from_name: Iuriatan Muniz

subject:
[Wiktionary-l] Creation of Local Wiktionary mailing list for the
	PORTUGUESE wiktionary...

body:
Thank you a LOT !!! =)

and once it's been created, can anyone add it's entry to the
http://mail.wikipedia.org/ list ??? Just to help new contributor to
find it...

Once again, thank you...
                                                    iuri

On 5/10/05, wiki at kopfrechnung.de <wiki at kopfrechnung.de> wrote:
> Hello List,
>
> I have just created the Mailing List for the PT Wiktionary, the list is named:
> "WiktionaryPT-l".
>
> See for registration and more:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiktionarypt-l
>
> Sincerly yours
> Ronny Raschkowan
> [U: Fire]
>
> Zitat von Iuriatan Muniz <iuriatan at gmail.com>:
>
> > Hello... I didn't find a explicit explanation of the procedure to open
> > a local wiktionary mailing list... But the fact is we of the
> > Portuguese wiktionary are in need of such a list...
> >
> > Who can create the list ??? I could be the responsible, or moderator,
> > or whatever is necessary...
> >
> > If i'm writing to the wrong address, sorry... =(
> >
> > []'s
> >                                        Iuri
> > _______________________________________________
> > Wiktionary-l mailing list
> > Wiktionary-l at Wikipedia.org
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiktionary-l
> >
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wiktionary-l mailing list
> Wiktionary-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiktionary-l
>


list: wikien-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: David Gerard

subject: [WikiEN-l] "block" considered too harsh a word?

body:
Jim Redmond (jim at scrubnugget.com) [050511 02:16]:

> "Enforced hiatus"?

"Edits by this account have been placed on euphemistic administrative
hiatus for 24 hours because: you posted D00Dy H3 at D 100 times on
[[Wikipedia]]."

- d.


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Longterm hosting strategy

references:
<427AC817.3020701@wikia.com> <d5gone$rcf$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<d5gtdk$7eq$1@sea.gmane.org>

body:
Tim Starling wrote:
> It accomplishes the acquisition of hardware that we wouldn't have had
> otherwise. The hardware/hosting donations were contingent on their
> location.

In the case of the two largest donations, Yahoo and Big Company X (to be
announced later), the donation could easily flow directly into our
existing Florida facility.   I proposed Asia to Yahoo and they liked the
idea, but it wasn't a deal-breaker.  They want to help us in a way that
we find useful.

Similarly Big Company X is basically giving us a very flexible offer.
Come up with what we want, they will supply it.

Now, Belnet and the Dutch organization (to be announced at the end of
this month) *were* geography specific, as were the Paris squids.

But we can do anything anywhere, including a massive upgrade of our
florida facility.

One possibility would be an architecture with:
1. Squids everywhere, i.e. anywhere we can get a set of 4-6 squid-class
machines hosted for free, we accept it.

2.  Everything else is in Florida

3.  Except for a site geographically remote with all the databases in
place and joyfully doing remote backup.

This is probably the easiest to administer (but am I wrong?) but would
leave us the "Hurricane single point of failure".

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikitech-l] Longterm hosting strategy

body:
Lee Daniel Crocker wrote:
> Sorry, but I have to make a big-picture comment.  The phase 3 software
> was a quick hack, and reasonably effective at getting us over the
> bandwidth hump until we could afford to throw more hardware at the
> problem.  But my impression is that it is still 10-20 times less
> efficient than it could be if done right.  Good software takes time to
> design and build.  Might it not be wise to consider starting now to
> invest in some development work?

Yes, probably so.

By going out and negotiating all these deals for hardware, I have put us
in a position where the money that we have raised can hopefully be used
for something else.  Instead of thinking of this as an either/or "either
more machines *or* development work" we are now in the happy situation
of "more machines are coming... free" and so we can have *both*.

I'm a little skeptical about the 10-20 times less efficient claim.  But
there's surely room for improvement; there always is.  Someone who is
qualified to say can comment on how much improvement there might be to
the code.

--Jimbo


subject: [WikiEN-l] 'block' considered too harsh a word?

body:
Tony Sidaway (minorityreport at bluebottle.com) [050511 02:42]:
> Joseph Reagle said:
> > On Tuesday 10 May 2005 12:16, Jim Redmond wrote:

> >> Hmm... I can't come up with a single word that does better than
> >> "block".  What about "administrative review"?  "Temporary leave"?
> >> "Enforced hiatus"?

> > Sabbatical, mini-WikiHoliday?

> "Crushed by elephant" works for me.

Or, for those blocked from wikien-l, "crushed by autofellatio". Or was that
the people who subscribe to the non-digest?

- d.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: "block" considered too harsh a word?

body:
Richard Holton (richholton at gmail.com) [050511 03:06]:

> How about something along the lines of "your privilege to edit has
> been temporarily suspended."
> This is quite direct about what exactly has happened, while reminding
> the user that they have no inherent right to edit. It also emphasizes
> the temporary-ness of the action.

Judging by the sort of messages we get afterwards, I also predict it will
make no difference whatsoever.

- d.


list: foundation-l

from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Wikiversity

body:
Delirium:

> To what extent are wikis well suited to any of these
> endeavors?

A very reasonable question. When all you have is a hammer ...

MediaWiki is great for textual content, decent for images, usable for
other files. It is also getting good at structuring content in various
ways (categories, RSS extension). Wikis in general are a powerful tool
to develop simple workflows without having to write applications, e.g.,
I can create something like "Featured article candidates" or "Votes for
deletion" from scratch without being a coder.

This covers much of the content and the process side of Wikisophia, e.g.
I can see how a certification model might be implemented using basic
wiki pages. It does not cover some of the needs for publication (i.e.
peer review), but this is something we're actively pursuing for
Wikipedia already, and my intuition is that the solution (stable
revision flagging) will very likely be similar.

What MediaWiki does not cover is the very large and crucial area of
systematic learning and assessment.  Its interaction capabilities are
also somewhat limited, though probably sufficient in the early stages of
the project. This is an area that is currently staked out by modular
learning management systems like [[Moodle]], which allow you to use many
different pedagogical tools for any particular course.

Consequently, we also lack support for standards in the eLearning field,
most importantly probably [[SCORM]], which are currently used to
exchange instruction files in the eLearning community. Obviously, this
makes it very difficult to get people from that community involved.

I am just at the beginning of the technical needs evaluation for
Wikisophia, which will take several months at least. But my current
belief is that we either need to interface with existing eLearning
systems or, an approach which I generally prefer, add some of the
desired functionality to MediaWiki (possibly as extensions) and turn it
into a serious competitor for Moodle.

I am strongly opposed to launching Wikisophia before its technical needs
are fully evaluated and, to the extent which is necessary for the basic
operation of the project, met.

Erik


list: wikimedia-l

subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Wikiversity


from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject:
[Foundation-l] Re: Thoughts about a future board budget meeting (or
	budget board meeting ?)

body:
--- Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> I think the board should do a budget/financial meeting soon. The last one was
> done a trimester ago, so it is high time.

Yep it is.

> It seems to me we probably largely differed from our first trimester budget
> planning (but I may be wrong :-)). If so, I presume it will be due to the
> various hosting offers we got... In any cases, I think it would be most
> informative to see where we are going...

I was planning on just asking the board to extend last quarter?s budget to also
cover this quarter, since that is what actually is happening. I had hoped that
we would *finally* be able to buy much more than we needed and thus get ahead
of traffic increases but that did not seem to happen. A supplemental budget
could be added along with a supplemental fund drive if needed.

> Mav
> I have been wondering in the past few days if you could provide us an update
> on our financial situation ? Both general report (quick update on values) and
> later one of your nice quaterly report on the foundation website would be
> most welcome... I suppose you will answer me that you did not receive banking
> statements yet to do so... but I guess Terry could help there more than he
> could before.

You suppose right. :) The problem has been on my end (my fax machine was not
working). As of this week it should be working now, so I?ll remind Terry about
that.

> Question for developers :
> I'd like us to be informed on a non technical level of the future technical
> requirements to expect and possibly to be reminded how much we can expect
> from partners on this. Ie, how much is planned in the future to spend on
> servers, hosting and so on. I am sure you will answer it is tough to say, I
> know :-)

Yes - this is very, very much needed. I asked for a needs/wants/wish list for
the last budget but that never materialized. Thus we brought in a whole bunch
of money with no concrete plan on how to spend it. That is not something I want
to repeat.

> The general idea would be to try to evaluate how long the money we have in
> the bank will last... and if we can envision spending some of it on more
> creative ways than servers :-)
> Opinion on this topic ?

We need some numbers on that first.

> PS : I must mention that we are currently stuck in a rather ridiculous
> situation. The french squids needs some RAM... this RAM can only be purchased
> in a few websites... which refuse american credit cards... so we are
> currently trying to have it bought by the german association... which legally
> is not really authorized to do this... so, either the french association
> quickly has cash to pay for such expenses, or the foundation should have a
> credit card in europe to take care of such matters... opinion ?

We could wire some money to the French chapter?s bank account.

-- mav

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Make Yahoo! your home page
http://www.yahoo.com/r/hs


subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re: Thoughts about a future board budget meeting (or
	budget board meeting ?)


from_name: Tim Starling

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Longterm software strategy

body:
Brent 'Dax' Royal-Gordon wrote:
> Most reasonably mature languages are fast enough that the performance
> bottlenecks are usually in user code.

What a horrible generalisation. Most reasonably mature languages have
shocking tight loop performance. Tight loops are required for the
parsing of wikitext.

Here's the minimalistic example. This C++ code:

int main() {for (unsigned i=0; i<(unsigned)1e9; i++);}

executes in 1.58 seconds on my desktop computer. It was compiled with
g++ -O3. The equivalent PHP code:

<?php for ($i=0; $i<1e7; $i++); ?>

...took 6.3 seconds, or 400 times slower than C++ on this task. Perl is
173 times slower. For old times' sake I ran this:

FOR i& = 1 TO 1E+08
NEXT

... on QuickBASIC in safe mode in a DOS box. It took 8.5 seconds, a mere
54 times slower than 32-bit C++. So don't tell me interpreted languages
are getting faster, they're as slow as the day they were invented. If
you need to execute large numbers of calls to short-running functions,
you're sunk.

-- Tim Starling (considering rewriting parser in QuickBASIC)


subject: [Wikitech-l] Parser (was Re: Longterm hosting strategy)

body:
Neil Harris (usenet at tonal.clara.co.uk) [050511 01:33]:

> This is exactly the direction Linus Torvalds is moving in with git.
> ("Git" is a very fast and lightweight content-addressable version
> management tool written by Linus Torvalds as an alternative to
> conventional version control tools. not an insult).
> In fact, the git approach of using SHA-1 hashes as "true" content IDs
> has much to recommend it, as then there is no need even to use locking
> to issue new version IDs, since they can be generated just by hashing
> the source. This makes the git "filesystem" scalable over a huge number
> of concurrent developers without any (realistic) chance of a clash; and
> if two files do clash, you just add spaces to the end of the new file
> until the clash goes away. Perhaps we should be looking at going in the
> direction of git at the same time as we move the Wikitext out of the DB?

Another interesting thing about git: as I understand it (from reading the
git-traffic digest, not using it or anything), git preserves authorship by
the line, even when content is moved between files. Which would give us an
answer to "who put this sentence in?" Which would be very helpful for
collaborative editing, requesting references, etc.

- d.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Reactions to blocking

body:
Leif Knutsen (vyer at earthlink.net) [050511 06:00]:

> I do think that complaints against admins should be taken seriously.  Nobody should be de-admined because of one editor's grievances, but if there's a pattern of bad and borderline abusive behavior, action should be taken.

There are in fact procedures suited to this, e.g. WP:AN/I discussion, and
if nothing else works then arbitration. (And the AC does deal with
complaints against admins, talk from some non-admins notwithstanding.)

What gets me, though, is with your supposed experience, that you think the
three-revert rule doesn't apply to you, and that it somehow has become a
five-revert rule.

Do please reread [[WP:3RR]], particularly the bit which points out: "Note
that historically, public denunciation of the blocking admin has not tended
to gain sympathy." Think about why that might be the case.

- d.


body:
David A. Desrosiers (desrod at gnu-designs.com) [050511 06:07]:

> > Which would give us an answer to "who put this sentence in?" Which
> > would be very helpful for collaborative editing, requesting
> > references, etc.

> 	"...identifying plagarism..." ;)

Well, yeah ;-) There's all sorts of things a per-line facility would help
editors with in regard to the process of collaborative editing.

I'm not sure "per-line" is the appropriate unit for Wikimedia work.
"Per-word" might be interesting, if we have intrepid MediaWiki
experimenters out there ;-)

- d.


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Fred Bauder

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: no PD in France

body:
Ok, that relates to an actual case we had in arbitration, Irismeister, who I
understand is a Romanian practitioner with a Iridology practice in Paris.
Should he sue, in a Paris court, he would presumably win, and with a French
affiliate have someone he could get his "legal" hands on. How exposed are
we? If he requested removal of all his contributions, could we easily comply
technically? That is, do we have software which would easily allow removal
of all of someone's edits?

Actually I see little harm in removing every article he ever edited, as we
have a capacity to regenerate, like a lizard who has lost his tail.

Fred

> From: Jean-Baptiste Soufron <jbsoufron at gmail.com>
> Reply-To: wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> Date: Wed, 11 May 2005 13:08:41 +0200
> To: wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Re: no PD in France
>
>>>
>>> Does this mean that a French author can sue us for using work that he
>>> voluntarily contributed to Wikipedia?  Assuming the author's work has
>>> monetary value more than zero, then the zero we are paying him is by
>>> necessity more than 7/12 less than what it is really worth.  Are we
>>> legally different in this case than a commercial publisher who
>>> convinces
>>> someone to sign away his rights for much less than they're worth?
>
> Well, at least he could try to sue. I am not sure he would get remedies
> for a non-commercial use, but he could certainly obtain to forbid you
> to us his work any longer.
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Wikiversity

body:
Tim-

> Wikiversity is a vastly larger and more ambitious project than anything
> launched before by Wikimedia.

I considered writing a similar statement earlier in the thread, but then
I reflected upon it and was no longer sure it's true. Wikinews in
particular is probably similarly ambitious if you consider the stated
long term goal to become an alternative to established news agencies and
to build a global network of citizen journalists. However, Wikisophia
can certainly be defined in a way to match or exceed Wikinews in its
ambitions.

> You have no incentive scheme for teachers
> besides monetary. You're a bunch of 20-something year old dreamers who
> happened to be in the right place at the right time, and you expect
> large organisations to give you grants?

The World Bank grant application is something tangible for which we are
partnering with other eLearning projects. The key question here is how
the project is going to be framed. Again, the name "Wikiversity" hurts
more than it helps. If you are going to a large international
institution, and you point them to Wikipedia and say you'd like to build
an eLearning project using similar principles, your chances are not too
bad that they will listen. If you say that you want to create a "wiki
university", your chances are not too bad that they will laugh at you.

> Perhaps we have an advantage in
> that the rest of the world hasn't yet cottoned on to the fact that the
> people running Wikipedia were just lucky to discover a good idea early
> and enthusiastically jump on the bandwagon, and that the whole thing has
> been pulled off with near-zero managerial expertise or effort. They will
> cotton on, possibly after a failure or two.

Jimbo often insists that Wikipedia is first and foremost an
encyclopedia, not a community, but sometimes it is important to remember
that it is both. We are talking about thousands of volunteers motivated
by a desire to share knowledge, innovating every single day in the ways
this knowledge is structured, presented and distributed. This community,
if it could be bought, would be worth billions of dollars. And it is
growing every day.

"They" don't have this community, and they will have difficulties
building it. "They", if we're talking about companies, are strictly
hierarchically organized, proprietary to the extreme, and driven purely
by profit. No, with very few exceptions, I'm not worried about the
establishment catching up with us. I predict that the strongest
competitors we will face in the coming years and decades will come from
our own ranks and from the open source community.

> No-one here has experience with running a university. As far as I know,
> none of the people involved in this project have even taught at the
> tertiary level.

Careful, the Wikimedia community is a more colorful bunch than you may
realize :-). I have personally been an outside lecturer on sexology at a
German university.

> Of course there are people willing to teach for free, but they are
> greatly outnumbered by the people who want to learn for free.

Probably, but you are missing one of the key points of eLearning, which
is to greatly reduce the time investment required by the teacher. Jimbo
is currently learning German using various resources, such as flash
cards and audio records. Wikisophia could provide similar resources and
online courses which require no continued teacher participation. Some of
this material would be appropriate on Wikibooks, some would not;
importantly, Wikisophia would also index resources outside our current
projects.

As for the teaching time, we can prioritize: People in developing
countries, for example, could receive preferential treatment for
distance teaching.

Again, if we use a name like Wikiversity, we set an expectation that
there will be "professors" lecturing eloquently about certain subjects,
which is of course not very feasible for the reasons you cite.

> In short, there's no way to obtain an acceptable student-teacher
 > ratio without paying teachers, and to pay teachers you need an
 > administrative structure and managerial expertise.

I'm all for it, but these are long term goals. In the short term,
Wikisophia can be useful as a repository and index of educational
resources, with some careful dabbling in teacher/student interaction,
certification and original research.

Erik


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Wikiversity


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Wikiversity

body:
Because the proposed project serves the people. Check out the book Going
Broke by Degree. There is a major societal project to construct a workaround
of the blockage which has resulted from persistent rent-seeking by
traditional educational institutions. We may not be the solution, but the
problem is there to be tackled.

Fred

> From: Walter van Kalken <walter at vankalken.net>
> Reply-To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List <foundation-l at wikimedia.org>
> Date: Wed, 11 May 2005 15:57:53 +0700
> To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List <foundation-l at wikimedia.org>
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Re: Wikiversity
>
>
>>
>> The people who want a wikiversity have already a playground to develop
>> concepts and produce something. So far, I haven't seen any results. If
>> they develop something useful, fine, let's have a wikiversity. But
>> until then I see no sense in this discussion.
>>
>> Founding new projects can be a nice hobby, but I prefer working at and
>> improving our existing ones.
>>
> Although I skipped everything she wrote above, I conquer with Elian on
> all the points she made. Why spread ourselves even thinner?
>
> Walter/Waerth
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Wikiversity


from_name: MacGyverMagic/Mgm

body:
People need to put a valid reason in the box when blocking someone.
All too often I see someone blocked with a message like "vandalism".
How is a user, especially a new one, going to know what they did wrong
if people are so unclear about it?

I don't think "block" is a harsh word at all, but the difference
between block and ban needs to be explained more clearly in the help
pages and the fact it's just temporary needs to be emphasized when
blocking.

--Mgm

On 5/11/05, Deathphoenix <originaldeathphoenix at gmail.com> wrote:
> David Gerard wrote:
>
> >Tony Sidaway (minorityreport at bluebottle.com) [050511 02:42]:
> >
> >
> >>Joseph Reagle said:
> >>
> >>
> >>>On Tuesday 10 May 2005 12:16, Jim Redmond wrote:
> >>>
> >>>
> >
> >
> >
> >>>>Hmm... I can't come up with a single word that does better than
> >>>>"block".  What about "administrative review"?  "Temporary leave"?
> >>>>"Enforced hiatus"?
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >
> >
> >
> >>>Sabbatical, mini-WikiHoliday?
> >>>
> >>>
> >
> >
> >
> >>"Crushed by elephant" works for me.
> >>
> >>
> >
> >
> >Or, for those blocked from wikien-l, "crushed by autofellatio". Or was that
> >the people who subscribe to the non-digest?
> >
> >
> You've been a bad widdle editor, and you have to sit by the wall.
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Wikiversity

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:
> You are confusing a goal-oriented approach with hurry. There is no
> hurry. There is, however, a grants proposal to the World Bank in the
> works, and before we start seriously working on that, I'd like some
> basics to be settled.

Addressing the list in general:

Wikiversity is a vastly larger and more ambitious project than anything
launched before by Wikimedia. You have no incentive scheme for teachers
besides monetary. You're a bunch of 20-something year old dreamers who
happened to be in the right place at the right time, and you expect
large organisations to give you grants? Perhaps we have an advantage in
that the rest of the world hasn't yet cottoned on to the fact that the
people running Wikipedia were just lucky to discover a good idea early
and enthusiastically jump on the bandwagon, and that the whole thing has
been pulled off with near-zero managerial expertise or effort. They will
cotton on, possibly after a failure or two.

No-one here has experience with running a university. As far as I know,
none of the people involved in this project have even taught at the
tertiary level.

It would be alright if this were a project like Wikipedia, where all we
needed to do is write 2000 lines of code, strike a spark, and watch the
whole thing roar into flame. But it's not. Wikipedia is mostly written
by the huge pool of bored students with plenty of time on their hands.
The vast bulk of them don't have the skills to teach at the tertiary
level, and those that do are already paid for their time at an existing
university.

Of course there are people willing to teach for free, but they are
greatly outnumbered by the people who want to learn for free. In short,
there's no way to obtain an acceptable student-teacher ratio without
paying teachers, and to pay teachers you need an administrative
structure and managerial expertise.

Sorry to be harsh, but it had to be said. I count myself in all
statements about lack of collective skills.

-- Tim Starling


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Wikiversity


from_name: Axel

subject: [Wikitech-l] Parsers

body:
On 5/10/05, Andrew Rodland <arodland at entermail.net> wrote:
> Recently I've been working on parsing wikitext for some projects of my own, and
> because I think that a general-purpose parser is just a good thing to have. In
> any case, I've made significant progress on a Perl implementation. I'll link to
> the code below, but what I think is more interesting is the english. As far as
> I can tell, it is possible to parse wikitext in a "single pass" fashion,  and
> it's possible to do it quickly (more on that once I finish the last few
> features I need to enable benchmarking). In fact, I believe that if one is
> willing to forgo the TOC at the top, it's possible to parse and render
> incrementally (though for various reasons that's probably not such a great
> idea). With regard to
> http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?ConsumeParseRenderVsMatchTransform my code
> is of the "consume/parse/render" variety.
>
> Anyway, I'll stop rambling on about it, and get to the point. At this point, I
> doubt that my code is clean enough or useful enough for anyone else to make use
> of it, but I'm mentioning it in case it provides any insight or grounds for
> discussion, or in case anyone would like to base work off of it or make
> suggestions.
>
> The code is part of BerliOS project "wikioncd"; svn is at
> svn://svn.berlios.de/wikioncd/trunk/wikioncd (the parser, with a temporary
> driver, is in parser.pl); the ViewCVS for same is at
> http://svn.berlios.de/viewcvs/wikioncd/trunk/wikioncd/ .

Could you please add your parser implementation to this list:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Alternative_parsers

--
Axel Kramer
http://www.phpeclipse.de - PHP Eclipse Plugin
http://www.plog4u.org - Wikipedia Eclipse Plugin


from_name: daniwo59 at aol.com

subject: [Foundation-l] Wikiversitophia

body:
I am a little taken aback about the eagerness with which Wikiversity is
being discussed. It seems to me that the big questions are what software we use
and what we call it.

Fortunately, Tim, Elian, and others hit the nail on the head with some  of
their comments. This whole conversation would be more productive if we were  to
discuss things like: who are the students, who are the teachers, levels of
education, course curricula, teacher incentives, structuring lesson plans,
structure of semesters, accreditation, meeting local educational standards  (which
are delineated very rigidly), subject matter, interconnectivity between
classes, extra-wiki learning, grading, acceptance standards, why and how a wiki,
etc., etc., etc.

Sorry, but claiming that we are starting something new is little more than  a
placebo for a poorly thought out project. Personally, I wish some of our more
 academically oriented contributors past and present would be asked to weigh
in  on this.

Danny


subject: [Foundation-l] Wikiversitophia


from_name: JYP

subject: [Wikitech-l] Year 2025 bug

body:
Hi!
>
> There are basically two ways this could happen: either some machine had
> its clock incorrectly set to 2025 instead of 2005, and was subsequently
> corrected, or there's a horrible mysterious bug that corrupts one
> particular digit of the timestamp sometimes.

On fr.wikipedia, at the same time the 2025 bug happened, all blocked users
with an expire time not indefinite were unblocked. I don't know if any
blocked user with an expire time after 2025 would not have been unblocked
as there were none.

JYP


subject: [WikiEN-l] RE: Corrected

body:
Fastfission (fastfission at gmail.com) [050511 01:25]:

> I don't see any good way around this. It is less a problem of
> Wikipedia itself (though I'd be very careful of "fair use" because of
> the way it is structured in US law), as it is with the ability of the
> big and powerful to wage legal war even on principles they are in the
> wrong on. It's more of a maddening thought than it is a sobering one.

The mediapathic nature of such a suit.

"They're suing an encyclopedia for quoting them."
"WTF?!"

"They're suing Wikipedia for quoting them."
"UNLEASH THE NINJA FIRST-AMENDMENT ATTACK LAWYERS!"

It's the sort of backup one hopes never to have to call upon. But it's
there and keen to help. Avoid copyright paranoia.

- d.


from_name: Phil Boswell

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Interwiki map

body:
How often is the map refreshed from [[m:interwiki map]]?

The article simply states "fairly regularly".

A suggestion was made on [[TFD]] that instead of using templates to generate
external inks, we should be using interwiki links, so I'd like to know how
quickly such could be added.
--
Phil
[[en:User:Phil Boswell]]


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Wikiversity

body:
Not true. I was involved for many years with the Denver Free University. But
my advice would mainly consist of avoiding much of what happened there.

Fred

> From: Jean-Baptiste Soufron <jbsoufron at gmail.com>
> Reply-To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List <foundation-l at wikimedia.org>
> Date: Wed, 11 May 2005 13:00:23 +0200
> To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List <foundation-l at wikimedia.org>
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Re: Wikiversity
>
>> No-one here has experience with running a university. As far as I know,
>> none of the people involved in this project have even taught at the
>> tertiary level.


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Wikiversity


from_name: Brent 'Dax' Royal-Gordon

subject: [Wikitech-l] Proposal for deprecation of syntax features for 1.5

body:
?var Arnfj?r? Bjarmason <avarab at gmail.com> wrote:
> 1. <p>
>
> The only reason one would want to use <p> is to avoid the effect two
> newlines have of spawning a new paragraph, that is, to be able to
> write something like:

I've used it in a few cases where a single bullet point needs to have
multiple paragraphs.  (Yes, this really does happen sometimes.)
There's no other way to do this in wikicode.

Other than that, I concur.

--
Brent 'Dax' Royal-Gordon <brent at brentdax.com>
Perl and Parrot hacker


from_name: Asbestos

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Usernames advertising websites

body:
>From the website:

"Register editor and reporter, Gordon Watts, has been on special assignment
on site at "Ground Zero," to continue court action, report, and participate
in protests of the various abuses of the disabled patients..."

"Alert! You are being asked to help impeach judges involved in the Terri
Schiavo case"

Whatever his username, we probably need to keep an eye on his edits.

Sam
--
Asbestos
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Asbestos

On 5/10/05, Pete/Pcb21 <pete_pcb21_wpmail at pcbartlett.com> wrote:
> blankfaze wrote:
>
> > I have just noticed http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:GordonWattsDotCom...
> > It seems to me to be somewhat inappropriate to create a username
advertising
> > a personal website, but I didn't see anything in the Wikipedia username
> > policy ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Username ) that says
> > anything about adverts...
>
> I think "not distruptive" should cover it. If it becomes disruptive,
> then ask him to change it.
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


from_name: Austin Hair

body:
> The
 element is used a lot to enforce linebreaks where you can't do it
> otherwise (inline as template variables, for instance) on w:en, at the very
> least. I don't see that it would be particularly easy to avoid using them.

Don't forget forcing a
, commonly needed for
columns of images and things.

-- Austin


from_name: Rick

body:
> Maybe it should be a requirement of adminship that
> admins list a
> public email address on their user: page.
>
> -a

Or not.  I had my email address public, until I got
fed up with the abusive emails (I get enough of that
on my Talk page) and deleted it.

RickK

Discover Yahoo!
Get on-the-go sports scores, stock quotes, news and more. Check it out!
http://discover.yahoo.com/mobile.html


from_name: Elisabeth Bauer

subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Wikiversity

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:

> However, Wikisophia can certainly be defined in a way to match or
> exceed Wikinews in its ambitions.

Ambitions are easy to exceed. Results are more difficult to achieve.

So far, we have one rather successful encylopedia, a media repository
which could use better organization, a dictionary which is in desperate
need of software modifications, a quote collection with unsolved legal
problems, a biology wiki which is boycotted by all wikipedian biologists
I know, a news site whose participants are in the process of learning
journalism (with very varying success if I look at the latest headlines
of german wikinews), a dead memorial wiki for sep 11, a wiki for
developing teaching resources where I'm always disappointed when I look
into, and a source repository which duplicates the efforts of project
gutenberg.

Isn't this enough to work on?

> Jimbo often insists that Wikipedia is first and foremost an
> encyclopedia, not a community, but sometimes it is important to
> remember that it is both. We are talking about thousands of
> volunteers motivated by a desire to share knowledge, innovating every
> single day in the ways this knowledge is structured, presented and
> distributed. This community, if it could be bought, would be worth
> billions of dollars. And it is growing every day.

Growing, yes. Each day new people arrive whom we have to teach our
values and processes. More and more conflicts have to be resolved, new
articles and changes have to be checked and fixed. "The community",
defined as the dedicated group of people, knowing the way of the wiki
and having expertise in an area, shouldn't be stretched to its limits.

The people who want a wikiversity have already a playground to develop
concepts and produce something. So far, I haven't seen any results. If
they develop something useful, fine, let's have a wikiversity. But until
then I see no sense in this discussion.

Founding new projects can be a nice hobby, but I prefer working at and
improving our existing ones.

greetings,
elian


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Wikiversity


from_name: Andrew Dunbar

subject: [Wikitech-l] [patch] Category headers change

body:
This will be very nice for alphabetic languages but maybe not so good
for Chinese and Japanese. Also, some projects allow multiple languages
in titles and it wouldn't make any sense to groups the "z" of one
alphabet with the "a" of another.

Andrew Dunbar (hippietrail)

On 5/11/05, Michael Keppler <Michael.Keppler at gmx.de> wrote:
> Brent 'Dax' Royal-Gordon schrieb:
> > The attached patch (6KB, unified diff) against CategoryPage.php in
> > MediaWiki 1.4.4 changes the way headings are inserted into category
> > pages.
>
> I like that style very much as it seems to be very useful for smaller
> wikis. However, I also found a minor glitch in the system. If a grouped
> list of articles is split over two columns, then the group should be
> divided into two groups again instead of having the "continued" flag in
> the second column.
> See http://mt.brentdax.com/wiki/Category:Supporting_characters for an
> example in your wiki, where two groups B-M and S-Y would be more
> intuitive than the group B-Y.
>
> Ciao, Michael.
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>

--
http://linguaphile.sf.net


from_name: Mark Horner

subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Wikiversity

body:
The wiki based development suffers a lack of cohesion. The purpose of
many of the books is not very well defined, specifically the target
audience and the guidelines on writing for that audience.

The FHSST project will develop only raw content on WikiBooks, then
extract it all and edit it properly to produce a final book which can be
printed. We'll put the final content back for the community but keep a
fixed stable copy. The dynamic nature of the wikis also ensures that
schools and governments will never have confidence in the quality of the
content they would pull off one of the wikis, there is no reason to
assume that someone hasn't maliciously modified the content and waving
changelogs around isn't going to be very convincing.

My 2 cents worth.

Mark

Delirium wrote:
> Erik Moeller wrote:
>
>>> a wiki for developing teaching resources where I'm always disappointed
>>
>>
>> > when I look into
>>
>> Yes, Wikibooks is another project which is suffering from the software
>> not addressing all of its needs, particularly the modularization of
>> individual books.
>
>
> While I still hope it will turn into something very useful, I do think
> writing full-fledged books is something that is much harder to do in a
> wiki-style form of collaboration, even with software changes.  Even on
> Wikipedia, the "broad overview" articles, with a few exceptions, tend to
> be at a much lower standard of quality than you might expect by looking
> at the more narrow articles below them in the hierarchy.  This is
> probably because it's just a lot harder to write a broad/synthesis
> article in a collaborative fashion---they don't lend themselves very
> well to division of labor and modularization, since their entire point
> is to do the big-picture thing.
>
> This isn't to say that decent WikiBooks couldn't be written in a modular
> fashion, but a *great* book really needs someone to come by and
> integrate everything---a great textbook is a much different thing than
> 15 stapled-together individually great chapters, which I think we're
> much better at doing.
>
> -Mark
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>

--
--
Mark Horner

Jabber/AIM/Yahoo:   marknewlyn

Co-author:
http://www.nongnu.org/fhsst
http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/fhsst

"Life is but a seg-fault away ...

Life received signal SIGSEGV, Segmentation fault.
0x42074d40 in calloc () from /lib/i686/liblife.so.6"


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Wikiversity


from_name: Pavol Cupka

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Our own IRC server

body:
it is possible, login to that irc channel and turn on the logging
feature in your irc client

--
Palica
http://sk.wikipedia.org/User:Palica
Nezabudni si vzia? svoje Wikam?ny. / Don't forget to take your
Wikamins today. - Palica
http://sk.wikipedia.org - slobodn? encyklop?dia, ktor? m??e ka?d?
upravova? - AJ TY


list: wiktionary-l

from_name: wiki at kopfrechnung.de

subject:
[Wiktionary-l] Creation of Local Wiktionary mailing list for
	the	PORTUGUESE wiktionary...

body:
Hello,

to add that list at http://mail.wikimedia.org, you need someone with shell
access to edit this index page.
Please ask someone at #mediawiki if he could do that.

Sincerly yours,
Ronny Raschkowan
[U: Fire]

Zitat von Iuriatan Muniz <iuriatan at gmail.com>:

> Thank you a LOT !!! =)
>
> and once it's been created, can anyone add it's entry to the
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/ list ??? Just to help new contributor to
> find it...
>
> Once again, thank you...
>                                                     iuri
>
> On 5/10/05, wiki at kopfrechnung.de <wiki at kopfrechnung.de> wrote:
> > Hello List,
> >
> > I have just created the Mailing List for the PT Wiktionary, the list is
> named:
> > "WiktionaryPT-l".
> >
> > See for registration and more:
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiktionarypt-l
> >
> > Sincerly yours
> > Ronny Raschkowan
> > [U: Fire]
> >
> > Zitat von Iuriatan Muniz <iuriatan at gmail.com>:
> >
> > > Hello... I didn't find a explicit explanation of the procedure to open
> > > a local wiktionary mailing list... But the fact is we of the
> > > Portuguese wiktionary are in need of such a list...
> > >
> > > Who can create the list ??? I could be the responsible, or moderator,
> > > or whatever is necessary...
> > >
> > > If i'm writing to the wrong address, sorry... =(
> > >
> > > []'s
> > >                                        Iuri
> > > _______________________________________________
> > > Wiktionary-l mailing list
> > > Wiktionary-l at Wikipedia.org
> > > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiktionary-l
> > >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Wiktionary-l mailing list
> > Wiktionary-l at Wikipedia.org
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiktionary-l
> >
> _______________________________________________
> Wiktionary-l mailing list
> Wiktionary-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiktionary-l
>


from_name: SPUI

body:
Alphax wrote:
> While "blocked" and "blocking policy" are wikilinked, it might not be
> such a great idea to so publicly advertise the mailing list.

How else are you going to appeal a block for which the blocking admin
has no email specified?


subject:
[Foundation-l] Thoughts about a future board budget meeting (or
	budget board meeting ?)

body:
Anthere wrote:

> PS : I must mention that we are currently stuck in a rather
> ridiculous situation. The french squids needs some RAM... this RAM
> can only be purchased in a few websites... which refuse american
> credit cards... so we are currently trying to have it bought by the
> german association... which legally is not really authorized to do
> this... so, either the french association quickly has cash to pay for
> such expenses, or the foundation should have a credit card in europe
> to take care of such matters... opinion ?

Kurt ordered 9 RAM chips for the french squids on 3rd May, AFAIK.

greetings,
elian


from_name: Nicolas Weeger

subject:
[Foundation-l] Re:[Wikitech-l] Thoughts about a future board budget
	meeting (or budget board meeting ?)

body:
Hi everyone.

> PS : I must mention that we are currently stuck in a rather ridiculous situation. The french squids needs some RAM... this RAM can only be purchased in a few websites... which refuse american credit cards... so we are currently trying to have it bought by the german association... which legally is not really authorized to do this... so, either the french association quickly has cash to pay for such expenses, or the foundation should have a credit card in europe to take care of such matters... opinion ?

We have cash, a few people made promises of donations (what kind of figures are we talking about, btw? 50?? 500?? 5000?? 50000??) . But we don't yet have a bank account, and we won't have credit card, I think - checks only.

So either we have the bank account fast and can pay via checks, or someone provides money and hopes to be refunded by the association...

Nicolas Weege

Acc?dez au courrier ?lectronique de La Poste : www.laposte.net ;
3615 LAPOSTENET (0,34?/mn) ; t?l : 08 92 68 13 50 (0,34?/mn)


subject:
[Wikitech-l] Thoughts about a future board budget meeting (or
	budget board meeting ?)


from_name: Jean-Baptiste Soufron

subject: Wiki University (was: Re: [Foundation-l] Re: Wikiversity=>Wikisophia)

body:
Well if I had a remark to do...

Wikiversity, Wikademy, etc. All these names are quite funny... but they
are quite funny!

Do you want it to be a serious project for players in real markets or
do you want to be a wikijoke for folks like us... ?

Why not something very simple like : WIKI UNIVERSITY

It's simple, precise, clear, beautiful and cool. Plus it looks serious
enough.

Le 11 mai 05, ? 00:23, James D. Forrester a ?crit :

> On Tuesday, May 10, 2005, at 11:12, Jean-Baptiste Soufron
> <jbsoufron at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Le 10 mai 05, ? 12:45, Anthere a ?crit :
>>
>>> I fear I must say the name wikiversity does speak much more
>>> to me, and wikisophia is confusing. I am not very keen on
>>> this name change.
>>
>> I agree with Anthere :)
>
> Hmm. I rather liked someone's (whose?) suggestion of "Wikademy", which
> is
> has the same contraction of the "Wiki" prefix to "Wik" that we have in
> "Wiktionary", for example, but is strongly educationally-themed without
> having too much of a Higher Education feel to it; indeed, it much more
> stresses a Further Education bent which I think is the direction that
> the
> project is heading towards... ?
>
> Yours,
> --
> James D. Forrester -- Wikimedia: [[W:en:User:Jdforrester|James F.]]
>
> Mail: james at jdforrester.org | jon at eh.org | csvla at dcs.warwick.ac.uk
> IM  : (MSN) jamesdforrester at hotmail.com
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>


message_id:
<42693F9F0032B96C@n016.sc0.cp.net> (added by
	postmaster@bouncemessage.net)

from_name: Eden Akhavi

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Thoughts about a future board budget meeting
	(orbudget board meeting ?)

body:
> PS : I must mention that we are currently stuck in a rather
> ridiculous situation. The french squids needs some RAM...
> this RAM can only be purchased in a few websites... which
> refuse american credit cards... so we are currently trying to
> have it bought by the german association... which legally is
> not really authorized to do this... so, either the french
> association quickly has cash to pay for such expenses, or the
> foundation should have a credit card in europe to take care
> of such matters... opinion ?

What RAM do you need - give me the specs/quantities and I'll see what I can
do.

//Eden


from_name: Delirium

subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Wikiversity

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:

>> a wiki for developing teaching resources where I'm always disappointed
>
> > when I look into
>
> Yes, Wikibooks is another project which is suffering from the software
> not addressing all of its needs, particularly the modularization of
> individual books.

While I still hope it will turn into something very useful, I do think
writing full-fledged books is something that is much harder to do in a
wiki-style form of collaboration, even with software changes.  Even on
Wikipedia, the "broad overview" articles, with a few exceptions, tend to
be at a much lower standard of quality than you might expect by looking
at the more narrow articles below them in the hierarchy.  This is
probably because it's just a lot harder to write a broad/synthesis
article in a collaborative fashion---they don't lend themselves very
well to division of labor and modularization, since their entire point
is to do the big-picture thing.

This isn't to say that decent WikiBooks couldn't be written in a modular
fashion, but a *great* book really needs someone to come by and
integrate everything---a great textbook is a much different thing than
15 stapled-together individually great chapters, which I think we're
much better at doing.

-Mark


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Wikiversity


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Wikiversity

body:
>>
>
> I'm disinclined to agree with blanket statements like this, but the
> biggest problem I see with your logic is that you seem to assume that
> we have to model Wikisophia after traditional institutions if we
> combine research and teaching under "one roof", and that researchers
> also have to be teachers in such a framework.
>
> This is exactly the problem with the name "Wikiversity", it limits our
> thinking to what is there, when we are trying to create something
> fundamentally new. This is why I refuse to even use this name when
> discussing the project. I am not talking about a "wiki-university"
> here.

Well then, could you better describe this new thing that is not a
university nor a research lab...

is it a caf? ? :)

wikicaf? ? :D

> In fact, what I would like to do is to really get to the bottom of
> these questions: What makes a good researcher? What makes a good
> teacher? How can we improve and assess people's ability to teach, or
> to research? How can we directly apply the latest results from
> didactical and pedagogical research to the teaching processes? How can
> we have meaningful feedback processes from learners to teachers to
> researches, and the other way?
> Certainly, the process of communicating knowledge to a larger group of
> people, whether in person or electronically, is always one which can
> have creative and surprising outcomes. I want to build a model where
> students can easily share ideas with people who are at the forefront
> of research,

I told you, it's a caf? !!!! :D

wikicaf? :)

> while being taught by those who have a proven ability to do so. We
> have to separate the discussion about *role selection* from the
> discussion about what roles should be allowed within a single project.
> Your analogy with "Current events" answers your own point: Research
> can begin as a section of Wikisophia, we can experiment with it, and
> we can assess how much sense it makes to develop this into its own
> separate project.

Well the thing is that teachers won't really participate to such a
project on the basis you suggest. Michel Foucault explained quite well
that the only difference between a teacher and his students is that the
students are evaluated by the teachers and nothing else, the only
difference is that information is not share equally among them.

And the further you go in your studies, the more true it is. Max Weber
wrote a whole book describing about the situation of PhD students in
front of their teachers.

Is it a good or a bad thing ?

I don't know but trying to help students to better share ideas with
teachers is nothing new. There has been plenty of experimentation about
this in France...

But what you describe could be interesting amongst people who are
already equals: researchers. So is it for researchers or for teachers,
or for both ? What would it look like ?

>
> * Wikiquote's entire body of work consists of other people's words
> offered as "free content"

"free content" is in no way a legal definition :)

> * Wikisource offers public domain content under the GFDL

you can't offer PD work under GFDL since GFDL is based on copyright...
>
> In the case of Wikinews, we had the foresight to know that neither the
> copyleft principle nor the complicated GFDL would necessarily be
> desirable, so we chose to put the content in the public domain,

which is not possible under many legislations in the world...

> The Wikimedia Commons was defined by me initially as a repository of
> *free* content, with no exceptions for fair use or non-commercial use
> content, and this decision, too, has proven to be very beneficial to
> the project.

Still there are many legal issues with commons.

I know it since I deal with them every day on IRC... can I use this on
commons ? could we put this ?

>
> The community that has arisen on the Commons is probably more aware of
> copyright issues than any other, systematic tagging of all content has
> always been part of its policies,

which is a VERY good thing !

>
> Just because copyright on these two projects is talked about a lot
> doesn't mean that they have a lot of problems; in fact, it means that
> they have been the busiest *solving* problems, while there's been
> virtually no progress on the issues with our existing projects listed
> above.

Well this is not an argument. There are copyright problems on each
projects, solved by none of them. Commons is no better (and no worse)
but it solved nothing and I don't see a lot of progress in it (except
systematic tagging).


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Wikiversity


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Wikiversity

body:
I agree with Tim.

The project looks very vague to me. Plus there are already many people
working on such things. For example, I am currently working with
researchers in France on something that could be part of it: a tool to
allow to adress consistency problems and evolution within wikis.

> Addressing the list in general:
>
> Wikiversity is a vastly larger and more ambitious project than anything
> launched before by Wikimedia. You have no incentive scheme for teachers
> besides monetary. You're a bunch of 20-something year old dreamers who
> happened to be in the right place at the right time, and you expect
> large organisations to give you grants? Perhaps we have an advantage in
> that the rest of the world hasn't yet cottoned on to the fact that the
> people running Wikipedia were just lucky to discover a good idea early
> and enthusiastically jump on the bandwagon, and that the whole thing
> has
> been pulled off with near-zero managerial expertise or effort. They
> will
> cotton on, possibly after a failure or two.
>
> No-one here has experience with running a university. As far as I know,
> none of the people involved in this project have even taught at the
> tertiary level.
>
> It would be alright if this were a project like Wikipedia, where all we
> needed to do is write 2000 lines of code, strike a spark, and watch the
> whole thing roar into flame. But it's not. Wikipedia is mostly written
> by the huge pool of bored students with plenty of time on their hands.
> The vast bulk of them don't have the skills to teach at the tertiary
> level, and those that do are already paid for their time at an existing
> university.
>
> Of course there are people willing to teach for free, but they are
> greatly outnumbered by the people who want to learn for free. In short,
> there's no way to obtain an acceptable student-teacher ratio without
> paying teachers, and to pay teachers you need an administrative
> structure and managerial expertise.
>
> Sorry to be harsh, but it had to be said. I count myself in all
> statements about lack of collective skills.
>
> -- Tim Starling
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Wikiversity


from_name: Fred Bauder

subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Wikiversity

body:
The posts on the list have resulted in my having an interest in the project.
That is what results from widening the base of people discussing a project.
My continued involvement would depend on others also having a serious
interest and the project amounting to something. "No one here" is quite
ambiguous.

Fred

> From: Tim Starling <t.starling at physics.unimelb.edu.au>
> Reply-To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List <foundation-l at wikimedia.org>
> Date: Thu, 12 May 2005 03:55:24 +1000
> To: foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> Subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Wikiversity
>
> Fred Bauder wrote:
>>
>> Tim Starling wrote:
>>>
>>> No-one here has experience with running a university. As far as I
>>> know, none of the people involved in this project have even taught
>>> at the tertiary level.
>>
>> Not true. I was involved for many years with the Denver Free
>> University. But my advice would mainly consist of avoiding much of
>> what happened there.
>
> [top post repaired]
>
> I meant the Wikiversity project, not all of Wikimedia. Only a handful of
> people have contributed to the Wikiversity pages on the wiki. No
> offence, but I didn't think you were one of them.
>
> -- Tim Starling
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Wikiversity


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: no PD in France

body:
>>
>> Does this mean that a French author can sue us for using work that he
>> voluntarily contributed to Wikipedia?  Assuming the author's work has
>> monetary value more than zero, then the zero we are paying him is by
>> necessity more than 7/12 less than what it is really worth.  Are we
>> legally different in this case than a commercial publisher who
>> convinces
>> someone to sign away his rights for much less than they're worth?

Well, at least he could try to sue. I am not sure he would get remedies
for a non-commercial use, but he could certainly obtain to forbid you
to us his work any longer.


from_name: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason

body:
Here are a few syntax features that I propose we deprecate for 1.5,
the reasons are mainly to simplify the the wikitext to make parsing
simpler.

1.

The only reason one would want to use
 is to avoid the effect two
newlines have of spawning a new paragraph, that is, to be able to
write something like:

This

Is all one

Paragraph

This feature is seldom (if ever) used.

2.  and
We have a syntax for these two, namely ''' and '' for  and  respectively.

3. {{msg:}}

Leftover stuff from the 1.2 days, let's kill it;)


from_name: Angela

subject:
[Foundation-l] Re: [Wikimediafr-l] Thoughts about a future board
	budget meeting (or budget board meeting ?)

body:
On 5/11/05, Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> I think the board should do a budget/financial meeting soon. The last one
> was done a trimester ago, so it is high time.

Considering how difficult it has been to get the board together for a
meeting in the last month, I strongly suggest we have this as part of
the meeting planned for Monday 16th May rather than trying to find a
suitable point in Jimbo's schedule for two meetings.

> Question for Danny and for those taking care of grants and prizes...
> I think we have no grants planned right now (except for wikimania). Am I
> correct that we should not expect any income in the near future from that
> direction ?

Also, are there any grants out there that people think we _should_ be
applying for which we might not be aware of yet?

> Also, depending on what is left, we must think of the time when the next
> fundraising will be reasonable to do. I suspect it is a bad idea to do it in
> summer... so, in short, do we need to plan something in june, or will we be
> able to last till september ?

I'd prefer June since that is still within the 2nd quarter which is
when the next fundraising drive was expected.

> ...so, either the french
> association quickly has cash to pay for such expenses, or the foundation
> should have a credit card in europe to take care of such matters... opinion ?

Is there any reason we don't have a credit card on the Belgian account?

Angela.


subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re: [Wikimediafr-l] Thoughts about a future board
	budget meeting (or budget board meeting ?)


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Wikiversity

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:

>> Isn't this enough to work on?
>
> Yes, for the time being. Our existing projects should stabilize before
> Wikisophia is launched. That doesn't mean we shouldn't think about it
> or work on grant applications and cooperations which will benefit all
> our projects.

Yes of course.  But in your original post on the matter you said, "I'd
like to announce my intention to move the relevant pages on Meta and
edit the summary to reflect the name change."  This kind of comment
announcing unilateral action is bound to rouse the community, and get
them it completely distracted on the issue of the name.  As much as I
support the continued use of "Wikiversity" I realize that if and when it
becomes a full fledged independent project it could do so with a
different name.  If your POV is that the new name should be "Wikisophia"
just keep using it in your messages.  If there is support for it others
will start using it too.  Presuming that it will be accepted is bound to
stir passions.

Ec


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Wikiversity


from_name: Poor, Edmund W

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Corrected (Wollmann)

body:
> There is no legal ground related to us mentionning that a third party
> elected him a kook; so this issue is irrelevant.

If not on legal grounds, how about on the general principle of being
nice?

Is it crucial to Wikipedia's integrity that we INCLUDE a mention of the
fact that some anonymous troublemakers have branded a non-notable
private citizen with a very annoying label?

Uncle Ed thinks not.


from_name: Brent 'Dax' Royal-Gordon

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re: Proposal for deprecation of syntax features for
	1.5

body:
Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
> I'm not sure if it would be a more or less drastic change, but making
> bold be four tics instead of three would also solve the problem.  Then
> without lookahead: 2 tics is italics; 3 ticks is an apostrophe plus
> italics; 4 tics is bold; 5 tics is an apostrophe plus bold; 6 tics is
> bold and italic; and 7 tics is an apostrophe plus bold and italic.

If we're going to do that, we might as well face up to the fact that
'' and ''' aren't particularly logical choices in the first place.
(I'm not going to argue that we should change it, just that if we're
going to change it we should make it more intuitive and convenient,
not less.)

--
Brent 'Dax' Royal-Gordon <brent at brentdax.com>
Perl and Parrot hacker


from_name: James D. Forrester

body:
On Wednesday, May 11, 2005, at 2:21 PM, Mathias Schindler
<neubau at presroi.de> wrote:

> ?var Arnfj?r? Bjarmason wrote:
> > Here are a few syntax features that I propose we deprecate for 1.5,
> > the reasons are mainly to simplify the the wikitext to make parsing
> > simpler.

[Snip:
, , and  elements, and the {{msg:xxx}} transclude tag.]

> Hi ?var,
>
> I support all three points on your list

Yes, they seem sensible.

> (why do you want to keep
 and
?)

The
 element allows styling which pre-pending a ' ' to each line
doesn't, which can be useful (and is used in places).

The
 element is used a lot to enforce linebreaks where you can't do it
otherwise (inline as template variables, for instance) on w:en, at the very
least. I don't see that it would be particularly easy to avoid using them.

> Depreciating it would result in error messages? A simple handbook
> addition? A social pressure to convert remaining ones?

I'd imagine an automatic conversion would be easiest to manage.

Yours,
--
James D. Forrester -- Wikimedia: [[W:en:User:Jdforrester|James F.]]

Mail: james at jdforrester.org | jon at eh.org | csvla at dcs.warwick.ac.uk
IM  : (MSN) jamesdforrester at hotmail.com


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Wikiversity

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:

> Anthere:
>
>> Then why are both wikicommons and wikinews still envased in copyright
>> issues ?
>
> "Envased" is not an English word, if you mean that both projects have
> lacked planning and foresight when it comes to copyright issues, then
> I would argue that the exact opposite is the case:

You're right of course, and sometimes it would be quite understandable
if it meant that Anthere wanted to see you stuffed in a vase. :-)

Literally, the reference is to the feminine form of "vase", which is the
sediment that builds up in a stagnant body of water.  It becomes
"enveser" or silted over.  Figuratively, it becomes "stuck in the mud",
or "mired".  An interesting word!

Ec


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Wikiversity


body:
Timwi <timwi at gmx.net> wrote:
> I can't believe people are still bringing forward this argument. No, we
> don't! We do *not* want to limit our set of alternatives for the benefit
> of other webmasters. Whoever needs a pure-PHP wiki engine should fork
> MediaWiki and maintain it themselves when it becomes too un-PHP for
> their taste. This shouldn't - rather, MUST NOT - be Wikimedia's
> responsibility, and it MUST NOT adversely affect Wikipedia's performance.
...
> Funny, first you clearly state that Wikimedia is not likely to run
> Windows servers anytime soon, and then you call for maintenance of
> Windows support. :-)

Then throw in an if($wgUseCExtensions) or something.

Although I contribute to en.wikipedia.org, understand that my primary
concern and interest in MediaWiki is as a piece of software I can use
on my own websites.  I don't use hosting accounts without shell access
(and in fact most of my sites are on my own server), but I can
sympathize with people who do; I don't use Windows servers, but I can
sympathize with those people too.

> > On the back end, Perl 6 is specced to have one of the most powerful
> > pattern-matching engines ever shipped with a language; it should be
> > able to eat wikicode for breakfast.
>
> Yet Another Not-Really-A-Parser (a.k.a. RegExp HodgePodge)?

grammar MediaWiki::Wikitext {
    rule start :parsetree {
        ^ <wikitext> $
    }
    rule wikitext {
        <literal> [ <command> <literal> ]*:
    }
    rule literal {
        <-[<>\[\]'{}\n]>*?
    }
    rule command {
        <bold_italic>
    |   <extlink>
    |   <wikilink>
    |   <template>
    |   (\n\h*\n)
    |   .                    # fallback
    }
    ...
}

Clearly that isn't complete (or even entirely functional), but you get the idea.

--
Brent 'Dax' Royal-Gordon <brent at brentdax.com>
Perl and Parrot hacker


body:
Zitat von Iuriatan Muniz <iuriatan at gmail.com>:

> Thank you a LOT !!! =)
>
> and once it's been created, can anyone add it's entry to the
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/ list ??? Just to help new contributor to
> find it...
>
> Once again, thank you...
>                                                     iuri
>
> On 5/10/05, wiki at kopfrechnung.de <wiki at kopfrechnung.de> wrote:
> > Hello List,
> >
> > I have just created the Mailing List for the PT Wiktionary, the list is
> named:
> > "WiktionaryPT-l".
> >
> > See for registration and more:
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiktionarypt-l
> >
> > Sincerly yours
> > Ronny Raschkowan
> > [U: Fire]
> >
> > Zitat von Iuriatan Muniz <iuriatan at gmail.com>:
> >
> > > Hello... I didn't find a explicit explanation of the procedure to open
> > > a local wiktionary mailing list... But the fact is we of the
> > > Portuguese wiktionary are in need of such a list...
> > >
> > > Who can create the list ??? I could be the responsible, or moderator,
> > > or whatever is necessary...
> > >
> > > If i'm writing to the wrong address, sorry... =(
> > >
> > > []'s
> > >                                        Iuri
> > > _______________________________________________
> > > Wiktionary-l mailing list
> > > Wiktionary-l at Wikipedia.org
> > > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiktionary-l
> > >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Wiktionary-l mailing list
> > Wiktionary-l at Wikipedia.org
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiktionary-l
> >
> _______________________________________________
> Wiktionary-l mailing list
> Wiktionary-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiktionary-l
>


from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [Foundation-l] Wikiversitophia

body:
daniwo59 at aol.com:
>  This whole conversation would be more productive if we were  to
> discuss things like: who are the students, who are the teachers, levels of
> education, course curricula, teacher incentives, structuring lesson plans,
> structure of semesters, accreditation, meeting local educational standards  (which
> are delineated very rigidly), subject matter, interconnectivity between
> classes, extra-wiki learning, grading, acceptance standards, why and how a wiki,
> etc., etc., etc.

Yes. Many of these discussions have already taken place on
[[m:Talk:Wikiversity]] and should continue there.

> Sorry, but claiming that we are starting something new is little more than  a
> placebo for a poorly thought out project.

Well, first of all, there already *is* a Wikiversity effort on
Wikibooks, whether we like it or not. At some point we'll have to decide
what to do with that. There also is de.wikiversity.org, which was
silently created; I was the first person who publicly stated that it
should not be considered an official Wikimedia effort.

Secondly, I personally have not advocated launching Wikisophia anytime
soon and have made it clear that in my opinion, the project needs a much
better definition and research into its needs before its launch. The
fact that I am advocating that this process should continue under a new
name doesn't mean that I want it to be finished tomorrow.

It seems that many people equate discussion with "impatient people
wanting the project to be launched", perhaps because this is the way
that things were done in the past. Personally, I think the discussion
we're having is an important prelude to seriously rethinking this idea,
and properly defining its scope (I do not allege that I have provided
such a definition, merely an outline thereof).

Erik


subject: [Foundation-l] Wikiversitophia


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Wikiversity

body:
Elisabeth Bauer:

> So far, we have one rather successful encylopedia, a media repository
> which could use better organization,

Kennisnet may be interested in helping with that, I am in talks with the
relevant people.

> a dictionary which is in desperate
> need of software modifications,

I'm working on that.

> a quote collection with unsolved legal
> problems,

Headache. Personally, I never wanted Wikiquote to be a Wikimedia project.

> a biology wiki which is boycotted by all wikipedian biologists
> I know,

:-) Gerard and I have talked a bit about this; once we have a Wikidata
prototype out in the wild, perhaps we'll be able to find funding to
create a Wikidata schema for Wikispecies.

> a news site whose participants are in the process of learning
> journalism (with very varying success if I look at the latest headlines
> of german wikinews)

I won't pat myself on the back too much, but I think we're doing well in
terms of monitoring the progress of the international editions and
highlighting successes and weaknesses.

> a dead memorial wiki for sep 11

Yes. Please convert into static HTML ASAP. If nobody else feels up to
the task, I'm willing to help.

> a wiki for developing teaching resources where I'm always disappointed
 > when I look into

Yes, Wikibooks is another project which is suffering from the software
not addressing all of its needs, particularly the modularization of
individual books.

 > a source repository which duplicates the efforts of project
> gutenberg.

A bit harsh; the coming language subdomain split is a good short term
solution to encourage more translations (I don't think it's the best
approach, but that's another story), which is probably the great
potential of Wikisource.

> Isn't this enough to work on?

Yes, for the time being. Our existing projects should stabilize before
Wikisophia is launched. That doesn't mean we shouldn't think about it or
work on grant applications and cooperations which will benefit all our
projects.

Erik


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Wikiversity


from_name: Mathias Schindler

body:
?var Arnfj?r? Bjarmason wrote:
> Here are a few syntax features that I propose we deprecate for 1.5,
> the reasons are mainly to simplify the the wikitext to make parsing
> simpler.

Hi ?var,

I support all three points on your list (why do you want to keep <br>
and <pre>?)

Depreciating it would result in error messages? A simple handbook
addition? A social pressure to convert remaining ones?

Mathias


from_name: Anders Wegge Jakobsen

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Proposal for deprecation of syntax features for 1.5

body:
"Mathias" == Mathias Schindler <neubau at presroi.de> writes:

> ?var Arnfj?r? Bjarmason wrote:
>> Here are a few syntax features that I propose we deprecate for 1.5,
>> the reasons are mainly to simplify the the wikitext to make parsing
>> simpler.

> Hi ?var,

> I support all three points on your list (why do you want to keep
>
 and
?)

 is pretty damm usefull when there's more
than one floated image on a page.

--
/Wegge
Min holdning til Usenet - <http://wiki.wegge.dk/Usenet>
Min weblog - <http://blog.wegge.dk/>


from_name: Andrew Rodland

body:
On 5/11/05, ?var Arnfj?r? Bjarmason <avarab at gmail.com> wrote:
> Here are a few syntax features that I propose we deprecate for 1.5,
> the reasons are mainly to simplify the the wikitext to make parsing
> simpler.

(Hello, I'm the guy who wrote "Parsers", but now from a subscribed address)

I'd also like to suggest the removal of the workaround (occupying most
of the first half of parser.php doQuotes) dealing with confusion of
quotes-as-text and quotes-as-markup within words. In other words, the
workaround provides that "l'''italic''plain" renders as
"l<i>italic</i>plain".

My feelings are that this is a rather complicated workaround for a
user-input error (see doQuotes() if you want to know how complicated),
and that furthermore, it's bad for parsing. It introduces an ambiguity
to the wikitext syntax that can't be resolved without an arbitrary
amount of forward context. This makes it hard to express wikitext as a
grammar, and almost as hard to parse it quickly. Hopefully its use is
rather rare; would it be possible to run a scan to find out more
conclusively?

Thank you for your time,
Andrew


from_name: Walter van Kalken

subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Wikiversity

body:
>
> The people who want a wikiversity have already a playground to develop
> concepts and produce something. So far, I haven't seen any results. If
> they develop something useful, fine, let's have a wikiversity. But
> until then I see no sense in this discussion.
>
> Founding new projects can be a nice hobby, but I prefer working at and
> improving our existing ones.
>
Although I skipped everything she wrote above, I conquer with Elian on
all the points she made. Why spread ourselves even thinner?

Walter/Waerth


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Wikiversity


from_name: Rebecca

subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Wikiversity

body:
On 5/11/05, Erik Moeller <erik_moeller at gmx.de> wrote:

> I considered writing a similar statement earlier in the thread, but then
> I reflected upon it and was no longer sure it's true. Wikinews in
> particular is probably similarly ambitious if you consider the stated
> long term goal to become an alternative to established news agencies and
> to build a global network of citizen journalists. However, Wikisophia
> can certainly be defined in a way to match or exceed Wikinews in its
> ambitions.

Wikiversity can, yes. That's what we've been saying all along.

> Probably, but you are missing one of the key points of eLearning, which
> is to greatly reduce the time investment required by the teacher. Jimbo
> is currently learning German using various resources, such as flash
> cards and audio records. Wikisophia could provide similar resources and
> online courses which require no continued teacher participation. Some of
> this material would be appropriate on Wikibooks, some would not;
> importantly, Wikisophia would also index resources outside our current
> projects.

This is one area in which you're dead right. Think outside the box,
people. There may be plenty of courses in which a facilitator plays a
continual role, but there may not be in others. In any case, such a
facilitator is going to play a very different role to that of my
lecturer at university in the real world.

> Again, if we use a name like Wikiversity, we set an expectation that
> there will be "professors" lecturing eloquently about certain subjects,
> which is of course not very feasible for the reasons you cite.

The same argument could have been used when we set up Wikipedia -
after all, the expectation then was that you needed each article in an
encyclopedia to be written by academics and peer reviewed. They may
indeed have that expectation, but that's where we need to show them
that that expectation is wrong.

> I'm all for it, but these are long term goals. In the short term,
> Wikisophia can be useful as a repository and index of educational
> resources, with some careful dabbling in teacher/student interaction,
> certification and original research.

A respository and idex of educational resources is Wikibooks. Careful
dabbling in teacher/student interaction, actual courses, and
potentially certification and original research is Wikiversity. This
is why we define our projects before creating them, instead of
creating great white elephants.

-- ambi


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Wikiversity


subject: [Foundation-l] Wikiversity=>Wikisophia

body:
On 5/11/05, Erik Moeller <erik_moeller at gmx.de> wrote:

> There are various "School" pages, most of which are stubs, some of which
> are vague collections of links to Wikibooks and Wikipedia, and very few
> of which make real attempts to organize information in courses. Due to
> the nature of (pseudo-)namespaces, information is strewn about: some is
> in the article namespace, some is in the proper pseudo-namespace, and it
> is very difficult to search the content properly. Categories are missing
> almost entirely. The software needs of the project have never been
> properly evaluated -- all that is used are standard blank wiki pages.

This is all it's ever going to become as long as it sits in template
mode in Wikibooks. Give it wings and it will fly.

> With such a broad scope, people have no idea what to put on those blank
> pages, so everyone is putting something different there. And, as
> expected, the project follows very strongly the models of traditional
> universities, which is not necessarily what is appropriate to achieve
> the desired goals.

A broad scope? The site Erik is advocating has no defined purpose
apart from "learning", and no model of how this could be achieved. Our
current model sets out a potential site design. Furthermore, I've
argued in the past of how this could work - taking some of the basic
ideas behind the structure of a university, and adapting them to
create our own e-learning project following wiki principles. There is
the potential for courses in all sorts of areas - not just your
standard tertiary fare - and the potential to boost Wikibooks, because
it would create the need to design workable textbooks and
supplementary materials.

> Given this, it is quite bitterly ironic that Ambi refers to the possible
> outcome of (re-)organizing the project as "disastrous"; it can hardly
> get any worse than it is at the present time. Moving this mess of pages
> to its own domain name is a recipe for failure.

It does need to be more clearly defined before being taken live - that
is true. I've had it in mind to write up a Wikinews-style proposal
since you began the process with that project, but haven't had the
time nor motivation to do so as of yet. This is why I'm *not* arguing
to move the current model to its own domain name at this very moment -
although I believe it would be a very good idea to do so in the
future.

> Many people are very excited about the idea, but very few people agree
> on what it actually means. The process of moving the project from a
> subspace on Wikibooks to its own domain name, as an official Wikimedia
> project, is the best possible opportunity to rethink Wikiversity, to
> evaluate and prioritize its technical needs, to get the existing
> eLearning community involved, to develop useful and consistent policies,
> to define and pursue long term goals, and so on.

Precisely. The way to do this, however, is not to throw the entire
idea out the window and insist on some amorphous mass that would not
even try to be a coherent project, but to finetune what's already been
proposed by the interested parties.

> There have been no "proposals and changes without consulting". I have
> suggested changing the name of the project, and I have cross-posted this
> suggestion to the relevant multi-language fora. This *is* a solicitation
> of feedback from the existing Wikiversity community on the proposed name
> change.

That's not what you advocated in your first post, but whatever - at
least it's a step away from mutilating the proposal immediately.

-- ambi


subject: [Foundation-l] Wikiversity=>Wikisophia


from_name: eric poscher

subject: [Wikitech-l] uploading picture_s_

body:
Hi,

Thanks for this hint, but this screenshot looks like the programm was written
for a very bad operating system, which I haven't been using for a long time.

any other suggestions how to do it the simple way?

scp upload  or something?

cheers,
eric

Pavol Cupka schrieb:
> Try this tool
>
> http://tiredbrain.com/wikimedia/commonplace/
>
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

--
.---------------------------------------------------------------------------.
|                 |    "I have a dream that my four little children will    |
|  eric.poscher   |     one day live in a nation where they will not be     |
|     @epe.at     |   judged by the color of their skin but by the content  |
|                 |       of their character." Martin Luther King, 1963     |
`--------------------------------------------------------------------------'


from_name: Arkady Rose

subject: [WikiEN-l] 'block' considered too harsh a word?

body:
SPUI wrote:
> Alphax wrote:
>
>> While "blocked" and "blocking policy" are wikilinked, it might not be
>> such a great idea to so publicly advertise the mailing list.
>
>
> How else are you going to appeal a block for which the blocking admin
> has no email specified?

Maybe it should be a requirement of adminship that admins list a
public email address on their user: page.

-a
--
Imagination is just intelligence having fun.

--
No virus found in this outgoing message.
Checked by AVG Anti-Virus.
Version: 7.0.308 / Virus Database: 266.11.8 - Release Date: 10/05/2005


body:
(forwarded to list. Whoops.)
On 5/11/05, Nicolas Weeger <nicolas.weeger at laposte.net> wrote:
> > I'd also like to suggest the removal of the workaround (occupying most
> > of the first half of parser.php doQuotes) dealing with confusion of
> > quotes-as-text and quotes-as-markup within words. In other words, the
> > workaround provides that "l'''italic''plain" renders as
> > "l<i>italic</i>plain".
> >
> <snipped>
> > Hopefully its use is
> > rather rare; would it be possible to run a scan to find out more
> > conclusively?
>
> Fatal error: failed assert( not_much_in_use ); on line 345 :)
> This is widely used (at least) on w:fr: and is *required* - many words
> starting with a vowel will yield a leading "l'", sometimes we want to
> highlight only the word after.
>
> > Thank you for your time,
> > Andrew
>
> Nicolas
>

I had guessed that it might find some use in fr -- It's too bad to
hear that it's "widely" used. However, I should note that it's not
_required_. <nowiki> resolves the ambiguity nicely. The fact that it
takes 17 characters is, well, unfortunate, but it's _correct_. The
workaround, on the other hand, does bad things to the language, and
makes the implementation of a more advanced parser exceedingly
difficult.

Andrew


subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re: Proposal for deprecation of syntax features
	for 1.5

body:
Andrew Rodland wrote:

>I had guessed that it might find some use in fr -- It's too bad to
>hear that it's "widely" used. However, I should note that it's not
>_required_. <nowiki> resolves the ambiguity nicely. The fact that it
>takes 17 characters is, well, unfortunate, but it's _correct_. The
>workaround, on the other hand, does bad things to the language, and
>makes the implementation of a more advanced parser exceedingly
>difficult.
>
>
I'm not sure if it would be a more or less drastic change, but making
bold be four tics instead of three would also solve the problem.  Then
without lookahead: 2 tics is italics; 3 ticks is an apostrophe plus
italics; 4 tics is bold; 5 tics is an apostrophe plus bold; 6 tics is
bold and italic; and 7 tics is an apostrophe plus bold and italic.

-Mark


from_name: Alphax

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

MacGyverMagic/Mgm wrote:
> People need to put a valid reason in the box when blocking someone.
> All too often I see someone blocked with a message like "vandalism".
> How is a user, especially a new one, going to know what they did wrong
> if people are so unclear about it?
>
> I don't think "block" is a harsh word at all, but the difference
> between block and ban needs to be explained more clearly in the help
> pages and the fact it's just temporary needs to be emphasized when
> blocking.
>
> --Mgm
>

About a week ago, my IP was blocked. (Not sure if this list supports it,
but I'll try and send a screenshot through.) I emailed someone (forget
who now, but thankyou to whoever you were :) ) explaining what was going on.

While "blocked" and "blocking policy" are wikilinked, it might not be
such a great idea to so publicly advertise the mailing list.

Perhaps reasons should have wikilinks in them, describing the policies
which have been violated...

- --
Alphax
GnuPG key: 0xF874C613 - http://tinyurl.com/8mpg9
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax
There are two kinds of people: those who say to God, 'Thy will be done,'
and those to whom God says, 'All right, then, have it your way.' - C. S.
Lewis
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Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

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from_name: Timwi

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re: Link table updates (was Re: Longterm software
	strategy)

body:
Greg Sabino Mullane wrote:
>
>>The problem with locking reads turns out to be a bug in InnoDB. Well,
>>I'm calling it a bug anyway.
>
> I know this has been covered before, but if we are talking about
> "longterm software strategy", I'd like to point out that PostgreSQL
> is still totally free, has no locking issues, and now offers replication.
> There are even some PG hackers lurking on this list (besides me) that
> would be more than happy to help move things in that direction. :)

Why do people keep pushing for PostgreSQL as if MySQL was some sort of
evil daemon? (No pun intended...)

I have never seen any substantial evidence that PostgreSQL is in any way
more suitable for the task at hand; people keep claiming it's "more
efficient" or "more robust" or whatever, but in the end, LiveJournal and
Slashdot are still using MySQL.


from_name: David Gerard

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Parser (was Re: Longterm hosting strategy)

body:
Pete/Pcb21 (pete_pcb21_wpmail at pcbartlett.com) [050511 13:54]:
> David Gerard wrote:

> >Well, yeah ;-) There's all sorts of things a per-line facility would help
> >editors with in regard to the process of collaborative editing.
> >I'm not sure "per-line" is the appropriate unit for Wikimedia work.
> >"Per-word" might be interesting, if we have intrepid MediaWiki
> >experimenters out there ;-)

> If we are going down this road, I should probably admit that some of the
> words used in my contributions can be found in other works. I'm claiming
> fair use.

It can be useful to know who was responsible for a given fragment as it
wends its way through the Wikipedia database. Possibly with a reference or
two attahed to that sentence, as it makes its way through various article
refactorings.

It will also help in printed GFDL compliance: identifying the five greatest
contributors to a given article.

- d.


from_name: slimvirgin at gmail.com

subject: [WikiEN-l] The niceness principle

body:
Hi Ed,

Sending this offline, just to say that I very much agree with you
regarding the principle of being nice. We seem to be almost alone in
this, however, and fighting an uphill battle.

Best,

Sarah

On 5/11/05, Poor, Edmund W <Edmund.W.Poor at abc.com> wrote:
> > There is no legal ground related to us mentionning that a third party
> > elected him a kook; so this issue is irrelevant.
>
> If not on legal grounds, how about on the general principle of being
> nice?
>
> Is it crucial to Wikipedia's integrity that we INCLUDE a mention of the
> fact that some anonymous troublemakers have branded a non-notable
> private citizen with a very annoying label?
>
> Uncle Ed thinks not.
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: The niceness principle

body:
Sorry all, I meant that to be offline.

Sarah

On 5/11/05, slimvirgin at gmail.com <slimvirgin at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Ed,
>
> Sending this offline, just to say that I very much agree with you
> regarding the principle of being nice. We seem to be almost alone in
> this, however, and fighting an uphill battle.
>
> Best,
>
> Sarah
>
> On 5/11/05, Poor, Edmund W <Edmund.W.Poor at abc.com> wrote:
> > > There is no legal ground related to us mentionning that a third party
> > > elected him a kook; so this issue is irrelevant.
> >
> > If not on legal grounds, how about on the general principle of being
> > nice?
> >
> > Is it crucial to Wikipedia's integrity that we INCLUDE a mention of the
> > fact that some anonymous troublemakers have branded a non-notable
> > private citizen with a very annoying label?
> >
> > Uncle Ed thinks not.
> > _______________________________________________
> > WikiEN-l mailing list
> > WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
> >
>


from_name: Asbestos

body:
On 5/11/05, Rick <giantsrick13 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> > Maybe it should be a requirement of adminship that
> > admins list a
> > public email address on their user: page.
> >
> > -a

I was thinking along these lines as well. I think accountability,
responsiveness, communication and trust could be improved by allowing users
alternate ways of contacting people, especially admins: users may well have
reasons for wanting to get in contact with an admin without letting the
whole world know about it.

Or not. I had my email address public, until I got
> fed up with the abusive emails (I get enough of that
> on my Talk page) and deleted it.
>
> RickK

Then why not get yourself an email address specifically for wikipedia? I set
myself a gmail account for this purpose, and have found it infinitely useful
(I can even send you an invitation if you want).

Sam

--
Asbestos
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Asbestos


from_name: David Monniaux

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: no PD in France

body:
Fred Bauder wrote:

>Ok, that relates to an actual case we had in arbitration, Irismeister, who I
>understand is a Romanian practitioner with a Iridology practice in Paris.
>Should he sue, in a Paris court, he would presumably win, and with a French
>affiliate have someone he could get his "legal" hands on. How exposed are
>we? If he requested removal of all his contributions, could we easily comply
>technically? That is, do we have software which would easily allow removal
>of all of someone's edits?
>
>
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer.

The right of withdrawal (CPI L121-4) can only be exerced if the author
indemnifies the publisher for the losses incurred by this withdrawal, as
very clearly stated in the law. My understanding is that Irismeister
would have to refund us the developer or employee time needed to sort
out his contributions...

Furthermore, Wikipedia is clearly a "collaborative work" (CPI L113-2).
In that circumstance, the rights may only be exerced by common agreement
of the authors, and if there is disagreement, a court would have to step
in. To me his means Irismeister would have to get a court to decide that
he can exerce his right of withdrawal from this common work.

Thus my analysis is that:
- it would cost him an arm and a leg
- the court could very likely just rule that he cannot ask for
withdrawal from this collaborative work.

-- DM


from_name: Bryan Derksen

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Corrected (Wollmann)

body:
Poor, Edmund W wrote:

>Is it crucial to Wikipedia's integrity that we INCLUDE a mention of the
>fact that some anonymous troublemakers have branded a non-notable
>private citizen with a very annoying label?
>
>
>
It seems to me based on what I've seen over the past week or two of this
debate that Wollman is both notable and public.

I think it is important ("crucial" may be overstating it) to Wikipedia's
integrity that it doesn't remove notable, verifiable information about
someone from articles solely based on the complaints and apparently
groundless legal threats of that person.


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Longterm software strategy

body:
Brent 'Dax' Royal-Gordon wrote:
>
> Most reasonably mature languages

Well, that excludes PHP for starters.  *ducks, runs, and hides* :)

> I like the idea of porting hotspots, but keep in mind that we want
> people to be able to use this even if they don't have access to a C
> compiler.

I can't believe people are still bringing forward this argument. No, we
don't! We do *not* want to limit our set of alternatives for the benefit
of other webmasters. Whoever needs a pure-PHP wiki engine should fork
MediaWiki and maintain it themselves when it becomes too un-PHP for
their taste. This shouldn't - rather, MUST NOT - be Wikimedia's
responsibility, and it MUST NOT adversely affect Wikipedia's performance.

> Also note that IPC and process-management mechanisms tend to vary
> across operating systems; we might lose Windows support, for example.

Funny, first you clearly state that Wikimedia is not likely to run
Windows servers anytime soon, and then you call for maintenance of
Windows support. :-)

> On the back end, Perl 6 is specced to have one of the most powerful
> pattern-matching engines ever shipped with a language; it should be
> able to eat wikicode for breakfast.

Yet Another Not-Really-A-Parser (a.k.a. RegExp HodgePodge)?

Timwi


subject:
[Wikimediafr-l] Re:[Wikitech-l] Thoughts about a future board
	budget meeting (or budget board meeting ?)

body:
Nicolas Weeger wrote:

>We have cash, a few people made promises of donations (what kind of figures are we talking about, btw? 50?? 500?? 5000?? 50000??) . But we don't yet have a bank account, and we won't have credit card, I think - checks only.
>
>
May I inquire why we won't have a credit card?

>So either we have the bank account fast and can pay via checks, or someone provides money and hopes to be refunded by the association...
>
>
I totally recommend against this. Direct experience shows me that this
way you *never* get refunded.


from_name: Anthere

subject:
[Foundation-l] Re: Thoughts about a future board budget meeting (or
 budget board meeting ?)

body:
Elisabeth Bauer a ?crit:
> Anthere wrote:
>
>> PS : I must mention that we are currently stuck in a rather
>> ridiculous situation. The french squids needs some RAM... this RAM
>> can only be purchased in a few websites... which refuse american
>> credit cards... so we are currently trying to have it bought by the
>> german association... which legally is not really authorized to do
>> this... so, either the french association quickly has cash to pay for
>> such expenses, or the foundation should have a credit card in europe
>> to take care of such matters... opinion ?
>
>
> Kurt ordered 9 RAM chips for the french squids on 3rd May, AFAIK.
>
> greetings,
> elian

Ah, thanks. This is good news :-)

ant


subject:
[Foundation-l] Re: [Wikimediafr-l] Thoughts about a future board
 budget meeting (or budget board meeting ?)

body:
Angela a ?crit:
> On 5/11/05, Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>
>>I think the board should do a budget/financial meeting soon. The last one
>>was done a trimester ago, so it is high time.
>
>
> Considering how difficult it has been to get the board together for a
> meeting in the last month, I strongly suggest we have this as part of
> the meeting planned for Monday 16th May rather than trying to find a
> suitable point in Jimbo's schedule for two meetings.

Quite true, but I am not sure we will have gathered all the relevant
information by monday... but we can try...

Mav, are you free on monday ?

<snip>

>>Also, depending on what is left, we must think of the time when the next
>>fundraising will be reasonable to do. I suspect it is a bad idea to do it in
>>summer... so, in short, do we need to plan something in june, or will we be
>>able to last till september ?
>
>
> I'd prefer June since that is still within the 2nd quarter which is
> when the next fundraising drive was expected.

I am not sure we should say "expected". We only need to do fundraising
if we have need of money...

>>...so, either the french
>>association quickly has cash to pay for such expenses, or the foundation
>>should have a credit card in europe to take care of such matters... opinion ?
>
>
> Is there any reason we don't have a credit card on the Belgian account?

I do not think there is a valid reason. I suggest we get one.

> Angela.


subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re: [Wikimediafr-l] Thoughts about a future board
 budget meeting (or budget board meeting ?)