:

http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestine
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_refugee
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_refugees

I am sincerely distressed by the way Jtdirl keeps accusing
me of censorship. I have never promoted censorship of
academic discouse, nor have I ever prevented anyone from
writing on this issue. That's just crazy. I just want to
maintain standard Wikipedia protocols. Jtdirl, please stop
the false accusations, and stop your reversions. Your POV
pushing is not acceptable; instead, please work with the
rest of us in the peer-reviewed articles which already are
gaining some measure of consensus.

RK

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software
http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com


subject: [Wikitech-l] Bandwidth usage

body:
JeLuF wrote:
>This all seems very unlikely to me. I think Mav and
>perhaps some other "power user" are using the alexa
>toolbar and their many hits adulterate the statistics.

Is that an allegation that I'm rigging the system?

Instead of throwing around baseless accusations why don't you look up the
criteria for hit counting; one IP is counted only once a day per page (see
http://pages.alexa.com/exec/faqsidos/help/index.html?index=1 ). Oh and I use
a non-Windows operating system so the Alexa Toolbar doesn't work on my
computer - same for a disproportionately large number of daily contributors.
So if anything Wikipedia's stats are undercounted by the use of the "power
users".

Good day.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


subject: [WikiEN-l] CNN

body:
--- Erik Moeller <erik_moeller at gmx.de> wrote:
> Brion-
>
> >
>
http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/internet/08/03/wikipedia/index.html
>
> > "Just minutes after the articles hit the site,
> they were tweaked and
> > polished by Wikipedia's cult-like following."
>
> > Hrm... At least we're only cult-*like*, not an
> actual *cult*. ;)
>
> Just wait until someone adds == Monopoly concerns ==
> to [[AOL Time
> Warner]].
>
> > I notice there's also some sort of video clip, but
> I think you have to pay
> > them money or something (in addition to installing
> RealPlayer, which may
> > not be to your liking).
>
> moeller at peace:~$ wget
> http://edition.cnn.com/ASIA/techwatch/techwatch.wmv
> moeller at peace:~$ mplayer techwatch.wmv
>
> Works for me ;-)
>
> Regards,
>
> Erik

That's only a short summary of the free video on the
main page.
--LDan

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software
http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com


from_name: a.crossman at blueyonder.co.uk

subject: [WikiEN-l] CNN

body:
The article about Wikipedia is now linked to from the front page of
CNN.com so now is the time for all Wikipedia volunteer firefighters
to report to duty. :-)

--
Allan Crossman - http://dogma.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk
PGP keys - 0x06C4BCCA (new) || 0xCEC9FAE1 (compatible)


body:
Jimmy-
> I'm convinced.  Palestinian liberator is to be banned.  Can someone
> take care of this for me?

No problem, but how about using the "revert all the bad edits of this user
on sight" strategy instead of the "ban this specific pseudonym of this
user" strategy as an experiment in this case? The latter strategy seems to
contribute to the proliferation of fake identities which need re-banning
and re-banning.

Regards,

Erik


from_name: Christopher Mahan

body:
--- Robert <rkscience100 at yahoo.com> wrote:

<clipped>

> RK

Boo hoo,

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

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software
http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com


from_name: Walter Vermeir

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: CNN

body:
Brion Vibber <vibber at aludra.usc.edu> wrote in
news:Pine.GSO.4.33.0308041437080.15569-100000 at aludra.usc.edu:

> On Mon, 4 Aug 2003 a.crossman at blueyonder.co.uk
> wrote:
>> The article about Wikipedia is now linked to from the front page of
>> CNN.com so now is the time for all Wikipedia volunteer firefighters
>> to report to duty. :-)
>
> http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/internet/08/03/wikipedia/index.html

There hyperlink points to http://wikipedia.com
It works but not proffesional.

--
Contact: walter AT wikipedia.be
Ook een artikeltje schrijven? WikipediaNL, de vrije GNU/FDL encyclopedie
http://www.wikipedia.be


from_name: Jimmy O'Regan

subject: [WikiEN-l] No comment

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:

>http://will.edit.wikipedia.articles.forfood.org/
>
>No comment on the tastefulness, or lack thereof, of this joke.
>:-)
>
>
Agh. It's one of those damned Dynamic DNS "joke" sites. After
has-a-small-penis.com they all look second rate ;)


body:
Steve Vertigo wrote:

>Mr Miyagi say : Left side of road, OK! Right side of
>road, OK! Middle of road, Squish like grape!
>
>
But being at both sides of the street at once is a sign of godliness :)


body:
Steve Vertigo wrote:

>I suppose a better way to end this thread would be to
>say "Is-Pal neutrality" is a complete oxymoron, just
>as most present controversial issues are.
>
>
Not really; I know a lot of people who couldn't give a s*** either way.


body:
Erik Moeller wrote:

>Jimmy-
>
>
>>I'm convinced.  Palestinian liberator is to be banned.  Can someone
>>take care of this for me?
>>
>>
>
>No problem, but how about using the "revert all the bad edits of this user
>on sight" strategy instead of the "ban this specific pseudonym of this
>user" strategy as an experiment in this case? The latter strategy seems to
>contribute to the proliferation of fake identities which need re-banning
>and re-banning.
>
>
>
So when we see something that, upon examination, is most definitely
vandalism, we revert? Never seen that approach used before :)


body:
Fred Bauder wrote:

>on 8/4/03 1:45 PM, Steve Vertigo at utilitymuffinresearch at yahoo.com wrote:
>
>
>
>>I suppose a better way to end this thread would be to
>>say "Is-Pal neutrality" is a complete oxymoron, just
>>as most present controversial issues are.
>>
>>-S-
>>
>>
>
>I think a few of us really are neutral or really sympathetic to both sides;
>but it's an obvious snakepit...
>
>
Yeah, like that minority of Israeli Jews who are sympathetic to the
Palestinians. I wish now I'd kept all those back issues of the Sunday Times!


subject: [WikiEN-l] Palestine liberator

body:
Daniel Ehrenberg wrote:

>--- Steve Vertigo <utilitymuffinresearch at yahoo.com>
>wrote:
>
>
>>>Has he made any '''''harmful edits?''''' That's
>>>
>>>
>>all
>>that
>>
>>
>>>really
>>>matters. If we kick him out, it won't make him any
>>>less racist. Probably more, actually.
>>>-LDan
>>>
>>>
>>ROFL.
>>You must not have read the previous emails. (like
>>JTs)
>>Lets just say they werent "technically correct" or
>>"factual", and his "counseling sessions" on
>>Wikipedia
>>were terminated. :)  -S-
>>
>>
>
>I know, and I sent an other email telling you to
>disregard this one.
>
>
What are the odds that Steve had an email drafted to say "whoops, saw
your followup", but read this instead? Pity there are no edit conflicts
with e-mail :)


subject: [WikiEN-l] CNN

body:
a.crossman at blueyonder.co.uk wrote:

>The article about Wikipedia is now linked to from the front page of
>CNN.com so now is the time for all Wikipedia volunteer firefighters
>to report to duty. :-)
>
>
Where's my hose? :)


subject: [Wikitech-l] Bandwidth usage

body:
Look at this graph:

http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?&range=1y&size=medium&comp
are_sites=&url=wikipedia.org#top

(for 1 year) during which we came from nothing (internet speaking), broke
into the top 10,100 and have rapidly risen to the 1,493th most used site.
Projecting the rate of change we will soon be in the top 1000.

Fred


subject:
[WikiEN-l] False cries of censorship in State of Israel
	article

body:
on 8/4/03 7:07 PM, Robert at rkscience100 at yahoo.com wrote:

> "rv yet more RK censorship. Does he ever stop? Does he have
> a clue what NPOV means?"

He knows what censorship is and POV, being an expert practitioner himself.
You'll just have to fight it out. Hint: he and his colleagues NEVER give up.

Fred


body:
Daniel-
> I don't agree with this at all - each project needs to have its own very
> distinct logo so that each project can be instantly recognizable when
> readers are using interproject links. Readers need to know very fast where
> they are.

They should, but we also need a common visual identity to let people know
that they are on a Wikimedia project site. For example, if Wiktionary had
a cartoonish logo, Wikipedia a photo-based logo and Textbook-Wiki an
abstract, thin line logo, there would be no common feel about all
projects. People might conclude that Wiktionary and Wikipedia are only
distantly related.

It's about finding the right balance -- the logos should not look too
similar, because the sites themselves already look relatively similar, but
they also should not look too different. This is best accomplished by
simply asking the original artist to draw the logos for the other projects
as well.

> Oh yes it is very essential - without it we cannot organize books in the
> WikiWay. Yeah sure we can hard code navigational aids like Next and Previous
> Page but 1) that is tedious, 2) it is very inflexible (any change of
> organization in a book's TOC would be difficult to implement) and 3) that
> ensures that each module can only be used for a single book.

While this may all be true, I do not see any of these as requirements
before the project is announced to a larger audience.

That being said, let me explain how I think a template system can be used
to accomplish the kind of dynamic multi-page TOC/navigation structure you
want.

With template system, I am referring to the mechanism whereby content from
other pages in a new template namespace can be transcluded, and keys/
values are assigned by the calling page:

|Country table
|Name => Germany
|Population => 83 million
|____

etc.

This would transclude the page [[Template:Country table]], which could
look like this:

  == %%Name%% ==

Population	%%Population%%

etc.

Now this is a very simple template system. A more complex template system
would support things like conditional blocks, loops and so forth.
Furthermore, we could have some automatically prefilled variable names.
For example, %%PAGENAME%% would contain the name of the page from which
the template is transcluded.

With these features, I could create a navigation footer simply by putting

|Organic chemistry navigation
|____

on the page. [[Template:Organic chemistry navigation]] could contain
something like

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

[!
%%titles%%=
  About this book
  Foundational concepts
  Alkanes and cycloalkanes
  Introduction to reaction
%%currentPageID%%=
  !!look up %%PAGENAME%% in %%titlesArray%%!!
]!

[? %%currentPageID%%==-1

Table of contents:

[* %%titlesArray%%

%%CURRENTVALUE%%

*]

?]

[? %%currentPageID%%!=-1
[!
%%prevPage=
  %%titlesArray[currentPageID-1]%%
%%nextPage=
  %%titlesArray[currentPageID+1]%%
!]

Navigation:

[[%%prevPage%%]] %%PAGETITLE%% [[%%nextPage%%]]

?]
----------------------------------------------------------

Explanations:

[? .. ?]
  conditional blocks, are only executed if condition in first line is true
[! .. !]
  instruction blocks, are always executed (for instructions that have more
  than one line, all lines after the first one have to be indented)
[* .. *]
  foreach blocks, cycles through the value in an array and stores the
  value for each iteration in %%CURRENTVALUE%%
%%..%%
  variable names, some of which are passed to the template by the calling
  page, others are predefined or defined by context (see above)
!!..!!
  internal function calls -- the template syntax provides functions for
  sorting, looking up values in an indexed array etc.

The template looks up the current page in the array, checks whether it is
the index page (if so, generates the TOC) or a content page (in which case
it generates the navigation page linking to the neighboring pages).
Simplified -- doesn't check if neighboring pages exist.

While this may seem complex, keep in mind that the above example is as
generic as possible. You can add titles to the TOC and navigation at any
time by simple modifying the titles array, and you can change the layout
of the TOC and the navigation arbitrarily. A built in function could be
provided for TOCs using a standard layout.

Regards,

Erik


from_name: Till Westermayer

body:
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . till we *) . . .

Hi,

>With template system, I am referring to the mechanism whereby
>content from other pages in a new template namespace can be
>transcluded, and keys/ values are assigned by the calling page:

Keep wikipedia simple!

The proposed template system as full programming language is overkill,
at least it looks to me like that. And it makes wikipedia viruses
possible, I guess. (Or at least something like an undetected silly
change to the template page resulting in 197 country pages showing
nonsense).

Of course a template mechanism could be useful for many things -- but it
also moves Wikipedias markup language further in the direction of a
programming language, i.e. something most non-techs see as complicated.
Simple templates could be a reduction of complexity, but if templates
become equivalent to turing machines, it's far to much ...

Best regards,

till we *)
 __ .
 / / / /                            ... Till Westermayer - till we *)
. .
  . mailto:till at tillwe.de . www.westermayer.de/till/ . icq 320393072
  . Habsburgerstr. 82 . 79104 Freiburg . 0761 55697152 . 0160 96619179
  . . . . .


subject: [WikiEN-l] CNN

body:
Brion-

> http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/internet/08/03/wikipedia/index.html

> "Just minutes after the articles hit the site, they were tweaked and
> polished by Wikipedia's cult-like following."

> Hrm... At least we're only cult-*like*, not an actual *cult*. ;)

Just wait until someone adds == Monopoly concerns == to [[AOL Time
Warner]].

> I notice there's also some sort of video clip, but I think you have to pay
> them money or something (in addition to installing RealPlayer, which may
> not be to your liking).

moeller at peace:~$ wget http://edition.cnn.com/ASIA/techwatch/techwatch.wmv
moeller at peace:~$ mplayer techwatch.wmv

Works for me ;-)

Regards,

Erik


body:
I have now looked at the Wikipedia article, "Israel". It is acceptable
without editing for inclusion in Internet-Encyclopedia; that is, it is
written from a sympathetic point of view, If you will compare the article,
"People's Republic of China", which includes sharply negative information
(Most of which I have insisted on including) you will see that the Israel
article fails to achieve a neutral point of view.

Just my opinion,

Fred


body:
Till-
>> With template system, I am referring to the mechanism whereby
>> content from other pages in a new template namespace can be
>> transcluded, and keys/ values are assigned by the calling page:

> Keep wikipedia simple!

That's what the template system is for -- moving tables, HTML etc. out of
the articles and into templates that can be optimized by people who like
doing that sort of thing. Other people just have to edit something
extremely simple like

|Country table
|Name => Germany
|____

|Navigation
|Next => Dogs
|Previous => Cats
|____

Regards,

Erik


from_name: tarquin

subject: [WikiEN-l] CNN

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:

>
>
>moeller at peace:~$ wget http://edition.cnn.com/ASIA/techwatch/techwatch.wmv
>moeller at peace:~$ mplayer techwatch.wmv
>
>
>
Thanks!
I could only get it on streaming, which was AWFUL on my 56k!


from_name: Erik Moeller

body:
Jimmy-
>> No problem, but how about using the "revert all the bad edits of this user
>> on sight" strategy instead of the "ban this specific pseudonym of this
>> user" strategy as an experiment in this case? The latter strategy seems to
>> contribute to the proliferation of fake identities which need re-banning
>> and re-banning.

> So when we see something that, upon examination, is most definitely
> vandalism, we revert? Never seen that approach used before :)

Well, the idea is that for a banned user, you don't really have to pay
much attention to what he does -- just revert and let other people restore
if it's any good. For non-banned users you have to look at each edit
carefully before reverting. Sorry if that distinction wasn't clear.

Regards,

Erik


body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:

>tarquin wrote:
>
>
>>But one of the things we need to do is make
>>
>>www.wikipedia.org
>>
>>lead to a multilingual portal and not the homepage of the english branch.
>>
>>
>
>Given the project-wide nature of the 300,000 article announcement I think that
>this very issue should finally be addressed. We don't need anything real
>fancy, just the already developed idea here
>http://mitglied.lycos.de/manske/wiki/test.php (without the intro text; its
>simply too long). Somebody will have to figure out how to fetch each wiki's
>{{NUMBEROFARTICLES}} output to make this work though. We can add more
>features as time goes by.
>
I think that page looks good in principle.

About two months ago I brought the subject back up on the international
mailing list, and Jimbo pronounced in favour of it. :)
I think we can move this thing forward :)


from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [Wikitech-l] Bandwidth usage

body:
Jens Frank wrote:
>Maveric, I didn't want to allege fraud,
>if you've got this impression I'm very sorry.

You are forgiven. :-) And I'm sorry for assuming that you were implying that I
was doing something wrong. I should have known better that you wouldn't do
that.

>The fact that an IP is only counted once per page would
>btw not reduce the impact of power users to the statistic.
>/wiki/Article
>/w/wiki.phtml?title=Article
>/w/wiki.phtml?title=Article&action=edit
>/w/wiki.phtml?title=Article&action=preview
>
>All are different pages for alexa, so a power user
>would generate lots of hits.

Only if they are an Alexa user. We could have a poll if you like. Oh and there
is no =preview; only =submit. And things like wiki.phtml?title=Article
usually only appear when viewing a print version. Besides editing and reading
are two different types of uses so they should be counted separately.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


from_name: Fred Bauder

subject: [Wikitech-l] CIA Factbook Slurping

body:
on 8/4/03 5:29 PM, Daniel Mayer at maveric149 at yahoo.com wrote:

> Evan Prodromou wrote:
>> So, hi again, everybody. I'm working on a project to
>> create a free, complete, up-to-date and reliable
>> _travel_guide_. ....
>
> Already a project for that:
>
> http://www.capitancook.com/
>
> It is GNU FDL and uses some Wikipedia content.

So that settles it? and Evan Prodromous should go back to mowing his lawn?

Here's his idea:

So, hi again, everybody. I'm working on a project to create a free,
complete, up-to-date and reliable _travel_guide_. It's similar in
philosophy to Wikipedia or Wiktionary -- providing a Wiki-edited
reference text with a free license -- but has the specific goal of
making a travel guide rather than an encyclopedia.

Capitancook does exist, but how do we know that this new project couldn't be
a lot better or that having two sites might be to the benefit of users of
both of them?

Fred


from_name: Delirium

subject: [WikiEN-l] False cries of censorship in State of Israel	article

body:
Fred Bauder wrote:

>I have now looked at the Wikipedia article, "Israel". It is acceptable
>without editing for inclusion in Internet-Encyclopedia; that is, it is
>written from a sympathetic point of view, If you will compare the article,
>"People's Republic of China", which includes sharply negative information
>(Most of which I have insisted on including) you will see that the Israel
>article fails to achieve a neutral point of view.
>
>
On this particular issue, I think the lack of sharp negative information
is simply because the [[Israel]] article is a very high-level overview,
giving an indication of what the country is, who lives in it, and what
conflicts it's engaged in.  Unlike in [[People's Republic of China]],
the controversies are so complex and, well, controversial that they
merit a separate article of their own -- [[Israeli-Palestinian
conflict]].  If you look at that article, you'll find plenty of negative
information.

-Mark


body:
Erik Moeller wrote:

>Well, the idea is that for a banned user, you don't really have to pay
>much attention to what he does -- just revert and let other people restore
>if it's any good. For non-banned users you have to look at each edit
>carefully before reverting. Sorry if that distinction wasn't clear.
>
>
Sorry, just couldn't pass up the chance to make a smart ass comment. As
for the "let other people..." part - that's what I have tried to do with
Michael's stuff for a while, and it's lead tosome minor disagreement; it
may take a while for this approach to gain currency.


subject: [Textbook-l] table of contents feature

body:
Karl-
> Hey, I am loving the fact that the textbook pages have all
> the features that are disabled in the main site, but could
> we get the table of contents feature ?

Patience, grasshopper. Some tweaks are in order before the other wikis are
updated to this version.

Regards,

Erik


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikimedia's first press release: Translators needed

body:
Please see the talk page of

http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia's_first_press_release

to sign-up.

--mav


subject: [Wikitech-l] Bandwidth usage

body:
Daniel-
> Jimbo wrote:
>> Bandwidth costs are minor, as far as I'm concerned.
>> I've never even bothered to break it out from my overall
>> bandwidth bill.  People think Wikipedia is popular, and it
>> is in a sense, but on a bandwidth basis, it's a small part of
>> what we do overall.

> You may be interested in this graph;

> http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?&range=6m&size=large&compa
> re_sites=bomis.com&url=wikipedia.org#graph

Bomis does other stuff which you are not aware of, Mav :-)

Regards,

Erik


from_name: Jens Frank

subject: [Wikitech-l] Bandwidth usage

body:
On Mon, Aug 04, 2003 at 04:22:51PM -0700, Daniel Mayer wrote:
> Jimbo wrote:
> >Bandwidth costs are minor, as far as I'm concerned.
> >I've never even bothered to break it out from my overall
> >bandwidth bill.  People think Wikipedia is popular, and it
> >is in a sense, but on a bandwidth basis, it's a small part of
> >what we do overall.
>
> You may be interested in this graph;
>
> http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?&range=6m&size=large&compare_sites=bomis.com&url=wikipedia.org#graph
>
These graphs look highly suspicious to me. According to alexa, wikipedia
is having more traffic than

* heise.de (very popular German IT news ticker)
* rtl.de (Germanys most popular commercial TV station)
* fokus.de, stern.de (two popular weekly news magazines)
* bild.de (most popular Yellow Press daily newspaper)
* microsoft.de
* Britannica.com
* sex.com is only a few places before us

This all seems very unlikely to me. I think Mav and perhaps some other
"power user" are using the alexa toolbar and their many hits adulterate
the statistics.

Regards,

	JeLuF


from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject: [Wikitech-l] Whitelist mode for article viewing

body:
Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
> Do we really want all that in our codebase ?
> Why can't you just fork ?

Although serving a general community of wikis should never become the
primary focus of our software project, i.e. we have more than enough
to do just keeping wikipedia on track, I see no harm in sometimes
including some features that make it easier for people to use our
software for other things.

For one thing, if the software is widely used, we will get a lot more
bugtesting and also a lot more interest from developers.

Right now, all the development has been done by people who were
interested in the encyclopedia project first and foremost, and saw a
need for software to make the pedia run better.

But if the software were a bit more widely usable, then we'd get
patches from people to fix bugs or improve performance.

The main thing that people have to understand, if they want to use our
software for something else, is that the software will always remain
optimized for exactly what we're doing, so extensive addition of huge
amounts of code that wouldn't be used by us would probably not be
welcomed.

But a little bit of code, I don't see much harm, but I do see a lot of
potential benefit.


subject: [Wikitech-l] Bandwidth usage

body:
Andre Engels wrote:
> No, check on the bottom of the page. 'Power users' can influence the number
> of page views, but they hardly if at all influence the reach. Still,
> Wikipedia's position in the reach listing is actually even better than its
> position in the page view listing.

How can we view the reach listing?

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikitech-l] Bandwidth usage

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:

> On Mon, 4 Aug 2003, Daniel Mayer wrote:
> > Brion wrote:
> > OK, that's weird (it works for me). Try
> >
> > http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?q=&url=wikipedia.org
> >
> > and type input bomis.com into the Compare Sites field.
>
> Great, that works.

Actually, I am surprised to see that according to this, bomis and
wikipedia have recently converged in terms of traffic.  I can assure
everyone that this is not true.

Wikipedia is growing faster than Bomis, but it would be a long time
before they were equal in either reach or pageviews.

So this probably means that Alexa's numbers are more of a novelty than
anything else.

--Jimbo


subject: [WikiEN-l] CNN video clip?

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:
> I notice there's also some sort of video clip, but I think you have to pay
> them money or something (in addition to installing RealPlayer, which may
> not be to your liking).

If anyone out there has access to this and wants to send me a copy,
under the principles of fair use, of course, I would really enjoy
watching it.


subject: [Wikitech-l] CIA Factbook Slurping

in_reply_to: <87znip148e.fsf@unicorn.bad-people-of-the-future.san-francisco.ca.us>; from evan@wikitravel.org on Mon, Aug 04, 2003 at 05:51:13PM -0400

body:
I notice that you're currently using the Creative Commons by-sa
(attribution share-alike) license.  That's a good license, nearly
identical in spirit to the GNU FDL but not, in my opinion, strictly
compatible.

Since you're only a few days in, you could still switch to GNU FDL
easily enough -- this might be best for you, if you envision a lot of
content sharing between your site and wikipedia (which seems natural).

I'm enthusiastic about your project, and I think the idea is
excellent.

I am planning to campaign with RMS to change the GNU FDL to be
cut-and-paste compatible somehow with CC ATT-SA, but it's hard to say
if that would ever happen.

--Jimbo


body:
on 8/5/03 5:31 AM, Tomasz Wegrzanowski at taw at users.sourceforge.net wrote:

> Do we really want all that in our codebase ?
> Why can't you just fork ?

Sourceforge serves more than just Wikipedia. Eventually our software will be
used in a variety of projects, unless it get screwed up so no one else can
use it without doing extensive tedious modifications.

Fred


body:
on 8/5/03 2:04 AM, Delirium at delirium at rufus.d2g.com wrote:

> On this particular issue, I think the lack of sharp negative information
> is simply because the [[Israel]] article is a very high-level overview,
> giving an indication of what the country is, who lives in it, and what
> conflicts it's engaged in.  Unlike in [[People's Republic of China]],
> the controversies are so complex and, well, controversial that they
> merit a separate article of their own -- [[Israeli-Palestinian
> conflict]].  If you look at that article, you'll find plenty of negative
> information.
>
> -Mark

No, they tried censorship in the case of People's Republic of China, too,
they just didn't win.

Fred


subject: [Textbook-l] Anonymous contributions

in_reply_to: <20030801024938.GA1751@tavaiah>; from taw@users.sourceforge.net on Fri, Aug 01, 2003 at 04:49:38AM +0200

body:
Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
> If it's copyrighted by anyone living in Europe, European laws apply.

European laws apply in Europe.  They have no impact on me.

--Jimbo


subject: [Textbook-l] Anonymous contributions

in_reply_to: <20030801114215.GA7104@tavaiah>; from taw@users.sourceforge.net on Fri, Aug 01, 2003 at 01:42:15PM +0200

body:
Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
> You can't have copyright over something
> in one country, while somebody else has copyright over it in others
> (of course what are your rights here is country-specific)

I don't think that this is literally true in all cases.  It may be
true in the general case, due to treaties or something like that.

> Oh, and we want Wikipedia to be distributable in Europe too, don't you
> remember ?

Yes!  That's very important, and so we need to follow the most
conservative policies that we can, so long as they don't materially
interfere with our encyclopedic and NPOV mission.

> And I don't really have to care about US laws at any point,
> only server owners has ;)

Right!  We each have to follow our own laws, and where they may
conflict, we should be sensitive to both parties when we can.

--Jimbo


subject: [Textbook-l] RE: Anonymous contributions

body:
Karl Wick wrote:
> Wasn't there a lawyer who offered free services to Jimmy a
> while back ? An expert opinion would he helpful in many
> issues to make a plan that is legal and helps achieve WP
> goals and mission, such as regarding the proposed
> dedication of copyrights to the Foundation.

Yes, he's advising me.

I like discussions of legal stuff on the lists, because it's often
interesting to me, but at some point I think that people should not
worry so much about it.  Let me worry about it.  :-)

--Jimbo


subject: [Textbook-l] Anonymous contributions

body:
Imran Ghory wrote:
>> The question before us then is this; can we state on our Wikibooks
>> copyright policy page and on every edit page that by pressing
>> save, that the submitter is agreeing to grant Wikimedia a
>> non-exclusive right to license to use their own unique and
>> copyrightable work under both the GNU FDL /and/ any other copyleft
>> license the Foundation may deem fit in the future (with a
>> defintion of "copyleft" linked from that word)?

> Yes.

The problem I see with this is that it precludes people from cutting
and pasting text from GNU FDL-only sources such as Wikipedia.  The
reason is that the person who is pasting it has *no right* to tell us
that we can relicense that text under a different license.

I still think there's some promise in the notion of a disjunctive
license, but I'm still puzzling it out with the authorities.

> > Question two: Would such a notice prevent us from using purely FDL
> > work (such as from Wikipedia)?

> Yes. The person who is importing the work will not be able to legally save
> the page and meet the required conditions.

Oh, I see Imran says the same as me.

I think this is an insurmountable obstacle for us on this particular
front.

> > Related question: If the above is true then could we add such a notice to
> > Wikipedia in order to cover all new submissions (we would also have to
> > contact every current and past contributor we could in order to ask them
> > about the change in copyright terms; if they say no or we can't find them
> > their text will only be under the FDL)?

That's right, we could do that, but what a tracking nightmare!  Every
article in Wikipedia would have to be flagged somehow.

This *could* conceivably work, though.  We could set up software tools
to allow signed-in contributors to click-agree that all of their past
contributions can be flexibly licensed.

But unless we have a *really good* reason, and I don't see that we do,
we shouldn't do this.

--Jimbo


body:
Alex R. wrote:
> I am not certain why there is a discussion of assigning copyright
> to the Wikimedia Foundation. Of course anyone is free to make
> such a contribution (though I doubt they will get a tax deduction
> for it) but it is not necessary IMHO for Wikimedia to use materials
> under the open license it already has, perhaps I do not understand
> the question, but what specifically cannot be acheived with the
> current open license that every Wikipedia contributor grants when
> they make contributions to any Wikipedia space?

I would say that the primary driving concern that we have is that
there are starting to be materials published under other free and
copyleft licenses (Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike being most
prominent) that are incompatible with the GNU FDL.  We'd love to be
able to cut and paste willy-nilly between all free resources, but we
can't, due to issues of license incompatibility.

http://www.wikitravel.org, or example, is CC ATT-SA, so we can't use
their materials and they can't use ours, not without specific
permission.  That's a real shame, and it's why I'm trying to get them
to change their license while they are just starting to get off the
ground.

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Whitelist mode for article viewing

body:
on 8/5/03 5:58 AM, Matthias Jordan at mjordan at code-fu.de wrote:

> Hi, folks!
>
> Fred Bauder wrote:
>
>> Sourceforge serves more than just Wikipedia. Eventually our software will be
>> used in a variety of projects, unless it get screwed up so no one else can
>> use it without doing extensive tedious modifications.
>
> Sorry, but I don't understand what you mean. Are you for including those
> closed-shop features into the main brach or against it?
>
> Bye!
>
> Matthias "not being a native speaker" Jordan

I think your whitelist mode can be set false and only be used if it is
turned on.

Fred


subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia more popular than Britannica!

in_reply_to: <3F0B5F48.1070000@telus.net>; from saintonge@telus.net on Tue, Jul 08, 2003 at 05:18:16PM -0700

body:
Ray Saintonge wrote:
> This kind of situation does not lend itself very well to waiting until
> we have the cash.  Encarta has a bit of an advantage in that department.
> A purchase offer of $1.00 may be more appropriate if it's presented as
> an offer which Safra's estate can't refuse.
>
> For interesting background reading see
> http://www.businessweek.com/1997/42/b3549124.htm and
> http://www.jewishsf.com/bk991210/obsafra.shtml
>
> Our offer also needs to maintain Wikipedia's philosophical integrity.

It's a shame that Safra has died, because presumably his estate will
have fiduciary responsibilities that would preclude any sort of OS
gift to the world.  Safra might have been persuadable, from the point
of view of charity, but his heirs, it's hard to predict.


from_name: Brett A. Thomas

subject: [Wikipedia-l] CNN article on Wikipedia

body:
Not a member of the list, so I may miss replies I'm not CCed to, but I
didn't see this mentioned in the archives.

CNN.com has an article on Wikipedia:

  http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/internet/08/03/wikipedia/index.html

It was linked from their front page yesterday, but is only in the tech
section, now.  It's pretty light and fluffy (and calls all the
Wikipedians "cult-like" ;), but it's about Wikipedia.  There's also a
"Video" link, which leads me to believe they may have mentioned this
on-air, too, but since I'm not a paying subscriber to CNN, I can't see it.

Brett (The Quark)


subject: [Wikitech-l] CIA Factbook Slurping

in_reply_to: Fred Bauder's message of "Tue, 05 Aug 2003 00:52:37 -0600"

body:
>>>>> "FB" == Fred Bauder <fredbaud at ctelco.net> writes:

    FB> So that settles it? and Evan Prodromous should go back to
    FB> mowing his lawn?

I don't have a lawn, so that doesn't even help.

Back to my original question: does someone have existing code to slurp
the Factbook?

~ESP

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


from_name: Lars Aronsson

subject: [Wikitech-l] CIA Factbook Slurping

body:
Evan Prodromou wrote:
> So, hi again, everybody. I'm working on a project to create a free,
> complete, up-to-date and reliable _travel_guide_. It's similar in

Sounds like www.capitancook.com

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


from_name: Daniel Ehrenberg

body:
--- Jimmy Wales <jwales at bomis.com> wrote:
> I would say that the primary driving concern that we
> have is that
> there are starting to be materials published under
> other free and
> copyleft licenses (Creative Commons
> Attribution-Share Alike being most
> prominent) that are incompatible with the GNU FDL.
> We'd love to be
> able to cut and paste willy-nilly between all free
> resources, but we
> can't, due to issues of license incompatibility.
>
> http://www.wikitravel.org, or example, is CC ATT-SA,
> so we can't use
> their materials and they can't use ours, not without
> specific
> permission.  That's a real shame, and it's why I'm
> trying to get them
> to change their license while they are just starting
> to get off the
> ground.
>
> --Jimbo

Is it in any way possible for us to have an agreement
with eachother that says that we can use eachother's
material? Would that be against the GPL?
LDan

__________________________________
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http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com


subject: [Textbook-l] Anonymous contributions

body:
--- Jimmy Wales <jwales at bomis.com> wrote:
> Imran Ghory wrote:
> >> The question before us then is this; can we state
> on our Wikibooks
> >> copyright policy page and on every edit page that
> by pressing
> >> save, that the submitter is agreeing to grant
> Wikimedia a
> >> non-exclusive right to license to use their own
> unique and
> >> copyrightable work under both the GNU FDL /and/
> any other copyleft
> >> license the Foundation may deem fit in the future
> (with a
> >> defintion of "copyleft" linked from that word)?
>
> > Yes.
>
> The problem I see with this is that it precludes
> people from cutting
> and pasting text from GNU FDL-only sources such as
> Wikipedia.  The
> reason is that the person who is pasting it has *no
> right* to tell us
> that we can relicense that text under a different
> license.
>
> I still think there's some promise in the notion of
> a disjunctive
> license, but I'm still puzzling it out with the
> authorities.
>
> > > Question two: Would such a notice prevent us
> from using purely FDL
> > > work (such as from Wikipedia)?
>
> > Yes. The person who is importing the work will not
> be able to legally save
> > the page and meet the required conditions.
>
> Oh, I see Imran says the same as me.
>
> I think this is an insurmountable obstacle for us on
> this particular
> front.
>
> > > Related question: If the above is true then
> could we add such a notice to
> > > Wikipedia in order to cover all new submissions
> (we would also have to
> > > contact every current and past contributor we
> could in order to ask them
> > > about the change in copyright terms; if they say
> no or we can't find them
> > > their text will only be under the FDL)?
>
> That's right, we could do that, but what a tracking
> nightmare!  Every
> article in Wikipedia would have to be flagged
> somehow.
>
> This *could* conceivably work, though.  We could set
> up software tools
> to allow signed-in contributors to click-agree that
> all of their past
> contributions can be flexibly licensed.
>
> But unless we have a *really good* reason, and I
> don't see that we do,
> we shouldn't do this.
>
> --Jimbo

What if we ask the FSF if we can consider a different
licence the "sucessor" to the FDL 1.2 for only
wikipedia's purposes. They probably won't do it, but
it's worth a try.
-LDan

__________________________________
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Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software
http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com


body:
--- Jimmy Wales <jwales at bomis.com> wrote:
> Alex R. wrote:
> > I am not certain why there is a discussion of
> assigning copyright
> > to the Wikimedia Foundation. Of course anyone is
> free to make
> > such a contribution (though I doubt they will get
> a tax deduction
> > for it) but it is not necessary IMHO for Wikimedia
> to use materials
> > under the open license it already has, perhaps I
> do not understand
> > the question, but what specifically cannot be
> acheived with the
> > current open license that every Wikipedia
> contributor grants when
> > they make contributions to any Wikipedia space?
>
> I would say that the primary driving concern that we
> have is that
> there are starting to be materials published under
> other free and
> copyleft licenses (Creative Commons
> Attribution-Share Alike being most
> prominent) that are incompatible with the GNU FDL.
> We'd love to be
> able to cut and paste willy-nilly between all free
> resources, but we
> can't, due to issues of license incompatibility.
>
> http://www.wikitravel.org, or example, is CC ATT-SA,
> so we can't use
> their materials and they can't use ours, not without
> specific
> permission.  That's a real shame, and it's why I'm
> trying to get them
> to change their license while they are just starting
> to get off the
> ground.
>
> --Jimbo

As a wikipedia author, why can't I relicence wikipedia
content under the CC ATT-SA?

__________________________________
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Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software
http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com


body:
on 8/5/03 7:59 AM, Jimmy Wales at jwales at bomis.com wrote:

> http://www.businessweek.com/1997/42/b3549124.htm

An aproposs quote from that article:

"...there are so many reasonable and free options [to obtain encyclopedic
information] that are good enough...

Of course, we would not want to call Wikipedia, "good enough".

The phrase "good enough" is generally used in parenting talk to describe an
upbringing which avoids disaster.

Fred


subject: [Wikitech-l] Bandwidth usage

body:
On Mon, Aug 04, 2003 at 06:25:03PM -0700, Daniel Mayer wrote:
> JeLuF wrote:
> >This all seems very unlikely to me. I think Mav and
> >perhaps some other "power user" are using the alexa
> >toolbar and their many hits adulterate the statistics.
>
> Is that an allegation that I'm rigging the system?

Maveric, I didn't want to allege fraud, if you've got this impression
I'm very sorry. I just assume that this statistic has a "systematic
error" and since it was also you (I think) who cited alexa some
weeks ago I falsly assumed you were a user of this toolbar.

> Instead of throwing around baseless accusations why don't you look up the
> criteria for hit counting; one IP is counted only once a day per page (see
> http://pages.alexa.com/exec/faqsidos/help/index.html?index=1 ). Oh and I use
> a non-Windows operating system so the Alexa Toolbar doesn't work on my
> computer - same for a disproportionately large number of daily contributors.
> So if anything Wikipedia's stats are undercounted by the use of the "power
> users".

The fact that an IP is only counted once per page would btw not reduce the
impact of power users to the statistic.
/wiki/Article
/w/wiki.phtml?title=Article
/w/wiki.phtml?title=Article&action=edit
/w/wiki.phtml?title=Article&action=preview

All are different pages for alexa, so a power user would generate lots
of hits.

Regarding the non-Windows-OS you are using, you are right, when thinking
of it I remember you providing some Konqueror screenshots, I could have
known this.

Regards,

	JeLuF


subject: [Textbook-l] Re: Anonymous contributions

body:
LDan
>As a wikipedia author, why can't I relicence
>wikipedia content under the CC ATT-SA?

Becuase you only own the stuff /you/ write. You can
relicense /your/ own work any way you want, but the
version you uploaded to the Wikimedia server is
forever under the GNU FDL.

-- mav

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software
http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com


subject: [Wikitech-l] Bandwidth usage

body:
Fred Bauder wrote:
> Look at this graph:
> http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?&range=1y&size=medium&comp
> are_sites=&url=wikipedia.org#top
>
> (for 1 year) during which we came from nothing (internet speaking), broke
> into the top 10,100 and have rapidly risen to the 1,493th most used site.
> Projecting the rate of change we will soon be in the top 1000.

Wikipedia did not come from nothing, but there is something wrong with
their data before 2003.  Other sites have data before 2003, including
susning.nu.

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


from_name: sannse

subject: [WikiEN-l] CNN

body:
> > > I notice there's also some sort of video clip, but
> > I think you have to pay
> > > them money or something (in addition to installing
> > RealPlayer, which may
> > > not be to your liking).
> >

In case you didn't see the whole thing - apparently us "wikians" are a group
of "nerds in thick glasses".  Well that's me down pat, I don't know about
the rest of you

;)

Oh well - I guess all publicity is good publicity

sannse


subject: [WikiEN-l] [POPWALES999@aol.com: Fwd: [GCFL] Encyclopedia]

body:
My dad sent me this joke which was forwarded to him from a
mailing list.  Funny for Wikipedia, particularly since I've
been thinking about how we could best go about producing a 1.0
print edition.  :-)

----- Forwarded message from POPWALES999 at aol.com -----

From: POPWALES999 at aol.com
Date: Tue, 5 Aug 2003 10:35:43 EDT
To: jwales at bomis.com, wales001 at bomis.com
Subject: Fwd: [GCFL] Encyclopedia

YOU COMPUTER TYPE GUYS SHOULD APPRECIATE THIS ONE......FUNNY.

From: GCFL <gcfl-info at gcfl.net>
Date: Tue,  5 Aug 2003 06:43:40 -0500 (CDT)
To: GCFL Subscriber <popwales999 at aol.com>
Subject: [GCFL] Encyclopedia

Working as a computer instructor for an adult-education
program at a community college, I am keenly aware of the
gap in computer knowledge between my younger and older
students.

My observations were confirmed the day a new student
walked into our library area and glanced at the
encyclopedia volumes stacked on a bookshelf.

"What are all these books?" he asked.

Somewhat surprised, I replied that they were
encyclopedias.

"Really?" he said. "Someone printed out the whole thing?"

Received from Thomas S. Ellsworth of GCF.

-=+=-

Remember when the funniest jokes were the clean ones?  They still are!
The Good, Clean Funnies List: Good, clean funnies five times a week,
FOR F R E E! ... AND NO ADS IN THE MAILINGS!

A cheerful heart is good medicine... (Prov 17:22a)

The latest GCFL funny can always be found on the web at
http://www.gcfl.net/archive/latest.php

To email this funny to a friend, go to
http://www.gcfl.net/archive/emailit.php?funny=20030805

For subscription and other information, go to our web page at
http://www.gcfl.net, or send email to gcfl-info at gcfl.net.

Mailing address: GCFL, Box 100, Harvest, AL 35749

You are subscribed as popwales999 at aol.com
To unsubscribe, go to
http://www.gcfl.net/cgi-bin/gcflweb.cgi?remove

----- End forwarded message -----


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Cooperating with IMDB, FreeDB etc.

in_reply_to: <8r9thoqObzB@westermayer-74391.user.cis.dfn.de>; from till@tillwe.de on Sun, Aug 03, 2003 at 03:01:00PM +0200

body:
Till Westermayer wrote:
> but wouldn't the inclusion of our copylefted material because of the
> meme-viral character of that material make IMDB and others going GNU?

Not if they are careful.  There's nothing wrong with including both
copylefted and proprietary material in a single aggregate publication.
For example, a book might include 7 ordinary-copyright essays, and 1
GNU FDL essay, and that'd be no problem.

Similarly, a website might contain some GNU FDL content and some other
content, no problem.

--Jimbo


subject: [Textbook-l] Anonymous contributions

in_reply_to: <8rH7nz8hpVB@erik_moeller>; from erik_moeller@gmx.de on Tue, Aug 05, 2003 at 03:26:00PM +0200

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:
> Jimmy-
> > Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
> >> If it's copyrighted by anyone living in Europe, European laws apply.
>
> > European laws apply in Europe.  They have no impact on me.
>
> Continental European copyright law cannot be transferred, only a subset of
> usage rights can be. This very much applies to you if you intend to
> distribute material to European readers under legally valid terms.

You're right about that.  My answer was too simplistic by far.

--Jimbo


subject: [Textbook-l] Anonymous contributions

in_reply_to: <20030805153408.7372.qmail@web41806.mail.yahoo.com>; from littledanehren@yahoo.com on Tue, Aug 05, 2003 at 08:34:08AM -0700

body:
Daniel Ehrenberg wrote:
> What if we ask the FSF if we can consider a different
> licence the "sucessor" to the FDL 1.2 for only
> wikipedia's purposes. They probably won't do it, but
> it's worth a try.

Yes, I'm proposing something of that nature.

--Jimbo


in_reply_to: <8rD7QYvhpVB@erik_moeller>; from erik_moeller@gmx.de on Mon, Aug 04, 2003 at 10:32:00PM +0200

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:
> Jimmy-
> > I'm convinced.  Palestinian liberator is to be banned.  Can someone
> > take care of this for me?
>
> No problem, but how about using the "revert all the bad edits of this user
> on sight" strategy instead of the "ban this specific pseudonym of this
> user" strategy as an experiment in this case? The latter strategy seems to
> contribute to the proliferation of fake identities which need re-banning
> and re-banning.

If I'm not too late on this, then yes, I certainly approve of us
experimenting with this strategy.  That's a good idea.  Based on past
experience, there is a certain class of problem user whom we seem to
only inspire to ever greater heights of problems.

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikitech-l] Bandwidth usage

body:
Jimbo wrote:
>So this probably means that Alexa's numbers are
>more of a novelty than anything else.

Good thing we found this out now instead of after we
send out our press release which states that,
according to Alexa,  Wikipedia.org has a higher rating
than Britannica.com. Is there a way to view actual
usage data between the two sites?
Britannica.com/stats/ doesn't work. I would also be
interested in seeing Bomis.com's data just to see how
wrong Alexa was; if that is OK with you Jimmy. :)

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

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body:
I'm going to be a bit firm here, but I want to push for a more
peaceful way of interacting that's more likely to lead to productive
solutions.  Both RK and Jtdirl are valued contributors in their own
right.

Robert, I really think you should moderate your tone, because I
think that doing so will make your comments more effective.

Robert wrote:
> For reasons I do not understand, Jtdirl is being dishonest
> about my work on Wikipedia.

It would be better to say "For reasons I do not understand, it seems
that Jtdirl has misperceived that nature of my work on Wikipedia."

'misperceived' leaves open the question of a moral judgment: was it
deliberate?  Was it an oversight?  Was it stupidity?  Was it
forgetfulness?

'seems' leaves open the possibility that with further discussion, it
may turn out that you were wrong.  'seems' has you only expressing
your current understanding of the situation, as opposed to a formal
and final judgment.

Making a moral judgment in a case like this is likely to turn people
off.  And, really, it runs a very strong risk of being _not true at
all_.  It strikes me as more likely that jtdirl is mistaken, rather
than actively dishonest.  Or that you are mistaken.

> "rv yet more RK censorship. Does he ever stop? Does he have
> a clue what NPOV means?"

I would also recommend jtdirl to avoid such terms as 'censorship' and
'does he have a clue'?  These are inflammatory and likely to give rise
to hard feelings rather than productive co-operation.

Better would be 'rv RK.  RK, I'm unconvinced that your edit here is
NPOV, can we chat on the talk page to reach a compromise?'

--Jimbo


from_name: rednblack at alum.mit.edu

subject: [WikiEN-l] CNN and the like

body:
So wikipedia is now reaching 1 in 1000 web users according to Alexa, which
is amazing, but also incredibly scary. The proportion of IPs making edits now
is much much higher than it was a year ago when I first began editing. I think
this is cause for concern... 90% of these IPs probably won't come back, but if
this continues we're going to be continually peppered with edits by people who
don't understand the norms of wikipedia, resulting in a breakdown of community,
NPOV, etc.

I think we should take some steps to combat this problem, and here they are:

* Major spikes should be anticipated and highlighted in advance. I had no clue
this CNN story was coming (and maybe no one else did either), but for stories
where people know a spike is coming it should be advertised prominently
beforehand, so that regular hands will know a flood of newcomers are arriving

* Communication with IP editors should be improved. Personally I'm in favor
of simply locking them out - as has been pointed out before, there's nothing
really any more anonymous about an IP than a logged in user (maybe even less
anonymous), and it's much harder to communicate with IPs consistently.
Alternatively maybe forced talk pages (i.e. you MUST read your notes if you are
an IP before you can edit) or the like would be better.

* There should be longer intervals between publicity. The Google effect is
getting hard enough to keep up with, and I'm afraid the process of
indoctrinating new people with NPOV (which I think is the most problematic
concept) and getting them to respond to community standards is beginning to
break down as the experienced hands get overwhelmed by new folks. We need to
relax and consolidate what we've got before we try to grow more - otherwise
we'll just bloom and die off, so to speak, killed by our own excesses.

Just some thoughts,
Saurabh

------
"In any event, if the occupation proves long-lasting, the American soldiers,
 who are today carrying Iraqi infants in their arms, will eventually chase them
 down alleys, beat them and kill them, as our [IDF] soldiers do."
 -- Gideon Levy, in Ha'aretz


from_name: Brion Vibber

body:
On Tue, 5 Aug 2003, Matthias Jordan wrote:
> A per-article ACL feature would be increadibly bloated and I wouldn't
> even know what benefits it could have.

We've already got one: every page has a "cur_restrictions" field, and
every user has a "user_rights" field.

Right now it's not extensively used and is partially hard-coded such that
only the "sysop" value is meaningful on pages, but it would be simple
to extend it to be similar to UNIX 'groups'... any user whose user_rights
field overlaps with the cur_restrictions field of a page would be able to
edit that page.

This wouldn't be relevant to Wikipedia, but we already load those fields
along with the page and user data and check them, just not very
thoroughly. There would be zero database cost to using them. Projects
which might want to restrict editing of certain pages to members of
specific groups could easily do so.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Andre Engels

subject: [Wikitech-l] Bandwidth usage

body:
On Tue, 5 Aug 2003, Lars Aronsson wrote:

> Fred Bauder wrote:
> > Look at this graph:
> > http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?&range=1y&size=medium&comp
> > are_sites=&url=wikipedia.org#top
> >
> > (for 1 year) during which we came from nothing (internet speaking), broke
> > into the top 10,100 and have rapidly risen to the 1,493th most used site.
> > Projecting the rate of change we will soon be in the top 1000.
>
> Wikipedia did not come from nothing, but there is something wrong with
> their data before 2003.  Other sites have data before 2003, including
> susning.nu.

My guess is that before December 2002, wikipedia's data were given as being
from wikipedia.com, and those data are now unreachable because wikipedia.com
is considered a part of wikipedia.org.

Andre Engels


subject: [Wikitech-l] Bandwidth usage

body:
On Tue, 5 Aug 2003, Jens Frank wrote:

> This all seems very unlikely to me. I think Mav and perhaps some other
> "power user" are using the alexa toolbar and their many hits adulterate
> the statistics.

No, check on the bottom of the page. 'Power users' can influence the number
of page views, but they hardly if at all influence the reach. Still,
Wikipedia's position in the reach listing is actually even better than its
position in the page view listing.

Andre Engels


body:
Alex756 wrote:
>It is ironic that these various licenses are
>incompatible with each other, maybe a simpler
>solution would be to have a very straightforward
>license like has been used commonly in areas where
>non-exclusive licensing is a commercial reality
>and just make sure that attribution is preserved
>(sort of like the moral rights approach of European
>copyright) isn't that what we all really want when
>we talk about open content?

You are asking the wrong question since we want our
content to be free, not just open. I, at least, get a
very positive feeling from knowing that everything I
write will be free forever. If all we required was
attribution then a proprietary encyclopedia could take
our work, improve upon it, sell it as a proprietary
work and we would not be able to build upon their
improvements; the chain of positive feedback would be
broken.

But the GFDL does have some serious problems compared
with the Creative Commons Share Alike Licence (such as
onerous compliance measures that we don't even bother
to enforce on downstream users; such as having
transparent copies, distribution of the whole GFDL
license with each copy and a changelog). However, we
are stuck with the GFDL because that was the best
option available when Wikipedia started. So, IMO, we
should keep things simple by having just one license
for all Wikimedia projects and we should work with the
GNU people to create a GFDL 2.0 which is compatible
with CCSA (and then work with the CC people to make a
CCSA 2.0 that is compatible with GFDL 2.0 or later).
We can't ignore the huge resource of free content that
is already in our own family - Wikipedia.

But I would still like to know if we could require all
new submissions to be more flexibly licensed so that
Wikimedia could re-license the text under one of
several copyleft licenses. We still, officially, would
be a GFDL shop but downstream users could ask the
Foundation about re-licencing selected Wikimedia works
under other copyleft licenses (of course this would
only be for content submitted after a certain date and
any content by users who explicitly agree to let
Wikimedia re-license their work under other copyleft
licenses - I'm sure there will be plenty of those).
This, IMO, would be an acceptable (but not ideal)
situation until the GNU and CC people get their act
together.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software
http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com


from_name: Yann Forget

subject: [Wikitech-l] bugs/features on the Hindi Wikipedia

body:
Hi,

Something else again. This should show a list of all articles, isn't ?

http://hi.wikipedia.org/wiki.cgi?action=Index

It doesn't work.
Thanks,
Yann

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


from_name: Evan Prodromou

subject:
License Incompatibilities (was Re: [Wikitech-l] CIA Factbook
 Slurping)

in_reply_to: Jimmy Wales's message of "Tue, 5 Aug 2003 05:34:06 -0700"

body:
>>>>> "JW" == Jimmy Wales <jwales at bomis.com> writes:

    JW> I notice that you're currently using the Creative Commons
    JW> by-sa (attribution share-alike) license.  That's a good
    JW> license, nearly identical in spirit to the GNU FDL but not, in
    JW> my opinion, strictly compatible.

Yes, I'm pretty sure they're incompatible, actually.

    JW> Since you're only a few days in, you could still switch to GNU
    JW> FDL easily enough -- this might be best for you, if you
    JW> envision a lot of content sharing between your site and
    JW> wikipedia (which seems natural).

I realize that the license incompatibility with Wikipedia articles is
a serious problem.

    http://www.wikitravel.org/article/Wikitravel:Why_Wikitravel_isn't_GFDL

However, I think that the GFDL isn't really compatible with our goals
for Wikitravel.

    http://www.wikitravel.org/article/Wikitravel:Goals_and_non-goals

Specifically, we want to make it really easy for a tourist information
office, a hotel or guesthouse, or a party planner to have a stack of
copies of a Wikitravel article for use by customers/visitors.

The heavyweight nature of the GFDL would make it hard for them to
comply: just having to redistribute the entire license text and a
changelog makes it unreasonable for 1-2 page articles, and having to
distribute source code is just out of the question.

The Attribution-ShareAlike 1.0 just requires a copyright notice and
the URL of the license -- small enough to fit in a little paragraph at
the end of an article.

It really bothers me a lot that the license incompatibilities make it
hard to borrow content from Wikipedia. I've thought about doing a dual
license, so that at least Wikitravel content could be shared into
Wikipedia, if not vice versa, but it seems like a lot of trouble (and
explaining).

The only consolation I have is that a lot of encyclopedic content
isn't really applicable for a travel guide. But there is a lot of
crossover. The trade-off is painful but apparently necessary.

    JW> I'm enthusiastic about your project, and I think the idea is
    JW> excellent.

Thanks for the support. We're excited about the project, too!

~ESP

--
Evan Prodromou
evan at prodromou.san-francisco.ca.us


subject: [Wikitech-l] CIA Factbook Slurping

body:
>>>>> "JW" == Jimmy Wales <jwales at bomis.com> writes:

    JW> I notice that you're currently using the Creative Commons
    JW> by-sa (attribution share-alike) license.  That's a good
    JW> license, nearly identical in spirit to the GNU FDL but not, in
    JW> my opinion, strictly compatible.

Yes, I'm pretty sure they're incompatible, actually.

    JW> Since you're only a few days in, you could still switch to GNU
    JW> FDL easily enough -- this might be best for you, if you
    JW> envision a lot of content sharing between your site and
    JW> wikipedia (which seems natural).

I realize that the license incompatibility with Wikipedia articles is
a serious problem. But I'm just not convinced that the GFDL is right
for us.

    http://www.wikitravel.org/article/Wikitravel:Why_Wikitravel_isn't_GFDL

However, I think that the GFDL isn't really compatible with our goals
for Wikitravel.

    http://www.wikitravel.org/article/Wikitravel:Goals_and_non-goals

Specifically, we want to make it really easy for a tourist information
office, a hotel or guesthouse, or a party planner to have a stack of
copies of a Wikitravel article for use by customers/visitors.

The heavyweight nature of the GFDL would make it hard for them to
comply: just having to redistribute the entire license text and a
changelog makes it unreasonable for 1-2 page articles, and having to
distribute source code is just out of the question.

The Attribution-ShareAlike 1.0 just requires a copyright notice and
the URL of the license -- small enough to fit in a little paragraph at
the end of an article.

It really bothers me a lot that the license incompatibilities make it
hard to borrow content from Wikipedia. I've thought about doing a dual
license, so that at least Wikitravel content could be shared into
Wikipedia, if not vice versa, but it seems like a lot of trouble (and
explaining).

The only consolation I have is that a lot of encyclopedic content
isn't really applicable for a travel guide. But there is a lot of
crossover. The trade-off is painful but apparently necessary.

    JW> I'm enthusiastic about your project, and I think the idea is
    JW> excellent.

Thanks for the support. We're excited about the project, too!

~ESP

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


from_name: Matthias Jordan

body:
Hi, folks.

I know it's a bold move but I want to propose a whitelist mode for
article viewing. This is a feature that is most useful for Wikis with a
closed user base. My implementation takes only few lines in Article.php
and a new global config variable. Default action is - as usual - that
everybody on this planet (or more precisely: in this net) can view
everything. If the feature is turned on, only logged in users are able
to view articles.

If nobody objects, I'll commit it into the unstable branch.

Bye!

Matthias

P.S.: You probably already guessed so, but I'm planning on using Phase3
for a knowledge database of a closed community so the next thing to
implement will be some sort of invitation-based user account generation
(else this viewing feature would be pretty pointless). I want to commit
these closed-shop features to the main branch because I feel that other
users may want to use Phase3 and its advanced Wiki engine for their own
internal projects, too.


body:
On Wed, 6 Aug 2003, Richard Grevers wrote:
> I don't see a problem of unwikiness. I am involved in two confidential
> projects which use UseMod wiki where editing is restricted to a smallish
> (about 50) pool of people (one has a slightly larger reading pool), and
> having access control as part of the software would be much more convenient
> then having to use httpd authentication (always enter via the same URL etc)

I should point out that you _don't_ need to enter via the same URL for
HTTP authentication -- going to any page in the protected zone without
sending the auth info will prompt a password request.

And most browsers will happily store your username/ password and
automatically send it, if your machines/user accounts are considered
secure enough. If you just want to restrict editing, not viewing, then
obviously that won't do, but if you want to restrict viewing, that's
exactly what it was designed for.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Alex R.

body:
It is ironic that these various licenses are incompatible with each
other, maybe a simpler solution would be to have a very straightforward
license like has been used commonly in areas where non-exclusive
licensing is a commercial reality and just make sure that atribution
is preserved (sort of like the moral rights approach of European
copyright) isn't that what we all really want when we talk about
open content?
Alex756

 "Jimmy Wales" <jwales at bomis.com> wrote:

> I would say that the primary driving concern that we have is that
> there are starting to be materials published under other free and
> copyleft licenses (Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike being most
> prominent) that are incompatible with the GNU FDL.  We'd love to be
> able to cut and paste willy-nilly between all free resources, but we
> can't, due to issues of license incompatibility.
>
> http://www.wikitravel.org, or example, is CC ATT-SA, so we can't use
> their materials and they can't use ours, not without specific
> permission.  That's a real shame, and it's why I'm trying to get them
> to change their license while they are just starting to get off the
> ground.
>
> --Jimbo


from_name: Tomasz Wegrzanowski

body:
On Tue, Aug 05, 2003 at 01:02:08PM +0200, Matthias Jordan wrote:
> Hi, folks.
>
> I know it's a bold move but I want to propose a whitelist mode for
> article viewing. This is a feature that is most useful for Wikis with a
> closed user base. My implementation takes only few lines in Article.php
> and a new global config variable. Default action is - as usual - that
> everybody on this planet (or more precisely: in this net) can view
> everything. If the feature is turned on, only logged in users are able
> to view articles.
>
> If nobody objects, I'll commit it into the unstable branch.
>
> Bye!
>
> Matthias
>
> P.S.: You probably already guessed so, but I'm planning on using Phase3
> for a knowledge database of a closed community so the next thing to
> implement will be some sort of invitation-based user account generation
> (else this viewing feature would be pretty pointless). I want to commit
> these closed-shop features to the main branch because I feel that other
> users may want to use Phase3 and its advanced Wiki engine for their own
> internal projects, too.

Do we really want all that in our codebase ?
Why can't you just fork ?


from_name: tarquin

subject: [WikiEN-l] CNN video clip?

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:

>Brion Vibber wrote:
>
>
>>I notice there's also some sort of video clip, but I think you have to pay
>>them money or something (in addition to installing RealPlayer, which may
>>not be to your liking).
>>
>>
>
>If anyone out there has access to this and wants to send me a copy,
>under the principles of fair use, of course, I would really enjoy
>watching it.
>
>
>
http://edition.cnn.com/ASIA/techwatch/techwatch.wmv

>
>
>


body:
Hi, folks!

Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:

> Do we really want all that in our codebase ?
> Why can't you just fork ?

That's an interesting point I already thought about myself. The gag is
this: the article viewing whitelist stuff only takes 20 lines (and that
includes the lines that merely compose the message "you gotta login to
view what's written here"). I'm already experimenting with the
invitation-only user account creation. I plan to implement it this way:
only users who have certain rights (like "user", "sysop", "developer",
maybe "accountcreation") can create accounts. It takes 10 lines of code
to check a user against a list of permissions. Then this 10 lines
function will be called twice: once for the construction of the login
form (don't show account creation fields if user isn't allowed) and once
for the function that actually creates a new account. And this code only
gets called upon login - and that is not supposed to occur so often that
my changes would have any impact on the CPU load.

So, all in all we talk about (estimated):

20 LOC for article writing
20 LOC for article viewing
20 LOC for account creation
  4 LOC for user messages per language
  3 LOC for global variables to define the behaviour.

Totaling less than 70 lines of code. Do you really want to fork a
separate branch for that stuff?

(But I must say I'm happy to see that people actually read what I write
- I didn't get /any/ feedback for days for what I've written.)

Bye!

Matthias

P.S.: Please, try to avoid complete quotes with only few lines of own
text under the quote.


body:
Hi, folks!

Fred Bauder wrote:

> Sourceforge serves more than just Wikipedia. Eventually our software will be
> used in a variety of projects, unless it get screwed up so no one else can
> use it without doing extensive tedious modifications.

Sorry, but I don't understand what you mean. Are you for including those
closed-shop features into the main brach or against it?

Bye!

Matthias "not being a native speaker" Jordan


body:
On Tue, Aug 05, 2003 at 05:47:03AM -0600, Fred Bauder wrote:
> on 8/5/03 5:31 AM, Tomasz Wegrzanowski at taw at users.sourceforge.net wrote:
>
> > Do we really want all that in our codebase ?
> > Why can't you just fork ?
>
> Sourceforge serves more than just Wikipedia. Eventually our software will be
> used in a variety of projects, unless it get screwed up so no one else can
> use it without doing extensive tedious modifications.

Yeah, but what he proposes is so radically unwiki that he should
probably just fork.