from_name: Peter Danenberg

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: { and function code

body:
> In more recent code I've been mainly using the first one, since I
> realised it was predominant before I came along.

     Brace style is certainly a religious issue, Tim.

     K&R,  however, dictates a hybrid: new-line open braces,
namely, for functions; and contiguous ones for statements:

     function( )
     {

          if ( ) {

          }

     }

It seems to strike a balance between readability (the  swift
apprehension of top-level functions) and oeconomy.

     Best, Peter


list: wikien-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Anthere

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Ban policy

body:
Ray Saintonge wrote:
> John Robinson wrote:
>
>> User JRR Trollkien (who, it is increasingly clear, is either a
>> reincarnation of a previously permanently-banned user, or so close to
>> him as not to make a difference) was blocked by an administrator
>> before he had made 20 edits.  He has now racked up 1500, which will
>> someday have to be gone through, each one, in an effort to remove the
>> introduced crap, due in large part to the fact that it has taken:
>
>
> If you feel that crap needs to be edited out from these 1500 articles,
> why do you need to wait for the arbitration committee to do anything.
> Crap is crap, whether or not the contributor is banned.
>
> Ec

I'd like to mention that fortunately, all these 1500 articles edits are
not crap. Remove the crap John, but let the regular edits please.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Ban policy

body:
John Robinson wrote:
>> in the last 6 months the AC has issued more user bans than Jimbo did
>> two years
>> before that
>
>
> Indeed. Most of them for a symbolic 24 hours. This is fine for regular
> contributors who occasionally go off the deep end, but that's not what
> most of
> the cases have involved. Wik's ban is over now, the only reason he's still
> gone is because he left on his own. Meanwhile Gohde and "Irismeister" are
> still up to their old tricks, exactly as before arbitration.
>
>> Are you volunteering to be a member of the AC?
>
>
> No, I am saying that the concept of an AC has been tried, and does not work.
> I don't consider this to be the fault of the AC or any of the members of it,
> rather a problem with overall structure, confusion with regard to the amount
> of authority it holds, etc.

I acknowledge John's concern.

It is true that the AC has banned more people than Jimbo, but it is also
true that there are many more trolls now than just 6 months ago. So far
as I can remember, there has always been at least 1 problematic user at
any point, but now, all the time, they are several.

So, I am not sure the comparison is relevant. Perhaps one of the reason
Jimbo gave us the hand to do that, was precisely because it was
requiring him more and more time.

-----

One issue is time. As you said, AC conclusion is often a very short time
of banning. When this time is over, the game is on again. May I suggest
that decisions taken by AC are two steps ones ?

Say a case is considered by AC
After a while, AC admits there is an issue, and that it is worth doing
something, say banning for 1 week. The AC is important here, because we
trust they make fair decisions, after they studied the case thoroughly

Could not the AC take 2 decisions at the same time ?
* first, immediate banning for perhaps 1 week
* second, additional decision already taken for "repetition of issue".
After the banning time is over, if the user starts being problematic,
and is reported by xx contributors (perhaps 5 ?), the AC immediately
release the second decision (perhaps 1 month banning).
- Either it is applied on the spot (that means that within ONE day 5
contributors could report and the user be banned again).
- Or the second decision (taken by AC perhaps 2 weeks sooner during
initial arbitration) is voted by contributors (agree, disagree, no
opinion) during a few days. if there is general agreement, the AC second
decision is applied.

-----

Second issue is transparency. I am sure people are worried and get
nervous, because they do not know enough what is going on during the AC

-----

Third point is evolution. I think there will be no go back in time.
Structurally speaking, Wikipedia will have more and more trolls as it
grows and develops and gets famous, and AS USERS BECOME MORE AND MORE
PROTECTIVE TOWARD ITS CONTENT.

I think some trolling cases would have less impact if people just gave
it less attention.

(belle d?finition du trollisme d'ailleurs...)


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Pascal Steichen

subject: [Wikipedia-l] New language wikipedia

body:
Hi,

I'd like to set up a new language in wikipedia : luxemburgish (language code LU). I read in your howto that I simply have to post a message to this list to get it set up so, here's my message ;)

cheers,
pst
--
Pascal Steichen
pascal.steichen at linux.lu

Lilux ASBL
www.lilux.lu

" Linux is like a woman, hard to understand
  But very nice once you get under the hood. "


from_name: Pablo Saratxaga

subject: [Wikipedia-l] New language wikipedia

body:
Kaixo!

On Sat, Jun 05, 2004 at 08:03:02PM +0200, Pascal Steichen wrote:
>
> luxemburgish (language code LU).

No, language code is "lb".
(LU is *country* code)

--
Ki ?a vos v?ye b?n,
Pablo Saratxaga

http://chanae.walon.org/pablo/		PGP Key available, key ID: 0xD9B85466
[you can write me in Walloon, Spanish, French, English, Catalan or Esperanto]
[min povas skribi en valona, esperanta, angla aux latinidaj lingvoj]
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list: wikitech-l

from_name: Tomasz Sienicki

subject: [Wikitech-l] upgrade problem (Wiktionary PL)

body:
 Hi,

 There was a problem with upgrading pl.wiktionary to 1.3 -- two
 namespaces (NS_WIKIPEDIA & NS_WIKIPEDIA_TALK) have been overwritten
 and some parts of the wiktionary are inaccessible now.

 I've put the updated $wgNamespaceNamesPl at
 http://pl.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wikipedysta:Tsca/LanguageWiktionaryPL.php-update

 --please update the language file. Thank you.

--
 tsca * Tomasz Sienicki
 talk page: http://pl.wiktionary.org/wiki/Dyskusja_Wikipedysty:Tsca


subject: [Wikipedia-l] New language wikipedia

body:
On Sat, Jun 05, 2004 at 09:12:30PM +0200, Pablo Saratxaga wrote:
> Kaixo!
>
> On Sat, Jun 05, 2004 at 08:03:02PM +0200, Pascal Steichen wrote:
> >
> > luxemburgish (language code LU).
>
> No, language code is "lb".
> (LU is *country* code)

Oh sorry didn't know ;) How did define his bytheway ?

>
>
> --
> Ki ?a vos v?ye b?n,
> Pablo Saratxaga
>
> http://chanae.walon.org/pablo/		PGP Key available, key ID: 0xD9B85466
> [you can write me in Walloon, Spanish, French, English, Catalan or Esperanto]
> [min povas skribi en valona, esperanta, angla aux latinidaj lingvoj]

> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l

--
Pascal Steichen
pascal.steichen at linux.lu

Lilux ASBL
www.lilux.lu

" Linux is like a woman, hard to understand
  But very nice once you get under the hood. "


subject: [Wikipedia-l] New language wikipedia

body:
Kaixo!

On Sat, Jun 05, 2004 at 09:31:48PM +0200, Pascal Steichen wrote:

> > > luxemburgish (language code LU).
> >
> > No, language code is "lb".
> > (LU is *country* code)
>
> Oh sorry didn't know ;) How did define his bytheway ?

Here: http://lcweb.loc.gov/standards/iso639-2/langcodes.html

--
Ki ?a vos v?ye b?n,
Pablo Saratxaga

http://chanae.walon.org/pablo/		PGP Key available, key ID: 0xD9B85466
[you can write me in Walloon, Spanish, French, English, Catalan or Esperanto]
[min povas skribi en valona, esperanta, angla aux latinidaj lingvoj]
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from_name: Walter Vermeir

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Re: I have been banned HOW CAN I APPEAL -> offtopic in
	WIkipedia-l

body:
sada asda wrote:
> I have been banned unfairly three times. I was first banned because I
> allegedly violated a "3 revert rule" of which I was never warned
> about; regardless of whether I did break it, I was banned by a sysop
> (Guarnaco) involved in an edit war on the page -- this is a gross
> violation of sysop rules!
[cut]

Please do only post to the relevant group. This is offtopic in
Wikipedia-l / gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.misc

Followup set to wikiEN-l / gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.english

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


subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Re: I have been banned HOW CAN I APPEAL -> offtopic
	in WIkipedia-l


from_name: Geoff Burling

subject: [WikiEN-l] 172

body:
On Fri, 4 Jun 2004 daniwo59 at aol.com wrote:

> If the problem with 172 was that he was rude, I can point to many more
> examples of rudeness by the people who are most vociferous in condemning him. It is
> unfortunate that there is no equal number of emails condemning their behavior.
I've been busy with work for the last few days, & there are probably better
issues I should address, but seeing this statement from Daniwo has made me
angry. 172 is consistently rude to anyone whom he does not consider his
intellectual equal, & especially to those who hold a contrary opinon
contrary to his.

I know this because I have crossed paths with him several times, & every
time he has shown himself to be an intellectual bully, more intent in
proving that he is right than in the Wikipedia process of debate,
mutual respect, & the goal of a Neutral Point of View. Allow me
to document these exchanges:

1. A few months after I started contributing to Wikipedia, when it was a
much smaller world both in terms of articles & contributors, I decided to
take a look at the Genocide article. I found it odd that the statements
that the Soviet Union & the Chinese had engaged in genocide had been
removed & replaced with long, opinionated rants by 172, who had added
a section that asserted the rule of the Belgian Free Congo was very much
an example. What I found odd about this was 172's arguments were that the
deaths by the 2 communist regimes were not an intentional act: while
of speciifc ethnicities people died, there was no intent to target them
based on their ethnic background. However, as horrific as the tale of the
Belgian Free Congo was, there is no evidence that the persons responsible
intended the widespread murder _based_ on their ethnic identities.

The issue was one of definition: genocide can be considered as a Crime
against Humanity, yet not all Crimes against Humanity are acts of genocide.
Admittedly, in popular usage the two terms become synonymous, yet I felt
172 was showing bad faith in applying the narrow definition only to the
cases of the Communist countries, yet applying the looser one to the
Belgium Congo: either all 3 cases are included, or all 3 cases are excluded.

(Admittedly, my opinion is that we should hold to the narrow definition,
otherwise we end up with a catalogue that includes every case of one nation
subduing one or more other natins -- which is then the whole of history.)

I expressed my opinions in the Talk page, & received this response for my
pains (which appears at Talk:Llywrch):

"First, I am not a Stalinist. Second, if I have to convince you of what
happened in Central Africa or Southwest Africa, then you're ignorant. Third,
if you are at all familiar with mainstream scholarship on Chinese history,
then I wouldn't have to convince you that those Free Tibet charges are
extremely questionable. Forth, I'm not here to advocate anything."

An admission here: due to his dogged defence of the Soviet Union & China,
I made the observation that he appeared to be the last believing Stalinist
left -- an allusion to the fact that almost every 1930's Stalinist would
infallibly defend every act of the Soviet Union, no matter how plausible,
clearly documented, or wrong, while simultaneously emphasising every
mistake or crime of Capitalism, the United States, etc. Perhaps I was
the first person to apply this label to 172; but I am amazed that he still
rants about this off-hand comment over a year & ahalf later.

The whole exchange ended badly: no matter what was said, 172 would not
concede that there was a contradiction, & proved very inflexible. Some of
made fun of him for this inflexibility, lacking any better course for
conflict resolution. I finally decided that since Wikipedia had so many
areas in need of material, that it was just wiser to avoid 172 & hope that
he matured, & learned how to engage in a constructive dialogue.

2. 172 nominated [[J?rgen Habermas]] as a Featured article, & I expressed
the opinion that it did not qualify because the article was full of
jargon & buzzwords & failed to explain his philosophy in a manner that
could be understood by a layman. He responded that as it was a technical
topic, the average layman should not expect to understand it -- yet it
should be a Featured Article, a claim that led to a spirited exchange
mentioned elsewhere.

I attempted to set forth an explanation why I felt the article was too
technical & jargon-laded, which appears in the Talk page to [[J?rgen
Habermas]]. However, 172 has not ssen fit to respond to my criticism,
nor even acknowledge its existence. I hope that someone can use it to
make this article more understandable.

3. About a month ago, 172 was listed at Quickvotes as possibly having
done something deserving a ban. The usual accusations & counter accusations
wer exchanged until 172 announced that he would leave Wikipedia shortly because
of his treatment -- once he had finished a couple of thing. Then he decided
that was not enough, & started throwing the "fuck" word around, as in
"fuck you" to one poster, & "I'll leave when I fucking decide to leave"
to another poster. For a person who claims to be very educated, & literate
he seems to have a problem finding the acceptible language to express himself.

The specific passages are at http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Wikipedia%3AQuickpolls&diff=3262781&oldid=3262645

Having sysop priviliges, I would have banned him for that rudeness; but
if he was truly going, doing so would only provide him with another excuse
to linger around & share what obscenities he knew. So I let him off,
yet he didn't leave.  Because of that, I doubt he'll live up to his
promise of leaving Wikipedia he made last night.

All of these incidents follow the same pattern: 172 asserts something
that is challenged, he repeats his reasons, he ignores any kind of rational
input from the other party (e.g., authorities quoted, logical arguments,
etc.), he starts getting nasty, & finally threatens to leave -- but stays.
Can contributing to a project where many of the other contributors are
unworthy of respect be worth contributing to? Can this project be so
unimportant it's not worth the effort to respect other contributors?
And how can the answer be anything but no to both?

In conclusion, 172 does not have the personality to be on Wikipedia. I feel
that whenever he makes an edit, there are only 3 choices left to the other
party: agree with him; avoid him; or get ready for a nasty flamewar. My
experience with him has negatively affected how I deal with new contributors:
I can never be sure if the next person I have a disagreement with will
treat me with the contempt 172 is always ready to hand out. And I suspect
that there are dozens more people like me either currently on Wikipedia, or
who have left because of 172's arrogance.

Geoff


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Ban policy

body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:
> --- Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>>One issue is time. As you said, AC conclusion is often a very short time
>>of banning. When this time is over, the game is on again. May I suggest
>>that decisions taken by AC are two steps ones ?
>
>
> That is why we have started to issue enforcement rulings that place users under
> a type of probation after their initial ban. With Wik, it was the possibility
> of a month ban if we determined he violated the terms of his probation (some of
> which is for an indefinite term).
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_arbitration/Wik2/Decided#Enforcement

great

>>Say a case is considered by AC
>>After a while, AC admits there is an issue, and that it is worth doing
>>something, say banning for 1 week. The AC is important here, because we
>>trust they make fair decisions, after they studied the case thoroughly
>>
>>Could not the AC take 2 decisions at the same time ?
>>* first, immediate banning for perhaps 1 week
>>* second, additional decision already taken for "repetition of issue".
>>After the banning time is over, if the user starts being problematic,
>>and is reported by xx contributors (perhaps 5 ?), the AC immediately
>>release the second decision (perhaps 1 month banning).
>>- Either it is applied on the spot (that means that within ONE day 5
>>contributors could report and the user be banned again).
>>- Or the second decision (taken by AC perhaps 2 weeks sooner during
>>initial arbitration) is voted by contributors (agree, disagree, no
>>opinion) during a few days. if there is general agreement, the AC second
>>decision is applied.
>
>
> That is almost exactly what we have done with Wik2, except the month banning is
> at the discretion of the AC.
>
> -- mav

but then... does that mean that editors will have to wait again for the
AC to decide over this ? Or may it be quickly done if necessary ?

Is there a risk there of a bottleneck ?


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [WikiEN-l] 172

body:
So now you add arrogance to sophistry.  You may have expressed your POV
at [[jargon]] and [[technical terminology]] but that does not change the
fact that you use "revisinism" as jargon.  We already have eight
defininitions in the article "revisionism", why not just add your own
revised definition as a ninth?  Being coy about the definition and
citing only an ISBN number, seems only a thinly veiled attempt to market
the tract an behalf of the authors.

To discuss with this elite crew we must accept a revisionist (in the
ordinary sense) interpretation of the term "revisionism".  We need to
accept this ultra conservative premise put forth by these tractarians..
We are not allowed to depend on the out-of-fashion Marxist "revisionism"
of Bernstein and Kautsky.

Nobody is requesting "complicated new verbal constructions".   A
definition comparable in length to those already in [[revisionism]]
would be enough.  Better still avoid the jargon altogether.

Ec

Fred Bauder wrote:

>Entry into a discussion of Marxist studies requires a willingness to become
>familiar with the vocabulary used in the field just as in the case of other
>specialized areas. Requiring the construction of complicated new verbal
>constructions is unreasonable. (And ultimately uncomprehensible.)
>
>I wrote the original article [[jargon]] but eventually wrote [[technical
>terminology]] also.
>
>Fred
>
>
>
>>From: Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net>
>>
>>I have no reason to doubt that the indicated book used these terms in a
>>specialized way.  (The book appears to be anti-Marxist, and a
>>pro-Marxist book would likely use it in a different way.)  Neither way
>>advances anybody's cause in these debates.  It's the "specialized way"
>>that gives the problem, and turns the term into jargon.  If there is no
>>definition of a term which the participants in a debate can hold in
>>common, then perhaps it would be better to find a more appropriate term.
>>
>>Ec
>>
>>Fred Bauder wrote:
>>
>>
>>>Marxist studies uses the terms "revisionist" and "traditionalist" in a
>>>specialized way. See page 2 of In Denial, ISBN 1893554724.
>>>
>>>Fred
>>>
>>>


from_name: Jens Frank

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: { and function code

body:
On Sun, Jun 06, 2004 at 01:39:35AM +1000, Tim Starling wrote:
> Ashar Voultoiz" wrote:
> > Hello,
> >
> > I am willing to know which formatting method we should use in code for
> > function declarations. Actually I see two shemes:
> >
> > 1)
> > function foobarone() {
> >     code here
> > }
> >
> > 2)
> > function foobartwo()
> > {
> >     code here
> > }
>
> My personal style is the second, but I think a number of other MediaWiki
> coders lean towards the first. The second is the K&R standard, see
> http://pantransit.reptiles.org/prog/CodingStyle.html . In more recent code
> I've been mainly using the first one, since I realised it was predominant
> before I came along. So I'd be happy enough converting everything to the
> first.

I'm normally also using style 2 myself.

Some statistics ( /includes/* only)
jf at mormo:/var/www-phase3/includes$ grep function *php| grep '(' |wc -l
1425
jf at mormo:/var/www-phase3/includes$ grep function *php| grep '(' |grep '{' |wc -l
692

Looks like a tie.

Regards,

	JeLuF


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] MediaWiki 1.3.0beta2 released

body:
This is a *BETA RELEASE* of MediaWiki 1.3.0, after a couple weeks of
testing and tweaking on Wikipedia. Things mostly work at this point, but
installation and upgrade paths may be awkward or broken on some systems
(we don't stress the regular install/upgrade system on Wikipedia since
we do mass runs of piecemeal updates).

Please read the release notes for details of what's changed and how to
upgrade. (Beta1 was not released as a package, but was available from
CVS only. Don't worry, you didn't miss it!)

The easiest upgrade path from a 1.2 MediaWiki install is to set up the
1.3 wiki in a fresh directory, run the web-based installer, and point it
at the same database. BACK UP YOUR DATABASE FIRST! Upgrading the
database may take a while, or may fail on some systems.

Release notes:
https://sourceforge.net/project/shownotes.php?release_id=243741

Download:
http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/wikipedia/mediawiki-1.3.0beta2.tar.gz?download

Wiki admin help mailing list:
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l

Bug report system:
https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=34373&atid=411192

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Bryan Derksen

subject: [WikiEN-l] 172

body:
At 10:14 PM 6/5/2004 -0700, Geoff Burling wrote:
>I've been busy with work for the last few days, & there are probably better
>issues I should address, but seeing this statement from Daniwo has made me
>angry. 172 is consistently rude to anyone whom he does not consider his
>intellectual equal, & especially to those who hold a contrary opinon
>contrary to his.

I've only crossed paths with 172 once, as far as I remember, and it was a
somewhat similar experience. I stumbled upon the article [[Origins of the
American Civil War]] and noticed that due to its long length it had been
split into four articles titled Origins of the American Civil War, Origins
of the American Civil War (2/4), Origins of the American Civil War (3/4)
and Origins of the American Civil War (4/4), all with a hand-crafted table
of contents and a set of "next page"/"previous page" links at the bottom
linking them together. I thought this was a rather inelegant and fragile
way to organize it, and went to the existing subpage [[Talk:Origins of the
American Civil War/categorization]] to look over previous discussion and
talk about how I wanted to change things.

172 seemed quite opposed to me doing anything at all, even before I'd
started presenting any specific ideas. He told me to read all the relevant
sections of other talk: pages without telling me which pages he was
referring to, and although I spent a great deal of time explaining why I
thought the article needed changing he wouldn't tell me why he was so
dead-set _against_ changing it. He moved the subpage /categorization to
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Origins_of_the_American_Civil_War/Archive_2
in the middle of our discussion, protected it without explanation, and
finally he stated that if I were to attempt to go ahead "that's going to
provoke an edit war." Since I'd seen some of his other edit wars and I
didn't seem to be getting anywhere with the discussion I just threw up my
hands and went on to other things.

This isn't a particularly "nasty" confrontation, as far as these things go,
but on the other hand I suspect it didn't get nasty because I simply gave
up and let him have his way. I feel bad about that; I honestly wanted to
improve the article but got driven off by threats and hassle rather than
convincing arguments to the contrary. 172 has since apologized but his
apology didn't contain any suggestion that he might be willing to allow
changes to the structure of those four articles so I don't know if it was
really worth much. I'm not concerned with my hurt feelings, I just want to
tidy up without fear of being bludgeoned into submission by edit war if I
do something 172 doesn't like.


list: foundation-l

subject:
[Foundation-l] Article validation (was WikiReader Free Software and
	Free Contents)

body:
--- "Thomas R. Koll" <tomk32 at gmx.de> wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 03, 2004 at 08:01:48PM +0200, Anthere
> wrote:
> > Neat ! I like the idea of double language.
> >
> > Who is reviewing the contents of the articles just
> before you generate
> > the pdf ?
>
> I gonna do as much as I can, but I need help in this
> review process.
> There are already a few like CatherineMunro helping
> and those will
> get their name in the impress (there's also a
> *complete* list of
> registered authors).
>
> ciao, tom

Hi Tom.

Yes, you need help. You already did something great in
organising the first publication of our content, which
was a serious step in the good direction :-) Thanks a
lot for doing this.

But you can't do it all alone. Publication should be a
team process and article validation is part of a
several step process.

Imho, no article should be printed with Wikimedia
approval/support, with no specific review beforehand.
Just because if the article contains a mistake (which
may or may not be obvious to you), the mistake can't
be
fixed on a pdf (...) and that could tarnish Wikimedia
image.

There have been several times discussions about
article validation (or certification ?). But afaik, it
was never done till any conclusion and decision of
action.

I think that it is high time that this is discussed
anew. I have a couple of ideas about this, and I think
some could reduce a bit tensions which exist on
en:wiki right now (and on de: as well, as I recently
heard), and at the same time increase cooperation and
people recognition. But I would be happy to hear about
other people opinion on that matter. I also know that
several people have good ideas on this as well. So...

I set a page on meta to host this discussion, or to be
the recipiendary of mailing list discussions.

Please help here :
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_validation

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Friends.  Fun.  Try the all-new Yahoo! Messenger.
http://messenger.yahoo.com/


list: wikimedia-l


subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Article validation (was WikiReader Free Software and
	Free Contents)


from_name: Tim Starling

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: { and function code

body:
Ashar Voultoiz" wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I am willing to know which formatting method we should use in code for
> function declarations. Actually I see two shemes:
>
> 1)
> function foobarone() {
>     code here
> }
>
> 2)
> function foobartwo()
> {
>     code here
> }

My personal style is the second, but I think a number of other MediaWiki
coders lean towards the first. The second is the K&R standard, see
http://pantransit.reptiles.org/prog/CodingStyle.html . In more recent code
I've been mainly using the first one, since I realised it was predominant
before I came along. So I'd be happy enough converting everything to the
first.

-- Tim Starling


from_name: David Gerard

subject: [WikiEN-l] Jimbo Wales, London 05 June 2004 meetup

body:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Jimbo_Wales/2004-06-05

I'm sure someone will get their pics online and external linked
in due course.

There's a list of people there and it isn't complete. Could
attendees please fill it out.

Same for the content of the talk. Disaster recovery and languages
was the issues I remember ...

- d.


subject: [Wikitech-l] solved Re: upgrade problem (Wiktionary PL)

body:
 Tomasz Sienicki wrote:

> a problem with upgrading pl.wiktionary to 1.3

 Fixed by Brion, thanks a lot!

--
 tsca * Tomasz Sienicki


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Re: { and function code

references:
<c9snk5$q72$1@sea.gmane.org> <c9spcd$tg7$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<20040605162250.GA25146@localhost.localdomain>

body:
Peter Danenberg wrote:
>      Brace style is certainly a religious issue, Tim.
>
>      K&R,  however, dictates a hybrid: new-line open braces,
> namely, for functions; and contiguous ones for statements:

Yes, a hybrid which I stick to fairly closely, as I have done for some
years. Except in the face of peer pressure, perhaps. A more interesting
question is the handling of multi-line function invocations and if
statements. Lee's style seems to involve a two space indent, distinguished
from a tab:

if ( some long
  line ) {
        do something
}

and

func(lots and lots of
  parameters);

Whereas I would tend to mix in a bit of Allman:

if (some long
        line)
{
        do something;
}

func(lots and lots
        of parameters
);

I'm also influenced by Microsoft's

perhaps(
        even,
        excessive
        use,
        of, /* vertical space */
        seen in the Windows API
);

Fear the right margin!

-- Tim Starling


subject:
[Foundation-l] Article validation (was WikiReader Free Software
	and Free Contents)

body:
--- Ulrich Fuchs <mail at ulrich-fuchs.de> wrote:
> A validation process can operate in two ways: either
> there is some was of a
> democratic voting sytem, which will lead to mediocre
> article (science is not
> democratic). Or there are some people which are more
> trusted than others -
> and that's the capitulation of the wiki principle.
>
> Our problems is not validation. Our problem is that
> the goals are not clear
> (what goes in, or perhaps: what goes in in which
> edition), and that editing
> (which means: deleting a lot of things) is
> considered bad habit.
>
> Uli

Nod. But we could give different goals to products.
For example, the goal of wikireaders could be from now
on be much more defined.

It is already a different goal that wikipedia
* it offers limited information (it is an extract of
wikipedia)
* it tries to cover quite generally a whole topic (eg,
a wikireader on a country will covers its geography,
politics, economics, tourism etc...)
* it is meant to be read only (errors can't be fixed).

* it is meant to be sold (while wikipedia is free)

We could add to these different goals the fact the
information in it has been double checked, that it
undergone an *organised* peer-review (rather than a
quite anarchic one like on wikipedia).

no ?

__________________________________
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http://messenger.yahoo.com/


from_name: Fred Bauder

subject: [WikiEN-l] 172

body:
The name of the book is "In Denial" the ISBN is just a guide to locating it
for those who know how to use it. ISBN 1893554724.

I suppose if we did an article on Marxist studies that language and its
alternatives could be fully set forth. What is needed here is the
information that due to interest by American intellectuals who perhaps were
involved in the upheavals of the 60s and 70s and entered Marxist studies a
climate of hostility to criticisms of Marxism became established in American
academia. There are a few scholars who have continued to research the
problems of what caused Marxism in practice to go wrong and armed with the
material resulting from the opening of the Soviet archives have made
significant contributions to the field. Fairness in our articles requires
both viewpoints be set forth.

For example 172 did not like the phrase, "Red Terror". Lenin and Trotsky
liked it and put it into practice but 172 didn't like it. So it couldn't be
in the history of the Soviet Union.

Fred

> From: Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net>
> Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Date: Sat, 05 Jun 2004 22:37:13 -0700
> To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] 172
>
> So now you add arrogance to sophistry.  You may have expressed your POV
> at [[jargon]] and [[technical terminology]] but that does not change the
> fact that you use "revisinism" as jargon.  We already have eight
> defininitions in the article "revisionism", why not just add your own
> revised definition as a ninth?  Being coy about the definition and
> citing only an ISBN number, seems only a thinly veiled attempt to market
> the tract an behalf of the authors.
>
> To discuss with this elite crew we must accept a revisionist (in the
> ordinary sense) interpretation of the term "revisionism".  We need to
> accept this ultra conservative premise put forth by these tractarians..
> We are not allowed to depend on the out-of-fashion Marxist "revisionism"
> of Bernstein and Kautsky.
>
> Nobody is requesting "complicated new verbal constructions".   A
> definition comparable in length to those already in [[revisionism]]
> would be enough.  Better still avoid the jargon altogether.
>
> Ec
>
> Fred Bauder wrote:
>
>> Entry into a discussion of Marxist studies requires a willingness to become
>> familiar with the vocabulary used in the field just as in the case of other
>> specialized areas. Requiring the construction of complicated new verbal
>> constructions is unreasonable. (And ultimately uncomprehensible.)
>>
>> I wrote the original article [[jargon]] but eventually wrote [[technical
>> terminology]] also.
>>
>> Fred
>>
>>
>>
>>> From: Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net>
>>>
>>> I have no reason to doubt that the indicated book used these terms in a
>>> specialized way.  (The book appears to be anti-Marxist, and a
>>> pro-Marxist book would likely use it in a different way.)  Neither way
>>> advances anybody's cause in these debates.  It's the "specialized way"
>>> that gives the problem, and turns the term into jargon.  If there is no
>>> definition of a term which the participants in a debate can hold in
>>> common, then perhaps it would be better to find a more appropriate term.
>>>
>>> Ec
>>>
>>> Fred Bauder wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>> Marxist studies uses the terms "revisionist" and "traditionalist" in a
>>>> specialized way. See page 2 of In Denial, ISBN 1893554724.
>>>>
>>>> Fred
>>>>
>>>>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l


list: wiktionary-l

subject: [Wiktionary-l] Nl.wiktionary

body:
Yesterday evening, we have been converted to the new software. I was hopefull that the conversion would also solve the problem we have with non alphabetical characters. Now, this situation is worse as characters like ????? ????? are not even shown in the bodies of the text as they were not shown in the titles of articles.

Could someone have a looksee what is amiss ??

Thanks,
GerardM


subject: [WikiEN-l] Response to Bryan Derken

body:
You still are not up for a ban to my knowledge, although I am not familiar
with the details of your arbitration. That seems to revolve around revert
wars. Not about banning for point of view editing or general nastyness.

Fred

> From: "Abe Sokolov" <abesokolov at hotmail.com>
> Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Date: Sun, 06 Jun 2004 09:36:12 +0000
> To: Wikien-l at Wikipedia.org
> Subject: [WikiEN-l] Response to Bryan Derken
>
> But considering the lynch mob atmosphere of this mailing list, I suppose
> that writing this article is more evidence in favor of a ban, right?


subject: [Wiktionary-l] Lost articles on nl:wiktionary

body:
Some more research:
*I can now make an article in the Chinese language
*Articles with a ? in the title I cannot rename. (I am moderator)
*Many messages are lost to me. (not all) the lost messages start and end with a "-".

Is there a backup to remedy things??

Thanks,
  GerardM


from_name: Abe Sokolov

subject: [WikiEN-l] Response to Bryan Derken

body:
Bryan Derksen:

Speaking of rudeness, aside from berating me on the mailing list due to one
single disagreement, you came out of nowhere on [[Talk:Origins of the
American Civil War]] dismissing the article division as "ugly" and
"fragile," proclaiming that you were going to "better organize" [the
article] while offering no specifics. Yet, weeks earlier Mav, AlexS, Sj, and
I had agreed on that very same division, which was arranged incidentally not
by me but by Sj. I called it "excellent" and perhaps a cure to for all "long
pages" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Longpages). AlexS called it a
"brilliant job" (see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Origins_of_the_American_Civil_War/Archive_1).
Mav simply stated that he was "OK with this format." So, was it unreasonable
for me to ask you to review the past discussion on the complex issue that
you were attempting to bring up? I think not.

Furthermore, your desire to "create better page titles" made no sense at
all. You failed to understand that these weren't four separate articles but
rather a single article consisting of four pages.

Wanting you to be aware of the reasons for which a number of users had
opposed the kind of division that you were proposing (a New
Imperialism-style division/series) isn't rude. Instead, making sure that
everyone's on the same page-- what I was attempting to do-- is usually
considered helpful.

You later admitted, "Yeah, that New Imperialism thing looks like the general
sort of idea I was proposing." However, you failed to respond to comments by
both Sj and me explaining the complications of undergoing just a drastic
restructuring of the article. In particular, you never responded to the
following comments by Sj:

Secondly, I agree that for a "NI-style" summary to work, '''much more'''
content is needed -- and I hope that someday that content appears.  (Once
there are >200kb of content on the origins of the Civil War, something
better than 10 long sequential pages will be necessary just to make sense of
it all!)  For now, 3 or 4 sequential pages - for purely technical reasons -
sounds like an acceptable idea (NB: it's possible to have a 30-page document
with ''one title''; that is impossible on this wiki, alas).  I'm going to go
ahead and take a stab at breaking it up, just as an exercise in being bold,
and b/c I want to get this off the 'featured status disputed' list; I won't
object if one of you reverts me and tries a different division.
[[User:Sj|+sj]][[User Talk:Sj|+]] 05:29, 2004 Mar 27 (UTC)

BTW, I'm not the only one who was happy with the article as it is. Note,
e.g., this comment on the talk page:

"I am in my first year teaching American history at the high school level,
and I thought this article was incredibly helpful, both to me and to my
students. Too often, websites or online encyclopedias provide only a cursory
overview of the Civil War, or present the lead-up to the conflict as an
inevitable polarisation of 'Slavery v. Anti-Slavery' and 'States Rights v.
Federalism'. Certainly these themes are central to the conflict, but they
were neither inevitable nor straightforward - nor did they take on the moral
overtones people tend to give them today. This article avoids those pitfalls
- thanks."

See also "Wikipedia for Journalists" by Sree Sreenivasan, Columbia Professor
& Poynter Visiting Professor
http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=32&aid=62126 . An excerpt reads, "So
far, the effort has created numerous reference-quality articles as wide
ranging as the Hutton Inquiry, algorithms, social history of the piano,
origins of the American Civil War, and severe acute respiratory syndrome. As
its quality has improved, news publications have increasingly cited
Wikipedia on subjects..."

But considering the lynch mob atmosphere of this mailing list, I suppose
that writing this article is more evidence in favor of a ban, right?

_________________________________________________________________
FREE pop-up blocking with the new MSN Toolbar ? get it now!
http://toolbar.msn.click-url.com/go/onm00200415ave/direct/01/


from_name: Ashar Voultoiz

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: modified Parser.php category goodness.

body:
Tobin Richard wrote:
> I've made some changes to Parser.php on my local install to make
> category pages a little neater. You can take a look at
> http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Category_sort_example.png for a
> fairly recent screenshot.
>
> Things changed are
> * Three column view of sub categories and articles
> * List view of subcategories and articles (if there are only a few)
> * headings for the first letter of sort keys in article and subcategory
> lists
> * "Category" doesn't appear before subcategories and
> * Display of the number of articles and subcategories.
>
> I have no idea if this code is safe/well thought out/whatever but it
> works fine on my local mediawiki installation.
>
> And no picking on my php skills ;-)
>
> Tobin.
>
> My version of the categoryMagic function follows. Just about everything
> after "# For all pages that link to this category" is changed.
>
> ----
<snip code>

Hello Tobin,

It looks great. I think we should implement it while we are still in
beta :o)

--
Ashar Voultoiz
[[fr:Utilisateur:Hashar]]


from_name: Hunter Peress

subject: [Wikitech-l] erik zachte and timeline

body:
Erik, your lack of presence on IRC has caused me after 2 weeks on there
 to address this issue on the mailing list.

I responded to Erik http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2004-May/009967.html (use
date-view, since the thread-view isnt grouping all the responses together).

NOW: after viewing this: http://members.chello.nl/epzachte/Wikipedia/EasyTimeline/Syntax.htm

I assume that erik himself wrote it.

Please remove timelines from the cvs until it is simplified to work with wiki-tables.

__________________________________
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Friends.  Fun.  Try the all-new Yahoo! Messenger.
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from_name: Ulrich Fuchs

body:
> people recognition. But I would be happy to hear about
> other people opinion on that matter. I also know that
> several people have good ideas on this as well. So...

If we all would agree that we are working on an encyclopaedia, not an
everything-goes-in-wiki, not a website, if we would all agree that its needed
to delete poorly researched content and articles on silly subjects (like "the
xyz drum produced by company A") while there aren't articles on the main
subject ("Drumming"), then we wouldn't need to talk about those "validation"
concepts, because the validation would happen all the time - the wiki
principle would do.

A validation process can operate in two ways: either there is some was of a
democratic voting sytem, which will lead to mediocre article (science is not
democratic). Or there are some people which are more trusted than others -
and that's the capitulation of the wiki principle.

Our problems is not validation. Our problem is that the goals are not clear
(what goes in, or perhaps: what goes in in which edition), and that editing
(which means: deleting a lot of things) is considered bad habit.

Uli


from_name: Stan Shebs

subject: [WikiEN-l] A first encounter with Categories

body:
Viajero wrote:

>Thanks to various responses to my earlier post on the subject, I have come to appreciate some of the possibilities of Categories, at least in theory. So, this morning I decided to categorize the forty or so articles on writers which I created or to which I made major contributions, having seen several suitable Categories show up in my Watchlist for similar articles. To start with,  I wanted to know what categories have already been created for writers and journalists. For example, I saw a category for for "Argentine writers" (the article on Borges I think). Does this mean I should also create a category for Uruguayan, Mexican, and Chilean writers (I wrote up a couple) even though such categories would have one or two entries?  However, there doesn't seem to be any comprehensive, hierarchical index of categories. [[Wikipedia:Categorization]] should serve this function, but it is woefully incomplete.
>
Having had a little outing with categories, with mixed satisfaction,
I'm more interested in going back and working on some topdown
organization. As you probably saw from some of the people fooling
with diagrams, there are a couple of different approaches. One is to
create categories for every conjunction of categories - if you have
"hotels" and "museums" and "Ohio", that means you should have "hotels
in Ohio" and "museums in Ohio" categories. The other approach is to
have an article in multiple categories and do nothing else, but then
the software currently gives you no easy way to list only the museums
in Ohio.

I personally tend to favor the second approach, because the
conjunction categories will combinatorially explode and eventually
outnumber articles. It seems more useful to add a way for the category
page to optionally group members by a second category or some such, so
you can go to the museums category and say "organize by location
categories" and have it sort and group by country/state/city.

In any case, I think category creation will settle down once there
are about as many categories as there are lists now.

Stan


body:
On Sun, Jun 06, 2004 at 10:42:58AM +0200, Ashar Voultoiz wrote:
> Tobin Richard wrote:
> >I've made some changes to Parser.php on my local install to make
> >category pages a little neater. You can take a look at
> >http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Category_sort_example.png for a
> >fairly recent screenshot.
> >
> >Things changed are
> >* Three column view of sub categories and articles
> >* List view of subcategories and articles (if there are only a few)
> >* headings for the first letter of sort keys in article and subcategory
> >lists
> >* "Category" doesn't appear before subcategories and
> >* Display of the number of articles and subcategories.
> >
> >I have no idea if this code is safe/well thought out/whatever but it
> >works fine on my local mediawiki installation.
> >
> >And no picking on my php skills ;-)
> >
> >Tobin.
> >
> >My version of the categoryMagic function follows. Just about everything
> >after "# For all pages that link to this category" is changed.
> >
> >----
> <snip code>
>
> Hello Tobin,
>
> It looks great. I think we should implement it while we are still in
> beta :o)
>

OK, it's in, but it's configurable, since I doubt it will work properly
for all languages (esp. some Asian ones).

>From http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misc_MediaWiki_tweaks
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Category: Page

There are two layouts for the category pages. One that simply lists articles
one by another, and one that puts them in a table and groups them by
their first character. The second and newer one uses MySQLs default sort
order, which might not be apropriate for all languages.

One can select which of the two styles is used by changing
MediaWiki:Usenewcategorypage. If the first character of that page is a '0' (zero),
the old layout will be used. This can be changed on a per-wiki base.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Response to Bryan Derken

body:
At 09:36 AM 6/6/2004 +0000, Abe Sokolov wrote:

>Bryan Derksen:
>
>Speaking of rudeness, aside from berating me on the mailing list due to
>one single disagreement, you came out of nowhere on [[Talk:Origins of the
>American Civil War]] dismissing the article division as "ugly" and
>"fragile," proclaiming that you were going to "better organize" [the
>article] while offering no specifics.

I "came out of nowhere" because I'd been randomly browsing around and had
just come across it for the first time; the readership of pages on
Wikipedia is not unchanging and new arrivals like that happen all the time.
I offered no specifics because I hadn't worked them out yet when I first
started posting on talk:. I was planning to work the specifics out
_collaboratively_ because I didn't want to step on anyones' toes if I could
help it. However, new arrival at that page or not, I have just as much
right to edit that article as you do. I was simply trying to be polite by
discussing it first.

>Furthermore, your desire to "create better page titles" made no sense at
>all. You failed to understand that these weren't four separate articles
>but rather a single article consisting of four pages.

I fully understood that, and I explained in talk: that I simply didn't
think it was a good idea to leave the page like that. Wikipedia is not
paper and I don't believe that one should have to "turn pages" like that if
it really is a single article.

My opinion that this is a bad way of organizing the page is just as well
thought out as your opinion that it isn't. Don't assume that I disagree
with you simply because you don't think I understand the issue as well as
you do.

>Wanting you to be aware of the reasons for which a number of users had
>opposed the kind of division that you were proposing (a New
>Imperialism-style division/series) isn't rude. Instead, making sure that
>everyone's on the same page-- what I was attempting to do-- is usually
>considered helpful.

You yourself later admitted that you came across as "curmudgeonly" in our
discussion. You also threatened edit wars on two occasions - the first time
by implication, saying I should avoid "meaningless edit wars" and the
second time explicitly telling me I would "provoke an edit war" if I went
ahead. I did _not_ consider your input to be particularly helpful, it came
across more as an obstinate insistence that you knew best for this page and
would brook no compromise. In contrast Mav, whom you included in your list
of people who supported the way the article was split up, seemed willing to
at least hear me out on my objections (hope you don't mind me invoking your
name like that, Mav).

I'm not going to discuss the details of the page itself any further here,
this is the mailing list and not the relevant talk: page. Go there if you
want to continue discussing it.

>But considering the lynch mob atmosphere of this mailing list, I suppose
>that writing this article is more evidence in favor of a ban, right?

This isn't about banning you. If I was into that sort of thing I would have
made more of a ruckus when you moved the in-progress discussion into
/Archive 2 and protected it, which even then seemed to me like a deliberate
attempt to quash further debate. I'm simply pointing out that I had a
similar experience to Geoff's, and came to a similar conclusion; you don't
seem to work well in the Wikipedia environment collaborating with people
who disagree with you, you seem to go on the attack instead.


from_name: Matthew Trump

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: A first encounter with Categories

body:
Yes the bot idea or some variation sounds extremely attractive.

During this shakedown cruise of categories, the main thing I've
noticed is that they are changing very rapidly. A category is
created, and articles are added to it. Then someone else creates more
specific sub-categories and begins shifting articles from the higher
level to the lower level category. Or the category name is changed to
reflect standards of capitalization or formatting (as might happen
the opera singer example)

In any case, this is resulting in many editors going through many
articles repeated to change the categorization. My watchlist is
filled with long repeated edits in multiple waves.

The root of this is that unlike lists, which can be changed "all at
once" by moving a page, categories have to tweaked by hand in every
single article in a particular category. It is the flip side of the
auto-generated nature of categories.

I agree with Anthere that some kind of bot system or automated update
of categories would be a very good thing if could alleviate this
problem. The current system is not only time-consuming but will
inevitably generate anger among editors as they see their hard work
of editing many articles swept away. Unlike page moves, this cannot
be undone by a simple procedure but requires many edits and hours of
work to undo under the current system.

Anthere said:
> what about selecting a topic you know well (perhaps Opera ? or a
> larger
> Music group), gather around you a bunch of editors you know to be
> reliable editors on that topic, then make a working group to identify
> which categories should exist, to which extent, under which naming
> scheme...
> Then, when you all agree together, write down for example all the
> categories which are likely to cover the Opera topic, then make a
> list
> of all articles which should belong on which category, have a bot do
> the
>   categories for these articles, and remove all categories which do
> not
> fit the scheme.
>
> Viajero wrote:
>> Thanks to various responses to my earlier post on the subject, I
>> have come to appreciate some of the possibilities of Categories, at
>> least in theory. So, this morning I decided to categorize the forty
>> or so articles on writers which I created or to which I made major
>> contributions, having seen several suitable Categories show up in
>> my Watchlist for similar articles. To start with,  I wanted to know
>> what categories have already been created for writers and
>> journalists. For example, I saw a category for for "Argentine
>> writers" (the article on Borges I think). Does this mean I should
>> also create a category for Uruguayan, Mexican, and Chilean writers
>> (I wrote up a couple) even though such categories would have one or
>> two entries?  However, there doesn't seem to be any comprehensive,
>> hierarchical index of categories. [[Wikipedia:Categorization]]
>> should serve this function, but it is woefully
>>  incomplete. [[Category:Main page]] is even worse. So, I turned to
>>
>>   http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Categories&article=Lists_of_articles_by_category
>>
>> which is an alphabetical list of categories, but the first five
>> hundred only range from ".hack" to "British cheeses", suggesting
>> that already on the order of eight to ten thousand categories (!!!)
>> have been created. Obviously this page huge can't be used for
>> looking up existing categories, if only because it would place a
>> tremendous burden on the servers. A random selection from just the
>> first 500:
>>
>> * 1983 albums
>> * 24-hour television news channels
>> * AHL Trophies and Awards
>> * Aerosmith albums
>> * Airports of the United Arab Emirates
>> * Art galleries and museums in Ohio
>> * Belgian cuisine
>> * Boston Bruins players
>>
>> What can possibly be the use of such narrow categories with only a
>> handful of entries? Shouldn't we be aiming for broad categories
>> (ie, albums, tv stations, awards, airports, museums, cuisines,
>> atheletes)?
>>
>> In any case, my only option for writers appears to be to add
>> categories on an ad hoc basis, and that exactly is what seems to be
>> happening across the entire encyclopedia. Turning to opera, for
>> example, a topic which I have worked a lot on, I see on
>> [[Category:Opera_singers]] that the following categories have been
>> created:
>>
>> Category:Baritone opera singers,
>> Category:Bass opera singers,
>> Category:Contraltos (opera singers),
>> Category:Mezzo-sopranos (opera singers),
>> Category:Sopranos (opera singers),
>> Category:Tenors (opera singers)
>>
>> They aren't even consistently labelled! It is entirely possible,
>> perhaps probable that someone will come along and create
>> "Category:Contraltos opera singers" "Category:Tenors". Each has
>> only one entry (tenor has two), indicating that they were created
>> on a strictly ad hoc basis with no effort made to track down all
>> the articles for a given category.
>>
>> I realize Categories are very new and the system will evolve. I am
>> also a big fan of Wikipedia's self-organizing characteristics and I
>> don't want to sound like a control freak. However, it seems to me
>> that Categories will only be useful if the system is implemented in
>> a thoughtful way. At the very least, it should be compulsory to add
>> new categories to [[Wikipedia:Categorization]] or [[Category:Main
>> page]], so that they can be referenced and evaluated by other
>> editors. Better yet would be to have some kind of vetting procedure
>> for introducing new categories. But given the number of categories
>> now in use, it seems that the genie is out of the bottle and that
>> this is all just wishful thinking.
>>
>>
>> V.
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


body:
At 02:52 PM 6/6/2004 +0300, Viajero wrote:
>Obviously this page huge can't be used for looking up existing categories,
>if only because it would place a tremendous burden on the servers.

Including categories in the search engine would be nice, assuming the
search engine was enabled. :) For now, I've been mostly just going to
articles which IMO are likely to have similar categories to the ones I'm
looking for and hoping that they've been categorized already. Or going to
one of the "root" categories and trying to follow the hierarchy down to the
specific ones I'm interested in.

>* Boston Bruins players
>
>What can possibly be the use of such narrow categories with only a handful
>of entries? Shouldn't we be aiming for broad categories (ie, albums, tv
>stations, awards, airports, museums, cuisines, atheletes)?

Broad categories exist as well. These small, highly-specific categories fit
under them as subcategories, which allows them to be grouped in very
flexible ways. For example, the "Boston Bruins players" category could fall
under the "Boston Bruins" category, which could fall under the "American
football teams" category, which could fall under the "American football"
category, so that if one wanted to grab a list of "all American
football-related articles" one could recursively include the subcategories
of "American football" and all those players' articles would be there. But
"Boston Bruins" could also fall under the category "Boston", so those
players would show up if one grabbed a list of "all Boston-related
articles". They can also fall under the category "Team sports players",
which could fall under the category "Sports players", which could fall
under the category "Athletes". So a list of all athletes on Wikipedia would
include the Boston Bruins players as well. (note: Wikipedia seems to be
down right now, so I'm just making these details up hypothetically)

The alternative would be to give each of the Boston Bruins players the
categories "American football", "Boston", and "Athletes", which would get
extremely messy and require much fancier queries if, say, you wanted a list
of articles about American football teams without including articles about
the particular players.


body:
At 09:10 PM 6/6/2004 +0300, Viajero wrote:

>On 06/06/04  at 12:58 PM, Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen at shaw.ca> said:
>
> > For example, the "Boston Bruins players" category could fall  under the
> > "Boston Bruins" category, which could fall under the "American  football
> > teams" category, which could fall under the "American football"
> > category, so that if one wanted to grab a list of "all American
> > football-related articles" one could recursively include the
> > subcategories  of "American football" and all those players' articles
> > would be there.
>
>You meant hockey of course. The Bruins are a hockey team. ;-)

When Wikipedia is down it's like a hemisphere of my brain is missing. :)


from_name: sada asda

subject: [WikiEN-l] how can I appeal my ban?

body:
I have been banned from the wikipedia. I have not been provided with a forum for discussing the issue, nor have I been given a reason why my ban is justified. My posts are being rejected from the english mailing list, the arbitration committee has neither ruled on this -- nor communicated with me. Why have I been banned, and how can I appeal?

---------------------------------
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Friends.  Fun. Try the all-new Yahoo! Messenger
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subject: [Wikipedia-l] how can I appeal my ban?

body:
I have been banned from the wikipedia. I have not been provided with a forum for discussing the issue, nor have I been given a reason why my ban is justified. My posts are being rejected from the english mailing list, the arbitration committee has neither ruled on this -- nor communicated with me. Why have I been banned, and how can I appeal?

---------------------------------
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Friends.  Fun. Try the all-new Yahoo! Messenger
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from_name: Viajero

body:
Thanks to various responses to my earlier post on the subject, I have come to appreciate some of the possibilities of Categories, at least in theory. So, this morning I decided to categorize the forty or so articles on writers which I created or to which I made major contributions, having seen several suitable Categories show up in my Watchlist for similar articles. To start with,  I wanted to know what categories have already been created for writers and journalists. For example, I saw a category for for "Argentine writers" (the article on Borges I think). Does this mean I should also create a category for Uruguayan, Mexican, and Chilean writers (I wrote up a couple) even though such categories would have one or two entries?  However, there doesn't seem to be any comprehensive, hierarchical index of categories. [[Wikipedia:Categorization]] should serve this function, but it is woefully incomplete. [[Category:Main page]] is even worse. So, I turned to

  http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Categories&article=Lists_of_articles_by_category

which is an alphabetical list of categories, but the first five hundred only range from ".hack" to "British cheeses", suggesting that already on the order of eight to ten thousand categories (!!!) have been created. Obviously this page huge can't be used for looking up existing categories, if only because it would place a tremendous burden on the servers. A random selection from just the first 500:

* 1983 albums
* 24-hour television news channels
* AHL Trophies and Awards
* Aerosmith albums
* Airports of the United Arab Emirates
* Art galleries and museums in Ohio
* Belgian cuisine
* Boston Bruins players

What can possibly be the use of such narrow categories with only a handful of entries? Shouldn't we be aiming for broad categories (ie, albums, tv stations, awards, airports, museums, cuisines, atheletes)?

In any case, my only option for writers appears to be to add categories on an ad hoc basis, and that exactly is what seems to be happening across the entire encyclopedia. Turning to opera, for example, a topic which I have worked a lot on, I see on [[Category:Opera_singers]] that the following categories have been created:

Category:Baritone opera singers,
Category:Bass opera singers,
Category:Contraltos (opera singers),
Category:Mezzo-sopranos (opera singers),
Category:Sopranos (opera singers),
Category:Tenors (opera singers)

They aren't even consistently labelled! It is entirely possible, perhaps probable that someone will come along and create "Category:Contraltos opera singers" "Category:Tenors". Each has only one entry (tenor has two), indicating that they were created on a strictly ad hoc basis with no effort made to track down all the articles for a given category.

I realize Categories are very new and the system will evolve. I am also a big fan of Wikipedia's self-organizing characteristics and I don't want to sound like a control freak. However, it seems to me that Categories will only be useful if the system is implemented in a thoughtful way. At the very least, it should be compulsory to add new categories to [[Wikipedia:Categorization]] or [[Category:Main page]], so that they can be referenced and evaluated by other editors. Better yet would be to have some kind of vetting procedure for introducing new categories. But given the number of categories now in use, it seems that the genie is out of the bottle and that this is all just wishful thinking.

V.


from_name: Christopher M. Hagar

body:
Hi,

Same here. Some of the history of a lot of articles has disappeared, I no longer have any items in my watchlist or in my contributions, and pages like Community Portal are gone. Something is definitely broken.

Cheers,

Chris Hagar


subject: [Wikitech-l] Big crash 6/6

body:
Current status:

We've managed to recover a dump of enwiki.cur minus a couple of damaged
pages (one on [[Surrey, Virginia]], and one or two next to it).
Currently running a backup of everything else so we can dump-and-restore
to a clean database.

We should be back online sometime tonight where "tonight" is defined as
"before I get any sleep".

Also Ariel seems to have developed some sort of difficulty.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Magnus Manske

subject: [Wikitech-l] New skin

body:
I just returned from vacation, and find the new software/skin in place.
Great! And thanks to everyone involved.

However...
* There is no longer a "section edit" link for the very first section
(before the first heading).
* In Mono, I cannot turn off the underlined links. When I'm not logged
in, links are not underlined, as I prefer. Logged in, they always are
(ugh!), and fiddling with the "underline links" setting in my
preferences doesn't help. Strangely, on de.wikipedia, I don't get the
underlines even when logged in.

Anyone up for some hotfixes? :-)

Magnus


subject: [Wikipedia-l] how can I appeal my ban?

body:
There is general agreement that you are a former user who was previously
banned. Please identify yourself.

Fred

From: sada asda <unfairlybanned2001 at yahoo.com>
Reply-To: wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
Date: Sun, 6 Jun 2004 14:49:36 -0700 (PDT)
To: wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
Cc: wikien-l at wikipedia.org
Subject: [Wikipedia-l] how can I appeal my ban?

I have been banned from the wikipedia. I have not been provided with a forum
for discussing the issue, nor have I been given a reason why my ban is
justified. My posts are being rejected from the english mailing list, the
arbitration committee has neither ruled on this -- nor communicated with me.
Why have I been banned, and how can I appeal?

Do you Yahoo!?
Friends.  Fun. Try the all-new Yahoo! Messenger
<http://messenger.yahoo.com/>
_______________________________________________
Wikipedia-l mailing list
Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l

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from_name: Anthere

body:
what about selecting a topic you know well (perhaps Opera ? or a larger
Music group), gather around you a bunch of editors you know to be
reliable editors on that topic, then make a working group to identify
which categories should exist, to which extent, under which naming scheme...
Then, when you all agree together, write down for example all the
categories which are likely to cover the Opera topic, then make a list
of all articles which should belong on which category, have a bot do the
  categories for these articles, and remove all categories which do not
fit the scheme.

Viajero wrote:
> Thanks to various responses to my earlier post on the subject, I have come to appreciate some of the possibilities of Categories, at least in theory. So, this morning I decided to categorize the forty or so articles on writers which I created or to which I made major contributions, having seen several suitable Categories show up in my Watchlist for similar articles. To start with,  I wanted to know what categories have already been created for writers and journalists. For example, I saw a category for for "Argentine writers" (the article on Borges I think). Does this mean I should also create a category for Uruguayan, Mexican, and Chilean writers (I wrote up a couple) even though such categories would have one or two entries?  However, there doesn't seem to be any comprehensive, hierarchical index of categories. [[Wikipedia:Categorization]] should serve this function, but it is woefully
>  incomplete. [[Category:Main page]] is even worse. So, I turned to
>
>   http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Categories&article=Lists_of_articles_by_category
>
> which is an alphabetical list of categories, but the first five hundred only range from ".hack" to "British cheeses", suggesting that already on the order of eight to ten thousand categories (!!!) have been created. Obviously this page huge can't be used for looking up existing categories, if only because it would place a tremendous burden on the servers. A random selection from just the first 500:
>
> * 1983 albums
> * 24-hour television news channels
> * AHL Trophies and Awards
> * Aerosmith albums
> * Airports of the United Arab Emirates
> * Art galleries and museums in Ohio
> * Belgian cuisine
> * Boston Bruins players
>
> What can possibly be the use of such narrow categories with only a handful of entries? Shouldn't we be aiming for broad categories (ie, albums, tv stations, awards, airports, museums, cuisines, atheletes)?
>
> In any case, my only option for writers appears to be to add categories on an ad hoc basis, and that exactly is what seems to be happening across the entire encyclopedia. Turning to opera, for example, a topic which I have worked a lot on, I see on [[Category:Opera_singers]] that the following categories have been created:
>
> Category:Baritone opera singers,
> Category:Bass opera singers,
> Category:Contraltos (opera singers),
> Category:Mezzo-sopranos (opera singers),
> Category:Sopranos (opera singers),
> Category:Tenors (opera singers)
>
> They aren't even consistently labelled! It is entirely possible, perhaps probable that someone will come along and create "Category:Contraltos opera singers" "Category:Tenors". Each has only one entry (tenor has two), indicating that they were created on a strictly ad hoc basis with no effort made to track down all the articles for a given category.
>
> I realize Categories are very new and the system will evolve. I am also a big fan of Wikipedia's self-organizing characteristics and I don't want to sound like a control freak. However, it seems to me that Categories will only be useful if the system is implemented in a thoughtful way. At the very least, it should be compulsory to add new categories to [[Wikipedia:Categorization]] or [[Category:Main page]], so that they can be referenced and evaluated by other editors. Better yet would be to have some kind of vetting procedure for introducing new categories. But given the number of categories now in use, it seems that the genie is out of the bottle and that this is all just wishful thinking.
>
>
> V.


subject: [Wikitech-l] Big crash 6/6

body:
Guillaume Blanchard wrote:
> Why don't cash in on this occasion to make a clean switch to Ariel ?
> Yesterday it was so terrible to edit article (before the crach) that I
> prefere 24h down time rather than N days of exterme slowness.

Right now no one can log in on ariel.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [Wikitech-l] New skin (one more)

body: Oh, and the "align=justify" doesn't work, either...


subject: [WikiEN-l] Armenia national football team

body: I wonder if they'll make it to the World Cup next time? :)


from_name: Jens Frank

subject: [Wikitech-l] Added new skin 'MySkin'

body:
Hi,

To enable people to write their own skin, without having
to overwrite monobook's settings, I've added a new skin
called MySkin. It's using an empty default CSS and gets
all its customization from User:someone/myskin.css

A five-minute mockup CSS based on
http://www.csszengarden.com/?cssfile=/074/074.css&page=4
is at
http://mediawiki.mormo.org/index.php/User:JeLuF/myskin.css
and looks like this:
http://mediawiki.mormo.org/images/1/15/EgyptianStyle.png

(it's really no production quality skin, just a small
proof-of-concept)

Best regards,

JeLuF


from_name: Thomas Luft

subject: [Wikitech-l] monobook.css and stubs

body:
The new skin is great and I like it a lot to edit the link colors to my
favorite ones. However I am missing a class for stubs. Was this feature
removed due to performance reasons? I set the "stub value" in the
preferences to 200 chars but it does not change the display?!
Regards

Thomas (Urbanus)


from_name: Philip Newton

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Greek characters not rendering correctly

references:
<99vqxSCxpVB@erik_moeller>	<043101c449e2$58d531e0$67c56bd8@impressario>	<40C07A8E.1060400@cs.ucy.ac.cy>	<c9pvhc$jb5$2@sea.gmane.org>
	<c9q05g$m05$1@sea.gmane.org> <40C0B165.1090403@pobox.com>

body:
On Fri, 04 Jun 2004 10:29:09 -0700, Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com>
wrote:

> Use the letter "i" instead of the number "1" in "π" and "φ".

And "χ".

Cheers,
Philip


from_name: Josip Rodin

subject: [Wikitech-l] New skin

body:
On Sun, Jun 06, 2004 at 04:04:59PM +0200, Magnus Manske wrote:
> * There is no longer a "section edit" link for the very first section
> (before the first heading).

Yeah, but the section edit links exist in the diff output. An acceptable
compromise if you ask me :)

--
     2. That which causes joy or happiness.


body:
That part was too obviously a good idea I think. :)

Anthere said:
>
>
> K Forstner wrote:
>> I'm again intrigued by the discussions here, be it categorizations
>> or a user
>> I seem to have never come across called 172 (?). I came back from a
>> weekend
>> a couple of hours ago and since then have been trying to access
>> Wikipedia --
>> to no avail.
>>
>> As far as categories are concerned, I tried to point out some days
>> ago that
>> there should be some policy everyone could agree on, but Timwi
>> suggested we
>> should just go ahead. The result of this approach is being deplored
>> already.
>>
>> I wonder though if a bot is the right answer.
>>
>> KF
>
>
> Well, I regret that all what people understood of my proposal was the
> final comment on bots. It was not a bot proposal I was suggesting,
> but a
> team working proposal, something a bit like a wikiproject, in order
> to
> reduce current anarchy on category organisation.
>
> No one commented on anything, but on this bot issue; so I gather my
> suggestion was not interesting. Never mind :-)
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


body:
As far as the bot thing goes, I meant it in the context of what you
proposed--something can be invoked when there is agreement that
categories should be altered according to some fashion. My comment
before--I think it's very much a good idea, and nearly self-evident,
that categories should ultimately be a group effort in some
semi-organized fashion as you described.

But I suppose right now really the only thing to do is sit back and
let the experiment with categories play out, with all its messiness.
Certainly everything is getting screwed up in a big way with
categories very quickly, but I suppose this is the only way to see
what should be done.

Anthere said:
>
>
> K Forstner wrote:
>> I'm again intrigued by the discussions here, be it categorizations
>> or a user
>> I seem to have never come across called 172 (?). I came back from a
>> weekend
>> a couple of hours ago and since then have been trying to access
>> Wikipedia --
>> to no avail.
>>
>> As far as categories are concerned, I tried to point out some days
>> ago that
>> there should be some policy everyone could agree on, but Timwi
>> suggested we
>> should just go ahead. The result of this approach is being deplored
>> already.
>>
>> I wonder though if a bot is the right answer.
>>
>> KF
>
>
> Well, I regret that all what people understood of my proposal was the
> final comment on bots. It was not a bot proposal I was suggesting,
> but a
> team working proposal, something a bit like a wikiproject, in order
> to
> reduce current anarchy on category organisation.
>
> No one commented on anything, but on this bot issue; so I gather my
> suggestion was not interesting. Never mind :-)
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


from_name: Laurent GUERBY

body:
Hi, I'm not sure if this list is the preferred channel to report
installation problem, if not please tell me what is the preferred channel :).
My machine is running SuSE 9.1 professional, no preexisting wiki database, Apache/2.0.49,
PHP 4.3.4, MySQL 4.0.18.

In config/index.php I had to comment the zlib setup line otherwise
the install would just hang after printing "Script URI path: /wiki":

	## Compress output if the browser supports it
	#{$zlib}if( !ini_get( 'zlib.output_compression' ) ) ob_start( 'ob_gzhandler' );

http://se.php.net/manual/en/function.ob-start.php says
some thinsg about ob_start and Apache 2:

<<
jkloss at hotmail dot com
17-Mar-2004 01:20
If ob_start does not seem to be working for you, note that with Apache 2
the flush() function causes PHP to send headers regardless of whether
ob_start had been called before flush.

ob_start();
echo 'test';
flush();

will cause Apache 2 to send whatever headers may be stacked up - which
means you can't use a header(location:xxx) after the flush.  To fix,
remove the flush().  Spent several hours discovering this.  Apache 1.x
didn't work this way.
>>

But I'm no PHP expert so I'm not sure it's relevant and what to do.

Even with this I got an error a bit later see below.
May be I need to change some PHP settings, from phpinfo it looks like I
have "memory_limit 8M", I tried 80M and the install
worked. What value should we recommend here?

BTW, wikipedia.org seems down right now, it would be nice
to include a recent english version of "Editing Help" with
the mediawiki release tarball. I'm using the google
cached version right now :).

Thank you in advance,

Laurent

<<
MediaWiki 1.3.0beta2 installation
Please include all of the lines below when reporting installation
problems.

Checking environment...
PHP 4.3.4 ok
PHP server API is apache2handler; ok, using pretty URLs (index.php/Page_Title)
Have zlib support; enabling output compression.
Found GD graphics library built-in, image thumbnailing will be enabled if you enable uploads.
Installation directory: /srv/www/htdocs/wiki
Script URI path: /wiki
Connected as root (automatic)
Connected to database... 4.0.18; enabling MySQL 4 enhancements
Created database wikidb
Creating tables... done.
Initializing data...
Created sysop account WikiSysop.
Initialising log pages...
Initialising "MediaWiki" namespace...
Fatal error:  Allowed memory size of 8388608 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 751891 bytes) in /srv/www/htdocs/wiki/includes/Parser.php on line 755
Fatal error:  Allowed memory size of 8388608 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 0 bytes) in Unknown on line 0
>>


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] NFS fun

body:
Just a note: NFS version 2 breaks on files over 2gb. Tweaking NFS
settings is cool, but remember to use version 3, not 2, if you set a
version explicitly. This lesson has been brought to you by Painful
Experience University (PEU).

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: NFS fun

body:
Ashar Voultoiz wrote:
> Is it the cause of the actual wikipedia "maintenance" ? :o)

No, we'll just be slightly delayed by redoing part of the backup.
(enwiki.old) Better we find out now when it can be redone easily than
when we really need it and have only an incomplete backup to work from!

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: K Forstner

body:
I'm again intrigued by the discussions here, be it categorizations or a user
I seem to have never come across called 172 (?). I came back from a weekend
a couple of hours ago and since then have been trying to access Wikipedia --
to no avail.

As far as categories are concerned, I tried to point out some days ago that
there should be some policy everyone could agree on, but Timwi suggested we
should just go ahead. The result of this approach is being deplored already.

I wonder though if a bot is the right answer.

KF

----- Original Message -----
From: "Matthew Trump" <wikipedia at decumanus.com>
To: <anthere9 at yahoo.com>; "English Wikipedia" <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
Sent: Sunday, June 06, 2004 6:54 PM
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Re: A first encounter with Categories

> Yes the bot idea or some variation sounds extremely attractive.
>
> During this shakedown cruise of categories, the main thing I've
> noticed is that they are changing very rapidly. A category is
> created, and articles are added to it. Then someone else creates more
> specific sub-categories and begins shifting articles from the higher
> level to the lower level category. Or the category name is changed to
> reflect standards of capitalization or formatting (as might happen
> the opera singer example)
>
> In any case, this is resulting in many editors going through many
> articles repeated to change the categorization. My watchlist is
> filled with long repeated edits in multiple waves.
>
> The root of this is that unlike lists, which can be changed "all at
> once" by moving a page, categories have to tweaked by hand in every
> single article in a particular category. It is the flip side of the
> auto-generated nature of categories.
>
> I agree with Anthere that some kind of bot system or automated update
> of categories would be a very good thing if could alleviate this
> problem. The current system is not only time-consuming but will
> inevitably generate anger among editors as they see their hard work
> of editing many articles swept away. Unlike page moves, this cannot
> be undone by a simple procedure but requires many edits and hours of
> work to undo under the current system.
>


body:
On 06/06/04  at 12:58 PM, Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen at shaw.ca> said:

> For example, the "Boston Bruins players" category could fall  under the
> "Boston Bruins" category, which could fall under the "American  football
> teams" category, which could fall under the "American football"
> category, so that if one wanted to grab a list of "all American
> football-related articles" one could recursively include the
> subcategories  of "American football" and all those players' articles
> would be there.

You meant hockey of course. The Bruins are a hockey team. ;-)

V. (Bostonian by birth)


from_name: Ricky Beam

subject: [Wikitech-l] Big crash 6/6

body:
On 6 Jun 2004, Erik Moeller wrote:
>Whether it was the kill -9 that led to the corruption or whether the
>database was already corrupted and did therefore not respond we do not
>know; in any case, there seem to have been no alternatives to killing it
>(people on #mysql knew nothing either).
...

Note: I am not pointing fingers.

Looking at my irc log (which contains 4000 lines from 6/6 alone), it appears
Tim started a second mysqld on the running database machine.  In the future,
do not attempt this.  It takes a lot of setup to prevent them from stepping
on each other.  I don't know how much isolation there was in this case.
(I know, because I've ran v3, v4.0, and v4.1 mysql's on the same machine.
 Along with half a dozen other databases :-) It's easier if you've compiled
 everything yourself.)

--Ricky


from_name: Gabriel Wicke

subject: [Wikitech-l] monobook.css and stubs

body:
On Sun, 2004-06-06 at 18:27 +0200, Thomas Luft wrote:
> The new skin is great and I like it a lot to edit the link colors to my
> favorite ones. However I am missing a class for stubs. Was this feature
> removed due to performance reasons? I set the "stub value" in the
> preferences to 200 chars but it does not change the display?!
> Regards

It should since wednesday (uses the old default colour for stubs).

Gabriel Wicke


subject: [Wikitech-l] erik zachte and timeline

body:
On Sun, Jun 06, 2004 at 11:26:53AM -0700, Hunter Peress wrote:
> Erik, your lack of presence on IRC has caused me after 2 weeks on there
>  to address this issue on the mailing list.
>
> I responded to Erik http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2004-May/009967.html (use
> date-view, since the thread-view isnt grouping all the responses together).
>
>
> NOW: after viewing this: http://members.chello.nl/epzachte/Wikipedia/EasyTimeline/Syntax.htm
>
> I assume that erik himself wrote it.
>
> Please remove timelines from the cvs until it is simplified to work with wiki-tables.
>

I'll be happy to remove the rather technical timeline once all your wishes come true.
Since I don't expect this to happen until at least end of this year, I'm strongly
opposed to removing the timelines again. Using transclusion, they are easy to hide from
users, as easy as images.

Best regards,

jens


subject: [Wikitech-l] monobook.css and stubs

body:
On Sun, Jun 06, 2004 at 09:45:06PM +0200, Gabriel Wicke wrote:
> On Sun, 2004-06-06 at 18:27 +0200, Thomas Luft wrote:
> > The new skin is great and I like it a lot to edit the link colors to my
> > favorite ones. However I am missing a class for stubs. Was this feature
> > removed due to performance reasons? I set the "stub value" in the
> > preferences to 200 chars but it does not change the display?!
> > Regards
>
> It should since wednesday (uses the old default colour for stubs).

You might have to purge the old stylesheet from your browser's cache.
If you use Mozilla, press Shift while clicking the reload button.
Using MSIE, I think it's Ctrl-Shift-F5 you have to hit.

	Regards,

	JeLuF


from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [Wikitech-l] Big crash 6/6

body:
We had a serious MySQL crash on suda with associated data corruption today
(6/6). There's a summary of the events leading up to the crash at
http://openfacts.berlios.de/index-en.phtml?title=Wikipedia_plans

Whether it was the kill -9 that led to the corruption or whether the
database was already corrupted and did therefore not respond we do not
know; in any case, there seem to have been no alternatives to killing it
(people on #mysql knew nothing either).

Shaihulud made a copy of the CUR tables from all wikis earlier today and
imported it on Ariel. We've switched the live wikis to readonly from
Ariel; readonly because Ariel doesn't have OLD and lots of other stuff,
because it's not sufficiently tested, and because we'd like to prevent any
data loss if possible.

Tim created a special "readonly" user on ariel for this purpose.

The following have been changed as long as we are in readonly mode:
1) Counters disabled on all wikis
2) Linkscc disabled
3) readonly file set to /home/wikipedia/common/readonly
4) user_newtalk disabled
5) $wgDatabaseServer and $wgDBuser changed to ariel

There will still be lots of error messages and because the OLD tables are
not on Ariel revision histories are missing etc. This is *only* to make
sure that people can read our articles.

The next step is to fix the data corruption on suda.

Regards,

Erik


subject: [Wikitech-l] Big crash 6/6

references:
<9AMw3EoCpVB@erik_moeller> <40C3A216.7050909@pobox.com>
	<3191D3C8-B830-11D8-B628-000A95AF8E04@creativechemistry.net>

body:
I second that. Am in awe of you guyses ability and dedication. Much
thanks.

Lightning said:
>
> On Jun 6, 2004, at 7:00 PM, Brion Vibber wrote:
>>
>> We should be back online sometime tonight where "tonight" is
>> defined
>> as "before I get any sleep".
>
>
> I just want to take a moment to say thanks. that kind of dedication
> is
> much appreciated. wikipedia would have never become what it is today
> without your help or this kind of dedication, its easy for people to
> say "X is broken *somebody* fix it"  and it seems you are more often
> than not that *somebody*
>
>
> Lightning
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>


from_name: Lightning

subject: [Wikitech-l] Big crash 6/6

body:
On Jun 6, 2004, at 7:00 PM, Brion Vibber wrote:
>
> We should be back online sometime tonight where "tonight" is defined
> as "before I get any sleep".

I just want to take a moment to say thanks. that kind of dedication is
much appreciated. wikipedia would have never become what it is today
without your help or this kind of dedication, its easy for people to
say "X is broken *somebody* fix it"  and it seems you are more often
than not that *somebody*

Lightning


from_name: Phil Sandifer

subject: [Wikipedia-l] how can I appeal my ban?

body:
I'd explain, but you've asked me not to talk to you.

-Snowspinner

On Jun 6, 2004, at 4:49 PM, sada asda wrote:

> I have been banned from the wikipedia. I have not been provided with a
> forum for discussing the issue, nor have I been given a reason why my
> ban is justified. My posts are being rejected from the english mailing
> list, the arbitration committee has neither ruled on this -- nor
> communicated with me. Why have I been banned, and how can I appeal?
>
>  Do you Yahoo!?
> Friends. Fun. Try the all-new Yahoo!
> Messenger_______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
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from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: Summary style (was Re: [WikiEN-l] Response to Bryan Derken)

body:
--- Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen at shaw.ca> wrote:
> You yourself later admitted that you came across as "curmudgeonly" in our
> discussion. You also threatened edit wars on two occasions - the first time
> by implication, saying I should avoid "meaningless edit wars" and the
> second time explicitly telling me I would "provoke an edit war" if I went
> ahead. I did _not_ consider your input to be particularly helpful, it came
> across more as an obstinate insistence that you knew best for this page and
> would brook no compromise. In contrast Mav, whom you included in your list
> of people who supported the way the article was split up, seemed willing to
> at least hear me out on my objections

Actually I agreed with you. The current state of the article series was a
temporary hack used to at least take care of the technical problems of the page
size issue. One 20KB - 30KB summary will eventually be needed for the series
and the detail moved to separate stand-alone articles. As it is, the only
option a user who wants to know about this part of U.S. history has at
Wikipedia is to read a ~2KB summary at [[History of the United States]], a ~1KB
lead section at [[Origins of the American Civil War]] or the entire 85KB+ body
of that series (which took about an hour to read every word). A comprehensive
summary that takes less than 15 minutes to read is needed as well as all the
detail - giving the reader a *choice* as to how much detail they are prepared
to go through in order to answer their questions. I would have written it
myself, but 172 indicated that any effort to do so would be reverted. So I
didn't bother spending time on it.

> (hope you don't mind me invoking your name like that, Mav).

Not at all. :) Although I expect 172 to ask me to recuse myself in the possible
 arbitration case involving him and VV.

> ...
> >But considering the lynch mob atmosphere of this mailing list, I suppose
> >that writing this article is more evidence in favor of a ban, right?
>
> This isn't about banning you. If I was into that sort of thing I would have
> made more of a ruckus when you moved the in-progress discussion into
> /Archive 2 and protected it, which even then seemed to me like a deliberate
> attempt to quash further debate. I'm simply pointing out that I had a
> similar experience to Geoff's, and came to a similar conclusion; you don't
> seem to work well in the Wikipedia environment collaborating with people
> who disagree with you, you seem to go on the attack instead.

Just some more background: 172 and I got into an edit war over whether or not
the Origins article should be listed at a featured article since the original
nomination was by an anon, was only seconded by 172 (who is the major author),
it did not have a lead section (that was later added), and was way too long.
The series hack you saw was (at the time) an acceptable compromise created to
stop the edit war. But the more I think about having such a fragile and
monolithic article designated as featured, the more I have come to regret my
acceptance of that compromise.

IMO, our featured articles should be easy to edit and be useful to a wide
variety of readers; from those that want quick summaries akin to what you might
expect to find in a desk-reference concise encyclopedia such as Webster's
Encyclopedia, to users who want lots of detail akin to what you might expect to
find in Britannica's full megapedia, along with a happy medium in-between, akin
to MS Encarta or Columbia. In short, we should have depth, breadth, and
brevity.

That is why I support what I call summary style articles. These are articles
which have one to three paragraph lead sections that briefly summarize the
entire topic and multi paragraph sections which summarize different aspects of
a topic and provide "Main article" links and, of course, in-line links to other
topics mentioned in the text (such as to articles on particular people or
events). Those main articles in turn follow the same organization until a topic
is *very* throughly covered but still very useful to people who do not want to
wade though all the detail. The user's navigation and exploration decides how
much content he/she is exposed to.

Lumping everything under the sun into one monolith article or article series
and not providing summaries is only useful to a limited set of users. Wikipedia
should have detail and summaries - not just one or the other.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

__________________________________
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subject: [Wikitech-l] Trivial bugfix in include/Math.php / Leave it as TeX

body:
Otherwise when a user chooses "Leave it as TeX" he always gets "$ $"
which is not that useful :).

Laurent

--- Math.php~	2004-06-06 21:14:58.655353058 +0200
+++ Math.php	2004-06-06 23:26:07.026770706 +0200
@@ -30,7 +30,7 @@

 		if( $this->mode == MW_MATH_SOURCE ) {
 			# No need to render or parse anything more!
-			return ('$ '.htmlspecialchars( $tex ).' $');
+			return ('$ '.htmlspecialchars( $this->tex ).' $');
 		}

 		if( !$this->_recall() ) {


body:
--- Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Nod. But we could give different goals to products.
> For example, the goal of wikireaders could be from now
> on be much more defined.
>
> It is already a different goal that wikipedia
> * it offers limited information (it is an extract of
> wikipedia)
> * it tries to cover quite generally a whole topic (eg,
> a wikireader on a country will covers its geography,
> politics, economics, tourism etc...)
> * it is meant to be read only (errors can't be fixed).
>
> * it is meant to be sold (while wikipedia is free)
>
> We could add to these different goals the fact the
> information in it has been double checked, that it
> undergone an *organised* peer-review (rather than a
> quite anarchic one like on wikipedia).

I agree with all of this and would like to add that the WikiReader idea could
eventually be expanded to cover entire limited subject/focus encyclopedias
(such as concise, science, biography, war, geography, ... etc.). Good
categorization could be used to help select which articles to go into these
various WikiReader encyclopedias and the concise version could use the lead
sections from a much larger set of articles. All selected articles would then
have to go through some kind of approval process and fixed as needed or
discarded from the list (all edits would still be on Wikipedia).

The idea that we could go from where we are to being able to print an entire
general encyclopedia like Britannica's megapedia (but larger) makes my head
spin. I think that the WikiReader idea could organically grow to fill that
role, but in manageable steps.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

__________________________________
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Friends.  Fun.  Try the all-new Yahoo! Messenger.
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