subject: [Wikipedia-l] More on marxists.org

body:
>On Fri, 16 Aug 2002, Michael R. Irwin wrote:
>
>> > I have done a good deal more reading on their site, and I find that
>> > virtually none of their material even comes close to NPOV.  It's
>> > filled throughout with standard Marxist jargon -- which is very out of
>> > the mainstream and treated (properly!) by most economists in the same
>> > way that astrology is treated by psychiatrists.
>>
>> Jimbo, you beg the question by ignoring that most economists
>> treat each others views and models (properly in my view) the
>> way most scientists treat astrology.  Why should Marxist
>> economics dogma be held to a higher standard than Keynesian
>> derived models and predictions that do not work well, if at
>> all, prior to NPOV'ing for inclusion in Wikipedia?  8)
>
>I agree. Economics is much less a hard science than astrophysics or astronomy.
>There are quite a number of serious marxist inclined economists out there.
>Include the ones in China, where doctrine is probably fairly strict
>(whereas in
>the west, each one is free to have his own pet theory), and marxist economists
>might come out in the marjority! :)
>
>Wikipedia right now is heavily balanced towards christian conservative,
>capitalist american views. Bringing in a load of marxist crap would be
>refreshing.

The opinion of someone who stands to get shot if they say the wrong thing
is not  worth much.

Fred


list: wikipedia-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Poor, Edmund W

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Marxists and Moonists

body:
I agree with what Gareth Owen wrote:
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Marxists say the market inevitably generates inequality and the accumulation
> of capital, and even more seriously, commodity production and the day-to-day
> activity entailed in buying and selling oneself on the market is the very
> ground on which bourgeois ideology grows.[1]
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
> and
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Followers of the Unification Church[2] believe Reverend Moon is the messiah,
> and that all the historical founders of all other religions have recently, in
> Heaven, proclaimed Moon's messiahship.
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------------


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia searching

body:
Andre suggested,

>Could the search feature be changed such that common words, rather than
>blocking the whole search, are removed from it (provided that there are
>also non-common words in the search)? What I mean is having the search
>"kermit the frog" get out the same effect as "kermit frog" rather than
>none at all.

I would like that, too.

Ed Poor


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Lars Aronsson

subject: [Wikitech-l] statistics: page views, edits

body:
The statistics page for Wikipedia says "There have been a total of
2445066 page views, and 49482 page edits since the software was
upgraded (July 20, 2002)."

Will these counters be reset the next time the software is upgraded?
Or will they ever be reset or reduced?  What do we really learn from
these numbers?  Could they be more useful if calculated differently?
Once the new software is launched for all languages, can we compare
the German Wikipedia against the Polish, using these numbers?

In addition to the accumulated value, I think it would be useful to
have a value that indicates the current rate of activity, either by
beginning a new counter each month (or week), or by having a decaying
average (i.e. an accumulated value filtered through a hi-pass filter).
Either way, it should use the same definition for different sites, so
we can compare values.

--
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  tel +46-70-7891609
  http://aronsson.se/ http://elektrosmog.nu/ http://susning.nu/


from_name: lcrocker at nupedia.com

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Searching with common words

body:
> Perhaps its time to think about rolling our own fulltext
> indexing mechanism?

Short of that, there are still a few tricks we can do.  First,
it was earier than I thought it would be to add MySQL's stoplist
to the code, so that's done now.  Conversely, if you or others
want to customize the list itself, you can edit the file
"FulltextStoplist.php" in the code, and I can recompile MySQL
to use our cutomized one.

Secondly, MySQL 4.0 has a much fancier fulltext search feature,
so we may want to switch over at some point when 4.0 is "blessed".
It's already a pretty stable product from what I hear, it's just
not "officially" stable.


from_name: Karen AKA Kajikit

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Search page

body:
Ray Saintonge wrote:
>
> There is one feature that I miss from the Search page.  It seems to have
> gotten lost with the software changeover.
>
> When I search for something, and the results are more than the 50 that I
> have set in my preferences, I would like to have an idea of just how
> many items contain the search term.  That lets me know whether it's
> worthwhile to look at any more pages for the term.

I know what you mean. I miss that option too!

--

Karen AKA Kajikit

And on the seventh day, God said 'What my world needs is a creature that
will truly appreciate it in all its facets' -
and so He made the kitten.

Come and visit my part of the web:
Kajikit's Corner: http://Kajikit.netfirms.com/
Aussie Support Mailing List: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AussieSupport
Allergyfree Eating Recipe Swap:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Allergyfree_Eating
Ample Aussies Mailing List: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ampleaussies/

Love and huggles to all!


from_name: Gareth Owen

subject: [Wikipedia-l] More on marxists.org

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

> There are several unstated assumptions here that are central to Marxist
> dogma

Quite true.  The article you quoted was utterly bollocks.
I'm would not raise an objection to its immediate deletion, were it included
in wikipedia.  But (and one should not take this too seriously either, I
don't actually care), I'd be keen to know why you differentiate between:

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Marxists say the market inevitably generates inequality and the accumulation
of capital, and even more seriously, commodity production and the day-to-day
activity entailed in buying and selling oneself on the market is the very
ground on which bourgeois ideology grows.[1]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
and
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Followers of the Unification Church[2] believe Reverend Moon is the messiah,
and that all the historical founders of all other religions have recently, in
Heaven, proclaimed Moon's messiahship.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Both camps sincerely hold those beliefs, and I don't know (or care) enough to
naysay either of them, but, as I understand it, few outside their movements
would give them much creedence.  I wouldn't dream of removing the latter, so I
couldn't bring myself to remove the former, either.

Setting aside the horrible writing from marxists.org, what worries me is that
the rejection of the former and acceptance of the latter as a valid
encyclopedia article is predicated on the politico-religious views of our
contributors, which is an intrinsically non-NPOV state of affairs.

[1] I don't even understand this sentence.  I guess I'm not up with jargon.
    I must return home and reread James Thurber's hilarious
        "What the leftists are saying"

[2] And I don't mean to single out the UC here, it is merely that their
    beliefs are more readily available than other minority religions.
--
Gareth Owen
"Je suis marxist, tendence Groucho" -- Paris graffito, 1968


subject: [Wikipedia-l] New "Recent Changes" format

body:
Andre Engels wrote:
>
> > Please go look at
> >
> > http://www.piclab.com/newwiki/wiki.phtml
> >
> > and give me feedback on the way it does "Recent changes".  There's
> > still a bit of work to do on things like user settings for it,
> > doing the same thing to the watchlist, and so on, but the page
> > itself should be done and I'd like to get some reactions.
>
> * The usage of " does not gain anything and would be confusing to those
>   who see it for the first time; better remove it.
>
> * Hiding multiple edits automatically hides minor edits, I don't think that
>   this behaviour is intended

The " makes no sense in listmode, so if you want to keep it then the
tablemode should be the default. The list looked like jumbled gibberish
until I clicked on the table button, when it all sprang into clear
readability.

--

Karen AKA Kajikit

And on the seventh day, God said 'What my world needs is a creature that
will truly appreciate it in all its facets' -
and so He made the kitten.

Come and visit my part of the web:
Kajikit's Corner: http://Kajikit.netfirms.com/
Aussie Support Mailing List: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AussieSupport
Allergyfree Eating Recipe Swap:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Allergyfree_Eating
Ample Aussies Mailing List: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ampleaussies/

Love and huggles to all!


from_name: Michael R. Irwin

subject: [Wikipedia-l] More on marxists.org

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:
>

>
> This objection suggests to me that you don't really get the point I'm
> trying to make here.

Perhaps I have been playing Devil's Advocate too much. 8)

I agree that the material will have to be thoroughly
worked over and augmented before it is stable NPOV.

regards,
Mike Irwin


from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Need to finalize image policy soon and work on article definition

body:
I think that the proposed image use policy is ready for list approval and
final changes and/or discussion. Please see:

http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Image_use_policy

A lack of any posts about the proposed image policy will be viewed as
acceptance of this pages as-is (yeah, like that is going to happen; I had to
say it anyway).

Another thing that I would like list members to look at is an article
definition FAQ that is being worked on that, when complete will be sublinked
under the first occurrence of the word "article" on the main page (otherwise
the statement "you can edit any article right now" might seem odd to a newbie
when the main page is obviously not editable).

See:
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_is_an_article

What is really needed now a short section explaining what the automatic
statistics actually consider to be articles. One thing that has already been
mentioned is that it looks like disambiguation pages are considered to be
articles by the software when very few humans would consider index pages to
be either encyclopedia of almanac-like articles. There is also a question as
to whether a list without any commas in a "list of" article could potentially
/not/ be considered to be an article by the software.

BTW, it would be nice if the statistics could somehow estimate the numbers of
the two types of articles wikipedia has; encyclopedia articles and supporting
almanac-like articles (lists).

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


subject: [Wikipedia-l] More on marxists.org

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

> If the subject of the article was "Marxism" it would be just fine.  Even if
> the subject of the article was "Marxist views on market socialism"

Aah.  I misunderstood.  We are in agreement.
--
Gareth Owen
"Wikipedia does rock.  By the count on the "brilliant prose" page, there
 are 14 not-bad articles so far" -- Larry Sanger (12 Jan 2001)


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Searching

body:
> Why not simply use the mysql search engine the way it is intended
> to, feeding it the whole search string in one piece,...
> With a newer version of mysql, we can even continue to use
> boolean search ("IN BOOLEAN MODE"). Also, you generate fewer SQL
> queries, and mysql create meaningful result scores. Furthermore, you
> gain the ability to search for phrases, which we don't have currently.

(1) You are mistaken that I now use multiple queries; I parse the
search string for ANDs and ORs and pass them along as a single
query with the same boolean structure (well, actually two queries--
one for titles and one for text--but not a query per term). (2) When
MySQL 4.0 becomes a reliable product, of course we'll use its newer
search features.

That being said, if MySQL now produces more useful results in non-
boolean mode, I'm certainly open to letting it do that; but I was
under the impression that the booleans were really needed.

I'm also planning to build a special "advanced search" page where
it might be an option to do it either way.


from_name: Axel Boldt

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Searching with common words

body:
Andre writes:

>Could the search feature be changed such that common words, rather
>than blocking the whole search, are removed from it

I would like that very much. I just searched for "leap second" and
found nothing, because "second" is a stop word...

The internal mysql search engine already does the right thing and
omits stop words silently, but we are using it separately for every
word, which causes the problem.

Axel


subject: [Wikipedia-l] More on marxists.org

body:
First cutting to the chase here:

Jimmy Wales wrote:

>
> This objection suggests to me that you don't really get the point I'm
> trying to make here.

If this article is representative, then yes, I also think our
current process of collaboratively editing (or edit warring) the
current pages could be overwhelmed for a while, even with a
trickle of articles.

This could result in a quantity of non NPOV (Marxist
bias) material being served as current pages until our
existing rate of contribution can process it.

Personally I do not see this as a new issue. Our current
process routinely serves biased or non NPOV material
on the current page until editors get around to editing it.
We short circuit this a bit with dedicated regulars tracking
the recent changes page alert for obviously unsuitable
or NPOV material.

This will be true until we implement some sort of revision
control process and serve only material NPOV'ed to some
threshold as the current page.  Elsewhere I proposed
a mechanism for this that I hoped would also reduce edit
wars by placing a focus on creating suitable material for
pages worth promotion to current page status instead of
deleting unsuitable material from the current page.
I think LDC also proposed a mechanism which was
slightly different.

I think our current process works overall in the long
run in that the bias is steadily eroded as diverse new
contributors discuss and improve it.  I think it is probable
that much bias still exists in many areas through lack
of diverse participation in the community or in specific
areas.

Perhaps if a few Marxists join us to hand trickle their
material in we can request that they help us identify our own
biases in other material as we assist them in NPOV'ing
the new Marxist material.  In other words, that they
participate fully in the community project with the goal
of a complete NPOV enclyclopedia.  This could be a quantum
leap in overall quality from some perspectives.

.... and now on to the verbose yet highly interesting
Devil's Advocacy and philosophical nitpicking.  Non interested
readers are advised to stop here.

regards,
Mike Irwin

>
> Michael R. Irwin wrote:

<snip>

Jimmy Wales wrote:

> What I would object to is a generic article called "freedom" which
> says "Freedom for the vast majority necessarily means restriction of
> the freedom of a small minority to exploit the labour of others".

This I understand.  I also would object if other views were
to be excluded.   My personal definition of freedom as a U.S.
citizen is probably somewhat similar to yours.

However, I can see some validity to this particular theoretical
viewpoint.

In order to reattain "freedom" to drink non carcinogenic water
in the U.S. it has proven necessary to regulate the entire economy
with regard to pesticides, toxic industrial waste, etc.  Now I
believe that most Americans would not intentionally and willfilly
poisen their neighbors downstream, but apparently a substantial
minority will not refrain voluntarily.  If a free market economy
with no environmental regulations tends to raise the unscrupulous
or willfully ignorant to top decision making positions because it
is cheaper to dump industrial waste products than process them
safely into other products or store them safely; then it will be
necessary to either distill your own water, avoid swimming holes,
avoid fishing, and etc. or else regulate chemical dumping.

Incidentally, it is interesting to note that it has been in
the news for years that U.S. Corporations seem to be happily
poisening Mexicans and a few Texans who share their groundwater,
via chemical dumping just across the U.S. Mexican border.
Apparently Mexico has refused to follow Marx's advice and regulate
the few, even if they are gringo owned foreign corporations, for
the benefit of the many.   This dedication to freedom is killing
and maiming many people each year for the bottom line of chemical
companies run by heroic absentee CEOs.

Enron, Worldcom, etc. have certainly demonstrated some regulation
and prosecution is necessary in capital markets (not to mention
energy markets) if small investors or consumers are to have equal
opportunity to profit from investing decisions or natural market
prices of energy.

As I understand this article on the Marxist view of "freedom"
Marx was fairly accurate in projecting what was required for
a highly successful capitalist society to protect itself from
its capitalists and executives.  Their freedom to dump industrial
wastes for increased profit margins has been restricted (So has
mine, so  perhaps he was wrong here.  Everybody regulated instead
of just a "minority".) so that I (and all others) can enjoy clean
water and a better overall environment.

His mistakes were apparently in assuming that we
must regulate the capitalist out of existence entirely, if he
did, and that only the greedy, wealthy, minority must be
regulated.

The article mentioned restriction not obliteration.  It
turns out that partial implementation of his theories in the
U.S. in ways compatible with the equal protection clause of the
U.S. Constitution, have had solid merit; while eliminating the
capitalists entirely did not work well for the Soviets.

I agree though, the title must be augmented as this is
not the only form of freedom available in a modern "free"
society.

>
> And "Positive freedom has been built up almost exclusively as a result
> of the struggle of the working class: initially the legislation
> limiting hours of work, child labour and so on, later the creation of
> free compulsory education, public health systems, right to form trade
> unions, and so forth, freedoms which explicitly limit the freedom of
> the capitalists to exploit workers, but give worker the opportunity to
> develop as human beings."
>
> See the entire entry here:
> http://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/f/r.htm#freedom
>
> Now, my objection is not just that these things are wrong, nor that
> they are the noble foundation of the great riproaring genocides of the
> past century.

Are they?  It looked to me like the now failed totalitarian
empires pretty consistently ignored the theory.


from_name: Hr. Daniel Mikkelsen

subject: [Wikipedia-l] More on marxists.org

body:
On Fri, 16 Aug 2002, Michael R. Irwin wrote:

> > I have done a good deal more reading on their site, and I find that
> > virtually none of their material even comes close to NPOV.  It's
> > filled throughout with standard Marxist jargon -- which is very out of
> > the mainstream and treated (properly!) by most economists in the same
> > way that astrology is treated by psychiatrists.
>
> Jimbo, you beg the question by ignoring that most economists
> treat each others views and models (properly in my view) the
> way most scientists treat astrology.  Why should Marxist
> economics dogma be held to a higher standard than Keynesian
> derived models and predictions that do not work well, if at
> all, prior to NPOV'ing for inclusion in Wikipedia?  8)

I agree. Economics is much less a hard science than astrophysics or astronomy.
There are quite a number of serious marxist inclined economists out there.
Include the ones in China, where doctrine is probably fairly strict (whereas in
the west, each one is free to have his own pet theory), and marxist economists
might come out in the marjority! :)

Wikipedia right now is heavily balanced towards christian conservative,
capitalist american views. Bringing in a load of marxist crap would be
refreshing.

-- Daniel


from_name: Jan Hidders

in_reply_to: <200208162053.WAA12444@linde.uni-paderborn.de>; from axel@uni-paderborn.de on Fri, Aug 16, 2002 at 10:53:17PM +0200

body:
On Fri, Aug 16, 2002 at 10:53:17PM +0200, Axel Boldt wrote:
> Andre writes:
>
> >Could the search feature be changed such that common words, rather
> >than blocking the whole search, are removed from it
>
> I would like that very much. I just searched for "leap second" and
> found nothing, because "second" is a stop word...
>
> The internal mysql search engine already does the right thing and
> omits stop words silently, but we are using it separately for every
> word, which causes the problem.

The problem with that was that MySQL's scoring was based more on OR'ing the
search words. So a search for "world war" would give you a result that is
similar to what you now get if you do "world OR war".

It surprises me a bit that "second" is a stopword, btw. That reminds me. As
far as I could tell there is only an English stopword list in MySQL. So
what do we do for the non-English Wikipedias? If we want to give them each
their own stopword list then we need to recompile MySQL for each of them and
given the all their own MySQL server. Or are we going to have one server
with an empty stopword list and see that doesn't let the fulltext index
explode in size?

Another thing is that if a word appears in more than 50% of the documents
then its search result will also be empty. We cannot filter those out in the
search text because we don't know which words these are.

Perhaps its time to think about rolling our own fulltext indexing
mechanism?

-- Jan Hidders


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Searching

body:
> I initially resisted because it would require copying all of MySQL's
> stoplist into the PHP code,

That gets to complicated. Why not simply use the mysql search engine
the way it is intended to, feeding it the whole search string in one
piece, rather than cutting it into words and start a separate search
for every word? With a newer version of mysql, we can even continue to
use boolean search ("IN BOOLEAN MODE"). Also, you generate fewer SQL
queries, and mysql create meaningful result scores. Furthermore, you
gain the ability to search for phrases, which we don't have currently.

Axel


from_name: Karl Juhnke

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: article definition / median article size

body:
> What is really needed now a short section explaining what the
> automatic statistics actually consider to be articles.

I feel fairly strongly that too many stubs are counted as articles, but
I suppose people have different opinions, and I may be in the minority.
 That's neither here nor there.

What would be non-controversial and extremely informative is to post
the median article size in the site statistics.  No matter how we
define articles and/or automatically count them, it would be great to
have another sentence after

"[blah blah] there are 37887 pages that are probably legitimate
articles"

which would say

"The median size of those 37887 articles is 997 bytes."

How difficult would this be to implement?  I, for one, would be quite
curious to know if the median article size is going up or down.

Peace,
-Karl

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
HotJobs - Search Thousands of New Jobs
http://www.hotjobs.com


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Searching with common words

body:
>Perhaps its time to think about rolling our own fulltext indexing
>mechanism?

Just the opposite! Let's just use mysql's fulltext search the way it
was intended. It is precisely designed for an application like ours,
and they say they optimized the parameters for large databases.
I'm sure we could not hack together anything comparable. (See also my
last post on wikipedia-l.)

Axel


from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject: [Wikipedia-l] More on marxists.org

in_reply_to: <3D5DE777.1B4D1A87@surfbest.net>; from mri_icboise@surfbest.net on Fri, Aug 16, 2002 at 11:04:39PM -0700

body:
Michael R. Irwin wrote:
> If this article is representative, then yes, I also think our
> current process of collaboratively editing (or edit warring) the
> current pages could be overwhelmed for a while, even with a
> trickle of articles.

It wasn't representative, it was a particularly bad example.  Others
have wisely pointed out that some of what they have is not so biased.

The biographies aren't bad at all.  Pretty much we just have to watch
for things like calling Milton Friedman "conservative" and calling
mainstream economics "bourgois economcis".  Those are easy terminology
fixes, though.

> Personally I do not see this as a new issue. Our current
> process routinely serves biased or non NPOV material
> on the current page until editors get around to editing it.

That's right.  If they were to dump things in too fast, though,
it would be hard to digest and some of it would end up getting
neglected.  Usually, things that manage to scroll off the recent
changes pages end up pretty stable.

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikipedia-l] More on marxists.org

in_reply_to: <r5i3ctd7kgv.fsf@gill.maths.keele.ac.uk>; from wiki@gwowen.freeserve.co.uk on Sat, Aug 17, 2002 at 01:12:16PM +0100

body:
Gareth Owen wrote:

> Am I right that your objection is "The articles on marxists.org are
> wholly unsuitable for inclusion in wikipedia under the titles they
> have on that site."

That's right.

> I'm yet to see anyone disagree with you on this.

I agree.

--Jimbo


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [Wikipedia-l] More on marxists.org

body:
Michael R. Irwin wrote:

>I think our current process works overall in the long
>run in that the bias is steadily eroded as diverse new
>contributors discuss and improve it.  I think it is probable
>that much bias still exists in many areas through lack
>of diverse participation in the community or in specific
>areas.
>
I think that Lee's woek on the Recent Changes page will help here.  As
long as recent changes was at 2000 article per day, they would
understandably fall off the table more quickly, often before anyone had
a chance to review them at all.

>Perhaps if a few Marxists join us to hand trickle their
>material in we can request that they help us identify our own
>biases in other material as we assist them in NPOV'ing
>the new Marxist material.  In other words, that they
>participate fully in the community project with the goal
>of a complete NPOV enclyclopedia.  This could be a quantum
>leap in overall quality from some perspectives.
>
The very first thing that I look forward to here is for at least one of
the people from marxist.org to visibly participate in these debates.
 Thus far they've only had the opportunity to sit back to see how the
wind is blowing in the Wikipedia debates.

>Jimmy Wales wrote:
>
>>What I would object to is a generic article called "freedom" which
>>says "Freedom for the vast majority necessarily means restriction of
>>the freedom of a small minority to exploit the labour of others".
>>
>However, I can see some validity to this particular theoretical
>viewpoint.
>
>His mistakes were apparently in assuming that we
>must regulate the capitalist out of existence entirely, if he
>did, and that only the greedy, wealthy, minority must be
>regulated.
>
Any judgement of Marx must take into account the simple fact that he
died in 1883, and he was limited in his opinions by events that preceded
him.

>The article mentioned restriction not obliteration.  It
>turns out that partial implementation of his theories in the
>U.S. in ways compatible with the equal protection clause of the
>U.S. Constitution, have had solid merit; while eliminating the
>capitalists entirely did not work well for the Soviets.
>
The equal protection clause is one of the more marxist elements of the
U. S. Constitution despite the fact that it was written before 1818.
 There are many crypto-marxists in the United States, as long as you
don't point out that their views correspond with Marxist ones.  Like the
gays of 50 years ago, they're afraid to come out of the closet.

>>And "Positive freedom has been built up almost exclusively as a result
>>of the struggle of the working class: initially the legislation
>>limiting hours of work, child labour and so on, later the creation of
>>free compulsory education, public health systems, right to form trade
>>unions, and so forth, freedoms which explicitly limit the freedom of
>>the capitalists to exploit workers, but give worker the opportunity to
>>develop as human beings."
>>
Except for the words "almost exclusively" I have no problem with this.
 This was the great contribution of the 2nd International.  Their
accomplishments stalled with WWI, and it is only recently that France
has seen the wisdom of further reducing the mandated weekly hours of
work.  With President George III the US has shown signs of going
backwards on this.

>>Now, my objection is not just that these things are wrong, nor that
>>they are the noble foundation of the great riproaring genocides of the
>>past century.
>>
Marx never mandated genocide.

>China is a bit more perplexing.  Are the Chinese people
>gaining more "negative freedoms" relative to where they
>started when the Communist Party took over?
>
China has never abandoned the superiority complex that goes with being
the middle kingdom.  Even its own brand of marxism had to be subservient
to that principle.  The continuing occupation of Tibet and the claims to
Taiwan have more to do with nationalism than with marxism.

Eclecticology


subject: [Wikipedia-l] More on marxists.org

body:
>> Am I right that your objection is "The articles on marxists.org are
>> wholly unsuitable for inclusion in wikipedia under the titles they
>> have on that site."
>
>That's right.
>
>> I've yet to see anyone disagree with you on this.
>
>I agree.

That might be a diplomatic way to approach them--just say that
all of their stuff is welcome, if titled "Marxist views on X..."
or similar, and that some information from those articles might
also make its way into the "X..." articles themselves, but not
most of it.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Re: article definition / median article size

body:
On Saturday 17 August 2002 10:25 am, Karl wrote:
> What would be non-controversial and extremely informative is to post
> the median article size in the site statistics. ?No matter how we
> define articles and/or automatically count them, it would be great to
> have another sentence after

That sounds like a great feature request, I say go ahead and post it before
it falls off this list.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


body:
> On a similar subject. What is the Wikipedia policy on using
> music/mp3 clips ?

We don't have that worked out yet.  I've been using 10-20
second clips at 64k bitrate, which should easily fall under
"fair use" doctrine and are reasonable downloads (see, for
example, "Simon and Garfunkel").  No one's complained yet,
and I doubt they will.


body:
On Saturday 17 August 2002 10:25 am, Krzysztof P. Jasiutowicz wrote:
> On a similar subject. What is the Wikipedia policy on using music/mp3
> clips ?
>
> Regards,
> kpjas.

There is currently a small paragraph talking about sound at the bottom of :
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Image_use_policy

I'm pretty sure Lee wrote it so if it is incomplete or unclear he will have
to explain it for you.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Searching

in_reply_to: <200208170330.g7H3Ugn29690@ross.bomis.com>; from lcrocker@nupedia.com on Fri, Aug 16, 2002 at 08:30:42PM -0700

body:
On Fri, Aug 16, 2002 at 08:30:42PM -0700, lcrocker at nupedia.com wrote:
>
> That being said, if MySQL now produces more useful results in non-
> boolean mode, I'm certainly open to letting it do that; but I was
> under the impression that the booleans were really needed.

I just tried if I could reproduce the bad scoring results of MySQL that made
me AND the search words, and I couldn't. I'm running now a slightly newer
and different version (3.23.41 on Linux) than when I did those tests
originally (3.23.?? on Windows), but perhaps I also did not do enough
testing and accidentally used some stopwords or words that didn't make the
50% limit.

Anyway, I don't have SQL access so if somebody could do some testing on the
currently running MySQL server to see how well it ranks for phrases like
'axel boldt'. In my memory, pages with a lot of 'axel' on it were higher
ranked than pages that contained both 'axel' and 'boldt' only once. The only
thing that happens now is that pages with only 'axel' on it also turn up in
the result.

As far as the need for boolean searches is concerned, I implemented it
because Larry Sanger asked for it and it seemed important at the time that he
had good searching capabilities. I doubt if it is used very much at the
moment.

> I'm also planning to build a special "advanced search" page where
> it might be an option to do it either way.

Once we start using MySQL4 that could be as simple as a text box that allows
people to do the MySQL binary fulltext search along with some explanation of
how to do the boolean searches, the exact phrase search and the search where
the search words have different relevancies.

So that leaves only the stopword-list problem. Do we really want a separate
MySQL server for evey different language that is compiled with its own
stopword list?

-- Jan Hidders


from_name: Tim Marklew

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: More on marxists.org

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:
>I have done a good deal more reading on their site, and I find that
>virtually none of their material even comes close to NPOV.

I disagree.  There are a significant number of articles at the site which
are close to NPOV.  Good examples are the biographies (for example, the
biography of Karl Marx himself is perfectly OK) and some historical articles
(eg. Great Leap Forward, which I have already put into Wikipedia with a few
changes and deletions).

It is of course correct that many, if not most of the articles in the
Encyclopedia of Marxism are not NPOV and are overtly Marxist.  It is after
all their openly stated aim to create a reference work written from a
Marxist viewpoint.  But we should not overlook the fact that among the
overtly political texts, unsuitable for Wikipedia, there are parts -
sometimes just paragraphs, sometimes whole articles - that are suitable for
Wikipedia with appropriate modification.

>filled throughout with standard Marxist jargon -- which is very out of
>the mainstream and treated (properly!) by most economists in the same
>way that astrology is treated by psychiatrists....

Again, I disagree.  Marxism is certainly a minority view. However, there do
exist distinguished economists today who draw on Marxist ideas.  Mainstream
sociology is also strongly influenced by Marxist though.

>Take this section for example, from "Market Socialism":
>
> >Should the working class succeed in taking political power, capital
> >would be abolished but there could be no question of simply
> >'abolishing' the market. This would take time. However, the market
> >inevitably generates inequality and the accumulation of capital, and
> >even more seriously, commodity production and the day-to-day activity
> >entailed in buying and selling oneself on the market is the very
> >ground on which bourgeois ideology grows.

>There are several unstated assumptions here that are central to
>Marxist dogma but which have no place in an NPOV presentation.  For
>example, it assumes that "should the working class succeed in taking
>political power" the market *could* be abolished, but not "simply" --
>it "would take time".  That's dogma on the same scientific level as
>phrenology.

>I suppose we could try to work with this stuff by prefacing everything
>with "Marxists claim..." and ending it with "but virtually all
>economists regard these Marxists as cranks."

Most modern economists would strongly disagree with Marxism, but I think it
would be unrepresentative and unnecessary to say that they would call them
cranks.  Much more NPOV is just to say that marxist economics is a minority
point of view.

>But that doesn't make
>for a very useful article about "market socialism".

Why not?  "Market socialism" is a term often (if not mostly) used by
Marxists, so Marxist views are relevant here. An article on market socialism
could certainly have some  material like this, perhaps toned down and
condensed, under a heading of "Marxist views on market socialism".

Part of the usefulness of the Encyclopedia of Marxism is that it aims to
give an overview of Marxist thought without giving undue precedence to
particular schools of Marxist thought.  So it's a useful source where we
want to say "this is what Marxists think" without quoting from one
individual's ideosyncratic opinion.

For the record, I personally strongly disagree with Marxism.

Tim (the Enchanter)

_________________________________________________________________
Chat with friends online, try MSN Messenger: http://messenger.msn.com


subject: [Wikipedia-l] More on marxists.org

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

> My objection is that these articles are extremely and irreparably NPOV.

But only if you maintain the original title, and I don't think anyone (except
yourself) has suggested it.

Is an article on marxists.org entitled "Freedom" not implicitly called
"Marxist views on freedom"  So include it in wikipedia under *that* title, or
as part of an article on "Marxist Economic Theory" and move on.

> This objection suggests to me that you don't really get the point I'm
> trying to make here.

Am I right that your objection is "The articles on marxists.org are wholly
unsuitable for inclusion in wikipedia under the titles they have on that site."

I'm yet to see anyone disagree with you on this.
--
Gareth Owen
"Wikipedia does rock.  By the count on the "brilliant prose" page, there
 are 14 not-bad articles so far" -- Larry Sanger (12 Jan 2001)


from_name: Krzysztof P. Jasiutowicz

body:
On 16-08-2002, Daniel Mayer wrote thusly :
> I think that the proposed image use policy is ready for list approval and
> final changes and/or discussion. Please see:
> http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Image_use_policy
[snip]
On a similar subject. What is the Wikipedia policy on using music/mp3
clips ?

Regards,
kpjas.


body:
On Fri, Aug 16, 2002 at 06:08:11PM -0700, lcrocker at nupedia.com wrote:
>
> [...]  Conversely, if you or others
> want to customize the list itself, you can edit the file
> "FulltextStoplist.php" in the code, and I can recompile MySQL
> to use our cutomized one.

Actually, out of curiosity I wrote a small PHP script that fills a table
with information about which words are used how many times and in how many
articles. It needs some refining (it runs over all pages in table cur and it
uses the regexp \w+ to find words) but with it we could for example determine a
list of words that is used in more than 50% of the pages. Those are the
search words that MySQL ignores anyway. It would also give us a quick and
dirty way to determine the stopword list for the non-English Wikipedias.

I'm running it at the moment on the dump from May 20.

-- Jan Hidders


from_name: Pierre Abbat

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Kimny ya 7ilo al 3ion

body:
This file was uploaded three times. Does anyone know what language that is,
or how to pronounce it?

phma


body:
On 17-08-2002, lcrocker at nupedia.com wrote thusly :
> > On a similar subject. What is the Wikipedia policy on using
> > music/mp3 clips ?
> We don't have that worked out yet.  I've been using 10-20
> second clips at 64k bitrate, which should easily fall under
> "fair use" doctrine and are reasonable downloads (see, for
> example, "Simon and Garfunkel").  No one's complained yet,
> and I doubt they will.
Does it apply to other countries (fair use) ?
Is it legally acceptable to apply the same doctrine to, for instance,
music works of Polish artists ?

Regards,
kpjas.


from_name: Jaap van Ganswijk

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Need to finalize image policy soon and
  work on article definition

body:
At 2002-08-17 22:01 +0200, Krzysztof P. Jasiutowicz wrote:
>On 17-08-2002, lcrocker at nupedia.com wrote thusly :
>> > On a similar subject. What is the Wikipedia policy on using
>> > music/mp3 clips ?
>> We don't have that worked out yet.  I've been using 10-20
>> second clips at 64k bitrate, which should easily fall under
>> "fair use" doctrine and are reasonable downloads (see, for
>> example, "Simon and Garfunkel").  No one's complained yet,
>> and I doubt they will.
>
>Does it apply to other countries (fair use) ?
>Is it legally acceptable to apply the same doctrine to, for instance,
>music works of Polish artists ?

Most countries, at least in Europe and North America have
adopted the Berne Convention rules of 1948 (Brussels) and
1971 (Paris). The USA since 1989-03-01. Most European
countries earlier.

I have a lot of links on:
http://www.chipdir.org/about/ - Look under legal stuff

Greetings,
Jaap

-- Chip Directory
-- http://www.chipdir.org/
-- http://www.chipdir.nl/
-- http://www.embeddedlogic.com/chipdir/ - New in the USA
-- And about 30 other mirror sites world-wide.
--
-- To subscribe to a free 'chip issues, questions and answers'
-- mailing list send a message to listguru at fatcity.com with
-- in the body 'subscribe chipdir-L'. About 500 experts are
-- willing to think with you about electronics problems etc.


from_name: Fred Bauder

subject: [Wikipedia-l] More on marxists.org

body:
At 01:17 PM 8/18/02 +0200, Andre Engels wrote:
>
>I would not be in favor of having loads of articles on someone's view on
>something. We need a general article on Marxism, and 2 or 3 articles like
>"Marxist views on Economics" or "Marxist views on History" might even be
>ok, but in general such a view should be (with the clear indications what
>it is) on the main page in those areas where the Marxist view is important,
>and not on Wikipedia at all where it is not.

A large number of articles either on Marxism and associated movements, or
historical articles on incidents where Communist parties have acted either
in or out of power are appropriate, when someone has the energy to do them.
Those articles necessarily will include Marxist theory as the actions are
incomprehensible in its absence.

Communism was certainly a great experiment, the results of which generated
a great deal of knowledge, there is no point at all in throwing the
knowledge away.

Marx, for example, was quite sure that socialization of the means of
production would create a cornucopia of wealth. Why and how that assumption
is wrong is a very interesting question.

Why for example, does China not simply start their own Walmarts instead of
importing them from Arkansas?

Fred


from_name: tarquin

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Need to finalize image policy soon and work on
 article definition

body:
Is there something in the image upload policy something about file names?

from RC:
/uploaded "Salsintr.JPG": interior of salisbury cathedral, england,
looking westward from the high altar/

In these modern times of long filenames, something like "Salisbury
Cathedral, England, interior view of the altar" might be better.


from_name: Andre Engels

subject: [Wikipedia-l] More on marxists.org

in_reply_to:
<200208171754.g7HHsaf16698@ross.bomis.com> from "lcrocker@nupedia.com"
 at "Aug 17, 2002 10:54:36 am"

body:
> >> Am I right that your objection is "The articles on marxists.org are
> >> wholly unsuitable for inclusion in wikipedia under the titles they
> >> have on that site."
> >
> >That's right.
> >
> >> I've yet to see anyone disagree with you on this.
> >
> >I agree.
>
> That might be a diplomatic way to approach them--just say that
> all of their stuff is welcome, if titled "Marxist views on X..."
> or similar, and that some information from those articles might
> also make its way into the "X..." articles themselves, but not
> most of it.

I would not be in favor of having loads of articles on someone's view on
something. We need a general article on Marxism, and 2 or 3 articles like
"Marxist views on Economics" or "Marxist views on History" might even be
ok, but in general such a view should be (with the clear indications what
it is) on the main page in those areas where the Marxist view is important,
and not on Wikipedia at all where it is not.

Andre


subject: [Wikipedia-l] More on marxists.org

body:
Andre Engels wrote:
>
> > At 01:17 PM 8/18/02 +0200, Andre Engels wrote:
> > >
> > >I would not be in favor of having loads of articles on someone's view on
> > >something. We need a general article on Marxism, and 2 or 3 articles like
> > >"Marxist views on Economics" or "Marxist views on History" might even be
> > >ok, but in general such a view should be (with the clear indications what
> > >it is) on the main page in those areas where the Marxist view is important,
> > >and not on Wikipedia at all where it is not.
> >
> > A large number of articles either on Marxism and associated movements, or
> > historical articles on incidents where Communist parties have acted either
> > in or out of power are appropriate, when someone has the energy to do them.
> > Those articles necessarily will include Marxist theory as the actions are
> > incomprehensible in its absence.
>
> I think that in most cases these explanations could be very short, with a
> link to a more general explanation which could be found at the 'Marxism' (or
> perhaps 'Communism') page. We should be giving a long, extensive overview of
> marxist ideas on that page, and give a short description of the marxist views
> on a subject with those subjects where that is of interest, but not create
> pages like "Marxist view on Freedom", "Marxist view on Sport", "Buddhist view
> on Sacrifice" or "Conservative Christian view on Terrorism".


from_name: Stephen Gilbert

subject: [Wikipedia-l] wikipedia.org

body:
--- Giskart <giskart at linux.be> wrote:
>
>
>
> At the same time of a possibel switch and the
> creation of the non-proffit organisation it is a
> good time for considering to use the domain
> www.wikipedia.org as the website for this
> non-proffit organisation en general information and
> promotion for all the Wikipedia's.
> The English Wikipedia can use en.wikipedia.org

The problem with that suggestion is that it would
break thousands of links across the web.

Stephen G.

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
HotJobs - Search Thousands of New Jobs
http://www.hotjobs.com


subject: [Wikipedia-l] More on marxists.org

body:
> At 01:17 PM 8/18/02 +0200, Andre Engels wrote:
> >
> >I would not be in favor of having loads of articles on someone's view on
> >something. We need a general article on Marxism, and 2 or 3 articles like
> >"Marxist views on Economics" or "Marxist views on History" might even be
> >ok, but in general such a view should be (with the clear indications what
> >it is) on the main page in those areas where the Marxist view is important,
> >and not on Wikipedia at all where it is not.
>
> A large number of articles either on Marxism and associated movements, or
> historical articles on incidents where Communist parties have acted either
> in or out of power are appropriate, when someone has the energy to do them.
> Those articles necessarily will include Marxist theory as the actions are
> incomprehensible in its absence.

I think that in most cases these explanations could be very short, with a
link to a more general explanation which could be found at the 'Marxism' (or
perhaps 'Communism') page. We should be giving a long, extensive overview of
marxist ideas on that page, and give a short description of the marxist views
on a subject with those subjects where that is of interest, but not create
pages like "Marxist view on Freedom", "Marxist view on Sport", "Buddhist view
on Sacrifice" or "Conservative Christian view on Terrorism".

> Communism was certainly a great experiment, the results of which generated
> a great deal of knowledge, there is no point at all in throwing the
> knowledge away.

I'm not saying that we should throw this knowledge away. I am just questioning:
 1. How much of it should be on Wikipedia, and
 2. If it should be on Wikipedia, where

What I was arguing was that the answer on question 2 should be "either on
the page on Marxism or on the subject page, NOT on a page called 'Marxist
view of <subject>'".

> Marx, for example, was quite sure that socialization of the means of
> production would create a cornucopia of wealth. Why and how that assumption
> is wrong is a very interesting question.

One can argue about what parts of marxist theory should be on Wikipedia, but
I do agree that the part you are now mentioning is probably worth it. However,
such a subject should NOT go to a page like "Marxist view on Wealth" or
"Marxist view on Socialization", but on "Marxism" or on "Socialization".
Although 'a very interesting question' in my opinion does also say that getting
NPOV might be difficult here, but giving Marx's reasoning on the point, and
the remark that the experience of 20th century Communism has proven him wrong
on this point seems to be well in place.

Andre


from_name: lcrocker at nupedia.com

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Backups.

body:
> I might have lost some messages, or something. But did anyone
> reply to my question about wikipedia backups?
> Is the wikipedia server being backed up?

The English Wikipedia is currently being backed up every few
days on an irregular schedule (read that as "whenever I think
about it").  I plan to write a cron script to automate that a
bit, but I haven't gotten around to it.  There are copies of
the database on the server itself in San Diego, and a few on my
server in San Antonio, and maybe a few with other people who
have downloaded tarballs.

I know nothing about the non-English sites--those are still
on the old server.


from_name: Brion VIBBER

subject: [Wikipedia-l] wikipedia.org

body:
Giskart wrote:
 > Are you sure ? If there can be a redirect form
 > www.wikipedia.com/a_articel to www.wikipedia.org/a_articel like it is
 > now done it must be no problem to point www.wikipedia.com/a_articel to
 > en.wikipedia.org/a_articel
 >
 > There are thousands of links to www.wikipedia.com but not (yet) to
 > www.wikipedia.org . That is the reasen why it is now the time to think
 > about this.

Another possibility is to have:
   http://www.wikipedia.org/
   http://www.wikipedia.com/
   http://wikipedia.org/
   http://wikipedia.com/
merely be a static page that links to the various languages, while:
   http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/*
   http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/*
   http://wikipedia.com/wiki/*
   http://wikipedia.org/wiki/*
would go to the English to preserve existing links, while the canonical
urls for such would be:
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/*

Unless you'd prefer to move the meta wiki into the www.wikipedia.org
place and declare it to be multilingual. (Shudder)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Backups.

body:
lcrocker at nupedia.com wrote:
>>I might have lost some messages, or something. But did anyone
>>reply to my question about wikipedia backups?
>>Is the wikipedia server being backed up?
>
> The English Wikipedia is currently being backed up every few
> days on an irregular schedule (read that as "whenever I think
> about it").  I plan to write a cron script to automate that a
> bit, but I haven't gotten around to it.

See: http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download

That doesn't tell you when the last backup was made, though. Go directly
to: http://www.wikipedia.com/tarballs/ , which for the moment at least
is just a directory listing. The current backup is from today at 2:49
pm, with some periodic older versions available as well.

(Hmm, tracking growth of the database dump's compressed size (=entropy?)
might be an interesting statistic. ;)

> I know nothing about the non-English sites--those are still
> on the old server.

I've been talking to Jason about that, those accidentally disappeared in
the transition and are being put back.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Lars Aronsson

subject: [Wikipedia-l] More on marxists.org

body:
Hr. Daniel Mikkelsen wrote:
> Wikipedia right now is heavily balanced towards christian
> conservative, capitalist american views.

I like the phrase "balanced towards".  Is that newspeak for "slanted"?
I agree with your analysis.

I think one big (happy) surprise effect of building a free
encyclopedia is these discussions about differing views and how to
negotiate a consensus or neutral view.  Wikipedia is a great school
and we should all pay tuition to Jimmy.

--
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  tel +46-70-7891609
  http://aronsson.se/ http://elektrosmog.nu/ http://susning.nu/


subject: [Wikipedia-l] wikipedia.org

body:
On Sun, 18 Aug 2002, Stephen Gilbert wrote:

> > At the same time of a possibel switch and the
> > creation of the non-proffit organisation it is a
> > good time for considering to use the domain
> > www.wikipedia.org as the website for this
> > non-proffit organisation en general information and
> > promotion for all the Wikipedia's.
> > The English Wikipedia can use en.wikipedia.org

> The problem with that suggestion is that it would
> break thousands of links across the web.

The longer we wait, the worse it'll get. Besides, a clever apache rewrite would
fix the problem until the search engines could catch up.

-- Daniel


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Backups.

body:
I might have lost some messages, or something. But did anyone reply to my
question about wikipedia backups?

Is the wikipedia server being backed up?

-- Daniel


from_name: Giskart

subject: [Wikipedia-l] wikipedia.org

body:
Stephen Gilbert wrote:
>>At the same time of a possibel switch and the
>>creation of the non-proffit organisation it is a
>>good time for considering to use the domain
>>www.wikipedia.org as the website for this
>>non-proffit organisation en general information and
>>promotion for all the Wikipedia's.
>>The English Wikipedia can use en.wikipedia.org
>
> The problem with that suggestion is that it would
> break thousands of links across the web.

Are you sure ? If there can be a redirect form
www.wikipedia.com/a_articel to www.wikipedia.org/a_articel like it is
now done it must be no problem to point www.wikipedia.com/a_articel to
en.wikipedia.org/a_articel

There are thousands of links to www.wikipedia.com but not (yet) to
www.wikipedia.org . That is the reasen why it is now the time to think
about this.

giskart


subject: [Wikipedia-l] wikipedia.org

body:
At 2002-08-18 23:58 +0200, Giskart wrote:
>Stephen Gilbert wrote:
>>>At the same time of a possibel switch and the
>>>creation of the non-proffit organisation it is a
>>>good time for considering to use the domain
>>>www.wikipedia.org as the website for this
>>>non-proffit organisation en general information and
>>>promotion for all the Wikipedia's.
>>>The English Wikipedia can use en.wikipedia.org
>>The problem with that suggestion is that it would
>>break thousands of links across the web.
>
>Are you sure ? If there can be a redirect form www.wikipedia.com/a_articel to www.wikipedia.org/a_articel like it is now done it must be no problem to point www.wikipedia.com/a_articel to en.wikipedia.org/a_articel
>
>There are thousands of links to www.wikipedia.com but not (yet) to www.wikipedia.org . That is the reasen why it is now the time to think about this.

I think it should be:
http://www.nl.wikipedia.org/
http://www.be.wikipedia.org/
http://www.pt.wikipedia.org/
http://www.eo.wikipedia.org/
etc.

I think that the english version should have two
names:
http://www.en.wikipedia.org/
and
http://www.wikipedia.org/

Let's face it, English is the lingua franca on
the internet!

Otherwise we could make:
http://www.wikipedia.org/
to be the 'portal' to the subdomains, but in which
language should it be?

I think all, the *.wikipedia.com sites should jump
to the appropriate *.org page, but at the same
time notifying intelligent search engines etc.
that the page was moved and links to it should be
changed.

By the way, my own *chipdir* sites have so many
non-correct links to them, that I gave up to ever
get it right. Years ago when the MS-DOS/CD-ROM
8.3 filesystem names where still quite dominant
I changed all the .html files to .htm files.
I still UNIX-link the main .htm files to .html
filenames or I would loose to many visitors
(I guess).

I also wrote a PHP-script to check out links in pages
(mainly for in the chipdir) and there are so many
sites out there that don't return the correct page
result codes (404 and such), that it's hard to ever
straighten that system out! There is a test version
on:
http://www.ii.nl/jaap/checkurl.php
Please ignore all the error message (about the script),
just fill in an URL in any of the two boxes and click
it's button. When you fill in http://www.wikipedia.com/
it may take 5 minutes or so, since all links will be
checked...

Don't use the script too check complete sites, it's
on a server hired by a friend. Email me for the source
if you want it. I don't mind GPL'ing it. My local
version may be improved in the mean time.

Greetings,
Jaap

-- Chip Directory
-- http://www.chipdir.org/
-- http://www.chipdir.nl/
-- http://www.embeddedlogic.com/chipdir/ - New in the USA
-- And about 30 other mirror sites world-wide.
--
-- To subscribe to a free 'chip issues, questions and answers'
-- mailing list send a message to listguru at fatcity.com with
-- in the body 'subscribe chipdir-L'. About 500 experts are
-- willing to think with you about electronics problems etc.


subject: [Wikitech-l] [rubenste@ohiou.edu: Re: help?]

body:
Steven, I am forwarding this to wikitech-l.  I haven't been logged in for two days,
so I'm not sure if there's any buzz about this.

----- Forwarded message from "steven l. rubenstein" <rubenste at ohiou.edu> -----

From: "steven l. rubenstein" <rubenste at ohiou.edu>
Date: Sat, 17 Aug 2002 14:59:08 -0400
To: Jimmy Wales <jwales at bomis.com>
Subject: Re: help?

Hi,

I have had a log-on problem for the past two days.  When I get to the main
page, I automatically log on (and my user ID appears on the upper right
corner).  But when I try to do anything, it automatically logs me
off.  What I mean is, when I try to go to any other page, my user-id
disappears and a number appears on the upper right corner.  What can I
do?  Are other people experiencing this?

Thanks,

Steve

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


subject: [Wikipedia-l] wikipedia.org

body:
Giskart wrote:
> In the future, when there is need for mony, the .com domain can possibly
> be used  for a readonly-wikipedia whit advertisment.

I'll never do this.  You have my word.

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikitech-l] software change for German Wikipedia

in_reply_to: <004301c2477f$56fdfda0$b90de1d9@maximilian>; from jansson@gmx.net on Mon, Aug 19, 2002 at 02:52:51PM +0200

body:
What are the requirements to be able to get de.wikipedia to the latest
version of the software.  What could Kurt help with?

Can we set a specific date for the move?  How about this upcoming Saturday?
Or Sunday?

--Jimbo

Kurt Jansson wrote:

> Hello dear people who have the right to access the server!
>
> Some people (including me) are really getting annoyed about the delay of
> the software change of the German wikipedia. Almost every day I (or
> someone else) has to explain, that this and that feature is coming soon
> with the new software - since several months. I know that nobody gets
> paid for this work, and I appreciate every line of code written, etc.
> But please don't make people believe that the software change is coming
> soon, if in reality it will take about half a year.
>
> Some things are put on hold in the German Wikipedia - like a press
> release - until the software change. But it's getting quite frustraing
> now.
>
> I don't want to accuse anyone, but just say: Don't promise things you
> can't keep. If your focus is on the Englisch Wikipedia that's okay with
> me, but just tell us so that we can deal with it.
>
>
> Kurt
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at ross.bomis.com
> http://ross.bomis.com/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l


from_name: The Cunctator

subject: [Wikipedia-l] www.wikipedia.org, en.wikipedia.org, etc.

body:
Regarding urls:

We have as much responsibility to usability as we do to political
correctness.

The best solution would handle both.

The worst solution would hurt usability and encourage language
balkanization.

What are the parameters of the situation?

1) www.wikipedia.org (and its minor variants wikipedia.org and
wikipedia.com) is and will forever remain the primary url.

2) Wikipedia is currently owned by an American company; it was started in
English; the English Wikipedia is orders larger than any other, English is
the lingua franca of the current times and of the Internet. All these may
change but are true now.

3) We desire all the language Wikipedias to be on equal footing.

Note that, for 3) to mean "equivalent in content", there would have to be
some mechanism to compensate for real-world differences in the degree of
participation in different languages. There will always be more English than
Icelandic speakers, etc. A perfect such mechanism would be expert-quality
automatic translation.

That out of the way, let me suggest that changing URLs should only be a
minor component of dealing with 3, not a primary focus. More effort should
be put into building the cross-link capabilities, perhaps with some
automatic dictionary translations. The wikipedias should all be running the
same software. There should be the option of having Recent Changes show
changes from any array of the languages, so that for a French contributor
fluent in English, his Recent Changes (and thus his Wikipedia, to a large
degree) looks like a French-English Wikipedia.

Etc.

I really think focussing only on the URLs is making us miss the big picture.


body:
> I have had a log-on problem for the past two days.  When I get
> to the main page, I automatically log on (and my user ID appears
> on the upper right corner).  But when I try to do anything, it
> automatically logs me off.

You're probably logging on initially to wikipedia.com; a few days
ago we changed all the internal links to wikipedia.org, so when
you follow a link your cookie goes away.  The solution is to change
your initial log in to wikipedia.org.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] wikipedia.org

body:
Jaap van Ganswijk wrote:
> I think it should be:
> http://www.nl.wikipedia.org/
> http://www.be.wikipedia.org/
> http://www.pt.wikipedia.org/
> http://www.eo.wikipedia.org/
> etc.

I do not. I find it not a good idea to make a url longer if there is no
good reasen for it. For those users that get confused if a url does not
start whit WWW there can be a redirect form http://www.nl.wikipedia.org
to http://nl.wikipedia.org. That is more than enough.

> I think that the english version should have two
> names:
> http://www.en.wikipedia.org/
> and
> http://www.wikipedia.org/

www.wikipedia.com can be a redirect to en.wikipedia.org
Just like nl.wikipedia.com to nl.wikipedia.org (and for the other
wikipedia's also offcourse)
And http://www.en.wikipedia.org redirect to http://en.wikipedia.org

> Let's face it, English is the lingua franca on
> the internet!
Yes, but most English speaking nations are allready online. In following
years many, many non-english users will com online. I think on china and
so. I agree that English is more or less the lingua franca on
the internet for the moment. But for how long ? Nobody knows ...

> Otherwise we could make:
> http://www.wikipedia.org/
> to be the 'portal' to the subdomains, but in which
> language should it be?

That is my idea, www.wikipedia.org for presentation and information
about the project. The education about the GNU/FDL-license. Things like
that ...
The default language should be English. Only the English wikipedia has
the resources to do that, the others are mutch to small at present. But
whit the possiblity to change to a different if the there is a translation.

In the future, when there is need for mony, the .com domain can possibly
be used  for a readonly-wikipedia whit advertisment.

giskart


from_name: Jason Richey

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:

> What are the requirements to be able to get de.wikipedia to the latest
> version of the software.  What could Kurt help with?
>

If I recall correctly, there is a test version of the german wikipedia
on the new software.  However, I don't recall any comments about the
bug list since it was translated a while back.  Most of the problems I
saw on the bug list were fairly simple fixes (mis-spellings or
mis-translations).  Of note, however, is the different date format.
Of course, there are other issues that may be larger than I am
realizing...

Jason Richey

English version:
http://test-de.wikipedia.com/wiki/wikipedia:Bug_report

German (original) version:
http://test-de.wikipedia.com/wiki/wikipedia:Beobachtete_Fehler

To: wikitech-l at nupedia.com
Cc:
Bcc:
Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] software change for German Wikipedia
Reply-To:
In-Reply-To: <20020819055707.E8069 at joey.bomis.com>; from
jwales at bomis.com on Mo\
n, Aug 19, 2002 at 05:57:07AM -0700

Jimmy Wales wrote:

> What are the requirements to be able to get de.wikipedia to the
> latest
> version of the software.  What could Kurt help with?
>

If I recall correctly, there is a test version of the german wikipedia
on the new software.  However, I don't recall any comments about the
bug list since it was translated a while back.  Most of the problems I
saw on the bug list were fairly simple fixes

> Can we set a specific date for the move?  How about this upcoming Saturday?
> Or Sunday?
>
> --Jimbo
>
>
> Kurt Jansson wrote:
>
> > Hello dear people who have the right to access the server!
> >
> > Some people (including me) are really getting annoyed about the delay of
> > the software change of the German wikipedia. Almost every day I (or
> > someone else) has to explain, that this and that feature is coming soon
> > with the new software - since several months. I know that nobody gets
> > paid for this work, and I appreciate every line of code written, etc.
> > But please don't make people believe that the software change is coming
> > soon, if in reality it will take about half a year.
> >
> > Some things are put on hold in the German Wikipedia - like a press
> > release - until the software change. But it's getting quite frustraing
> > now.
> >
> > I don't want to accuse anyone, but just say: Don't promise things you
> > can't keep. If your focus is on the Englisch Wikipedia that's okay with
> > me, but just tell us so that we can deal with it.
> >
> >
> > Kurt
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Wikitech-l mailing list
> > Wikitech-l at ross.bomis.com
> > http://ross.bomis.com/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at ross.bomis.com
> http://ross.bomis.com/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

--
"Jason C. Richey" <jasonr at bomis.com>


body:
> What are the requirements to be able to get de.wikipedia to the
> latest version of the software.  What could Kurt help with?

Do you want to put it on the new server or the old one? Magnus
has done an intitial translation for the new software, and Brion's
conversion scripts are complete, so I'd just need to get my hands
on the existing database, do the initial installation, and then
hopefully hand over maintenance to Magnus.


body:
On 8/19/02 10:57 AM, "lcrocker at nupedia.com" <lcrocker at nupedia.com> wrote:

>
>> I have had a log-on problem for the past two days.  When I get
>> to the main page, I automatically log on (and my user ID appears
>> on the upper right corner).  But when I try to do anything, it
>> automatically logs me off.
>
> You're probably logging on initially to wikipedia.com; a few days
> ago we changed all the internal links to wikipedia.org, so when
> you follow a link your cookie goes away.  The solution is to change
> your initial log in to wikipedia.org.
>
By the way, if you visit www.wikipedia.org, shouldn't the cookie be for
'wikipedia.org' instead of 'www.wikipedia.org'?


from_name: Poor, Edmund W

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Imports from marxism.org

body:
I know this has been hashed out pretty thoroughly. Let me try to sum up, as well as put in my own 2 cents.

No one wants to import the entire Marxism encyclopedia at once.

Some people say, import a trickle. How frequently is an open question: 3 per hour? 2 per day?

Some advocates of importing say, prepend the phrase 'Marxist view of' to the title of each imported article. This would sidestep the NPOV issue -- maybe.

Jimbo points out that the biographies seem pretty good; it's mainly the concept articles that have a pro-Marxist slant.

My primary suggestion is: if anyone sees an article they like at marxism.org which doesn't have a name conflict with an existing wikipedia article, then just copy it. Assuming marxism.org is willing to let us do this.

Ed Poor


from_name: Kurt Jansson

subject: [Wikipedia-l] wikipedia.org

body:
> I think it should be:
> http://www.nl.wikipedia.org/
> http://www.be.wikipedia.org/
> http://www.pt.wikipedia.org/
> http://www.eo.wikipedia.org/
> etc.

I think it should be
www.wikipedia.nl
www.wikipedia.be
www.wikipedia.pt
www.wikipedia.eo (uuups)

The longer we wait to get these domains, the more we will have to deal
with domain grabbers. Which domains besides .com, .org and .de do we
(Jimmy) already own?

Kurt


body:
Hello dear people who have the right to access the server!

Some people (including me) are really getting annoyed about the delay of
the software change of the German wikipedia. Almost every day I (or
someone else) has to explain, that this and that feature is coming soon
with the new software - since several months. I know that nobody gets
paid for this work, and I appreciate every line of code written, etc.
But please don't make people believe that the software change is coming
soon, if in reality it will take about half a year.

Some things are put on hold in the German Wikipedia - like a press
release - until the software change. But it's getting quite frustraing
now.

I don't want to accuse anyone, but just say: Don't promise things you
can't keep. If your focus is on the Englisch Wikipedia that's okay with
me, but just tell us so that we can deal with it.

Kurt


from_name: Tim Chambers

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Whither tech future?

body:
As we toil to develop an encyclopedia, Kuro5hin is talking about the tech
future. I say it looks disappointing, at least for the next 10 years when
compared with the past 10. (OK, this is just a shameless plug for my first
Front Page article. :-)

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2002/8/19/54354/3995

<>< Tim


body:
--- The Cunctator <cunctator at kband.com> wrote:
> That out of the way, let me suggest that changing
> URLs should only be a
> minor component of dealing with 3, not a primary
> focus.

I agree.

> More effort should
> be put into building the cross-link capabilities,
> perhaps with some
> automatic dictionary translations.

I think automatic dictionary translations would be a
big mess. I am continually reminded of the
shortcomings of dictionary translations here in South
Korea. Human-made links are by far superior to any
automatic translation of words.

> The wikipedias
> should all be running the
> same software.

Absolutely. As soon as the other language projects
start running the Phase III software, they can start
linking to each other and the English 'pedia.

> There should be the option of having
> Recent Changes show
> changes from any array of the languages, so that for
> a French contributor
> fluent in English, his Recent Changes (and thus his
> Wikipedia, to a large
> degree) looks like a French-English Wikipedia.

The only problem with this suggesting is that the
English Wikipedia's Recent Changes is huge when it
should each and every change, rather than combining
changes made on the same article. Adding the French
one to that would make it useless.

Stephen G.

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
HotJobs - Search Thousands of New Jobs
http://www.hotjobs.com


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Connection to www.wikipedia.org is broken

body:
> Something's wrong with the web server.

I did some software updates and moved some directories in
preparation for upgrading the German Wikipedia.  The site
shouldn't have been down for more than a minute, and it looks
like it's running smoothly now.  If that's not the case, let
me know.


from_name: Charles Breiterman

subject: [Wikipedia-l] correct wavelength for x-rays

body:
Re: potential substantive error

In the Wikipedia entry for x-rays, I think you mean
that they range from 5 pm to 10 nm, (not .5 pm).  .5
picometers works out to 2.5 MeV, well into the gamma
ray range.

Didn't know where else to send this.

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
HotJobs - Search Thousands of New Jobs
http://www.hotjobs.com


subject: [Wikitech-l] Connection to www.wikipedia.org is broken

body:
I just started getting this error (after the page or most of it has loaded)
within the past hour. I am using Konqueror. What is wrong?

phma


from_name: Hr. Daniel Mikkelsen

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Imports from marxism.org

body:
On Mon, 19 Aug 2002, Poor, Edmund W wrote:

> My primary suggestion is: if anyone sees an article they like at marxism.org
> which doesn't have a name conflict with an existing wikipedia article, then
> just copy it. Assuming marxism.org is willing to let us do this.

In addition I suggest a task page where requested marxism.org and completed
marxism.org imports are listed with their marxism.org names and their
wikipedia.org names.

I think this would be very much in the Wikipedia spirit - organized by people,
not by software.

-- Daniel


from_name: Pierre Abbat

body:
On Monday 19 August 2002 17:15, Pierre Abbat wrote:
> I just started getting this error (after the page or most of it has loaded)
> within the past hour. I am using Konqueror. What is wrong?

Tried again with Lynx and got the same problem. I typed the command
lynx -source http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Recentchanges >wiki.html
and got an output ending like this:

 (diff) (hist) . . Transistor-transistor
logic; 13:52 . . Heron

</

Something's wrong with the web server.

phma


body:
On 8/19/02 6:21 PM, "Stephen Gilbert" <canuck_in_korea2002 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>> There should be the option of having
>> Recent Changes show
>> changes from any array of the languages, so that for
>> a French contributor
>> fluent in English, his Recent Changes (and thus his
>> Wikipedia, to a large
>> degree) looks like a French-English Wikipedia.
>
> The only problem with this suggesting is that the
> English Wikipedia's Recent Changes is huge when it
> should each and every change, rather than combining
> changes made on the same article. Adding the French
> one to that would make it useless.
>
Right. There are a lot of ways to make the Recent Changes page more useful.
The trick is to figure out a way of doing so without allowing total
balkanization.

One reform/change I'd recommend is that for non-minor edits, something must
be put in the summary. That still trusts users enough not to waste their
time on minor edits, but forces them to help others review their work
easily.


body:
On Monday 19 August 2002 19:23, lcrocker at nupedia.com wrote:
> > Something's wrong with the web server.
>
> I did some software updates and moved some directories in
> preparation for upgrading the German Wikipedia.  The site
> shouldn't have been down for more than a minute, and it looks
> like it's running smoothly now.  If that's not the case, let
> me know.

It's fine now.

phma


subject: [Wikipedia-l] wikipedia.org

body:
Kurt Jansson wrote:
> I think it should be
> www.wikipedia.nl
> www.wikipedia.be
> www.wikipedia.pt
> www.wikipedia.eo (uuups)

At the end every wikipedia must dicide on there own(like the germans),
but in general using ccTLD's can create nationalistic problems. Most if
not all wikipedia's are not the wikipedia of a specific nation but from
a language and that can be spread over several country's. Those left out
will not be amused.
And somtimes the ccTLD do not exicest.
Or it is idiotic.

www.wikipedia.be -> =the ccTLD of Belgium and the Belorussian language.
Trust me on this, the do not speak Belorussian in Belgium

The gTDL .org is perfect for Wikipedia i think.

> The longer we wait to get these domains, the more we will have to deal
> with domain grabbers. Which domains besides .com, .org and .de do we
> (Jimmy) already own?

also .info, .net

That these are safe is not bad but to buy every possibel wikipedia.*
seems a waste to me.

giskart


subject: [Wikipedia-l] wikipedia.org

body:
Brion VIBBER wrote:
> Another possibility is to have:
>   http://www.wikipedia.org/
>   http://www.wikipedia.com/
>   http://wikipedia.org/
>   http://wikipedia.com/
> merely be a static page that links to the various languages, while:
>   http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/*
>   http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/*
>   http://wikipedia.com/wiki/*
>   http://wikipedia.org/wiki/*
> would go to the English to preserve existing links, while the canonical
> urls for such would be:
>   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/*

Good possibility. I like it.

> Unless you'd prefer to move the meta wiki into the www.wikipedia.org
> place and declare it to be multilingual. (Shudder)

Can still be done later. The problem is the lack of time. If you wait to
long there are to many links to the new location of the english
wikipedia that can not be broken. If there is no fundamental objection
to put the English wikipedia at en.wikipedia.org then that must be done.
What to do whit www.wikipedia.org can wait (a littel.)

giskart


body:
On Mon, 19 Aug 2002, Charles Breiterman wrote:

> Re: potential substantive error
>
> In the Wikipedia entry for x-rays, I think you mean
> that they range from 5 pm to 10 nm, (not .5 pm).  .5
> picometers works out to 2.5 MeV, well into the gamma
> ray range.
>
> Didn't know where else to send this.

Hi, Charles.

If you have a correction to a Wikipedia article, you can simply edit it right
there and then, in your browser! That's what Wikipedia is all about!

-- Daniel


from_name: koyaanisqatsi at nupedia.com

subject: [Wikipedia-l] [obsidian@hostkingdom.net: Re: Regnal Chronologies and Wikipedia]

body:
That's very generous of him.  :-) Thanks for looking into it.

kq

You Wrote:
>Hi,
>
>I include the author's written permission to use materials from :
>
>http://www.hostkingdom.net
>
>Regards,
>kpjas.
>
>----- Forwarded message from Obsidian <obsidian at hostkingdom.net> -----
>From: "Obsidian" <obsidian at hostkingdom.net>
>Date: Tue, 20 Aug 2002 09:20:04 -0400
>To: kpj at kki.net.pl
>Subject: Re: Regnal Chronologies and Wikipedia
>X-Mailer: WorldClient 6.0.0j
>
>Greetings
>     I've looked over your site, and like the idea a great deal - it is
>consistent with my own beliefs that knowledge ought to be as freely
>available as possible. You have my permission to utilize material from my
>own sites within yours, as long as you re-format it to your own site's
>requirements rather than simply copy-and-paste my pages. I would
>appreciate backlinks and source attribution where appropriate, but even
>if that isn't possible, you are still free to adapt whatever you find
>useful from my work.
>
>Cordially;
>Bruce R. Gordon
>
>Ex Tenebra, Lux
>
>http://www.hostkingdom.net/regindex.html
>[Wikipedia-l]
>To manage your subscription to this list, please go here:
>http://www.nupedia.com/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l


body:
>I include the author's written permission to use materials from :
>http://www.hostkingdom.net

To be safe, we should really make note of this on the talk
page of any page we actually use his stuff on.  That way, there's
a permanent record of his permission attached to the articles
where it's relevant.


body:
> Woulnd't it be better to have a set-up where all updates to
> the codebase of the English Wikipedia are (semi-)automatically
> propagated to all Wikipedias that use the same codebase? If not
> I fear that the non-English Wikipedias will keep on lagging behind
> on the bug fixes or new features such the enhanced recent changes
> page or subtle (or not so subtle) changes in the markup language,
> or whatever changes are yet to come. Making the updates automatic
> would also ensure that all future changes in the Wikipedia are
> internationalization aware, because if they're not the bug reports
> will start coming in from the non-English Wikpedias.

I'm inclined to think that if a particular community isn't large
enough to come up with a developer to take care of its own needs,
then it /should/ be left behind.  UseMod wiki is a fine piece of
software for a small level of activity, and if a group never
outgrows it, I don't see any reason for me to waste time and
effort on them.  The German, Spanish, and Polish guys are on the
ball and won't be a problem.  But I don't plan to make much effort
on behalf of the others unless they can come up with someone
from among their own ranks with the energy and skills necessary
to take care of themselves.


body:
There's no interface for it, but if you think those should
be restored, I'll restore them.

>How do you undelete pages?
>
>Andre Engels deleted
>September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attack/New York Times stories
>September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attack/New York Times articles, October
16-
>
>Even if there are problems with those pages, e.g. the links not
working, the
>pages are useful if only for the headlines.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] [obsidian@hostkingdom.net: Re: Regnal Chronologies and

body:
>> I include the author's written permission to use materials from :
>> http://www.hostkingdom.net

> Great job, thanks!
> I think it would be polite to acknowledge the materials taken
> from his site with a boilerplate note at the bottom of the article
> containing a link back, similar to what we have been doing with
> FOLDOC materials,

I think we should set a precendent that such acknowledgements go
on the Talk page, not in the main article.  As long as they are
posted at the top of the talk page, with discussion below, and not
deleted if discussion is refactored, I think we will meet all our
credit obligations without limiting our ability to edit text.


from_name: Jan Hidders

in_reply_to: <200208191749.g7JHnln24469@ross.bomis.com>; from lcrocker@nupedia.com on Mon, Aug 19, 2002 at 10:49:47AM -0700

body:
On Mon, Aug 19, 2002 at 10:49:47AM -0700, lcrocker at nupedia.com wrote:
>
> Do you want to put it on the new server or the old one? Magnus
> has done an intitial translation for the new software, and Brion's
> conversion scripts are complete, so I'd just need to get my hands
> on the existing database, do the initial installation, and then
> hopefully hand over maintenance to Magnus.

Woulnd't it be better to have a set-up where all updates to the codebase of
the English Wikipedia are (semi-)automatically propagated to all Wikipedias
that use the same codebase? If not I fear that the non-English Wikipedias
will keep on lagging behind on the bug fixes or new features such the
enhanced recent changes page or subtle (or not so subtle) changes in the
markup language, or whatever changes are yet to come. Making the updates
automatic would also ensure that all futere changes in the Wikipedia are
internationalization aware, because it they're not the bug reports will
start coming in from the non-English Wikpedias.

Having said that, it should of course be the community of the German
Wikipedia who decides if they really want such a setup. But if they do, then
please let us get things right this time.

-- Jan Hidders


from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Regnal resource

body:
>I think we should set a precendent that such
>acknowledgements go on the Talk page, not in
>the main article.  As long as they are posted
>at the top of the talk page, with discussion
>below, and not deleted if discussion is
>refactored, I think we will meet all our
>credit obligations without limiting our
>ability to edit text.

I agree. There is no need to clutter the main article
with source links when most of the info at the link is
already included in the Wikipedia article. This method
of attribution is also what I have been doing for the
element articles. See:
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Magnesium Of
course, also citing your sources in the edit summary
is a good idea to prevent mistaken accusations of
copyright infringement. I don't think the author
intends to place the text into the public domain
though so we shouldn't imply that. Perhaps it is time
for somebody to make a [[Wikipedia:Open content
resources]] page for this type of resource.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
HotJobs - Search Thousands of New Jobs
http://www.hotjobs.com


body:
How do you undelete pages?

Andre Engels deleted

September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attack/New York Times stories

and

September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attack/New York Times articles, October 16-

Even if there are problems with those pages, e.g. the links not working, the
pages are useful if only for the headlines.


body:
> Perhaps I'm only stating the obvious here, but I would suggest
> the following guidelines:
> - Local developers can make always updates in local parts
>   of the code, for updates in the common part of the code they
>   should ask Lee's permisson.
> - When a new version of the code is installed for the English
>   Wikipedia then this should be announced (on Wikitech-l) and
>   then installed on local Wikipedias by the local developers as
>   soon as possible.
> - Local developers are responsible for putting local bug-reports
>   on something in the common code in the Sourceforge bugtracker.

It should be simpler than that.  There is only one codebase, and
it contains only one language-specific file: "LanguageDe.php",
"LanguageEs.php", and so on, all of which are kept in the single
codebase.  There'a also a "LocalSettings.php" for each install,
but that doesn't change once installed.
Those files can be changed at will by anyone without affecting
the English wiki, and should be.  The code is also organized so
that if, say, I add a special page and update the code of the
foreign version, that special page will appear in the foreign
version, but with English text; they can add the translation for
that page at any time, no coordination needed.

I also don't have any problem with Brion, Magnus, you, and other
developers doing direct checkins.  I'd prefer that such new checkins
be tested on my server before installing them on the wiki server,
but even there I can see small bug fixes not wanting to bother.

In short, I don't think we need to worry about coordination unless
one of the groups decides to "fork" the code for some reason, and
in that case I'd try to talk them out of it, but if they really
wanted to do it, they're free to, and then they'd definitely be on
their own.


body:
>> I think we should set a precendent that such acknowledgements go
>> on the Talk page, not in the main article.  As long as they are
>> posted at the top of the talk page, with discussion below, and not
>> deleted if discussion is refactored, I think we will meet all our
>> credit obligations without limiting our ability to edit text.

>Are Talk pages open for search engines' robots ?

Yes, talk pages are currently indexed and followed just like
the main pages.


body:
>> [...] The code is also organized so that if, say, I add a
>> special page and update the code of the foreign version, that
>> special page will appear in the foreign version, but with
>> English text; they can add the translation for that page at
>> any time, no coordination needed.

> If *you* update the code of the foreign version? Does that mean
> that you would also take care of installing the updated code for
> the foreign versions? That would take all my worries away, but I
> was under the impression you wanted to leave that to the local
> developers.

Well, read that as "if the code gets updated from CVS", by
whoever.  When I update the main code with something like a bug
fix, it will be a pretty trivial thing for me to update the
forgeign ones at the same time, so I'll probably do that.  But
I also might forget.  Also, someone like Magnus might fix a bug
and update only the German installation, leaving me to update
the English one later.

Jimbo moved us to the new server in part so he could give
accounts out more freely (currently I, Axel, Brion, Magnus, and
Neil have accounts there), so he would no longer be a bottleneck
or a single point of failure.  It makes no sense to just make me
the bottleneck instead (although I'm sure Jimbo sees that as an
improvement :-)


body:
For those wikipedias that /should/ be using the same codebase, it
seems reasonable to me that they should have all of the scripts
symlinked to the scripts of the main wikipedia.  Then, any
configurable variables could be exported by Apache as ENV variables.
By doing this, you avoid running a script to update things, a person
doesn't have to update them manually, and all of the apropriate
wikipedias will be running the same software...

Just a thought...

Jason

Jan Hidders wrote:

> On Tue, Aug 20, 2002 at 09:47:34AM -0700, lcrocker at nupedia.com wrote:
> > > Woulnd't it be better to have a set-up where all updates to the codebase
> > > of the English Wikipedia are (semi-)automatically propagated to all
> > > Wikipedias that use the same codebase? [...]
> >
> > I'm inclined to think that if a particular community isn't large
> > enough to come up with a developer to take care of its own needs,
> > then it /should/ be left behind.  UseMod wiki is a fine piece of
> > software for a small level of activity, and if a group never
> > outgrows it, I don't see any reason for me to waste time and
> > effort on them.
>
> Just for clarity, I was only talking about "all Wikipedias that use the same
> codebase". What I'm concerned about is that those that will move to the
> Phase III script will also stay in sync in the future. Also note that I
> wrote "semi-automatic"; I realize that updates that involve running scripts
> on the database and/or changing the database schema should not be automated.
> But at least the updates that involve only updating the common scripts
> should be made as easy as possible. I would suggest that we put the local
> scripts and common scripts into separate directories.
>
> > The German, Spanish, and Polish guys are on the ball and won't be a
> > problem.
>
> Hmm, that reminds me, perhaps I should get a bit more involved with the
> Dutch Wikipedia. :-)
>
> But are you really sure there will be no problems? What I am afraid of is
> that local developers start fixing bugs in the common part of the code. What
> happens if you don't agree with those fixes? Or what if one of your updates
> to the common part is going to break something on their Wikipedia? Are they
> then going to have to fix this locally or should they stick to the previous
> version until you have fixed the problem or approved their fix? Can they
> depend on you for this? Apologies if that sounds insulting but from their
> point of view that may not be so obvious.
>
> Perhaps I'm only stating the obvious here, but I would suggest the following
> guidelines:
> - Local developers can make always updates in local parts of the code, for
>   updates in the common part of the code they should ask Lee's permisson.
> - When a new version of the code is installed for the English Wikipedia then
>   this should be announced (on Wikitech-l) and then installed on local
>   Wikipedias by the local developers as soon as possible.
> - Local developers are responsible for putting local bug-reports on
>   something in the common code in the Sourceforge bugtracker.
>
> -- Jan Hidders
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at ross.bomis.com
> http://ross.bomis.com/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

--
"Jason C. Richey" <jasonr at bomis.com>


from_name: Krzysztof P. Jasiutowicz

body:
Hi,

I include the author's written permission to use materials from :

http://www.hostkingdom.net

Regards,
kpjas.

----- Forwarded message from Obsidian <obsidian at hostkingdom.net> -----
From: "Obsidian" <obsidian at hostkingdom.net>
Date: Tue, 20 Aug 2002 09:20:04 -0400
To: kpj at kki.net.pl
Subject: Re: Regnal Chronologies and Wikipedia
X-Mailer: WorldClient 6.0.0j

Greetings
     I've looked over your site, and like the idea a great deal - it is
consistent with my own beliefs that knowledge ought to be as freely
available as possible. You have my permission to utilize material from my
own sites within yours, as long as you re-format it to your own site's
requirements rather than simply copy-and-paste my pages. I would
appreciate backlinks and source attribution where appropriate, but even
if that isn't possible, you are still free to adapt whatever you find
useful from my work.

Cordially;
Bruce R. Gordon

Ex Tenebra, Lux

http://www.hostkingdom.net/regindex.html


subject: [Wikipedia-l] can we speed up google?

body:
Does anyone know why google hasn't indexed the site for 6 weeks, and what we can do about it?

http://216.239.33.100/search?q=cache:EHqlxYG4nS0C:www.wikipedia.com/+wikipedia&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

http://216.239.33.100/search?q=cache:tPVsevDE3l4C:www.wikipedia.com/wiki/special:RecentChanges+wikipedia&hl=en&ie=UTF-8
Cheers,

kq


body:
>For those wikipedias that /should/ be using the same codebase, it
>seems reasonable to me that they should have all of the scripts
>symlinked to the scripts of the main wikipedia.  Then, any
>configurable variables could be exported by Apache as ENV variables.
>By doing this, you avoid running a script to update things, a person
>doesn't have to update them manually, and all of the apropriate
>wikipedias will be running the same software...

That will work wonderfully up to the first time we make a software
update that requires a database change.  In that case, we want to
make sure that the upgrade process incudes the database update, and
each one has to be done individually.


from_name: Axel Boldt

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] [obsidian@hostkingdom.net: Re: Regnal Chronologies and
 Wikipedia]

body:
> I include the author's written permission to use materials from :
> http://www.hostkingdom.net

Great job, thanks!

I think it would be polite to acknowledge the materials taken from his
site with a boilerplate note at the bottom of the article containing a
link back, similar to what we have been doing with FOLDOC materials,
see e.g. [[TeX]]. For that, it would also be useful to save the
permission email somewhere on Wikipedia, like [[Public Domain
Resources/Hostkingdom licence]]. And the site should be added to
[[Public Domain Resources]] of course.

Axel


body:
On 20-08-2002, lcrocker at nupedia.com wrote thusly :
> >> I include the author's written permission to use materials from :
> >> http://www.hostkingdom.net
> > Great job, thanks!
> > I think it would be polite to acknowledge the materials taken
> > from his site with a boilerplate note at the bottom of the article
> > containing a link back, similar to what we have been doing with
> > FOLDOC materials,
> I think we should set a precendent that such acknowledgements go
> on the Talk page, not in the main article.  As long as they are
> posted at the top of the talk page, with discussion below, and not
> deleted if discussion is refactored, I think we will meet all our
> credit obligations without limiting our ability to edit text.
Are Talk pages open for search engines' robots ?

Regards,
kpjas.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] form of permission needed

body:
I have found on this website : http://www.pagel.clara.co.uk/rr/index.htm
audio that seems usefull for wikipedia EN

For the articel about "World War I" this :
http://www.pagel.clara.co.uk/mp3/ww1.mp3    4.46MB

For the articel about "League of Nations" :
http://www.pagel.clara.co.uk/mp3/lon.mp3   7.94MB

For the articel about "Weimar Republic" :
http://www.pagel.clara.co.uk/mp3/weimar.mp3   4.33MB

Lisen to it, it is very good.

I have ask the creator what is licence policy is, this is his responds:
<quote>
I'm not a legal expert, but my intention is that it should be free for
anyone to use and copy, as long as I am credited as the writer. From what I
have seen of http://www.wikipedia.org/ , I would be happy for you to link to
it.

Cheers
jonathan pagel
</quote>

Would this be enough to consider it as a permision or should i ask to
put somthing on his site or what ?

giskart


from_name: Karen AKA Kajikit

subject: [Wikipedia-l] a minor but disconcerting 'bug' in move page

body:
When you move a page it generates a message that says 'X' page moved to
'Y'... but if there are any spaces in the title it leaves them out so
'Ancient Rome' apparantly becomes 'AncientRome'. So of course if you try
to access the page via the link you can't because it takes you to a
blank edit screen! Like I said, disconcerting, because it made me think
I'd managed to 'lose' several long entries before I worked out what was
going on. If you go to the recent changes screen the correct title has
actually been generated.

--

Karen AKA Kajikit

And on the seventh day, God said 'What my world needs is a creature that
will truly appreciate it in all its facets' -
and so He made the kitten.

Come and visit my part of the web:
Kajikit's Corner: http://Kajikit.netfirms.com/
Aussie Support Mailing List: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AussieSupport
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Love and huggles to all!