subject: [Foundation-l] Latest board resolutions

body:
Lars Aronsson wrote:

>Michael R. Irwin wrote:
>
>
>>Oldak Quill wrote:
>>
>>
>
>
>
>>>So if Wikimedia and its assets were taken down in the US, those
>>>in other countries could quickly replace them?
>>>
>>>
>
>
>
>>Once the WMF or new equivalent in U.S. was back up and running
>>they could rehire the technical and administrative staff and
>>reestablish
>>
>>
>
>Please, this starts to sound like a cult drifting off into "if we
>have a fortress, they can never get us", ending up like those in
>Waco, Texas. (The 1993 events described as [[en:Waco Siege]].)
>
>What exactly are you trying to achieve?
>
I am trying to achieve reliable future access to the WMF data for anyone
who wishes to establish a future fork to take up where WMF leaves off
should a calamity befall the WMF.

>If you want immunity
>against legal threats in the western world (and for what outlaw
>purpose would you want this?), you probably have to relocate to
>North Korea, Syria or Zimbabwe.
>
>
Personally I do not think we need or want immunity, nor do I think it is
possible.   In my view compliance is reasonable and required.

I do think making damn sure that the millions of manhours of donated
effort spent developing the Wikimedia project data can not be partially
or totally wasted by the simple expedient of purchasing all media and
data rights of the WMF from a liquidation authority for a few thousand
dollars and then filing nuisance lawsuits against anyone posting or
publishing online the entire dataset from backups.

If you do not like the above scenario make up your own and consider how
to defuse it.

The datasets the WMF supports online are just now getting to the point
of potentially depressing sales of millions and then hundreds of
millions and then billions of dollars of published materials in the
U.S.A annually.    The publishing industry in the U.S. is not going to
roll over and modernize any easier than the record labels, Disney,
U.S.Government; and the other DRM proponents did.  They can buy access
to the U.S. Congress just as easy as anyone else.

Nor is it unlikely that the U.S. government might like a return to more
easily controlled media focal points.    I do not know if you have
noticed; but as official policy, both foreign and domestic, the U.S. now
employs torture, has secret courts (an oxy moron), and has an executive
branch which does not even meet its responsibility under federal law to
tell a secret court within 3 days why it backdated the ability for
secret police raids, searches, wiretaps, etc.   This is a substantial
departure from the typical U.S. citizen's mental image of the "land of
the free".

Some people claim this is standard practice while at War while others
claim this is a substantial departure from U.S. policy, laws, and
expectations.   The one thing that is clear is that the "War on Terror"
is likely to be finished when the office of the U.S. president (POTUS)
says it is finished.   It is not prudent to be relying exclusively on
the Constitution of the United States for the ability to publicly
publish useful information potentially detrimental to large business or
government interests in the U.S.

If this is a nonissue because duplicate dataset updates are routinely
sent to various chapters that have agreed to serve as out of U.S.
control zones backups and reestablish internet access within six months
of WMF shutdown; then maybe someone can say so publicly and we can leave
all risk management issues and elimination of single points of failure
to the God King and his designated Trustees and staff.

BTW,  is a completed audit on the WMF's first few years of operation
posted somewhere online where interested parties such as myself can
review it?

If it is not posted, but available upon request, then I would like to
request copies or be placed upon the distribution list so I get copies
when they become available.

later,
lazyquasar


list: wikimedia-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Michael R. Irwin

subject: [Foundation-l] Latest board resolutions


list: foundation-l

subject: [Foundation-l] Latest board resolutions

body:
Oldak Quill wrote:

>On 31/07/06, Lars Aronsson <lars at aronsson.se> wrote:
>
>
>>What exactly are you trying to achieve?  If you want immunity
>>against legal threats in the western world (and for what outlaw
>>purpose would you want this?), you probably have to relocate to
>>North Korea, Syria or Zimbabwe.
>>
>>
>
>Since we're being a little unrealistic here anyway, I would suggest we
>develop some kind of distributed hosting system to supplement our
>servers. It would be similar to those distributed computing clients
>(Folding at home, Seti at home, &c.), except the client would be using some
>of your disc space and bandwidth instead of your computing power.
>
>But then, I'm only dreaming.
>
>
Both of those systems use centralized database servers and coordination
bandwidth.  Main advantage is in distibuting processing.  For example,
when I was running Seti at Home and Folding at Home a processing packet would
take a couple of minutes to download and then spend days processing in
the screensaver before linking to upload results and download another
processing packet.

Might be useful if we ever have heavy processing requirements such as
creating and maintaining read only controlled files in a distributed
content cache for serving to the public unless they  request editable
version.

You might find  http://www.dijjer.org/ of interest.     This a plugin
that provides distributed caching.  It would probably take some
modifications to our server software to return a dijjer based URL to a
cached version if the user is not editing and the current editable
version when they click the edit button.   As I recall the Dijjer URL
contacts a Dijjer server of some kind so modification might be required
to talk to our own Dijjer URL server/tracker to be able to guarantee
decent performance.

Oceanstore (currently prototyped as "Pond") or BitTorrent (particularly
in serving large backup files) might offer some reduced server loading
advantages if we ever get to the point of serving controlled or official
articles to the non editing public or casual users while editing and
improving in the background at the central WMF project server farm.
Last time I checked it uses a large number of servers to establish core
funtionality.   IIRC individual desktops can be used for caching
reliable chunk of information

Likewise:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNUnet except I think it
distibutes files to caches not reliability enhanced chunks for later
reassembly and service to requestor.

later,
lazyquasar


subject: [Foundation-l] Latest board resolutions


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Tim Starling

subject: [Wikitech-l] diff efficiency

body:
Steve Summit wrote:
> On the subject of diff efficiency, which button is more
> expensive, Show Preview or Show Changes?  I have an ultraparanoid
> bot which "presses" one or both before actually submitting, and
> it occurs to me that it would be marginally easier on the servers
> if the bot used the cheaper one first.  (Though of course only
> if substantial numbers of its doublechecks failed, which they
> typically don't.)

For whole pages, generating a diff takes about 2ms plus 40ms to load the
text to diff against, rendering a page takes about 800ms. So it's
cheaper to use "show changes" by a factor of 20. In fact, we've been
considering suppressing the "current version" display from diff pages by
default, especially for large pages, since rendering the current version
constitutes the vast majority of the time it takes to generate those
pages. These figures are averages based on latest profiling, some pages
take significantly longer than 800ms.

-- Tim Starling


from_name: Jay R. Ashworth

subject: [Wikitech-l] Interpolation is faster than concatenation

references:
<eafdac$3hf$1@sea.gmane.org> <200607291339.22871.schuetzm@gmx.net>
	<eagrnk$fs6$1@sea.gmane.org>

body:
On Sat, Jul 29, 2006 at 07:41:38PM -0400, Tim Starling wrote:
> Which brings me to this:
>
> Jay R. Ashworth wrote:
> > "If a programmer can simulate a construct more efficiently than the
> > compiler can implement it, then the compiler writer has blown it
> > *badly*".  --Guy L Steele, in Harbisone & Steele.
>
> It's not so easy to simultaneously optimise compile speed and execution
> speed. Improving one often means trading off the other. An intermediate
> representation, even one hand-written in the source language, can escape
> that tradeoff.

I believe Steele's implication (from the original context, which I
don't think I could find easily) was WRT final execution speeds, rather
than how long they took to compile, Tim.  But I see your point, in
further reflection.

Cheers,
-- jra
--
Jay R. Ashworth                                                jra at baylink.com
Designer                          Baylink                             RFC 2100
Ashworth & Associates        The Things I Think                        '87 e24
St Petersburg FL USA      http://baylink.pitas.com             +1 727 647 1274

	The Internet: We paved paradise, and put up a snarking lot.


subject: [Foundation-l] Latest board resolutions

body:
Lars Aronsson wrote:

>Michael R. Irwin wrote:
>
>
>
>>If this is a nonissue because duplicate dataset updates are routinely
>>sent to various chapters that have agreed to serve as out of U.S.
>>control zones backups
>>
>>
>
>And what I'm telling you is that "out of U.S. control zones" are
>essentially North Korea, Syria, and Zimbabwe.  If the U.S. govt
>were to close down the Wikimedia Foundation, then a backup in
>Sweden would not help you one bit.  Libya will not help you,
>because Khadaffi is far to eager to improve relations to the
>western world.  That is, in a fight between you and the U.S. Govt,
>Khadaffi would side with the later.
>
>Venezuela's Chavez might want to help you, but will he be able to?
>
>You better start building that fort near Waco. You're on your own.
>
>
>
>
What fort?   I have been primarily talking about reliability,
robustness, cutover load management.

Others seem paranoid we cannot find a way to reliably comply with U.S.
law regarding copyright, slander, etc.

I agree in a "fight" with the U.S. government they can take down servers
wordwide, by cruise missile or smart bomb if necessary.   It merely
seems a bit harder to come up with discrete excuses unnoticed by the
public worldwide if the servers are distributed.

As I recall when Reagan bombed Libya's Kaddafi we (the U.S.) lost a B-1
at sea partially because France refused overflight rights during the attack.

How about Australia?   U.S. Warships are not allowed port call
priveleges there unless U.S.G. certifies it has no nuclear munitions on
board.

More seriously I had not noticed that U.S. influence was so pervasive
and reliable.

I think some distributed server installations would go a long way
towards reducing capricious or questionable action from U.S. courts.
Further I would think it would take some time for U.S. influence to shut
down all other servers.   Time that would allow proper appeals to U.S.
Appellate Courts or even the Supreme Court while the material was still
available from other servers.

We could call this the lightening bug strategy.    One server goes down
and another one lights up.

Anyway.  It is not my problem at all.  It is the WMF Board or Trustees
responsibility to figure out what the WMF owes contributors and users
worldwide.

I merely found the technical problem of guaranteeing world wide data
access after an Altantic tsanami or Cat 6 hurricane washed over Florida
a bit interesting.

regards,
lazyquasar


subject: [Foundation-l] Latest board resolutions


subject: [Foundation-l] Latest board resolutions

body:
Jeffrey V. Merkey wrote:

snip

>Oh come on guys, WMF is not going to get swept away, and they do not
>enjoy "sovereign immunity" because they are
>
>1. Not a State (11th Ammendment)
>2. Not the United States Goverment (must have Waiver of Immunity)
>3. Not an Indian Nation
>
>
I think we were talking about practical immunity from problems large
enough to cause problems.  Not sovereignty.

>They are a non-profit corp, which gives them all the rights of any
>citizen (since a corporation is a citizen).
>
>
Right.   Which means in case of judicial error the corporation is likely
to be ordered to liquidate all assets if necessary to partially fullfull
any penalties assessed by the court.

Ever hear of anyone bankrupted by an auto accident?

>They do GOOD THINGS, and they act in GOOD FAITH.
>
>
So we assume.  Errors are possible.   Some potential errors might be
costly and could be life threatening to the erring entity.  Particularly
if at times cash reserves are low.

>They are not going away (unless they want to), getting smashed, or being
>litigated into oblivion. If things really get
>that bad, they can co-locate their hosting on Indian Land somewhere
>under "Native American Language Preservation"
>and then they truly will have immunity from most causes of action if the
>program is run by one of the tribes with an English version
>of the site as an adjunct "add on" non-primary site.
>
>
>
So are there Sovereign Indian Lands somewhere which directly border
Canada or Mexico such that a data fiber link could be established
between the international internet and the servers without crossing U.S.
jurisdiction?

regards,
lazyquazer


subject: [Foundation-l] Latest board resolutions


subject: [Foundation-l] Latest board resolutions

body:
Jeffrey V. Merkey wrote:

>Lars Aronsson wrote:
>
>
>
>>Michael R. Irwin wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
snip

>
>This talk is just nonsense. WMF is in great shape. It they can muzzle me
>and put a harness and
>me and get me working to help them, they can fix anything.
>
>Jeff
>
>
One of the Founders, Larry Sanger, seemed to agree with you that
strategic planning was not an appropriate topic to waste contributers'
time upon.

It is nice to run into an optimist once in while.

As a practical matter you might wish to consider that as an organization
grows people generally expect its competence to grow as well.

regards,
lazyquasar


subject: [Foundation-l] Latest board resolutions


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [Foundation-l] Project Proposal: Wikicat

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:

>On 7/30/06, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
>
>
>>Citations and verifiability are absolutely essential to the credibility
>>of Wikipedia and its sister projects.  Nevertheless, a person
>>undertaking to substantiate his contributions should not need a
>>professional librarianship background to do so.  Any manner of clearly
>>identifying the source should be acceptable.
>>
>>
>Absolutely. However, we should also make the tools of professional
>referencing as easy to use as possible. You're right on that freely
>available (not necessarily freely licensed) content will be the first
>to be referenced. Thus, it is likely that Wikimedia will become both a
>primary beneficiary and driving force of the open access movement.
>
I can be patient.

>What is saddening to me is that even better referencing tools and
>systematic source checking processes will likely not be sufficient to
>deal adequately with the vast amounts of knowledge that is _not_ free
>or not even digital. Indeed, already today, I've seen quite a lot of
>cases where Wikipedians have reacted with intense frustration to the
>citation of sources that they could not verify simply by following a
>link.
>
That's not just sad; it's scary.  It's on a par with saying,  "If it's
on the internet it must be true."  It reflects a series of tendencies in
the developed world with profound societal effects.  When the most
important factor for gaining knowledge is convenience it puts us on
track for a Fahrenheit-451 kind of world.  And I'm sure there is a
certain segment of society that will be quite happy to encourage the
people to take their new form of opium.

>One of my great hopes is that a broad international coalition of NGOs
>will eventually emerge to call for harmonization of copyright terms to
>a reasonable length. Perhaps Wikimedia could be part of such a
>coalition. If I look at the fantastic work Project Gutenberg is doing
>on even the most obscure publications, I cannot begin to imagine the
>profound effects on our culture it would have if copyright would last,
>say, 14 years, with the option to renew for another 14:
>http://creativecommons.org/projects/founderscopyright/
>
Reducing the terms of copyright back to a reasonable level will be an
uphill fight, and the way some of our collegues bend over to prevent the
least suggestion of a copyright violation and stay law abiding does not
give me a lot of hope.

Ec


from_name: Jeffrey V. Merkey

subject: [Foundation-l] Latest board resolutions

body:
Michael R. Irwin wrote:

>>If you want immunity
>>against legal threats in the western world (and for what outlaw
>>purpose would you want this?), you probably have to relocate to
>>North Korea, Syria or Zimbabwe.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>Personally I do not think we need or want immunity, nor do I think it is
>possible.   In my view compliance is reasonable and required.
>
>I do think making damn sure that the millions of manhours of donated
>effort spent developing the Wikimedia project data can not be partially
>or totally wasted by the simple expedient of purchasing all media and
>data rights of the WMF from a liquidation authority for a few thousand
>dollars and then filing nuisance lawsuits against anyone posting or
>publishing online the entire dataset from backups.
>
>If you do not like the above scenario make up your own and consider how
>to defuse it.
>
>The datasets the WMF supports online are just now getting to the point
>of potentially depressing sales of millions and then hundreds of
>millions and then billions of dollars of published materials in the
>U.S.A annually.    The publishing industry in the U.S. is not going to
>roll over and modernize any easier than the record labels, Disney,
>U.S.Government; and the other DRM proponents did.  They can buy access
>to the U.S. Congress just as easy as anyone else.
>
>Nor is it unlikely that the U.S. government might like a return to more
>easily controlled media focal points.    I do not know if you have
>noticed; but as official policy, both foreign and domestic, the U.S. now
>employs torture, has secret courts (an oxy moron), and has an executive
>branch which does not even meet its responsibility under federal law to
>tell a secret court within 3 days why it backdated the ability for
>secret police raids, searches, wiretaps, etc.   This is a substantial
>departure from the typical U.S. citizen's mental image of the "land of
>the free".
>
>Some people claim this is standard practice while at War while others
>claim this is a substantial departure from U.S. policy, laws, and
>expectations.   The one thing that is clear is that the "War on Terror"
>is likely to be finished when the office of the U.S. president (POTUS)
>says it is finished.   It is not prudent to be relying exclusively on
>the Constitution of the United States for the ability to publicly
>publish useful information potentially detrimental to large business or
>government interests in the U.S.
>
>If this is a nonissue because duplicate dataset updates are routinely
>sent to various chapters that have agreed to serve as out of U.S.
>control zones backups and reestablish internet access within six months
>of WMF shutdown; then maybe someone can say so publicly and we can leave
>all risk management issues and elimination of single points of failure
>to the God King and his designated Trustees and staff.
>
>BTW,  is a completed audit on the WMF's first few years of operation
>posted somewhere online where interested parties such as myself can
>review it?
>
>If it is not posted, but available upon request, then I would like to
>request copies or be placed upon the distribution list so I get copies
>when they become available.
>
>later,
>lazyquasar
>_______________________________________________
>foundation-l mailing list
>foundation-l at wikimedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>
>
>
Oh come on guys, WMF is not going to get swept away, and they do not
enjoy "sovereign immunity" because they are

1. Not a State (11th Ammendment)
2. Not the United States Goverment (must have Waiver of Immunity)
3. Not an Indian Nation

They are a non-profit corp, which gives them all the rights of any
citizen (since a corporation is a citizen).

They do GOOD THINGS, and they act in GOOD FAITH.

They are not going away (unless they want to), getting smashed, or being
litigated into oblivion. If things really get
that bad, they can co-locate their hosting on Indian Land somewhere
under "Native American Language Preservation"
and then they truly will have immunity from most causes of action if the
program is run by one of the tribes with an English version
of the site as an adjunct "add on" non-primary site.

Jeff


subject: [Foundation-l] Latest board resolutions


subject: [Foundation-l] Latest board resolutions

body:
Lars Aronsson wrote:

>Michael R. Irwin wrote:
>
>
>
>>If this is a nonissue because duplicate dataset updates are routinely
>>sent to various chapters that have agreed to serve as out of U.S.
>>control zones backups
>>
>>
>
>And what I'm telling you is that "out of U.S. control zones" are
>essentially North Korea, Syria, and Zimbabwe.  If the U.S. govt
>were to close down the Wikimedia Foundation, then a backup in
>Sweden would not help you one bit.  Libya will not help you,
>because Khadaffi is far to eager to improve relations to the
>western world.  That is, in a fight between you and the U.S. Govt,
>Khadaffi would side with the later.
>
>Venezuela's Chavez might want to help you, but will he be able to?
>
>You better start building that fort near Waco. You're on your own.
>
>
No, just turn it over to one of the tribes and give whichever tribe 51%
control of
WMF. We do this stuff all the time with corporate investments. The trade
off is you
fall under the jurisdiction of tribal Courts. Since only tribal folks
can bring causes of
action in tribal court, the outside world (with the single exception of
the US Attorney General)
are barred from stirring up trouble.

This talk is just nonsense. WMF is in great shape. It they can muzzle me
and put a harness and
me and get me working to help them, they can fix anything.

Jeff

>
>
>


subject: [Foundation-l] Latest board resolutions


list: wikien-l

from_name: Oldak Quill

subject: [WikiEN-l] Lists of words

body:
On 30/07/06, Guettarda <guettarda at gmail.com> wrote:
> It would appear that lists of words violate the provision that Wikipedia
> should not have articles which define individual words, nor should it
> include Lists of such definitions. However, we have
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Lists_of_words ,
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Lists_of_slang and
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Lists_of_phrases , among others.
> Policy is descriptive, not prescriptive. Is this policy still being applied
> (in which case, *all* of these articles must be deleted), or not (in which
> case the wording of the policy needs to be changed). I have raised the issue
> at
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:What_Wikipedia_is_not#Lists_of_Words
>
> I don't know if all of these articles need to be deleted, or whether policy
> needs to be modified to reflect reality.  But I think this needs to be
> determined in general, not determined piecemeal

We have many articles which define individual words (cheese,
lawnmower, carpenter, etc.), but I take the problem is to do with
articles about the words themselves. One that comes to mind is the
article [[fuck]], quite a good read.

Many articles which aren't specifically about the word have sections
concerning etymology and semantics.

I don't think this is a problem for Wikipedia. I don't think being
"encyclopaedic" is to do with what articles are about, it is to do
with how they are written and how the information is presented.
--
Oldak Quill (oldakquill at gmail.com)


from_name: brion at pobox.com

subject: [Wikitech-l] MediaWiki automated test run failure 2006-07-31

body:
An automated run of parserTests.php showed the following failures:

Running test Table security: embedded pipes (http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2006-April/034637.html)... FAILED!
Running test Link containing double-single-quotes '' (bug 4598)... FAILED!
Running test Magic Word: {{CURRENTMONTHNAMEGEN}}... FAILED!
Running test Template with thumb image (wiht link in description)... FAILED!
Running test message transform: <noinclude> in transcluded template (bug 4926)... FAILED!
Running test message transform: <onlyinclude> in transcluded template (bug 4926)... FAILED!
Running test BUG 1887, part 2: A <math> with a thumbnail- math enabled... FAILED!
Running test HTML bullet list, unclosed tags (bug 5497)... FAILED!
Running test HTML ordered list, unclosed tags (bug 5497)... FAILED!
Running test HTML nested bullet list, open tags (bug 5497)... FAILED!
Running test HTML nested ordered list, open tags (bug 5497)... FAILED!
Running test Parsing optional HTML elements (Bug 6171)... FAILED!
Running test Inline HTML vs wiki block nesting... FAILED!
Running test Mixing markup for italics and bold... FAILED!
Running test 5 quotes, code coverage +1 line... FAILED!
Running test HTML Hex character encoding.... FAILED!
Running test dt/dd/dl test... FAILED!

Passed 412 of 429 tests (96.04%) FAILED!


from_name: Gregory Maxwell

subject: [Wikitech-l] diff efficiency

references:
<eaibln$9k7$1@sea.gmane.org> <2006Jul30.1131.scs.0004@eskimo.com>
	<eajpt5$l1f$1@sea.gmane.org>

body:
On 7/30/06, Tim Starling <t.starling at physics.unimelb.edu.au> wrote:
> For whole pages, generating a diff takes about 2ms plus 40ms to load the
> text to diff against, rendering a page takes about 800ms.

800ms is consistent from what I measured when I was trying to parse
all past revisions.... but I thought I was doing something wrong at
the time because I couldn't imagine that it was that slow.


from_name: MacGyverMagic/Mgm

subject: [WikiEN-l] Lists of words

body:
Wikipedia should not define individual words, it's not a dictionary, but if
encyclopedic articles can be written about phrases (like the recent FA Bush
quote) and words (or rather the concept behind the word), there's nothing
wrong with creating lists to make them easily searchable. For example, I
have nothing against a list of phrases.

Mgm

On 7/31/06, Guettarda <guettarda at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> It would appear that lists of words violate the provision that Wikipedia
> should not have articles which define individual words, nor should it
> include Lists of such definitions. However, we have
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Lists_of_words ,
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Lists_of_slang and
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Lists_of_phrases , among others.
> Policy is descriptive, not prescriptive. Is this policy still being
> applied
> (in which case, *all* of these articles must be deleted), or not (in which
> case the wording of the policy needs to be changed). I have raised the
> issue
> at
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:What_Wikipedia_is_not#Lists_of_Words
>
> I don't know if all of these articles need to be deleted, or whether
> policy
> needs to be modified to reflect reality.  But I think this needs to be
> determined in general, not determined piecemeal
>
> Ian
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


subject: [WikiEN-l] So you think you can be a Wikipedia article

body:
Peter Ansell wrote:

>On 29/07/06, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
>
>
>>Both direct and representative democracy have their shortcomings.  A
>>truly democratic system should be temporal as well as spatial.  In other
>>words there cna be no final determinative vote on almost anything
>>because those votes make no allowance for the views of those who have
>>not yet joined us.
>>
>>
>That was a joke right? You can't just wait forever because someone
>"might" come. Policies in the real world have to be made in some
>finite timespace. Half of wikipedia's problems may indeed come from
>the fact that policies are argued over endlessly, through opinions
>like yours that the more argument/time and effort spent, the better
>the situation will "possibly be". Ever heard of the concept of
>diminishing returns, and/or the concept of negative return on
>investment.
>
No joke about it.  In the real world controversial policies can be
decided by votes where there are winners and losers.  The the winners
fight like hell to protect the status quo.  Sure, decisions need to be
made, and nothing that I said supported waiting forever.  When support
reaches a certain level a policy is adopted, but people can continue
adding their views, or even changing them.  When that threshold reaches
an other predetermined level the policy is changed.  I also said nothing
about anybody spending more time argument and effort than they already
have.  If you already made your point in the early stages why would you
feel obliged to keep arguing.  Policies with a broad community support
are unlikely to ever change anyways, but there will be more incentive to
develop policies co-operatively rather than by the old win lose model..

Diminishing and negative returns have nothing to do with this.

Ec


from_name: Fastfission

subject: [WikiEN-l] Common sense exceptions to our copyright policy.

body:
On 7/27/06, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> Thoughts?

I think the general intent is a good one, though I don't think that
the Wikipedia system of government would allow any individual to
easily sit in such a position with the exception of Jimbo.

There may be other ways to achieve the same ends, though. Perhaps we
could draw up special rules for exceptions on copyright issues -- they
would be VERY hard to satisfy and would be designed with the few known
cases of "common sense" exceptions in mind (and could amended later if
others popped up). Then it could just become part of a deletion review
or image policy or what have you.

Personally I think there is a lot of room for a little commonsense
flexibiity in images -- people get all bent out of shape about whether
or not it is hypothetical that the German government could decide to
enforce all copyrights on Nazi photographs that defaulted to them,
even though there is no reason to think that they ever will and it is
questionable whether or not they have the legal standing to do that
even if they wanted to. Ditto with people worrying that just because
you can copyright a lighting arrangement scheme, suddenly all
photographs of the building with this scheme become derivative works
and copyright infringement. In both cases the legal danger is entirely
hypothetical and dubious at that -- they are based on stretched and
literal interpretations of complicated aspects of the copyright law
and nobody has ever been taken to court over them. And yet they are
used to delete widely circulated historical content (the Nazi images)
or even user-produced free content (in terms of the lighting and
architecture issues).

I don't know the best way around it -- having a class of images that
says "this image is hypothetically copyrighted but Jesus Christ people
it's not ever going to make trouble for anyone, even commercial
reusers" is, I think, likely to be misapplied unless it is closely
watched. I don't know if that should be done by one individual, by a
committee, by anyone who feels up to it, etc.

FF


subject: [WikiEN-l] Uploading images should be a privilige, not a right

body:
Anthony wrote:

>On 7/27/06, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
>
>
>>Alphax (Wikipedia email) wrote:
>>
>>
>>>What particularly irks me about Flickr is that people can change the
>>>licenses on their photos; I came across a Featured Picture on Commons
>>>the other day which had been uploaded in December 2005, tagged as
>>>CC-BY-SA 2.0, had been uploaded to Flickr in November 2005, but when I
>>>viewed the photo in July 2006 the tag on Flickr was CC-NC-ND 2.0. The
>>>worst part is that the image on Flickr has no "history" page, and the
>>>Internet Archive doesn't have the page, so there's no way I can verify
>>>that the image was indeed tagged that way when it was uploaded to Commons.
>>>
>>>
>>This all comes down to a question of proof.  One needs to assume if the
>>use of the photograph was legal at the time that it was used that use
>>and all downstream uses that derive from it will continue to be legal.
>>The downstream user will probably need to establish the chain of
>>provenance in the event of a legal dispute.  It would be his
>>responsibility to trace up the food chain to establish the freeness of
>>the material.
>>
>>For us, we probably need to be a bit more thorough in documenting our
>>usage, particularly noting the date and time the material was taken.
>>This may require archiving a download of a status file from Flickr.
>>
>>
>I seriously doubt proof is going to help in a situation like this.
>There are so many other factors involved.  Was the person who uploaded
>the file to Flickr actually the copyright holder?  Who was the license
>granted to?  Can the license be revoked?  Was the uploader of legal
>age to grant the license?
>
>If someone releases something under a free license and then changes
>his or her mind later, 99 times out of 100 the best solution is to
>just find replacement content.  It's just too much of a grey area
>legally.
>
For the sake of argument about a specific aspect of copyright we need to
hold the other factors constant.  It then goes without saying that if
the rights to use the material failed for other reasons that could
render the revocability argument moot.

Ec


from_name: Dabljuh

subject: [WikiEN-l] "Submit review"

body:
Fork and do it.
To be fair, existing editors would have to be reviewed this way as well.


from_name: ScottL

subject: [WikiEN-l] Lists of words

body:
Steve Bennett wrote:
>
> I spent quite a while trying to make sense of that guideline,
> particularly the contradictory "not a list of dictionary definitions"
> and "glossaries are ok" (I struggle to see any difference between the
> two).
>
> The best I can come up with is:
> Wikipedia should *not* have articles describing some simple concept in
> some complicated language. Like "ultrak00l people say freblejobjuice
> to mean coca cola".
>
> However, Wikipedia *should* have articles describing complicated
> concepts in simple language: In the mythical sport of fishwrestling, a
> bloobloop is when the wrestler takes the fish, wraps it twice around
> his neck and proceeds to pin its gills to the nearest railing. This
> concept was introduced in 1936 when....
>
> The current "Wikipedia is not a dictionary" is almost meaningless and
> doesn't help resolve any disputes whatsoever. I can't believe I voted
> to delete "List of fighting game terms" under "No lists of such
> definitions" when it was totally valid under "glossary pages".
>
> Of course, can anyone actually demonstrate harm caused by dictionary
> definitions in Wikipedia?
>
> Steve

   I tend to agree with your assessment here, I think.  Though I would
add that some of these lists are more appropriate in that their grouping
together has some encyclopedic value when related to some other topic.
This is not something a (traditional) dictionary could do.  Terms
specific to a subject that we have an article on especially when they
are used in non-standard ways should be documented (if possible in the
article in question.  If the list gets too long like any other
subsection it should be broken off.

   I think the guideline should be more related to "would moving this to
wikitionary result in some sort of loss of value".  If it would not then
move.

Dalf


from_name: Lars Aronsson

subject: [Foundation-l] Latest board resolutions

body:
Michael R. Irwin wrote:
> Oldak Quill wrote:

> >So if Wikimedia and its assets were taken down in the US, those
> >in other countries could quickly replace them?

> Once the WMF or new equivalent in U.S. was back up and running
> they could rehire the technical and administrative staff and
> reestablish

Please, this starts to sound like a cult drifting off into "if we
have a fortress, they can never get us", ending up like those in
Waco, Texas. (The 1993 events described as [[en:Waco Siege]].)

What exactly are you trying to achieve?  If you want immunity
against legal threats in the western world (and for what outlaw
purpose would you want this?), you probably have to relocate to
North Korea, Syria or Zimbabwe.

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


subject: [Foundation-l] Latest board resolutions


from_name: John Lyden

subject: [WikiEN-l] Accented characters (was Re: fancruft)

body:
On 7/30/06, Matt Brown <morven at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Like you said, policy is a stick to hit people with. There's been
> > absolutely no consensus as to this issue. None.
>
> Entirely the issue, I feel, and why there is de facto no fully
> functioning policy on this topic.

I'm finding more and more that despite having a Policy Stick to beat
people with, many others are too afraid to hit them with it.

--
John Lyden - rasputinaxp at gmail.com
"The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to
live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same
time..." -Kerouac


from_name: Matt Brown

body:
On 7/30/06, John Lyden <rasputinaxp at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm finding more and more that despite having a Policy Stick to beat
> people with, many others are too afraid to hit them with it.

Policy is descriptive, not prescriptive.  With the exception of core
Wikipedia policies not subject to debate, you can't use policy to
force things through without broad support.

The use of diacritical marks in page names for people, when the name
is fully recognisable even by those not familiar with the diacritics,
and where appropriate redirects exist, does not (IMO) have that broad
support.  It may have a majority, but I doubt even that when it comes
to (english-language) Wikipedia contributors as a whole.  Straw polls
and the like just show how many people are rabid about the issue.

Certainly I think that neither extreme point of view has a majority,
and that it's hard to even find a point-in-the-middle that could gain
overwhelming support.

-Matt


subject: [Foundation-l] Latest board resolutions

body:
On 31/07/06, Lars Aronsson <lars at aronsson.se> wrote:
> What exactly are you trying to achieve?  If you want immunity
> against legal threats in the western world (and for what outlaw
> purpose would you want this?), you probably have to relocate to
> North Korea, Syria or Zimbabwe.

Since we're being a little unrealistic here anyway, I would suggest we
develop some kind of distributed hosting system to supplement our
servers. It would be similar to those distributed computing clients
(Folding at home, Seti at home, &c.), except the client would be using some
of your disc space and bandwidth instead of your computing power.

But then, I'm only dreaming.
--
Oldak Quill (oldakquill at gmail.com)


subject: [Foundation-l] Latest board resolutions


body:
On 7/31/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> The other major point to bear in mind is that all of this should
> really only apply when there is a genuine established tradition of
> using the name in English. That is a very small minority of any
> foreign names...

And in hockey, they're a significant minority. That's where this came in.

I'm not trying to throw the blanket of "Use English" over the entire
wiki, I'm trying to keep the hockey articles by their most-identified
English usage. That's all, no more, no less.

-Ras

--
John Lyden - rasputinaxp at gmail.com
"The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to
live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same
time..." -Kerouac


from_name: Ilmari Karonen

body:
Alphax (Wikipedia email) wrote:
> Ilmari Karonen wrote:
>>
>>Also, we'd need to decide how to handle images on Commons.
>
> Cooperate with Commons?

...yes, of course.  Sorry, I meant in the technical sense.  The Commons
images don't exists in the same database as the local ones, and I'm not
really very familiar with the way they're handled.  The current bad
image list circumvents that issue by simply doing hash lookups on the
image names without actually checking the image tables at all.

--
Ilmari Karonen


subject: [Foundation-l] Latest board resolutions

body:
Michael R. Irwin wrote:

> If this is a nonissue because duplicate dataset updates are routinely
> sent to various chapters that have agreed to serve as out of U.S.
> control zones backups

And what I'm telling you is that "out of U.S. control zones" are
essentially North Korea, Syria, and Zimbabwe.  If the U.S. govt
were to close down the Wikimedia Foundation, then a backup in
Sweden would not help you one bit.  Libya will not help you,
because Khadaffi is far to eager to improve relations to the
western world.  That is, in a fight between you and the U.S. Govt,
Khadaffi would side with the later.

Venezuela's Chavez might want to help you, but will he be able to?

You better start building that fort near Waco. You're on your own.

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


subject: [Foundation-l] Latest board resolutions


from_name: Death Phoenix

subject: [WikiEN-l] Regulation of user pages

body:
On 7/30/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Ilmari Karonen wrote:
> > It's called sarcasm.  I know it's hard to convey over the Internet, but
> > I did honestly expect the Gratuitous Capitalization, not to mention the
> > juxtaposition of the words "userbox" and "war", would in this case have
> > made it clear enough.  If you have any suggestions for making it even
> > more over-the-top, please do tell.
> >
> > In the fact of it, you are, of course, right.  It's not a war, and
> > calling it such is particularly ironic given that we do have actual
> > real-world armed conflicts (the Israel/Lebanon one comes to mind, as
> > well as the situation in Kosovo) spilling over to Wikipedia.  It's a
> > rather chilling thought that some of the people involved in those edit
> > wars might actually be fighting the same battles off-wiki with real guns
> > and bombs.
> >
>
> I can imagine the headlines:
>
> "OSAMA BIN LADEN CAPTURED WHILE EDITING WIKIPEDIA FROM INTERNET CAFE"
>

There's no such thing as bad publicity, right?


from_name: Steve Bennett

subject: [Wikitech-l] diff efficiency

body:
On 7/31/06, Tim Starling <t.starling at physics.unimelb.edu.au> wrote:
> For whole pages, generating a diff takes about 2ms plus 40ms to load the
> text to diff against, rendering a page takes about 800ms. So it's
> cheaper to use "show changes" by a factor of 20. In fact, we've been
> considering suppressing the "current version" display from diff pages by
> default, especially for large pages, since rendering the current version
> constitutes the vast majority of the time it takes to generate those
> pages. These figures are averages based on latest profiling, some pages
> take significantly longer than 800ms.

Now, if only the rendering all took place in JavaScript...!

:)

Steve


subject: [WikiEN-l] Categories for deletion/discussion issues

body:
On 7/29/06, Michael Snow <wikipedia at earthlink.net> wrote:
> All it fundamentally means is something non-alcoholic, as in the
> opposite of "hard drink". Lemonade can be a soft drink (unless of course
> it's hard lemonade), but it doesn't qualify as pop or soda. As with
> freeway/motorway/etc., there is no single satisfactory term that both
> includes all that should be included, and excludes all that should be
> excluded. If you want to say carbonated non-alcoholic flavo(u)red
> beverage with absolute precision, that's what you have to say.

Actually in Australia the term "fizzy drink" is sometimes used
(especially informally), and that seems by far the most accurate and
least open to misinterpretation.

Not that I'm suggesting it.

Or would someone claim that beer would be a "fizzy drink"...hhmm.

Steve


subject: [WikiEN-l] Fair use status of animated screencaps

body:
On 7/29/06, Oldak Quill <oldakquill at gmail.com> wrote:
> I think this depends upon whether moving images (videos clips) are
> available under fair use. Does anyone know the specifics?

Of course they are, for the normal purposes of commentary, satire etc.
Look at any TV show that regularly takes snippets from other shows to
make fun of them (or just comment etc).

Steve


subject:
[WikiEN-l] Dead wikipedians and how to really make a project
	boring to death

references:
<ea84nf$4c1$1@sea.gmane.org> <op.tdgclrfhr18sbe@mainframe.lan>
	<71cd4dd90607290714x222db593r8bf1f2faa0e1f9a7@mail.gmail.com>
	<op.tdgvcppwr18sbe@mainframe.lan>

body:
On 7/29/06, Sherool <jamydlan at online.no> wrote:
> If you are saying we should change the policy and allow use of unfree (or
> at least "semi free") contnet in "community space" because it is seperate
>  from our content, then that is one thing, I disagree, but it is a somewhat
> valid argument. You might be interested in trying to breathe som life back
> info

Although this would have lots of "bad uses", there are times when it
would be useful, like uploading images related to WP:FPC. There are
times you'd like to upload an image that demonstrates a technique,
flaw, related image etc - but it's your own private photo and you
don't want to release it under GFDL. For example, someone is
nominating a photo of a dragonfly, and says it's great. You want to
show them a much better photo of a dragonfly that you took (to show
how easy it is), but you don't want to release it under free licence.
Seem reasonable?

The current "best practice" is simply not to label it at all - it will
probably survive deletion for 1-2 weeks.

Steve


subject: [WikiEN-l] Lists of words

body:
On 7/31/06, Guettarda <guettarda at gmail.com> wrote:
> It would appear that lists of words violate the provision that Wikipedia
> should not have articles which define individual words, nor should it
> include Lists of such definitions. However, we have
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Lists_of_words ,
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Lists_of_slang and
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Lists_of_phrases , among others.
> Policy is descriptive, not prescriptive. Is this policy still being applied
> (in which case, *all* of these articles must be deleted), or not (in which
> case the wording of the policy needs to be changed). I have raised the issue
> at
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:What_Wikipedia_is_not#Lists_of_Words

I spent quite a while trying to make sense of that guideline,
particularly the contradictory "not a list of dictionary definitions"
and "glossaries are ok" (I struggle to see any difference between the
two).

The best I can come up with is:
Wikipedia should *not* have articles describing some simple concept in
some complicated language. Like "ultrak00l people say freblejobjuice
to mean coca cola".

However, Wikipedia *should* have articles describing complicated
concepts in simple language: In the mythical sport of fishwrestling, a
bloobloop is when the wrestler takes the fish, wraps it twice around
his neck and proceeds to pin its gills to the nearest railing. This
concept was introduced in 1936 when....

The current "Wikipedia is not a dictionary" is almost meaningless and
doesn't help resolve any disputes whatsoever. I can't believe I voted
to delete "List of fighting game terms" under "No lists of such
definitions" when it was totally valid under "glossary pages".

Of course, can anyone actually demonstrate harm caused by dictionary
definitions in Wikipedia?

Steve


subject: [WikiEN-l] "Submit review"

body:
On 7/30/06, Erik Moeller <eloquence at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 7/30/06, maru dubshinki <marudubshinki at gmail.com> wrote:
> > An email list for this is a *horrible* idea. You're proposing that
> > something that could receive hundreds and hundreds of emails a day
>
> Well, that remains to be seen. In any case, as I replied earlier, both
> talk page and e-mail list are options, and we could switch between
> them, or offer both, as necessary.

Email is great as an input method because - as pointed out - it's less
scary. The email should then be immediately rerouted back onto the
wiki, because the wiki is The Right Place to have article-specific
discussions. Contact information can be trimmed out if necessary, but
I don't see that you can both respect people's reputation and hide
their private information at the same time.

Steve


from_name: Adam Lorenz

subject: [WikiEN-l] An alternative to "critics"

body:
I would just delete the whole sentence.

Adam

On 7/31/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I've never much liked sentences that start "Critics argue that...".
> Here's an alternative I saw at [[Tied Test]]:
>
> --
> Some commentators believed Chappell should have taken Snedden's word
> that the catch was good.
> --
>
> I find this to be more natural, less contrived, and more NPOV.
> "Critics" seems to imply that the people had it in for the subject of
> the article for some reason. "Commentators" is much more neutral -
> just (presumably somewhat notable) people who expressed an opinion on
> the event.
>
> Any opinions? Other alternatives to the infamous "critics"?
>
> Steve
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

--
Adam J. Lorenz


body:
On 7/30/06, Oldak Quill <oldakquill at gmail.com> wrote:
> Two good examples are historical. We should use "Hermann G?ring" (not
> Goering) and "Napol?on" (not Napoleon).

Hmm, I would agree that G?ring is marginally preferable to Goering,
but Napoleon is vastly preferable to Napol?on. In the latter case,
it's a pronunciation thing: in English, we say "Napol-ee-on" not
"Napol-ay-on". In the former, Goering just seems uneducated...

It's a really tricky question overall, and I often have trouble
deciding which form I prefer. Particularly, on French topics, I have
major leanings towards keeping the French name, but that's just
because I'm biased. It often seems so much more precise to keep the
real French term for something than some novel translation (can you
imagine High Speed Train rather than TGV for instance?)

The other major point to bear in mind is that all of this should
really only apply when there is a genuine established tradition of
using the name in English. That is a very small minority of any
foreign names...

Steve


body:
On 7/30/06, John Lyden <rasputinaxp at gmail.com> wrote:
> That's what I was trying to illustrate with the Dvo??k/Dvorak example.
> It's not a bias against using "those funny little foreign characters."
>  Like you said, it's how the word is best-known amongst English
> speakers. I certainly understand and respect that American isn't

I missed the debate, but it seems obvious that the accents in
(Antonin) Dvorak should be retained: any CD or score of music by
Dvorak would have the accents written. Any discussion of Dvorak would
have them. And so should we.

If we were discussing a different Dvorak (perhaps the one after whom
the keyboard layout I'm using is named), then different considerations
would apply. I don't think the Dvorak layout is ever called the Dvo??k
layout for instance, nor is the writer John Dvorak ever called John
Dvo??k.

Blanket rules like "Use English" don't help at all.

Steve


from_name: Lord Voldemort

subject: [WikiEN-l] An alternative to "critics"

body:
On 7/31/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
> I've never much liked sentences that start "Critics argue that...".
> Here's an alternative I saw at [[Tied Test]]:
>
> --
> Some commentators believed Chappell should have taken Snedden's word
> that the catch was good.
> --
>
> I find this to be more natural, less contrived, and more NPOV.
> "Critics" seems to imply that the people had it in for the subject of
> the article for some reason. "Commentators" is much more neutral -
> just (presumably somewhat notable) people who expressed an opinion on
> the event.
>
> Any opinions? Other alternatives to the infamous "critics"?

It's still weasel words. How about, "So and So from ''newspaper X''
have written that that dude messed up and should be fired. <source
from newspaper X by So and So>"  Be specific.  Who are these
"commentators" or "critics".  If it is a general feeling, then is
there some sort of poll that could show that?  --LV


from_name: Mark Wagner

body:
On 7/29/06, Sherool <jamydlan at online.no> wrote:
> The problem is though that a lot of people are remarkably resistant
> to taking any notice of instructions and warnings. They just want to
> upload cool images, and get very upset when we remove and delete them.

Which is why we need to remove the upload link.  If they need to hunt
around a bit before they can upload images, there's a chance they'll
run into the instructions.

--
Mark
[[User:Carnildo]]


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [Wikipedia-l] The Onion on Wikipedia

body:
Brad Patrick wrote:

>We are all cracking up here at the office.  Well done!
>
>On 7/26/06, Dirk Riehle <dirk at riehle.org> wrote:
>
>
>>Just saw this:
>>
>>http://www.theonion.com/content/node/50902
>>
>>Enjoy!
>>
>>Dirk
>>
>>PS: In case you wonder what kind of magazine The Onion is, try our
>>favorite reference:
>>
>>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Onion
>>
I was especially amused by the line "But after a string of military
antics and a convoluted scheme involving chicken feathers and an
inflatable woman, the British were eventually defeated..."

It reminded me of something that I randomly found in the stacks at the
University of Toronto library many years ago in a very long series of
pamphlets sponsored by various US government agencies in the 1960s.
There were so many of these that it seems that the library staff had
great difficulty keeping them catalogued.

One in particular was memorable.  "The Toxic Effects of Burning Chicken
Feathers."  It was produced by the U.S. Army!  The only disappointment
was that the motivation for the study was not what would seem to be the
obvious one.  It had to do with the manufacture of mattresses for
soldiers, and the possible hazards in the event of a barracks fire.

Ec


subject: [Wikipedia-l] top post

body:
Giuseppe DAngelo wrote:

>I always top post - take it or lump it.
>
>  But...the e-mail I use doesn't seem to automatically signal the original e-mail  - don't ask me why - I don't know the answer - but I would have thought you would all be smart enough to know that I had included a quote from 5 minutes ago.
>
Not unless you cite it.  Not all of sit on the mailing list waiting for
a letter from the lover that doesn't exist.  Sometimes I just let them
build up for several hours, or even days so I can deal with all of them
together.

Ec


from_name: Robert Scott Horning

subject: [Foundation-l] Latest board resolutions

body:
Ray Saintonge wrote:

>Jack wrote:
>
>
>
>>>>>I'm just not comfortable with leasing period.
>>>>>I find Wikipedia to be too important to leave in anyone's hands
>>>>>other than the immediate foundation.  A company that leases
>>>>>servers may easily give in to legal challenges or other backhanded
>>>>>threats.
>>>>>-- mboverload
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>It seems rather far fetched to me that a company with a big leasing
>>>contract like this is going to just decide to break its contract and
>>>confiscate its servers.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>See "FBI seizes Indymedia servers"
>><http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/10/08/1097089554894.html>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>Nothing we do can prevent this kind of activity from the American KGB.
>
>Ec
>
>
Who said it had to be the FBI for that matter.  The State of Florida is
just as capable of messing around like this as well (or other local law
enforcement agencies), and likely to screw things up when they try to
physcially seize the equipment... or more so since they don't tend to
have the technical background of the FBI.

--
Robert Scott Horning


subject: [Foundation-l] Latest board resolutions


subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia is featured by on the front
 page	ofAsahi Shimbun, the leading newspaper in Japan

body:
Tangotango wrote:

>I've now translated the second page, and added some information on the
>diagrams and screenshots that were published. Here's the link again,
>in case you missed it ;) -
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Tangotango/Asahi
>
>Cheers,
>
>Tangotango
>
>On 30/07/06, Berto <albertoserra at ukr.net> wrote:
>
>
>>Hi!
>>
>>
>>>I've posted a translation of the first page at
>>>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Tangotango/Asahi . I'll follow up
>>>soon with the second page.
>>>
>>>
>>"A world built on a gentle order that created itself."
>>
>>I love this phrase. Please add the second page, too.
>>
I like the use of the term "virtuous cycle" instead of the usual
"vicious cycle". :-)

I've noted that this and other articles that refer to the "Nature" study
are quick to note that EB reacted negatively, but often fail to remark
that Wikipedia's response was to correct errors quickly.

Ec


from_name: Steve Summit

subject: [Wikitech-l] diff efficiency

body:
Tim Starling wrote:
> For whole pages, generating a diff takes about 2ms plus 40ms to load the
> text to diff against, rendering a page takes about 800ms.

I'd gotten the impression that rendering was slower.
Thanks for confirming.

> So it's cheaper to use "show changes" by a factor of 20.

That much!

> In fact, we've been considering suppressing the "current version"
> display from diff pages...

But until you do, I guess the point (i.e. which button a
conscientious bot or user should press first) is moot, since the
slow preview button takes 800 ms, and the fast diff button takes
40+800ms.


from_name: Oldak Quill

body:
On 31/07/06, Fastfission <fastfission at gmail.com> wrote:
> Personally I think there is a lot of room for a little commonsense
> flexibiity in images -- people get all bent out of shape about whether
> or not it is hypothetical that the German government could decide to
> enforce all copyrights on Nazi photographs that defaulted to them,
> even though there is no reason to think that they ever will and it is
> questionable whether or not they have the legal standing to do that
> even if they wanted to. Ditto with people worrying that just because
> you can copyright a lighting arrangement scheme, suddenly all
> photographs of the building with this scheme become derivative works
> and copyright infringement. In both cases the legal danger is entirely
> hypothetical and dubious at that -- they are based on stretched and
> literal interpretations of complicated aspects of the copyright law
> and nobody has ever been taken to court over them. And yet they are
> used to delete widely circulated historical content (the Nazi images)
> or even user-produced free content (in terms of the lighting and
> architecture issues).

Although I entirely agree with you on the Nazi copyright issue (though
I think the images copyrights defaulted to Bavaria, which further
complicates matters). Buildings are a problem for our contributors. A
well known example of this is the Eiffel Tower whose owners have been
known to chase down those who claim copyright over night-time pictures
of the tower due to the particular way they arrange the lights.
--
Oldak Quill (oldakquill at gmail.com)


from_name: Chad Perrin

subject:
[Wikitech-l] OT: What language would *you* have done it in,
	and why?

body:
On Mon, Jul 31, 2006 at 04:46:58PM +0200, Warhog (aja Julian Fleischer) wrote:
> Unicode support in PHP is also lacking, you can't safe a PHP-Script as
> UTF-8 or even UTF-16. But a programming language more or less does not
> even need to support, as unicode is designed to be compatible to older
> charsets. You can also handle strings as binary data, no problem then.
>
> For PHP there is also a multibyte extension and there are some functions
> available which allow you to converts ISo-8859-X and UTF-8 (for XML
> support e.g.). I don't know how far mediawiki makes use of such
> features, as it uses UTF-8 only i guess - which is compatible and
> therefore there is no need for PHP to be "compliant" or something like that.

PHP is supposedly planning to incorporate Python's ICU, which has some
reasonable Unicode support for regexen, at some point in the future.
Ruby is reportedly integrating Oniguruma (a regular expression engine)
by the end of the year, which will apparently provide substantial
Unicode support -- though Oniguruma can be used now as an external
library, of course, and someone started supporting ICU support for Ruby
a while ago too (as an external library -- though of course it's an
external library in Python too).  Perl, of course, probably has several
dozen ways to support Unicode in CPAN.

. . . but as far as I'm aware, there's no such thing as a language that
provides full native Unicode support.  The best we could do is use an
external library, which is something you can do with Ruby anyway.

--
CCD CopyWrite Chad Perrin [ http://ccd.apotheon.org ]
unix virus: If you're using a unixlike OS, please forward
this to 20 others and erase your system partition.


from_name: jkelly at fas.harvard.edu

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Technical solution to bad fair use (was:Uploading images
	should be a privilige...)

body:
  Hi,

  Our current setup does mean that it is much, much easier for someone to upload
an unfree image than it is for someone to delete it.  This makes sense when it
comes to valuable freely-licensed content, but is not ideal when it comes to
the "I found this image somewhere on the web and slapped a fair use template on
it" images.  But there are drawbacks to adding more hoops to jump through in the
upload process, as pointed out by Gregory Maxwell and others here -- we don't
want to make it any more difficult for people to contribute their original
work.

  Another technical solution might be to impose terrible resolution on unfree
images, which itself could be switched off (perhaps by bureaucrats) when there
is a real need to (as, for instance, with the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad
cartoons).  If the default was for unfree content to be less aesthetically
appealing than freely-licensed content, we wouldn't have editors constantly
replacing freely-licensed images with unfreely-licensed ones.

  Incidentally,

> >I've always regarded our lack of photographers as a product of the
> >greater startup time consumption (can't really take half a picture),
> >combined with our culture which isn't that friendly to photographers.
> >
> An unfriendly culture? Hadn't noticed that myself.

  At en we have proven largely willing to say to photographers that their work
is not valued.  We pay a kind of lip service to how great it is to have
freely-licensed material, but it is regularly replaced by more
professional-looking images found elsewhere on the web under a "fair use"
claim.  That would certainly suggest that doing photography for en is not worth
one's time.

               Jkelly


from_name: geni

body:
On 7/31/06, Fastfission <fastfission at gmail.com> wrote:
In both cases the legal danger is entirely
> hypothetical and dubious at that -- they are based on stretched and
> literal interpretations of complicated aspects of the copyright law
> and nobody has ever been taken to court over them.

Did you just volunteer to be a test case?

--
geni


from_name: Mark Williamson

subject: [Wikipedia-l] The Onion on Wikipedia

body:
What would be the obvious one?

People setting chickens afire?

Mark

On 31/07/06, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> Brad Patrick wrote:
>
> >We are all cracking up here at the office.  Well done!
> >
> >On 7/26/06, Dirk Riehle <dirk at riehle.org> wrote:
> >
> >
> >>Just saw this:
> >>
> >>http://www.theonion.com/content/node/50902
> >>
> >>Enjoy!
> >>
> >>Dirk
> >>
> >>PS: In case you wonder what kind of magazine The Onion is, try our
> >>favorite reference:
> >>
> >>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Onion
> >>
> I was especially amused by the line "But after a string of military
> antics and a convoluted scheme involving chicken feathers and an
> inflatable woman, the British were eventually defeated..."
>
> It reminded me of something that I randomly found in the stacks at the
> University of Toronto library many years ago in a very long series of
> pamphlets sponsored by various US government agencies in the 1960s.
> There were so many of these that it seems that the library staff had
> great difficulty keeping them catalogued.
>
> One in particular was memorable.  "The Toxic Effects of Burning Chicken
> Feathers."  It was produced by the U.S. Army!  The only disappointment
> was that the motivation for the study was not what would seem to be the
> obvious one.  It had to do with the manufacture of mattresses for
> soldiers, and the possible hazards in the event of a barracks fire.
>
> Ec
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>

--
Refije dirije lanm? yo paske nou posede pw?p bato.


from_name: Fred Bauder

subject: [WikiEN-l] An alternative to "critics"

body:
On Jul 31, 2006, at 8:30 AM, Steve Bennett wrote:

> I've never much liked sentences that start "Critics argue that...".
> Here's an alternative I saw at [[Tied Test]]:
>
> --
> Some commentators believed Chappell should have taken Snedden's word
> that the catch was good.
> --
>
> I find this to be more natural, less contrived, and more NPOV.
> "Critics" seems to imply that the people had it in for the subject of
> the article for some reason. "Commentators" is much more neutral -
> just (presumably somewhat notable) people who expressed an opinion on
> the event.
>
> Any opinions? Other alternatives to the infamous "critics"?

The name of the source or sources.

Fred


from_name: Brian Chau

subject: [WikiEN-l] Lists of words

body:
After reading your email posted up to this mailing list, I have browsed the
webpages provided in your email. I am suspicious about your accuracy on the
comment concerning about encyclopedia having prescriptive articles.

I am writing to give you one very important point: the articles which
contain definitions of words are from Wiktionary (URL: www.wiktionary.org
<http://www.wiktionary.org/> ), which is a branch project of the Wikimedia.
Wikipedia is only providing a link to the webpage in Wiktionary. Therefore
Wikipedia does not contain prescriptive articles as you accused. Although
there are articles linked from the webpages containing lists in the
Wikipedia itself, they are not giving definitions of the phrases. Even if it
provides definitions of phrases, they are mostly in foreign languages other
than English, thus it is difficult to find them from myriad of dictionaries.
I cannot find a point to urge the community to delete the webpages.

Encyclopedia is a great collection of knowledge. Even if some content is not
useful to particular person(s), there is no need to delete them unless they
are not decent. There is not any sound reason to object knowledge
accumulation.

Last but not least, please *read carefully before you make an accusation*.
It is absolutely unwise to shout out complaints without sufficient proof to
support them. You better look before you leap. Otherwise, you will be the
one who is embarrassed if your naive, childish, and incomprehensive
accusations finally light up the anger of the public.

Good luck to you if you are going to continue with such kind of behaviour.

Brian Chau

-----Original Message-----
From: Guettarda [mailto:guettarda at gmail.com]
Sent: Monday, July 31, 2006 6:11 AM
To: English Wikipedia
Subject: [WikiEN-l] Lists of words

It would appear that lists of words violate the provision that Wikipedia

should not have articles which define individual words, nor should it

include Lists of such definitions. However, we have

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Lists_of_words ,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Lists_of_slang and

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Lists_of_phrases , among others.

Policy is descriptive, not prescriptive. Is this policy still being applied

(in which case, *all* of these articles must be deleted), or not (in which

case the wording of the policy needs to be changed). I have raised the issue

at

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:What_Wikipedia_is_not#Lists_of_W
ords

I don't know if all of these articles need to be deleted, or whether policy

needs to be modified to reflect reality.  But I think this needs to be

determined in general, not determined piecemeal

Ian


body:
On 7/31/06, Matt Brown <morven at gmail.com> wrote:
> Policy is descriptive, not prescriptive.  With the exception of core
> Wikipedia policies not subject to debate, you can't use policy to
> force things through without broad support.

It's both: Policy prescribes that everyone must follow what consensus
has agreed on.

> The use of diacritical marks in page names for people, when the name
> is fully recognisable even by those not familiar with the diacritics,
> and where appropriate redirects exist, does not (IMO) have that broad
> support.  It may have a majority, but I doubt even that when it comes
> to (english-language) Wikipedia contributors as a whole.  Straw polls
> and the like just show how many people are rabid about the issue.
>
> Certainly I think that neither extreme point of view has a majority,
> and that it's hard to even find a point-in-the-middle that could gain
> overwhelming support.

One of the weaknesses with the Wikipedia model that is becoming more
apparent. There are just some issues where consensus can never be
gained, so a consistent policy can never be achieved. Which is a pity:
It means our encyclopaedia will never have any kind of broad
consistency, and will instead have different articles following
different rules which reflect the local consensuses that have been
achieved.

Steve


subject: [WikiEN-l] Regulation of user pages

body:
On 7/31/06, Death Phoenix <originaldeathphoenix at gmail.com> wrote:
> There's no such thing as bad publicity, right?

Heh, I was just imagining a subheading:

> > "OSAMA BIN LADEN CAPTURED WHILE EDITING WIKIPEDIA FROM INTERNET CAFE"

Wales: We're serious about not allowing unsourced contributions - no exceptions!

Steve


from_name: Simetrical

subject: [Wikitech-l] diff efficiency

references:
<eaibln$9k7$1@sea.gmane.org> <2006Jul30.1131.scs.0004@eskimo.com>
	<eajpt5$l1f$1@sea.gmane.org> <2006Jul31.1214.scs.0002@eskimo.com>

body:
On 7/31/06, Steve Summit <scs at eskimo.com> wrote:
> But until you do, I guess the point (i.e. which button a
> conscientious bot or user should press first) is moot, since the
> slow preview button takes 800 ms, and the fast diff button takes
> 40+800ms.

Nope, because "show changes" doesn't render the page.  It just shows
you the diff.


body:
On 7/31/06, Chad Perrin <perrin at apotheon.com> wrote:
> . . . but as far as I'm aware, there's no such thing as a language that
> provides full native Unicode support.

It appears PHP 6 will: http://www.zend.com/zend/week/php-unicode-design.txt.


references:
<eafdac$3hf$1@sea.gmane.org> <200607291339.22871.schuetzm@gmx.net>
	<eagrnk$fs6$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<7c2a12e20607292327q6799d228qb9e7bc708cf5bc01@mail.gmail.com>

body:
I found this rather interesting page on PHP optimization:
http://www.php.lt/benchmark/phpbench.php.  It concludes that the
difference between single and double quotes is negligible altogether,
unless you're using an unescaped $ and *not* referring to a variable
(which understandably seems to confuse the interpreter a bit).  I have
no idea what version of PHP that is, however.


from_name: Daniel Bregman

subject: [Foundation-l] Incubator Logo

body:
After nearly a month of voting, the logo has been chosen for Wikimedia
Incubator
(http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Incubator/logo).

I'm writing on behalf of http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:NielsF, who
created the logo. He wishes to know how to tranfer copyright over to the
Wikimedia Foundation.

What would need to be included in a transferal statement, and where should
it be put?

Thank you very much.

-Daniel (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Dbmag9)


subject: [Foundation-l] Incubator Logo


from_name: Delirium

subject: [WikiEN-l] An alternative to "critics"

body:
Steve Bennett wrote:

>I've never much liked sentences that start "Critics argue that...".
>Here's an alternative I saw at [[Tied Test]]:
>
>--
>Some commentators believed Chappell should have taken Snedden's word
>that the catch was good.
>--
>
>I find this to be more natural, less contrived, and more NPOV.
>"Critics" seems to imply that the people had it in for the subject of
>the article for some reason. "Commentators" is much more neutral -
>just (presumably somewhat notable) people who expressed an opinion on
>the event.
>
>
I think it depends on the subject.  If it's a controversial subject,
sometimes it's reasonable to broadly group some commentators as
"critics".  For example, I think many critics of mainstream psychiatry
can be neutrally described as such, and doing so provides more
information to the reader than being really vague about it.  In some
cases, like with political groups, one might even go so far as to say
"opponents".

I do agree that we shouldn't invent camps where they don't exist, and in
those cases (like the one you quote), simply calling people
"commentators" is more appropriate.

-Mark


from_name: Gregory Maxwell

body:
On 7/31/06, Mark Wagner <carnildo at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 7/29/06, Sherool <jamydlan at online.no> wrote:
> > The problem is though that a lot of people are remarkably resistant
> > to taking any notice of instructions and warnings. They just want to
> > upload cool images, and get very upset when we remove and delete them.
>
> Which is why we need to remove the upload link.  If they need to hunt
> around a bit before they can upload images, there's a chance they'll
> run into the instructions.

Simply making the upload link a link to upload instructions... and
asking users to upload by forming a image redlink would actually do a
lot to help.  A lot of images get uploaded without ever being linked
in.. and where an image is used is very helpful in figuring it out its
status (for fair use images, at least).


from_name: Steve Bennett

subject: [WikiEN-l] An alternative to "critics"

body:
I've never much liked sentences that start "Critics argue that...".
Here's an alternative I saw at [[Tied Test]]:

--
Some commentators believed Chappell should have taken Snedden's word
that the catch was good.
--

I find this to be more natural, less contrived, and more NPOV.
"Critics" seems to imply that the people had it in for the subject of
the article for some reason. "Commentators" is much more neutral -
just (presumably somewhat notable) people who expressed an opinion on
the event.

Any opinions? Other alternatives to the infamous "critics"?

Steve


from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject: [Foundation-l] Latest board resolutions

body:
I think anyone who thinks Wikipedia should be more famous and more
popular should be excited, rather than fearful, about the prospect of an
out-of-the-blue confiscation of our servers or shutdown.  Such an event
would make us more powerful than ever.

I have said this before, but it is worth repeating... we have very
powerful friends in the U.S. government, in business, in charitable
foundations, in major law schools, etc.

We need to expect that sooner or later, despite our best efforts to
always do the right thing and be kind to everyone, there will be some
kind of frivolous lawsuit against us.  Such is the nature of life in a
litigious nation, and we need to take this seriously in every part of
our planning, of course.

But the idea that the US government is suddenly going to shut us down
(a) is so far fetched that it is hard to even imagine it seriously and
(b) would be something which would make our traffic and popularity
triple or quadruple within just a few weeks, worldwide.

Robert Scott Horning wrote:
> Ray Saintonge wrote:
>
>> Jack wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>>>>>> I'm just not comfortable with leasing period.
>>>>>> I find Wikipedia to be too important to leave in anyone's hands
>>>>>> other than the immediate foundation.  A company that leases
>>>>>> servers may easily give in to legal challenges or other backhanded
>>>>>> threats.
>>>>>> -- mboverload
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>> It seems rather far fetched to me that a company with a big leasing
>>>> contract like this is going to just decide to break its contract and
>>>> confiscate its servers.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>> See "FBI seizes Indymedia servers"
>>> <http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/10/08/1097089554894.html>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>> Nothing we do can prevent this kind of activity from the American KGB.
>>
>> Ec
>>
>>
> Who said it had to be the FBI for that matter.  The State of Florida is
> just as capable of messing around like this as well (or other local law
> enforcement agencies), and likely to screw things up when they try to
> physcially seize the equipment... or more so since they don't tend to
> have the technical background of the FBI.
>

--
#######################################################################
#    Office: 1-727-231-0101       |  Free Culture and  Free Knowledge #
#    http://www.wikipedia.org     |     Building a free world         #
#######################################################################


subject: [Foundation-l] Latest board resolutions


from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [Foundation-l] Wiki expert in Nigeria needed

body:
A friend of mine, Wayne Mackintosh of the Commonwealth of Learning
(col.org), is looking for a local wiki expert in Nigeria to help with
wiki skills development "to a group of folk with low technical
experience." The project "is aimed at developing free content for
health professionals." The wiki expert would be paid, of course.

Anyone know someone who might qualify, or someone who might know someone?

Thanks,

Erik


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wiki expert in Nigeria needed


from_name: Warhog (aja Julian Fleischer)

subject:
[Wikitech-l] OT: What language would *you* have done it in,
 and why?

body:
Unicode support in PHP is also lacking, you can't safe a PHP-Script as
UTF-8 or even UTF-16. But a programming language more or less does not
even need to support, as unicode is designed to be compatible to older
charsets. You can also handle strings as binary data, no problem then.

For PHP there is also a multibyte extension and there are some functions
available which allow you to converts ISo-8859-X and UTF-8 (for XML
support e.g.). I don't know how far mediawiki makes use of such
features, as it uses UTF-8 only i guess - which is compatible and
therefore there is no need for PHP to be "compliant" or something like that.

Carlos schrieb:
> henna wrote:
>
>> On 7/28/06, Carlos <angus at quovadis.com.ar> wrote:
>>
>>> Tels wrote:
>>>
>>>> I don't know much about Ruby, except that I heard Unicode support is really
>>>> lacking. Which pretty much rules it out for anything serious text
>>>> processing in this age :-D
>>> Does MediaWiki do "anything serious text processing"?
>>
>> In case you didn't know, mediawiki works with several non-english
>> language, which are more or less impossible to support unless your
>> programming language understands Unicode.
>
> And how is it possible now?
>
> Tip: investigate before answering (search for 'xc0' in the code tree).


subject: [WikiEN-l] An alternative to "critics"

body:
On 7/31/06, Lord Voldemort <lordbishopvoldemort at gmail.com> wrote:
> It's still weasel words. How about, "So and So from ''newspaper X''
> have written that that dude messed up and should be fired. <source
> from newspaper X by So and So>"  Be specific.  Who are these
> "commentators" or "critics".  If it is a general feeling, then is
> there some sort of poll that could show that?  --LV

Obviously specific quotes are the best solution. But the wiki model
strongly encourages the addition of "better" while waiting for "best".

At least by saying "some commentators", you're not trying to imply
that it was a "general feeling" - it's simply *some* (preferably
notable) people expressed that opinion.

Incidentally, the other day I did a google search for "considered to
be", "widely considered" and a couple of others at wikipedia, and
turned up 700,000 matches. It was amusing.

Steve


from_name: Anthony

subject: [WikiEN-l] An alternative to "critics"

body:
On 7/31/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 7/31/06, Lord Voldemort <lordbishopvoldemort at gmail.com> wrote:
> > It's still weasel words. How about, "So and So from ''newspaper X''
> > have written that that dude messed up and should be fired. <source
> > from newspaper X by So and So>"  Be specific.  Who are these
> > "commentators" or "critics".  If it is a general feeling, then is
> > there some sort of poll that could show that?  --LV
>
> Obviously specific quotes are the best solution. But the wiki model
> strongly encourages the addition of "better" while waiting for "best".
>
> At least by saying "some commentators", you're not trying to imply
> that it was a "general feeling" - it's simply *some* (preferably
> notable) people expressed that opinion.
>
Potentially libelous statement?  Check.  Unsourced?  Check.

No, "better" is not better than "best", when you're talking about an
unsourced statement like that.  The proper solution is deletion unless
and until a source can be attributed with the statement.

Anthony


from_name: ScottL

subject: [WikiEN-l] An alternative to "critics"

body:
Lord Voldemort wrote:
> On 7/31/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I've never much liked sentences that start "Critics argue that...".
>> Here's an alternative I saw at [[Tied Test]]:
>>
>> --
>> Some commentators believed Chappell should have taken Snedden's word
>> that the catch was good.
>> --
>>
>> I find this to be more natural, less contrived, and more NPOV.
>> "Critics" seems to imply that the people had it in for the subject of
>> the article for some reason. "Commentators" is much more neutral -
>> just (presumably somewhat notable) people who expressed an opinion on
>> the event.
>>
>> Any opinions? Other alternatives to the infamous "critics"?
>
> It's still weasel words. How about, "So and So from ''newspaper X''
> have written that that dude messed up and should be fired. <source
> from newspaper X by So and So>"  Be specific.  Who are these
> "commentators" or "critics".  If it is a general feeling, then is
> there some sort of poll that could show that?  --LV

   I get annoyed with people who over use the interdiction against
weasel words to the point that I think fewer people understand weasel
words than understand copyright.  It is only weasel wording if you say
"some people" when you really mean "Me personally or the people I agree
with".  That said, just because its not weasel wording does not mean it
is acceptable to put unreferenced material.  The problem is that
sometimes you really do mean "some commentators" or in some contexts all
of the "weasel words" are what you really do mean and what you should
use.  Its just that in these contexts you should also include a
references.

   I have seen a number of cases where a general category of people
holding a position are referenced to and a single notable example given
without the implication that they are the only ones "such as green peace
(link to ref)", "such as Roger Ebert (ref)".  Personally I think we
should not ever refer to ANYTHING as weasel wording since it can be
inflammatory but instead refer to the actual editorial policy reason
that the specific instance is wrong.  This gives people guidance on how
to fix it and is less inflammatory.

   That said I suppose I am not disagreeing with anything said above but
I felt like I had to get that rant off my chest after seeing so many
good editors be 100% unhelpful to many newbies by screaming about
"weasel words".  I have not looked at "avoid weasel words" for a while
but I think perhaps we shoudl add the suggestion that: If you find a
problem with unreferenced or inappropriately referenced facts don't try
and weasel out of supporting you position by saying "well its weasel
words".

Dalf


subject: [WikiEN-l] An alternative to "critics"

body:
On 7/31/06, Anthony <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:
> No, "better" is not better than "best", when you're talking about an
> unsourced statement like that.

*Cough*  What I meant was that "better" is not better than nothing, of course :)


from_name: Stan Shebs

subject: [WikiEN-l] Technical solution to bad fair use

body:
jkelly at fas.harvard.edu wrote:

>
>  At en we have proven largely willing to say to photographers that their work
>is not valued.  We pay a kind of lip service to how great it is to have
>freely-licensed material, but it is regularly replaced by more
>professional-looking images found elsewhere on the web under a "fair use"
>claim.  That would certainly suggest that doing photography for en is not worth
>one's time.
>
I'm still a little mystified by this claim. To date I've uploaded
about 2,000 of my own photos, and I can't recall a single article
where one of my photos has been replaced by a nonfree image. On
the contrary, I see my pics showing up unexpectedly in additional
articles. That's not to say replacement doesn't happen, no
mechanism to notify if it did, but when I spot-check, I don't see
anything going on. So where exactly is all this replacement with
nonfree happening?

Stan


from_name: Tim Starling

body:
Chad Perrin wrote:
> PHP is supposedly planning to incorporate Python's ICU, which has some
> reasonable Unicode support for regexen, at some point in the future.

PHP already has unicode regex support, because PCRE has had it for some
time and PHP just bundles that. In fact, the simplest way to split a
UTF-8 string by character in PHP 4-5 with no mbstring is to do
preg_match_all('/./u',...). MediaWiki uses this on occasion.

In PHP 6, they are moving to a 16-bit character type (not sure if it's
UTF-16 or UCS-2), with a distinct binary string type. If "unicode
semantics" are enabled, string literals will be unicode by default, and
all the usual string operations would be character-wise. I dare say this
would cause some backwards compatibility problems for applications such
as MediaWiki.

PHP 6 requires ICU for its internal unicode support, but I'm not sure to
what extent they will be providing interfaces to ICU's more complex
functions. Note that ICU is not "Python's ICU", it's a library written
by IBM which is natively C, C++ and Java. There is a set of swig
wrappers to bind the C++ API to Python.

-- Tim Starling


subject: [Wikitech-l] Interpolation is faster than concatenation

body:
Simetrical wrote:
> I found this rather interesting page on PHP optimization:
> http://www.php.lt/benchmark/phpbench.php.  It concludes that the
> difference between single and double quotes is negligible altogether,
> unless you're using an unescaped $ and *not* referring to a variable
> (which understandably seems to confuse the interpreter a bit).  I have
> no idea what version of PHP that is, however.

Yes, the difference in execution time is negligible, as I said in my
previous post. However, the difference in parse time is said to be
significant.

-- Tim Starling


from_name: Daniel P. B. Smith

subject: [WikiEN-l] An alternative to "critics"

body:
"Steve Bennett" <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
I've never much liked sentences that start "Critics argue that...".
Here's an alternative I saw at [[Tied Test]]:

Some commentators believed Chappell should have taken Snedden's word
that the catch was good.

> On 7/31/06, Lord Voldemort <lordbishopvoldemort at gmail.com> wrote:
>> It's still weasel words. How about, "So and So from ''newspaper X''
>> have written that that dude messed up and should be fired. <source
>> from newspaper X by So and So>"  Be specific.  Who are these
>> "commentators" or "critics".  If it is a general feeling, then is
>> there some sort of poll that could show that?  --LV
>
> Obviously specific quotes are the best solution. But the wiki model
> strongly encourages the addition of "better" while waiting for "best".
>
> At least by saying "some commentators", you're not trying to imply
> that it was a "general feeling" - it's simply *some* (preferably
> notable) people expressed that opinion.

I agree with Lord Voldemort... and not only does wordsmithing the
weasel words not help _much,_ in this case I don't even think it's
clear whether the proposed substitute helps at all. To me, the phrase
"critics charge" is a warning that this represents a point of view
that is held by a substantial number of people, but probably a
faction, and probably a minority. "Some commentators" is vaguer and
_softens_ the impression that a faction is being represented.

But frankly I think the "better solution while waiting for the best"
is to slap a {{citation needed}} on any sentence beginning  "critics
charge..." and delete it eventually if none is forthcoming.

The funny thing, of course, is that an actual verbatim quote from one
particular critic is usually stronger, more flavorful, and more
precise than any attempt to summarize what "the critics charge."
Which is better:

"Critics charge that the United States Constitution failed to define
a meaningful role for the Vice President"

or

"In 1932, John Nance Garner said 'The vice presidency isn't worth a
pitcher of warm piss.'"

{{cite book|title=Cassell's Humorous Quotations|first=Nigel|last=Rees|
publisher=Sterling Publishing Company, Inc.|year=2003|id=ISBN
0304365882}} [http://tinyurl.com/g9lal p. 760]

"Critics charge" is journalistic language. _This is OK_ in a
newspaper because the assumption (don't pile on me, I know about
Jayson Blair), ah say the _assumption_ is that reporters are
authorities, maintain journalistic standards, and wouldn't write
"critics charge" unless it were reasonably accurate. It's not OK in
Wikipedia.


from_name: Richard Holton

subject: [Wikipedia-l] The Onion on Wikipedia

body:
The army had a real problem with soldiers in 'Nam getting hooked on smoking
chicken feathers...it was very tragic.

On 7/31/06, Mark Williamson <node.ue at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> What would be the obvious one?
>
> People setting chickens afire?
>
> Mark
>
> On 31/07/06, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> > Brad Patrick wrote:
> >
> > >We are all cracking up here at the office.  Well done!
> > >
> > >On 7/26/06, Dirk Riehle <dirk at riehle.org> wrote:
> > >
> > >
> > >>Just saw this:
> > >>
> > >>http://www.theonion.com/content/node/50902
> > >>
> > >>Enjoy!
> > >>
> > >>Dirk
> > >>
> > >>PS: In case you wonder what kind of magazine The Onion is, try our
> > >>favorite reference:
> > >>
> > >>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Onion
> > >>
> > I was especially amused by the line "But after a string of military
> > antics and a convoluted scheme involving chicken feathers and an
> > inflatable woman, the British were eventually defeated..."
> >
> > It reminded me of something that I randomly found in the stacks at the
> > University of Toronto library many years ago in a very long series of
> > pamphlets sponsored by various US government agencies in the 1960s.
> > There were so many of these that it seems that the library staff had
> > great difficulty keeping them catalogued.
> >
> > One in particular was memorable.  "The Toxic Effects of Burning Chicken
> > Feathers."  It was produced by the U.S. Army!  The only disappointment
> > was that the motivation for the study was not what would seem to be the
> > obvious one.  It had to do with the manufacture of mattresses for
> > soldiers, and the possible hazards in the event of a barracks fire.
> >
> > Ec
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Wikipedia-l mailing list
> > Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
> >
>
>
> --
> Refije dirije lanm? yo paske nou posede pw?p bato.
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>

--

[[W:en:User:Rholton]]


from_name: Pedro Sanchez

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Technical solution to bad fair use (was:Uploading
	images should be a privilige...)

body:
If that were doable, it'd be great to inforce that "fair use images
must be low resolutions"
I've seen several megapixel "fair use" images

On 7/31/06, jkelly at fas.harvard.edu <jkelly at fas.harvard.edu> wrote:
>   Hi,
>
>   Our current setup does mean that it is much, much easier for someone to upload
> an unfree image than it is for someone to delete it.  This makes sense when it
> comes to valuable freely-licensed content, but is not ideal when it comes to
> the "I found this image somewhere on the web and slapped a fair use template on
> it" images.  But there are drawbacks to adding more hoops to jump through in the
> upload process, as pointed out by Gregory Maxwell and others here -- we don't
> want to make it any more difficult for people to contribute their original
> work.
>
>   Another technical solution might be to impose terrible resolution on unfree
> images, which itself could be switched off (perhaps by bureaucrats) when there
> is a real need to (as, for instance, with the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad
> cartoons).  If the default was for unfree content to be less aesthetically
> appealing than freely-licensed content, we wouldn't have editors constantly
> replacing freely-licensed images with unfreely-licensed ones.
>
>   Incidentally,
>
> > >I've always regarded our lack of photographers as a product of the
> > >greater startup time consumption (can't really take half a picture),
> > >combined with our culture which isn't that friendly to photographers.
> > >
> > An unfriendly culture? Hadn't noticed that myself.
>
>   At en we have proven largely willing to say to photographers that their work
> is not valued.  We pay a kind of lip service to how great it is to have
> freely-licensed material, but it is regularly replaced by more
> professional-looking images found elsewhere on the web under a "fair use"
> claim.  That would certainly suggest that doing photography for en is not worth
> one's time.
>
>                Jkelly
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


from_name: Michael Snow

body:
Gregory Maxwell wrote:

> On 7/31/06, Mark Wagner <carnildo at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On 7/29/06, Sherool <jamydlan at online.no> wrote:
>> > The problem is though that a lot of people are remarkably resistant
>> > to taking any notice of instructions and warnings. They just want to
>> > upload cool images, and get very upset when we remove and delete them.
>>
>> Which is why we need to remove the upload link.  If they need to hunt
>> around a bit before they can upload images, there's a chance they'll
>> run into the instructions.
>
> Simply making the upload link a link to upload instructions... and
> asking users to upload by forming a image redlink would actually do a
> lot to help.  A lot of images get uploaded without ever being linked
> in.. and where an image is used is very helpful in figuring it out its
> status (for fair use images, at least).

While I like that we're debating ways to encourage more
copyright-compliant uploads, I'm not sure about this particular idea.
Right now, when I happen across an article with a red link for an image,
I know to remove it and/or look for a substitute. Do we want to make
people wonder whether they should wait around in case there's an upload
forthcoming?

--Michael Snow


from_name: mboverload

subject: [Wikitech-l] diff efficiency

body:
How 'bout we get Cray to donate a supercomputer and we just have that do the
diffs.  =D

On 7/31/06, Steve Summit <scs at eskimo.com> wrote:
>
> Simetrical wrote:
> >On 7/31/06, Steve Summit <scs at eskimo.com> wrote:
> >>Tim Starling wrote:
> >>> In fact, we've been considering suppressing the "current version"
> >>> display from diff pages...
> >>
> >> But until you do, I guess the point (i.e. which button a
> >> conscientious bot or user should press first) is moot, since the
> >> slow preview button takes 800 ms, and the fast diff button takes
> >> 40+800ms.
> >
> > Nope, because "show changes" doesn't render the page.  It just shows
> > you the diff.
>
> (smacks forehead)
>
> I fell for Tim's sly misdirection utterly. :-)  He was talking about,
> and just there I was thinking of, the diffs run off of the history page,
> not the edit page.
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>


subject: [Foundation-l] Latest board resolutions

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:

>I think anyone who thinks Wikipedia should be more famous and more
>popular should be excited, rather than fearful, about the prospect of an
>out-of-the-blue confiscation of our servers or shutdown.  Such an event
>would make us more powerful than ever.
>
>
Anyone who thinks Wikipedia should have the benefit of increased
attention to quality, so as to deserve at least in some measure its
fame, popularity, and power, on the other hand...

--Michael Snow


subject: [Foundation-l] Latest board resolutions


subject: [WikiEN-l] Colbert Report heads-up

body:
Stephen, how could you do this to us =(

On 7/31/06, John Lyden <rasputinaxp at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Be aware...in his The Word segment 10 minutes ago EDT Stephen Colbert
> asked people to go to [[Elephant]] and insert bad information, and
> people are already hitting the article.
>
> FYI.
>
> --
> John Lyden - rasputinaxp at gmail.com
> "The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to
> live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same
> time..." -Kerouac
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>