from_name: Magnus Manske

subject: [Wikitech-l] Offline-/CD-Reader

body:
I have (despite some protests :-) begun to write an offline wikipedia
reader. It is C++, using wxWindows, and the free Dev-C++ development
environment.

I was pleasently surprised to find that wxWindows not only contains a
built-in HTML display component, but also a zipfile input stream, so it
can read a file directly from a packed archive, which makes it perfect
for CD-ROM use (no need to unpack the thing).

An offline reader for pre-made HTML pages could be up in a matter of
days. But I'd like to aim higher.
1. The power of C++ would make it perfect for parsing the wiki code.
2. The parser will be an object (of course), which could be used in a
Phase IV C++ software.
3. It could be used as a fast client-side reader, instead of a web
browser, for wikipedia pages. It could load the wiki code from the live
site without the server having to render it.
4. It could serve as a special wikipedia offline (or client-side) editor.

I'll try to implement some of #1 before going public, though.

Magnus


list: wikitech-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [Wikitech-l] Banning signed in users

body:
Allowing sysops to generally ban signed in users would reverse our
existing policy that this can only be done with Jimbo's blessing. But we
don't have to go that far. It would be relatively simple to do the
following:

1) Rename the "Block IP" special page to "Block user"
2) Add an additional textfield on that page to ban a signed in user
3) If you try to ban a signed in user, the CUR and OLD table are queried
to check whether that user has made any edits that are older than 14 days
4) If this is the case, the user is not banned and a warning message is
displayed. Otherwise, the user is banned.

By doing this, we raise the trust level required to be "immune" from sysop
bans, while making it possible to quickly block persistent vandals.

As an additional refinement, we could add a past_ban flag to the user
table. If a user has been banned in the past, he can be banned again by
any sysop.

I don't know if we can retrieve the IP address from our tables - I don't
see how since we do not store it in CUR. But if we can, we could also
provide sysops with the IP address of the blocked user, after they have
successfully blocked them.

Regards,

Erik


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Karl Eichwalder

subject: [Wikipedia-l] ips for usernames

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

> So, ideas?

Sure :)  Do not ban at all and the problem will vanish.

Instead try to identify the attackers and take appropriate actions.
Yes, that's easy said but it's the only way to make this world a better
world.

--
ke at suse.de (work) / keichwa at gmx.net (home):              |
http://www.gnu.franken.de/ke/                            |      ,__o
Free Translation Project:                                |    _-\_<,
http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/contrib/po/HTML/             |   (*)/'(*)


list: wikien-l

from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [WikiEN-l] The Lir situation

body:
Jonathan Walther wrote:

> I suggest that Zoe can be Lir's mentor; if Lir ignores Zoe, then only he
> is to blame for whatever action she uses her sysop powers for to deal
> with him.  Not only is it poetic justice, but I feel Lir has progressed
> enough that spending time deliberately trying not to piss off Zoe would
> complete the polish on his Wiki-indoctrination and make him the valued
> contributor we all know he is capable of being.

I can't decide whether Jonathan is showing Gandhi-esque genius for the
resolution of a tough problem, or being the matchmaker for a romance
from hell.  They'd have to talk together.

Eclecticology


from_name: Zoe

subject: [WikiEN-l] The Lir situation

body:
Thanks for clearing that up, Vicki.  I don't have a problem with that.
Zoe
 Vicki Rosenzweig <vr at redbird.org> wrote:At 02:43 PM 2/8/03 -0800, Zoe wrote:

>I have no problem with Erik's provisos, they're pretty much what I would
>have done anyway. Except for being a moderator, not an editor. Are you
>saying you don't want me working on any articles on my own? If that's
>what you're saying, I can't live with that.

That's not what it means. It just means that we (sysops) need to separate
our editing
from our adminning/sysop work. If I think an article needs protection from
vandals, _I
stop editing it myself_. This is to avoid the temptation to use sysop
powers unfairly in
an edit war.

It doesn't mean I can't edit pages, or that you wouldn't be able to.

--
Vicki Rosenzweig
vr at redbird.org
http://www.redbird.org

_______________________________________________
WikiEN-l mailing list
WikiEN-l at wikipedia.org
http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

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from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] Slow query log

body:
On sab, 2003-02-08 at 17:25, Ian Gilfillan wrote:
> Thanks for the slow query log - I don't have the db in front of me now, but
> I'll take a look later.

Great, thanks for your help!

> It may be worthwhile changing user_newtalk to InnoDb to
> see what happens. It's currently MyISAM, and if the talk pages are being
> updated frequently table locking may be a problem here, so row level locking
> may be more efficient.

It's updated very infrequently, and the slow query log lists the time
spent as being in the query, not in waiting for locks. That's why I'm so
stumped...

My recollection of looking at the SHOW PROCESS list during peak times is
that these queries were usually sitting in "Statistics" or "Opening
tables" state. (What _is_ "Statistics"? The online manual doesn't seem
to explain it.)

It occurs to me that our table cache is only 256; we've got a
max_connections of 250, and have a fair number of 2-table joins
(searching, checking status of linked pages on view, recentchanges and
watchlist) and, taking all wikis into account, some 400+ tables.

Lesse...
| Open_tables              | 256        |
| Opened_tables            | 6671       |

Yikes! I'm going to up it to about 1000 and see what that does...

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Pieter Suurmond

subject: [Wikitech-l] Offline-/CD-Reader

body:
Wow, Magnus, you are going fast!! :-)
Good luck with coding / nice weekend / keep us informed!
Pieter

Magnus Manske wrote:
>
> I have (despite some protests :-) begun to write an offline wikipedia
> reader. It is C++, using wxWindows, and the free Dev-C++ development
> environment.
>
> I was pleasently surprised to find that wxWindows not only contains a
> built-in HTML display component, but also a zipfile input stream, so it
> can read a file directly from a packed archive, which makes it perfect
> for CD-ROM use (no need to unpack the thing).
>
> An offline reader for pre-made HTML pages could be up in a matter of
> days. But I'd like to aim higher.
> 1. The power of C++ would make it perfect for parsing the wiki code.
> 2. The parser will be an object (of course), which could be used in a
> Phase IV C++ software.
> 3. It could be used as a fast client-side reader, instead of a web
> browser, for wikipedia pages. It could load the wiki code from the live
> site without the server having to render it.
> 4. It could serve as a special wikipedia offline (or client-side) editor.
>
> I'll try to implement some of #1 before going public, though.
>
> Magnus
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikipedia.org
> http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l


from_name: Vicki Rosenzweig

subject: [WikiEN-l] The Lir situation

body:
At 02:43 PM 2/8/03 -0800, Zoe wrote:

>I have no problem with Erik's provisos, they're pretty much what I would
>have done anyway.  Except for being a moderator, not an editor.  Are you
>saying you don't want me working on any articles on my own?  If that's
>what you're saying, I can't live with that.

That's not what it means. It just means that we (sysops) need to separate
our editing
from our adminning/sysop work. If I think an article needs protection from
vandals, _I
stop editing it myself_. This is to avoid the temptation to use sysop
powers unfairly in
an edit war.

It doesn't mean I can't edit pages, or that you wouldn't be able to.

--
Vicki Rosenzweig
vr at redbird.org
http://www.redbird.org


subject:
[Wikitech-l] [brion@pobox.com: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Problem with
	'User Contributions']

body:
On mer, 2003-02-05 at 02:40, Philipp W. wrote:
> -Why do you use varchar(14) for timestamps?
> The Mysql-Date functions are so powerfull and very fast!

The phase 2 software (used january-july 2002) used a TIMESTAMP column.
However, the damn things get rewritten every time you update the row; a
lot of operations had to have "cur_timestamp=cur_timestamp" stuck in
them, but we had a LOT of bugs caused by forgetting to do this.
(Renaming a page caused its previous revisions' timestamps to be reset
to the current time, and apparently vanish from the history list; once
or twice table restructurings resulted in *every* article's last
modified time being reset.)

When Lee Crocker rewrote the software, he switched the type to VARCHAR
and just imported the values as they're formatted for a TIMESTAMP
(YYYYMMDDHHMMSS). A DATETIME column might or might not be more
efficient.

We can't rely on Mysql's date->text formatting functions though as we
serve multiple languages out of a single server, with timezone
selectable per user and formatting per language.

> -Did you ever thought about using hints in
> your sql-commands to hely mysql using the right Index?

When we _have_ the right indices, that'll be the time to hint them. :)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: The Cunctator

subject: [WikiEN-l] The Lir situation

body:
On 2/8/03 6:51 PM, "Jonathan Walther" <krooger at debian.org> wrote:
> On Sat, Feb 08, 2003 at 06:49:38PM -0500, Vicki Rosenzweig wrote:
>> That's not what it means. It just means that we (sysops) need to separate
>> our editing
>> from our adminning/sysop work. If I think an article needs protection from
>> vandals, _I
>> stop editing it myself_. This is to avoid the temptation to use sysop
>> powers unfairly in
>> an edit war.
>>
>> It doesn't mean I can't edit pages, or that you wouldn't be able to.
>
> In practice, it amounts to that. I have seen Eric and Ortolan and some
> others attack Ed Poor when he appropriately protected a page to stop an edit
> war, when he had recently been involved in editing that page himself.
>
> I believe that attack on Ed Poor was unjustified, and I don't want to
> see a repeat of such attacks made on Zoe.

It's only your judgment that Poor's action was appropriate.

One of the most effective ways of avoiding seeing things you don't like is
to close your eyes.

None of us here are saints, and we all err. These errors should be pointed
out and our actions challenged--within the bounds of, shall we say, ahimsa.
Those with power and authority have the capacity to make more harmful
errors. Thus challenges to their action should be more vociferous.

But what's going on is the inevitable problem with the establishment of an
arbitrary hierarchy of power.

-tc


from_name: Toby Bartels

subject: [Wikitech-l] Glitch restoring deleted page; lost history

body:
I have a trick for combining the history of badly moved pages,
which I've applied successfully a few times over the past month.
When I tried it just now, it failed miserably.
I will describe my actions:

First, I checked that the histories of [[Pennsylvania Dutch]]
and [[Pennsylvania German]] didn't overlap, except for redirecting.
Then I deleted [[Pennsylvania Dutch]] (the current redirect).
Then I moved [[Pennsylvania German]] to [[Pennsylvania Dutch]].
Then I restored the deletion of [[Pennsylvania Dutch]].
Et voila! the entire history is combined at [[Pennsylvania Dutch]]
(except for the unavoidable intrusion of redirects at the moving point),
ready to be moved back to [[Pennsylvania German]].

Well, that's how it had always worked before.
But in fact, the deleted history of [[Pennsylvania Dutch]] was *not* restored!
I restored it again, to see if that would help, but it didn't.
So I sadly moved it back to [[Pennsylvania German]],
and now there seems to be no way to get the history of [[Pennsylvania Dutch]].

Where did it go?  History shouldn't be permanently deletable
with our nice soft delete.  I suspect a database bug, but I don't know how.

Further hints of a database bug:
Thinking that I might have misspelled "Pennsylvania" at some point,
I did a search on the term "Dutch".
Although I got several redirects in the page title matches
and these matches easily fit onto a single page of results,
[[Pennsylvania Dutch]] never appeared on the list.
Yet the page undoubtedly exists, historyless though it may be.

So there is a bug somewhere that lost track of [[Pennsylvania Dutch]];
and there is some history that was truly deleted forever,
but which we might be able to dredge from the database (or yesterday's log),
and which it would be good to restore to its proper place
in the history of [[Pennsylvania German]].

-- Toby Bartels


body:
On sab, 2003-02-08 at 20:29, Toby Bartels wrote:
> Well, that's how it had always worked before.
> But in fact, the deleted history of [[Pennsylvania Dutch]] was *not* restored!
> I restored it again, to see if that would help, but it didn't.
> So I sadly moved it back to [[Pennsylvania German]],
> and now there seems to be no way to get the history of [[Pennsylvania Dutch]].

Please double-check the history of [[Pennsylvania German]] carefully.
Note that there is a known problem that causes revisions to be listed
OUT OF ORDER when portions of the histories were restored from deletion
(or imported from the old pre-Jan 2002 UseModWiki version of Wikipedia).

This is caused by a performance hack which works around sssllllooowww
sorting on pages with a large number of revisions. 90% of the time rows
are in the correct order, but in the above cases they are not.

I do see this kind of odd ordering on [[Pennsylvania German]], which
leads me to suspect the restoration worked just fine. If revisions were
actually lost, I can whip out a backup from a couple days ago.

Proper ordering will appear again once the database is re-organized a
little, either late tonight or tomorrow.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Jonathan Walther

subject: [WikiEN-l] The Lir situation

body:
On Sat, Feb 08, 2003 at 05:46:40PM -0800, Zoe wrote:
>   Thanks for clearing that up, Vicki.  I don't have a problem with that.

If things were the way Vikki said they were, that would be fantastic.
The incident with Ed Poor that I referred to was where he was helping
edit an article, then noticed an edit war, and froze the page.

After the page was frozen there were howls of protest from Eric, Ortolan88
and so forth that he had left the page in a "biased" form.  On THEIR
request he took the disputed text out entirely, until such time as the
page could be unprotected.

Then he got attacked by these individuals for doing the very thing they
had begged him to do previously.

What I'm trying to say, Zoe, is that you can't win unless you are
willing to stick to your guns.  Do what you feel is the right thing for
the Wikipedia, and I will back you up.

Jonathan

>     At 02:43 PM 2/8/03 -0800, Zoe wrote:
>     >I have no problem with Erik's provisos, they're pretty much what I
>     would
>     >have done anyway. Except for being a moderator, not an editor. Are you
>     >saying you don't want me working on any articles on my own? If that's
>     >what you're saying, I can't live with that.
>
>     That's not what it means. It just means that we (sysops) need to
>     separate
>     our editing
>     from our adminning/sysop work. If I think an article needs protection
>     from
>     vandals, _I
>     stop editing it myself_. This is to avoid the temptation to use sysop
>     powers unfairly in
>     an edit war.
>
>     It doesn't mean I can't edit pages, or that you wouldn't be able to.

--
                     Geek House Productions, Ltd.

  Providing Unix & Internet Contracting and Consulting,
  QA Testing, Technical Documentation, Systems Design & Implementation,
  General Programming, E-commerce, Web & Mail Services since 1998

Phone:   604-435-1205
Email:   djw at reactor-core.org
Webpage: http://reactor-core.org
Address: 2459 E 41st Ave, Vancouver, BC  V5R2W2
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subject: [WikiEN-l] The Lir situation

body:
On Sun, Feb 09, 2003 at 04:37:43AM +0100, elian wrote:
>Just having reverted some content that Zoe unjustifiedly deleted without
>giving any reasons[1] I must say I don't trust Zoe to use sysop powers -
>at least in everything which concerns the arab-israeli conflict - in a
>fair way.

When not dealing with Lir, naturally Zoe will be expected to use her
sysop powers in the same manner, and to the same high standard as all
the other sysops.

Jonathan

--
                     Geek House Productions, Ltd.

  Providing Unix & Internet Contracting and Consulting,
  QA Testing, Technical Documentation, Systems Design & Implementation,
  General Programming, E-commerce, Web & Mail Services since 1998

Phone:   604-435-1205
Email:   djw at reactor-core.org
Webpage: http://reactor-core.org
Address: 2459 E 41st Ave, Vancouver, BC  V5R2W2
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subject: [WikiEN-l] The Lir situation

body:
On Sun, Feb 09, 2003 at 03:50:00AM +0100, Erik Moeller wrote:
>> I can't decide whether Jonathan is showing Gandhi-esque genius for the
>> resolution of a tough problem, or being the matchmaker for a romance
>> from hell.  They'd have to talk together.
>
>The whole idea of a mentor system (which I proposed) rests on the fact
>that the person being mentored acknowledges the mentor as someone they
>respect, not that the "mentor" can punish the "pupil" to "complete the
>polish on his Wiki-indoctrination" (Clutch's words - the same Clutch who
>repeatedly vandalized Lir's user page to instill "good taste" into her).

To call the tasteful improvements I made to Lir's page "vandalism" shows
your particular form of bias, Eric.  Your conviction that my desire for
neutrality equates to anti-Semitism shows it's impact in your other
comments about me.

For someone who self-identifies as a humanist, you sure lack a humanist
ethic.

Jonathan

--
                     Geek House Productions, Ltd.

  Providing Unix & Internet Contracting and Consulting,
  QA Testing, Technical Documentation, Systems Design & Implementation,
  General Programming, E-commerce, Web & Mail Services since 1998

Phone:   604-435-1205
Email:   djw at reactor-core.org
Webpage: http://reactor-core.org
Address: 2459 E 41st Ave, Vancouver, BC  V5R2W2
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subject: [WikiEN-l] The Lir situation

body:
Zoe,

thanks for thinking about this. The thing is, while Lir has made many
edits that justified her ban, as Mav and others have observed, her
behavior has somewhat improved recently. I don't recall her calling anyone
a moron under the "Vera Cruz" identity, for example. I also think that any
ban should be temporary, and that we should give everyone an opportunity
to reform.

Regarding your connected sysop request, I have no objections under these
conditions, which every sysop should meet:

1) That you are not an editor, but a moderator;
2) That you do not use the "page protection" privilege in conflicts where
you yourself are involved;
3) That you only delete pages which are obvious nonsense
("aihwerjfoaijw"), or have been listed on "Votes for deletion" for a while
without significant dissent.

Given these restrictions, I also find it hard to see what you could do
regarding Lir's behavior with sysop privileges that you cannot presently
do?

Regards,

Erik


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: [Wikipedia-l] Re: front page of www and Trophées du Libre

body:
Anthere-
> I disagree with you that the ONLY goal of the portal
> page should be to direct people to other places. I
> sure think it is a bad idea just for it to be a
> redirection place, and for this reason, I proposed
> that "content" be placed on the "portal page".
> This proposition didnot meet anybody's interest and
> the provisionnal portal does only contain links to
> others places. Which is wrong imho.

> The fact some people decided the "portal" page should
> only contain redirection links is not a justification
> of this being the goal to reach

Mav suggested that we use language "sniffing" until we have something
better than redirects in place, which certainly makes sense.

I object somewhat to the term "sniffing", which may make many people think
of privacy violations. Which each request you send to the Wikipedia
server, your browser automatically sends your preferred language(s) to us.
This can even include obscure languages like Esperanto and Catalan. At the
moment, we are simply throwing this data away.

If you want more than just language links on the portal, you have to wait
for phase IV. It's that simple. What we probably can do immediately,
though, is highlight (e.g. background color) the existing language link to
the user's primary language on *every page* (not just www.wikipedia.org)
that has a translation in that language.

Regards,

Erik


from_name: rednblack at alum.mit.edu

subject: [WikiEN-l] The Lir situation

body:
I believe that's "Solomon-esque". I think it's a great idea.

Saurabh

------
"Ever think of introducing yourself?" Y.T. says.
"Nah," he says, "people always forget names. You can just think of me as that
 one guy, y'know?" -Snow Crash

In message <3E45B2D6.6010204 at telus.net>, Ray Saintonge said:
>Jonathan Walther wrote:
>
>> I suggest that Zoe can be Lir's mentor; if Lir ignores Zoe, then only he
>> is to blame for whatever action she uses her sysop powers for to deal
>> with him.  Not only is it poetic justice, but I feel Lir has progressed
>> enough that spending time deliberately trying not to piss off Zoe would
>> complete the polish on his Wiki-indoctrination and make him the valued
>> contributor we all know he is capable of being.
>
>I can't decide whether Jonathan is showing Gandhi-esque genius for the
>resolution of a tough problem, or being the matchmaker for a romance
>from hell.  They'd have to talk together.
>
>Eclecticology
>
>
>
>_______________________________________________
>WikiEN-l mailing list
>WikiEN-l at wikipedia.org
>http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Navigation and search tools

body:
Tom-
> The Cologne Blue interface has only "Find", no "Search", no "Go".

blame Brion ;-). He didn't want that button in the first place, and I'm
certainly not going to try to convince him to have it in his beloved
Cologne Blue skin.

Note that the Go button has been recently improved to go do the nearest
match if it doesn't find a direct hit.

Regards,

Erik


from_name: Tom Parmenter

body:
So, I have a choice of a handsome interface or a "Go" button?  I don't
like either of the other skins, but I missed the "Go" button without
even knowing everybody else had one.

still grumpy after all these years,

Tom Parmenter
Ortolan88

|From: erik_moeller at gmx.de (Erik Moeller)
|Sender: wikipedia-l-admin at wikipedia.org
|Reply-To: wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
|Date: 08 Feb 2003 21:37:00 +0100
|
|Tom-
|> The Cologne Blue interface has only "Find", no "Search", no "Go".
|
|blame Brion ;-). He didn't want that button in the first place, and I'm
|certainly not going to try to convince him to have it in his beloved
|Cologne Blue skin.
|
|Note that the Go button has been recently improved to go do the nearest
|match if it doesn't find a direct hit.
|
|Regards,
|
|Erik
|_______________________________________________
|Wikipedia-l mailing list
|Wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
|http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
|


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: SERIOUS HELP NEEDED NOW!

body:
Sheldon's suggestions:

> (1) Flexibility on the part of the administrator (Jimbo). If there
> are no vandals currently active, the current laissez-faire system
> works fine. When there's a pest afoot, however, Jimbo should be able
> to temporarily turn on additional security features, such as giving
> sysops added powers.

Any solution that depends on Jimbo being present is IMHO flawed. Jimbo is
usually logged off on the weekends, for example.

> (2) The ability to temporarily restrict contributions from
> non-registered users.

We already have that - IP blocking. We never had a vandal that could
switch IPs faster than we could block them. What would be nice is wildcard
support at least for the fourth octet.

> (3) The ability to create some kind of registration barrier that will
> make it harder for vandals to get back in the door immediately by
> simply registering under a new name.

See my suggestion on wikitech to allow sysops to ban signed in users who
have made no contributions older than n days. We should also have account
creation per IP throttling.

A real ermegency measure would be to only allow users listed on "Most
active Wikipedians" to make edits when emergency mode has been switched
on.

We could allow any sysop to turn on this emergency mode. If it is turned
on, a message would be prominently displayed on every page. If a sysop
abuses this privilege, he is promptly banned.

> (4) The ability to push a button that will instantly send one million
> megavolts coursing through the body of Ed Poor. (Just joking.)

No teasing, please ..

Regards,

Erik


subject: [Wikitech-l] Size of database dump

body:
Part of my offline reader is the functionality to split a database dump
into a zillion files, one for each article. (That function will only be
used on the *coding* side, e.g., on the wikipedia server when generating
a CD-ROM version).

So I downloaded the zipped German database, which unzips to ~33MB.
Imagine my surprise when the article files (article namespace only!)
came to less than 14MB (~16.000 files).

It seems that in each database dump, we have the "search indexed"
article text as well, which contains the same text as the article, but
without special chars.

Can we not dump that field next time? It would reduce the file size (and
download time) by about 50%!

Magnus


subject: [WikiEN-l] The Lir situation

body:
On Sun, Feb 09, 2003 at 02:18:06AM -0500, Tom Parmenter wrote:
>I'm glad to say that so far as I know, Ed has never frozen another
>page in which he was personally involved and you have never edited
>anyone else's user page again.  Good for both of you.

On the flip side, good for the rest of you that Ed and I have not yet
*needed* to take such action again.

Jonathan

--
                     Geek House Productions, Ltd.

  Providing Unix & Internet Contracting and Consulting,
  QA Testing, Technical Documentation, Systems Design & Implementation,
  General Programming, E-commerce, Web & Mail Services since 1998

Phone:   604-435-1205
Email:   djw at reactor-core.org
Webpage: http://reactor-core.org
Address: 2459 E 41st Ave, Vancouver, BC  V5R2W2
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subject: [WikiEN-l] The Lir situation

in_reply_to:
<20030209045755.GA31461@reactor-core.org> (message from Jonathan
	Walther on Sat, 8 Feb 2003 20:57:55 -0800)

body:
I'm glad to say that so far as I know, Ed has never frozen another
page in which he was personally involved and you have never edited
anyone else's user page again.  Good for both of you.

Howlin' Tom Parmenter
Ortolan88

|From: Jonathan Walther <krooger at debian.org>
|Content-Disposition: inline
|Sender: wikien-l-admin at wikipedia.org
|Reply-To: wikien-l at wikipedia.org
|Date: Sat, 8 Feb 2003 20:57:55 -0800
|
|
|--pf9I7BMVVzbSWLtt
|Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed
|Content-Disposition: inline
|Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
|
|On Sat, Feb 08, 2003 at 05:46:40PM -0800, Zoe wrote:
|>   Thanks for clearing that up, Vicki.  I don't have a problem with that.
|
|If things were the way Vikki said they were, that would be fantastic.
|The incident with Ed Poor that I referred to was where he was helping
|edit an article, then noticed an edit war, and froze the page.
|
|After the page was frozen there were howls of protest from Eric, Ortolan88
|and so forth that he had left the page in a "biased" form.  On THEIR
|request he took the disputed text out entirely, until such time as the
|page could be unprotected.
|
|Then he got attacked by these individuals for doing the very thing they
|had begged him to do previously.
|
|What I'm trying to say, Zoe, is that you can't win unless you are
|willing to stick to your guns.  Do what you feel is the right thing for
|the Wikipedia, and I will back you up.
|
|Jonathan
|
|>     At 02:43 PM 2/8/03 -0800, Zoe wrote:
|>     >I have no problem with Erik's provisos, they're pretty much what I
|>     would
|>     >have done anyway. Except for being a moderator, not an editor. Are y=
|ou
|>     >saying you don't want me working on any articles on my own? If that's
|>     >what you're saying, I can't live with that.
|>
|>     That's not what it means. It just means that we (sysops) need to
|>     separate
|>     our editing
|>     from our adminning/sysop work. If I think an article needs protection
|>     from
|>     vandals, _I
|>     stop editing it myself_. This is to avoid the temptation to use sysop
|>     powers unfairly in
|>     an edit war.
|>
|>     It doesn't mean I can't edit pages, or that you wouldn't be able to.
|
|--=20
|                     Geek House Productions, Ltd.
|
|  Providing Unix & Internet Contracting and Consulting,
|  QA Testing, Technical Documentation, Systems Design & Implementation,
|  General Programming, E-commerce, Web & Mail Services since 1998
|
|Phone:   604-435-1205
|Email:   djw at reactor-core.org
|Webpage: http://reactor-core.org
|Address: 2459 E 41st Ave, Vancouver, BC  V5R2W2
|
|--pf9I7BMVVzbSWLtt
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|
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|
|--pf9I7BMVVzbSWLtt--
|_______________________________________________
|WikiEN-l mailing list
|WikiEN-l at wikipedia.org
|http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
|


from_name: Ian Gilfillan

subject: [Wikitech-l] Slow query log

body:
Thanks for the slow query log - I don't have the db in front of me now, but
I'll take a look later. It may be worthwhile changing user_newtalk to InnoDb to
see what happens. It's currently MyISAM, and if the talk pages are being
updated frequently table locking may be a problem here, so row level locking
may be more efficient.

Quoting Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com>:

> > Slow query log from Friday morning to present:
> > http://www.wikipedia.org/tools/slowquerylog.gz
>
> I notice more slow queries than you'd expect on user_newtalk. It's a
> bone-simple query, fully indexed:
> EXPLAIN SELECT 1 FROM user_newtalk WHERE user_ip='some_ip_address';
> +--------------+------+---------------+---------+---------+-------+------+----
---------------------+
> | table        | type | possible_keys | key     | key_len | ref   | rows
> | Extra                   |
> +--------------+------+---------------+---------+---------+-------+------+----
---------------------+
> | user_newtalk | ref  | user_ip       | user_ip |      40 | const |    1
> | where used; Using index |
> +--------------+------+---------------+---------+---------+-------+------+----
---------------------+
>
> or:
>
> EXPLAIN SELECT 1 FROM user_newtalk WHERE user_id=some_user_id_number;
> +--------------+------+---------------+---------+---------+-------+------+----
---------------------+
> | table        | type | possible_keys | key     | key_len | ref   | rows
> | Extra                   |
> +--------------+------+---------------+---------+---------+-------+------+----
---------------------+
> | user_newtalk | ref  | user_id       | user_id |       4 | const |    1
> | where used; Using index |
> +--------------+------+---------------+---------+---------+-------+------+----
---------------------+
>
> One of these two queries happens on *every* page view; the table
> itself
> is quite small (a few dozen rows generally), and 99% of the time
> queries
> will turn up no rows. It's only altered when a user talk page is
> changed, or viewed by its owner.
>
> CREATE TABLE `user_newtalk` (
>   `user_id` int(5) NOT NULL default '0',
>   `user_ip` varchar(40) NOT NULL default '',
>   KEY `user_ip` (`user_ip`),
>   KEY `user_id` (`user_id`)
> ) TYPE=MyISAM
>
> I'm assuming that the sometime slowness here is a side effect of other
> things being slow somehow.
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
>


subject: [Wikitech-l] Installing Wikipedia3

body:
On sab, 2003-02-08 at 10:40, Fred Bauder wrote:
> I've downloaded Wikipedia3 from Sourceforge. (To a Mac, so I'm changing all
> the line endings to Unix as I read the program).
>
> I have a web site set up for it to go into and have the information that the
> homepage should be named index.htm.
>
> Of the files in newcode base which one should go there? And should it be
> renamed?

The main script is wiki.phtml; you could rename it, but make sure you
change the setting of wgScript in LocalSettings.php to match. Depending
on your web server configuration, 'index.phtml' might work; 'index.htm'
probably won't, as PHP usually has to be named distinctively or it
doesn't get run through the PHP interpreter.

> I'm just trying now to get Wikipedia3 to run, not worrying about how to
> change coding to customize it; no one is likely to stumble on the website
> for a while, but I'm no programer so I probably could use help later with
> one thing or another.

Well, good luck! :)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [WikiEN-l] The Lir situation

body:
>> I suggest that Zoe can be Lir's mentor; if Lir ignores Zoe, then only he
>> is to blame for whatever action she uses her sysop powers for to deal
>> with him.  Not only is it poetic justice, but I feel Lir has progressed
>> enough that spending time deliberately trying not to piss off Zoe would
>> complete the polish on his Wiki-indoctrination and make him the valued
>> contributor we all know he is capable of being.

> I can't decide whether Jonathan is showing Gandhi-esque genius for the
> resolution of a tough problem, or being the matchmaker for a romance
> from hell.  They'd have to talk together.

The whole idea of a mentor system (which I proposed) rests on the fact
that the person being mentored acknowledges the mentor as someone they
respect, not that the "mentor" can punish the "pupil" to "complete the
polish on his Wiki-indoctrination" (Clutch's words - the same Clutch who
repeatedly vandalized Lir's user page to instill "good taste" into her).

Aside from that, this goes far beyond the purposes for which sysop powers
are intended and moves us away from a wiki-community to one ruled by
editorial police forces who can reign arbitrarily with no process of
appeal, much like Everything2.

One thing is clear: There are more grounds to ban Clutch, based on his
past behavior, than to ban Lir.

Regards,

Erik


subject: [WikiEN-l] The Lir situation

body:
On Sun, Feb 09, 2003 at 04:30:03AM -0500, The Cunctator wrote:
>> To call the tasteful improvements I made to Lir's page "vandalism" shows
>> your particular form of bias, Eric.  Your conviction that my desire for
>> neutrality equates to anti-Semitism shows it's impact in your other
>> comments about me.
>>
>Heh..."tasteful"...

<snip>

You probably intended that to be a witty putdown, but a) the edit
comments are not the edits.  You seem to be making the
map-is-the-territory fallacy.  And b) you pasted a single paragraph from
an older version of Lirs page, not the one I finally edited.  Deceptive
behavior, I think.

Jonathan

--
                     Geek House Productions, Ltd.

  Providing Unix & Internet Contracting and Consulting,
  QA Testing, Technical Documentation, Systems Design & Implementation,
  General Programming, E-commerce, Web & Mail Services since 1998

Phone:   604-435-1205
Email:   djw at reactor-core.org
Webpage: http://reactor-core.org
Address: 2459 E 41st Ave, Vancouver, BC  V5R2W2
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subject: [WikiEN-l] The Lir situation

body:
On 2/9/03 12:05 AM, "Jonathan Walther" <krooger at debian.org> wrote:

> On Sun, Feb 09, 2003 at 03:50:00AM +0100, Erik Moeller wrote:
>>> I can't decide whether Jonathan is showing Gandhi-esque genius for the
>>> resolution of a tough problem, or being the matchmaker for a romance
>>> from hell.  They'd have to talk together.
>>
>> The whole idea of a mentor system (which I proposed) rests on the fact
>> that the person being mentored acknowledges the mentor as someone they
>> respect, not that the "mentor" can punish the "pupil" to "complete the
>> polish on his Wiki-indoctrination" (Clutch's words - the same Clutch who
>> repeatedly vandalized Lir's user page to instill "good taste" into her).
>
> To call the tasteful improvements I made to Lir's page "vandalism" shows
> your particular form of bias, Eric.  Your conviction that my desire for
> neutrality equates to anti-Semitism shows it's impact in your other
> comments about me.
>
Heh..."tasteful"...

"(We want good taste, or we'll spit you out.)"
"(adding link to important article on Good Taste)"
"(Don't try to wriggle out of it Lir; a contributor of your stature needs to
develope some TASTE)"
"(Wriggle, wriggle, wriggle. If you don't take other peoples feelings
seriously Lir, why should we take your work seriously?)"
"(Give me some evidence you know what good taste is Lir. C'mon, I challenge
you.)"
"(not even close. try again, Lir baby)"

"Hopefully the user behind this account will use this week to read some
other encyclopedias to get an idea of what properly belongs in an
encyclopedia, and what does not. If this user wishes to return peacefully,
develop even a MODICUM of taste, and resign her Grolier-funded job of
sabotaging the Wikipedia, she will be welcomed back with open arms."

"(your fate is being decided; if you don't take your fate seriously, it will
certainly take YOU very seriously)"
"(Oliver Pereira is probably Lir, based on his mailing list posts, the date
he created his account, and his pattern of editing. If he tries to play
nice, then that is fine.)"
"(Oliver, your defense of Lir makes me wonder if you aren't planning to be
similarly anti-social yourself. I will indeed be watching your edits.)"


from_name: elian

subject: [WikiEN-l] The Lir situation

body:
Vicki Rosenzweig <vr at redbird.org> writes:

> That's not what it means. It just means that we (sysops) need to
> separate our editing from our adminning/sysop work. If I think an
> article needs protection from vandals, _I stop editing it myself_.

But this depends on your good jugdement if an article is really
vandalized.

Just having reverted some content that Zoe unjustifiedly deleted without
giving any reasons[1] I must say I don't trust Zoe to use sysop powers -
at least in everything which concerns the arab-israeli conflict - in a
fair way.

greetings,
elian
[1] Irgun: she deleted a remark that some regard the organization as
terrorist. With a short look at us-israel.org she could have seen that
even the Israeli mainstream considers Irgun to be terrorist.
--
to listen to the words of the learned, and to instill into others the
lessons of science, is better than religious exercises.
                                                   - prophet muhammad


from_name: Pedro M.V.

subject: [Wikitech-l] UTC time

body:
I suggest include a UTC clock in the wikipedia.

This is interesting when you see : "Sorry! This feature has been temporarily disabled during peak access hours for performance reasons; come back between 02:00 and 14:00 UTC and try again".

One would add : "Now it?s XX:XX UTC ( i.e. 1994-11-05  13:15:30Z)".  Or a link in UTC to see UTC time ( if the user it?s interested ).

You can see the standard at http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-datetime

So seeing the UTC time you can see in your local time, you can imagine easily  the UTC time and some ideas about tag http://journeytoforever.org/energiaweb/dttag.htm

We can add this clock http://www.page-1.com/cwmcompare.htm or similar.

Regards.


from_name: Chuck Smith

subject: [Wikipedia-l] www front page

body:
After reading the latest arguments about automatic
redirects and such from www.wikipedia.org, I just want
to emphasize that I want it to be a simple
choose-your-language page, so that multilingual people
would immediately see that they could contribute in
multiple languages.  Speaking more than one language,
*really* enhances the Wikipedia experience because you
see points of view that may be expressed by members of
one language and not that of others.  It's also one of
my incentives to continue to study Dutch and
Slovene...

More Languages = More Wikipedia  =)
Fulfill Your Obsession, Learn Another Language!  :-)

Chuck

=====
Interesting fact:  Google returns more
results for "Esperanto" than for "Catalan"
----------------------------------------
Learn Esperanto! - http://www.lernu.net/
Enciklopedio: http://eo.wikipedia.org/

___________________________________________________
Yahoo! M?viles
Personaliza tu m?vil con tu logo y melod?a favorito
en http://moviles.yahoo.es


subject: [WikiEN-l] The Lir situation

in_reply_to:
<20030209072326.GA32650@reactor-core.org> (message from Jonathan
	Walther on Sat, 8 Feb 2003 23:23:26 -0800)

body:
|From: Jonathan Walther <krooger at debian.org>
|Content-Disposition: inline
|Sender: wikien-l-admin at wikipedia.org
|Reply-To: wikien-l at wikipedia.org
|Date: Sat, 8 Feb 2003 23:23:26 -0800
|
|
|--Dxnq1zWXvFF0Q93v
|Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed
|Content-Disposition: inline
|Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
|
|On Sun, Feb 09, 2003 at 02:18:06AM -0500, Tom Parmenter wrote:
|>I'm glad to say that so far as I know, Ed has never frozen another
|>page in which he was personally involved and you have never edited
|>anyone else's user page again.  Good for both of you. =20
|
|On the flip side, good for the rest of you that Ed and I have not yet
|*needed* to take such action again.
|
|Jonathan
|

There is never any such "need".  There's always another sys op.
There's always a place to complain about another user.

Tom Parmenter
Ortolan88

|--=20
|                     Geek House Productions, Ltd.
|
|  Providing Unix & Internet Contracting and Consulting,
|  QA Testing, Technical Documentation, Systems Design & Implementation,
|  General Programming, E-commerce, Web & Mail Services since 1998
|
|Phone:   604-435-1205
|Email:   djw at reactor-core.org
|Webpage: http://reactor-core.org
|Address: 2459 E 41st Ave, Vancouver, BC  V5R2W2
|
|--Dxnq1zWXvFF0Q93v
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|Content-Disposition: inline
|
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|
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|
|--Dxnq1zWXvFF0Q93v--
|_______________________________________________
|WikiEN-l mailing list
|WikiEN-l at wikipedia.org
|http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
|


subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia scheduled downtime tonight

body:
The English-language Wikipedia will be in _read-only mode_ for a few
hours tonight (Feb 9->Feb 10) while the database structure is altered to
eliminate some of the remaining performance drags before the heavy
weekday traffic gets into full swing.

This will also fix the out-of-order page history bug, which was caused
by a temporary workaround to the slow history problem.

The downtime window will cover roughly 04:00-08:00 UTC (UK time). For us
USians, that's 8pm-midnight PST / 11pm-3am EST. Australians & others,
please check http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_zone for the appropriate
offset to your local time. (I'm not certain of the end time; it may run
shorter, and hopefully won't run longer. It's a big database, and mass
modifications take a *long* time.)

During that time the wiki should remain accessible for reading, but no
one will be able to log in or make edits.

I'll also be upgrading various other languages to the current software
revision; those should go relatively quickly, and will be staggered.
Generally, meta, wiktionary, and Wikipedia's other languages should
remain accessible for both reading and editing through the night except
for some brief read-only outages.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

ps Tech note: I figure we should hold off on the mysql 4 upgrade until
they can release a version that isn't followed within a day by a dire
warning about a new bug that directly affects a type of query that we
use a lot for Wikipedia. :)

In the meantime, I'm adding the inverse timestamp column which can be
sorted on the index by mysql 3 (thus speeding and fixing bugs in
history, contribs, & recentchangeslinked), and a random queue index
column to replace the separate table and its insanely slow refilling
operation.

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subject: [Wikitech-l] Wikipedia scheduled downtime tonight

body:
The English-language Wikipedia will be in _read-only mode_ for a few
hours tonight (Feb 9->Feb 10) while the database structure is altered to
eliminate some of the remaining performance drags before the heavy
weekday traffic gets into full swing.

This will also fix the out-of-order page history bug, which was caused
by a temporary workaround to the slow history problem.

The downtime window will cover roughly 04:00-08:00 UTC (UK time). For us
USians, that's 8pm-midnight PST / 11pm-3am EST. Australians & others,
please check http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_zone for the appropriate
offset to your local time. (I'm not certain of the end time; it may run
shorter, and hopefully won't run longer. It's a big database, and mass
modifications take a *long* time.)

During that time the wiki should remain accessible for reading, but no
one will be able to log in or make edits.

I'll also be upgrading various other languages to the current software
revision; those should go relatively quickly, and will be staggered.
Generally, meta, wiktionary, and Wikipedia's other languages should
remain accessible for both reading and editing through the night except
for some brief read-only outages.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

ps Tech note: I figure we should hold off on the mysql 4 upgrade until
they can release a version that isn't followed within a day by a dire
warning about a new bug that directly affects a type of query that we
use a lot for Wikipedia. :)

In the meantime, I'm adding the inverse timestamp column which can be
sorted on the index by mysql 3 (thus speeding and fixing bugs in
history, contribs, & recentchangeslinked), and a random queue index
column to replace the separate table and its insanely slow refilling
operation.

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subject: [Wikitech-l] Blocked another leech

body:
80.2.170.93  public2-bror2-5-cust93.bror.broadband.ntl.com

Using "WebStripper/2.19". I've blocked both the UA string "WebStripper"
(permanently) and the IP (will clear it after a few days).

Is there some kind of rate-of-connections-per-IP throttling we could do
with Apache?

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: steve

subject: [Wikipedia-l] blocking:

body:
Perhaps an N by a username on the recent changes page can denote a new username: thus helping people figure out anons who log in for a one-shot go at things. -Stevertigo
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subject: [WikiEN-l] Naming convention: popularity vs. correctness

body:
On dim, 2003-02-09 at 13:47, Erik Moeller wrote:
> Linkability is not an argument: People are already linking to this article
> using [[Pennsylvania German|Pennsylvania Dutch]], because obviously they
> do not want to use the corrupt form. Searchability is neither, since
> redirects show up in searches.

On the contrary, that shows that people *do* want to use the corrupt
form, else they would be changing the links to [[Pennsylvania German]]
and letting the technically correct form appear in the text.

What it does show is that people have an aversion to linking to
redirects.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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body:
On dim, 2003-02-09 at 14:09, Erik Moeller wrote:
> Sorry, my example was incorrect. I meant [[Pennsylvania Dutch|Pennsylvania
> German]]. I always get confused with the direction -- that's why I think
> the syntax should be [[foo->bar]], not [[bar|foo]].

Well then, objection withdrawn. :)

> > What it does show is that people have an aversion to linking to
> > redirects.
>
> Indeed.

Lord knows why; that's what they're *there* for.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [Wikipedia-l] www front page

body:
On dim, 2003-02-09 at 14:45, Pedro M.V. wrote:
> Chuck Smith wrote:
> > After reading the latest arguments about automatic
> > redirects and such from www.wikipedia.org, I just want
> > to emphasize that I want it to be a simple
> > choose-your-language page,
>
> This a problem, because, somebody cannot understand "choose your
> language".

Would anyone have difficulty understanding that a list of language
names, including their own language _in its native name and script_, is
a choose-your-language list?

> Automatic redirection solves this problem, transporting you to your
> language frontpage.

Unless it chooses the wrong language, of course.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re:  ips for usernames

body:
On dim, 2003-02-09 at 15:02, Pedro M.V. wrote:
> > On Saturday 08 February 2003 12:35 pm, Jimmy Wales wrote:
> > > It sometimes happens that true vandals login.  I give as an example
> > > Annetit on the [[Woman]] article.  If this person was posting from an
> > > ip number, instead of a username, they would have been promptly and
> > > justly banned immediately.
> > >
> Instead of ban, one could make a Prevent Suspension. The user could
> read, but not change the articles.

A ban on the wiki prevents only editing; a banned username or IP address
can still be used to read articles.

Note that there is a _separate_ issue of completely banning an IP
address from any access to the site; this is sometimes done to keep the
system from being ground to a completele halt by a badly behaved
"download every link on the site as fast as or faster than possible"
bot, but not for editing behavior on the wiki.

Hint: if you're going to download somebody's entire site, allow several
seconds between each hit. DO NOT download multiple links simulatenously.
DO NOT run as rapidly as the requests can make their way down the pipe.
Particularly if you know the site is dynamically generated!

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Blocked another leech

body:
On dim, 2003-02-09 at 13:28, Jan Hidders wrote:
> There is an Apache module for that:
>
>   http://dominia.org/djao/limitipconn.html

Thanks, that could help. What I'd really to see though is some adaptive
limiting; it's not uncommon for someone (especially on dial-up) to open
a half dozen links at once and let them load in the background, and we
should allow that. But if they keep up six connections at a time for
minutes or hours, that's a problem.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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body:
So then you're in favor of moving Christopher Columbus to Cristobal Colon, just like Lir was?
I will disagree with it now just as much as I disagreed with it then.  "Correctness" is another word for "elitism".  We shouldn't confuse the reader.  If it's good enough for World Book, Collier's and Britannica, why isn't it good enough for us?  I especially object to continuing to call "Pennsylvania Dutch" "Pennsylvania German", as I've said in the Talk page for that article.  The Google search I did clearly shows what people call it.  And it has nothing to do with using a "corrupt" form.  I object strenuously to use of that term.  That's EXTREME elitism.  People are calling it what people expect to see and have been forced to get around where we have mistakenly put the article.
Zoe
 Erik Moeller <erik_moeller at gmx.de> wrote:I think we need to change our naming convention to use the more correct
article title if everybody who knows the history of the term in question
agrees that it is correct; that is, if everybody who has a coherent POV on
the matter shares the same opinion. In other words, we should use
academically correct titles, not those which Google prefers.

Examples:

1) Ockham's Razor should not reside at Occam's Razor (Occam is the
latinization of the town name Ockham; the town still exists today).

2) Pennsylvania Dutch should be at Pennsylvania German (it is not Dutch at
all; the word is merely a corruption of "Deutsch" or "D?tsch").

As I wrote on [[Talk:Pennsylvania Dutch]]:

Regarding the title, I agree this should be under Pennsylvania German.
This is a case where a redirect makes perfect sense. I support anglicized
article titles, but I do not support using an obviously inccorect title
because it is more popular among the uninformed. It is not POV for us to
assert that "Pennsylvania German" is correct if there's nobody who
disagrees, based on factual arguments and not mere habit, with that
statement. This "Dutch" has nothing to do with Dutch.

[...]

Linkability is not an argument: People are already linking to this article
using [[Pennsylvania German|Pennsylvania Dutch]], because obviously they
do not want to use the corrupt form. Searchability is neither, since
redirects show up in searches. Google-ability is only slightly reduced,
since "Pennsylvania Dutch" would still be mentioned in the article body.
_______________________________________________
WikiEN-l mailing list
WikiEN-l at wikipedia.org
http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

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subject: [Wikitech-l] Random page queue filling is darn slow

body:
On ?a?, 2003-02-06 at 23:41, Olrick wrote:
> On 06 Feb 2003 23:12:52 -0800
> Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:
> > Off the top of my head; what if the random queue listed *every* page;
> > each page would be queued when it was created (and removed if deleted or
> > changed to non-"article" state), and associated with a random index
> > number. When asked to view a random page, we sort on the random index
> > column (which would be indexed!) and take the lowest number; then assign
> > that same article a new random index.
> >
> > This wouldn't require the occasional delay to refill the queue, and
> > since the random index would be indexed, retrieval should be quick
> > enough even with a large number of articles.
>
> Sounds good, but then why not put the random index field directly into the
> 'cur' table ? It would allow to completely remove the random queue table.

Er, yes, that makes more sense. :)

This is in CVS, and in place on test.wikipedia.org. Try it out...

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Fred Bauder

body:
Redundancy is an accepted principle of good design, expecially for indexes
(which is what we're talking about). So both should be titles if both are in
use by the public (our masters).

Correctness is best avoided in any event as it is a source of friction.
Perhaps there is some preference by the Pennsylvania Dutch, perhaps not, but
the term is in general use. It also referrs to German immigrants who arrived
during a certain time frame and share certain cultural characteristics, not
to German immigrants in general.

Fred

> From: erik_moeller at gmx.de (Erik Moeller)
> Reply-To: wikien-l at wikipedia.org
> Date: 09 Feb 2003 22:47:00 +0100
> To: wikien-l at wikipedia.org
> Subject: [WikiEN-l] Naming convention: popularity vs. correctness
>
> I think we need to change our naming convention to use the more correct
> article title if everybody who knows the history of the term in question
> agrees that it is correct; that is, if everybody who has a coherent POV on
> the matter shares the same opinion. In other words, we should use
> academically correct titles, not those which Google prefers.
>
> Examples:
>
> 1) Ockham's Razor should not reside at Occam's Razor (Occam is the
> latinization of the town name Ockham; the town still exists today).
>
> 2) Pennsylvania Dutch should be at Pennsylvania German (it is not Dutch at
> all; the word is merely a corruption of "Deutsch" or "D?tsch").
>
> As I wrote on [[Talk:Pennsylvania Dutch]]:
>
> Regarding the title, I agree this should be under Pennsylvania German.
> This is a case where a redirect makes perfect sense. I support anglicized
> article titles, but I do not support using an obviously inccorect title
> because it is more popular among the uninformed. It is not POV for us to
> assert that "Pennsylvania German" is correct if there's nobody who
> disagrees, based on factual arguments and not mere habit, with that
> statement. This "Dutch" has nothing to do with Dutch.
>
> [...]
>
> Linkability is not an argument: People are already linking to this article
> using [[Pennsylvania German|Pennsylvania Dutch]], because obviously they
> do not want to use the corrupt form. Searchability is neither, since
> redirects show up in searches. Google-ability is only slightly reduced,
> since "Pennsylvania Dutch" would still be mentioned in the article body.
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at wikipedia.org
> http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l


subject: [Wikitech-l] Bug reports auto-notification

body:
On mer, 2003-02-05 at 11:25, Brion Vibber wrote:
> On Wed, 5 Feb 2003, Jason Richey wrote:
> > This seems like the kind of thing that should be sent to wikitech-l
> > automatically.  Am I wrong in thinking this?
>
> It would be both bug reports and all changes to bug reports. (added
> comments, change of priority level, etc). If people want those forwarded
> to this list, it can be done.

For that matter, can we do that without the list trying to send things
to noreply at sourceforge.net all the time?

>  If people would prefer a separate list, that
> can be done.

Anyone?

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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body:
On 2/9/03 4:47 PM, "Erik Moeller" <erik_moeller at gmx.de> wrote:
> 1) Ockham's Razor should not reside at Occam's Razor (Occam is the
> latinization of the town name Ockham; the town still exists today).
>
> 2) Pennsylvania Dutch should be at Pennsylvania German (it is not Dutch at
> all; the word is merely a corruption of "Deutsch" or "D?tsch").
>
> As I wrote on [[Talk:Pennsylvania Dutch]]:
>
> Regarding the title, I agree this should be under Pennsylvania German.
> This is a case where a redirect makes perfect sense. I support anglicized
> article titles, but I do not support using an obviously inccorect title
> because it is more popular among the uninformed. It is not POV for us to
> assert that "Pennsylvania German" is correct if there's nobody who
> disagrees, based on factual arguments and not mere habit, with that
> statement. This "Dutch" has nothing to do with Dutch.
>
The current policy is the healthier one. Wikipedia should by and large
reflect the common consensus, at least on a zero-order approximation, not
try to enforce the "correct" view of specialists or linguistic sticklers (of
whose ranks I consider myself a member), in particular with the names of
entries.

For example, I know about the term "Pennsylvania Dutch" and have seen it
used in many contexts (social, political, commercial branding, etc.) whereas
"Pennsylvania German" is just not a term in use.

Similarly, "Occam's Razor" is by far the more prevalent and *preferred*
spelling for the term by English speakers.


body:
At 05:20 PM 2/9/03 -0500, the Cunctator wrote:
>On 2/9/03 4:47 PM, "Erik Moeller" <erik_moeller at gmx.de> wrote:
> > 1) Ockham's Razor should not reside at Occam's Razor (Occam is the
> > latinization of the town name Ockham; the town still exists today).
> >
> > 2) Pennsylvania Dutch should be at Pennsylvania German (it is not Dutch at
> > all; the word is merely a corruption of "Deutsch" or "D?tsch").
> >
> > As I wrote on [[Talk:Pennsylvania Dutch]]:
> >
> > Regarding the title, I agree this should be under Pennsylvania German.
> > This is a case where a redirect makes perfect sense. I support anglicized
> > article titles, but I do not support using an obviously inccorect title
> > because it is more popular among the uninformed. It is not POV for us to
> > assert that "Pennsylvania German" is correct if there's nobody who
> > disagrees, based on factual arguments and not mere habit, with that
> > statement. This "Dutch" has nothing to do with Dutch.
> >

<snip>

>For example, I know about the term "Pennsylvania Dutch" and have seen it
>used in many contexts (social, political, commercial branding, etc.) whereas
>"Pennsylvania German" is just not a term in use.

I agree. In this particular case, we're not dealing with a long-dead
philosopher: we're dealing with the language of a thriving community. The
question is, or should be, _what terms do they use_? In particular, what terms
do they use when they're speaking English? (In Pennsylvania Dutch, I suspect
they call it "Deutsch".) Certainly, the region is called the Pennsylvania Dutch
Country, not the Pennsylvania German Country. Googling won't get
you this one--the Amish avoid the Internet.

--
Vicki Rosenzweig
vr at redbird.org
http://www.redbird.org


from_name: Eugene Gill

subject: [WikiEN-l] The MIT Vandal is back

body:
The MIT Vandal is back right now as User:Sumar
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subject: [WikiEN-l] The MIT Vandal is back

body:
Seems to have been a hit and run attack on 3 random articles (Eton College,Yanomami and Arecibo radio telescope). But the style was the same as the MIT vandal, i.e. subtle changes in one case and chunks deleted in another.

Mintguy
  ----- Original Message -----
  From: Eugene Gill
  To: wikien-l at wikipedia.org
  Sent: Sunday, February 09, 2003 6:15 PM
  Subject: [WikiEN-l] The MIT Vandal is back

  The MIT Vandal is back right now as User:Sumar
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subject: [Wikitech-l] FYI test.wikipedia.org

body:
I've overwritten the experimental stuff in test.wikipedia.org with the
current work code (including the new timestamp & random code which will
be going live in a few hours -- test fast! :)

Copies of the recent state should be in the 'backup2' subdirectory.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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body:
Brion VIBBER wrote:

>Please double-check the history of [[Pennsylvania German]] carefully.
>Note that there is a known problem that causes revisions to be listed
>OUT OF ORDER when portions of the histories were restored from deletion
>(or imported from the old pre-Jan 2002 UseModWiki version of Wikipedia).

Ah! you're right, it's all there.
Thanks! -- I was worried there for a moment.
^_^

-- Toby


body:
On dim, 2003-02-09 at 18:35, Toby Bartels wrote:
> Brion VIBBER wrote:
> >Please double-check the history of [[Pennsylvania German]] carefully.
> >Note that there is a known problem that causes revisions to be listed
> >OUT OF ORDER when portions of the histories were restored from deletion
> >(or imported from the old pre-Jan 2002 UseModWiki version of Wikipedia).
>
> Ah! you're right, it's all there.
> Thanks! -- I was worried there for a moment.
> ^_^

Yay! Well, that's one happy wiki-ending.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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body:
On Sun, Feb 09, 2003 at 11:36:00PM +0100, Erik Moeller wrote:
>> The current policy is the healthier one. Wikipedia should by and large
>> reflect the common consensus, at least on a zero-order approximation, not
>> try to enforce the "correct" view
>
>There's no reason to put correct in quotation marks here if nobody
>disagrees other than by mere habit. And if that is so, it is proper for an
>encyclopedia to use the correct term. That's why the Britannica uses
>"Ockham's Razor". Using the Google popularity test for article titles is
>unprofessional.

Look, English isn't your native language; I wish you would stop showing
disrespect for the common linguistic heritage of those for who it IS
their first, and usually ONLY language.

Jonathan

--
                     Geek House Productions, Ltd.

  Providing Unix & Internet Contracting and Consulting,
  QA Testing, Technical Documentation, Systems Design & Implementation,
  General Programming, E-commerce, Web & Mail Services since 1998

Phone:   604-435-1205
Email:   djw at reactor-core.org
Webpage: http://reactor-core.org
Address: 2459 E 41st Ave, Vancouver, BC  V5R2W2
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body:
On Sun, Feb 09, 2003 at 08:38:54PM -0500, Tom Parmenter wrote:
>
>Of course, "German" is no more Deutsch (or Dietsch) than "Dutch" is.
>"Dutch" is at least cognate with what they call themselves in their
>own language, whereas "German" is is a Celtic name that has never been
>used by any of the many Teutonic peoples.

According to Tacitus, 2000 years ago they were calling themselves
something cognate with "Germanii", which was the Roman word for them.
How did German suddenly become a "Celtic" word?  What research can you
show to back up that assertion?  How can I trust other information you
add to Wikipedia articles if it has a similar amount of research behind
it?

Jonathan

--
                     Geek House Productions, Ltd.

  Providing Unix & Internet Contracting and Consulting,
  QA Testing, Technical Documentation, Systems Design & Implementation,
  General Programming, E-commerce, Web & Mail Services since 1998

Phone:   604-435-1205
Email:   djw at reactor-core.org
Webpage: http://reactor-core.org
Address: 2459 E 41st Ave, Vancouver, BC  V5R2W2
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body:
Nastiness doesn't get you anywhere, Clutch.  A quick Google search found http://druidry.org/obod/druid-path/celts_saxons.html which said, in part, "The ancient Germans and Celts had many things in common so culturally it might be more correct to group them all together as Northwest Europeans rather than separate them politically".  How much research have you done on the issue?  Germanii were only one tribe, anyway, weren't they?
Zoe
 Jonathan Walther <krooger at debian.org> wrote:On Sun, Feb 09, 2003 at 08:38:54PM -0500, Tom Parmenter wrote:
>
>Of course, "German" is no more Deutsch (or Dietsch) than "Dutch" is.
>"Dutch" is at least cognate with what they call themselves in their
>own language, whereas "German" is is a Celtic name that has never been
>used by any of the many Teutonic peoples.

According to Tacitus, 2000 years ago they were calling themselves
something cognate with "Germanii", which was the Roman word for them.
How did German suddenly become a "Celtic" word? What research can you
show to back up that assertion? How can I trust other information you
add to Wikipedia articles if it has a similar amount of research behind
it?

Jonathan

--
Geek House Productions, Ltd.

Providing Unix & Internet Contracting and Consulting,
QA Testing, Technical Documentation, Systems Design & Implementation,
General Programming, E-commerce, Web & Mail Services since 1998

Phone: 604-435-1205
Email: djw at reactor-core.org
Webpage: http://reactor-core.org
Address: 2459 E 41st Ave, Vancouver, BC V5R2W2
> ATTACHMENT part 2 application/pgp-signature

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