from_name: Nikola Smolenski

subject: [Wikitech-l] Multilingual interface

body:
On Saturday 08 May 2004 12:42, Brion Vibber wrote:
> Nikola Smolenski wrote:
> > Since that message, I've noticed some bugs and had no time to fix them,
> > but now I think I can present a beta version. Note I worked against
> > 1.2.0rc3 and not against the CVS; this because if I did something in the
> > wrong way, and a rewrite is needed, I didn't want to adapt to CVS changes
> > at the same time. I hope this will be no problem. I have to say that I
> > have a SF account and know how to work with the CVS, so I can submit the
> > code changes directly to it, if needed. Differences follow:
>
> In general I would highly recommend *against* doing significant
> development on the stable branch. Forward porting things is sometimes
> more work than expected -- particularly when there are major changes --
> or just doesn't get done and your neat new thing gets lost; if you put
> it in the development version, you just have to wait and it'll become
> the stable version. ;)

OK, I'll make future patches against the unstable branch.

> > I think that this is quite selfexplanatory. If $wgLanguageCode is a
> > string, then there is old-fashioned monolingual interface. If it is an
> > array, then a multilingual interface.
> >
> > LocalSettings.php:
> > $wgLanguageCode = array("en","de","sr");
>
> Neat! But there are some problems that need to be overcome.
>
> First, it won't interact at all well with $wgUseDatabaseMessages, since
> we have no way to distinguish which language a defined message is
> intended to reach. Now, it's possible to just make the two modes
> mutually exclusive, so you get the hardcoded messages if in non-default
> language. That's probably ok.

No it won't. I have disabled it, and it's easy to make sure that if one is
set, the other one is forcefully disabled:

if(is_array($wgLanguageCode)) {
        $wgLanguageArray=$wgLanguageCode;
	$wgUseDatabaseMessages=FALSE;

$wgUseDatabaseMessages is not used prior to this point.

> Second, a number of language-specific options will affect how things are
> parsed and stored. Namespace interpretation will be different; I notice
> this is partially taken care of in your patch by run-time patching to
> hardcode the English names, but some languages define additional aliased
> names which would break under another class, and it would be preferable
> to always use the content language's names rather than English.

A final solution for this would require that, eventually, a MediaWiki
installation in ''any'' language recognises codes of ''every'' language.
Eventually, this could be done, but until it is done I think that
multilingual installations could use English messages only. As I understand,
this is needed for Wikisource, Wikibooks and Wiktionary and staying with
English is at least as good as what is already there :)

if(is_array($wgLanguageArray)) eval("\$wgNamespaceNames".ucfirst(
$wgLanguageCode )."=\$wgNamespaceNamesEn;");

should be changed to:

if(is_array($wgLanguageArray)) {
	eval("\$wgNamespaceNames".ucfirst( $wgLanguageCode
)."=\$wgNamespaceNamesEn;");
	eval("\$wgMagicWords".ucfirst( $wgLanguageCode )."=\$wgMagicWordsEn;");
	eval("\$wgAllMessages".ucfirst( $wgLanguageCode
)."['linktrail']=\$wgAllMessagesEn['linktrail'];");
	eval("\$wgAllMessages".ucfirst( $wgLanguageCode
)."['uploadlog']=\$wgAllMessagesEn['uploadlog'];");
	eval("\$wgAllMessages".ucfirst( $wgLanguageCode
)."['uploadlogpage']=\$wgAllMessagesEn['uploadlogpage'];");
	eval("\$wgAllMessages".ucfirst( $wgLanguageCode
)."['deletionlog']=\$wgAllMessagesEn['deletionlog'];");
}

That linktrail bit might be a bit of a problem. But even this way, again, it
is at least as good as what is there already. Eventually, linktrail should be
specific to a code page, not a language. Whether it would be reasonable to do
so for UTF-8 I am not sure.

I think that these are all options which affect affect how things are
parsed and stored. If I have missed something, tell. I was thinking about also
forcing following and other similar options to English:

"mainpage"              => "Main Page",
"aboutpage"             => "$wgMetaNamespace:About",
"helppage"              => "$wgMetaNamespace:Help",

But as a multilingual site would need to have them in all its languages, I
proclaim this a feature, not a bug! :)

> Some languages are still using Latin-1 charset, and you really can't mix
> Latin-1 with UTF-8. Besides the encoding of the messages themselves, the
> fulltext search index is treated very differently between latin-1 and
> UTF-8, and some languages such as Chinese and Japanese do some different
> work to insert simulated word spaces. At some point (hopefully for 1.4)
> we'll want to add language-specific sorting for displays of
> titles/usernames etc, which will require generating and storing indexes
> which depend on the content language.

Yes. One can use all languages in same encoding (all Latin-1, all Latin-2,
all UTF-8...) but can not mix encodings. It is trivial to convert any language
to UTF-8, except for the linktrail which is not used anyway. Wikisource,
Wikibooks and Wiktionary are in UTF-8 already, so I don't think it will be a
problem for them. I don't think that language-specific sorting will be a
problem when introduced; an user will simply see text sorted in his language.
But good luck to one who is going to implement it in UTF-8 for all languages!
As for Chinese and Japanese, you were referring to stripForSearch? I don't
think that it is a problem, Chinese and Japanese users will be able to search
properly, other users will not, but they are not now anyway. But take a look
at this:

        # Italic is not appropriate for Japanese script
        # Unfortunately most browsers do not recognise this, and render <em>
as italic
        function emphasize( $text )
        {
                return $text;
        }

It could make some problems. Eventually, things like this should be specific
to the language of a page or even a section of a page. Currently, if Japanese
Wikipedia has some emphasized text in English, or if English Wikipedia has
some emphasized text in Japanese, things don't work properly. Perhaps
emphasize function in Language.php should be remade to not emphasize Japanese
and Chinese characters. I don't want to even imagine how that could be done.

> Most of the other stuff could be dealt with by defining a 'master
> language' which controls the content encoding, namespace definitions,
> logpage names, logpage content, material used for {{transposed}} and
> substituted messages in content, etc, and a 'display language' which can
> be selected by the user which will determine the language used for user
> interface messages. This probably requires more work on the language
> classes and messages to separate out links.

Yes. Well, currently, English acts as the master language. In future, it
should be possible to have some other language as a master language.

> Also I'm not keen on changing the value and type of $wgLanguageCode. It
> would be best I think to keep things predictable and separate the array
> of selectable languages from the master/content language.

Not a problem. I agree, in light of being able to use another master language
in future (that language would then be defined in $wgLanguageCode). While
$wgLanguageCodes might be the most intuitive name, it could be easily
overlooked, so how about $wgLanguageArray?

If all of this is fine, I'm downloading the code from the CVS, and sending the
patches.


list: wikien-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Poor, Edmund W

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Disciplinary process (was: I just blocked someone for
	9999 hours)

body:
Theresa,

Thanks for outlining your "disciplinary process". It's completely in
line with what I have been proposing and/or doing for the two years I
have acted as a steward of Wikipedia.

> But you don't need to be so harsh either. This is just some kid
mucking about.
> We deal with this kind of thing all the time. (well I do anyway) I go
through a procedure
>
> 1)       Talk page. You must warn them on their talk page first. It's
only polite.
> Tell him he can't take down wikipedia, so give up. Invite him to
contribute properly.
> 2)       Talk page again. Stern warning this time
> 3)       delete nonsense articles and protect real ones as necessary,
explain what
> you are doing
> 4)       Block for 24 hours
> 5)       Block for longer if necessary
>
> I rarely get to stage 5

The idea is to begin by assuming good faith. Explain, request, remind.

If that doesn't work, start turning on the heat. Warn, temp block, ban.

It's amazing how many variations of this principle have appeared over
the nearly 3 years Wikipedia has been in operation.

Ed Poor, aka Uncle ED
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from_name: Daniel P.B.Smith

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: troubled

body:
> From: Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com>
[snippages]
> We censor pictures of clitoris on the english wikipedia.
> We censor clitoris pictures, while billion of humans on Earth have a
> clitoris, and that is something perfectly normal to have.
>
> We censor clitoris for the motive that people could be shocked.
>
> However, we do not censor pictures of torture and humiliation. Forgive
> me, but I am troubled.So, explain to me why we show shocking images of
> human humiliation,
> while we cant display clitoris, because chaste eyes would be shocked ?

It troubles me, too.

If you want an _explanation..._ as opposed to a justification... I'd
say that many Wikipedians seem to implicitly judge the suitability of
pictures in Wikipedia by applying the standards of major U.S.
newspapers. As of today, I can't imagine the Boston Globe printing a
photograph of a clitoris; I _can_ imagine it printing a carefully
stylized diagram of one, although I'm not sure whether they ever have.
And they _have_ printed some of the abuse pictures, with genitalia
blurred.

The New York Times used to, and I believe still does bear the slogan
"All the news that's fit to print." I suspect many people follow the
judgements of the New York TImes. I don't say this is right, I'm saying
I think it's what many of us do.

I don't mean that newspapers specifically are arbiters; I mean that
there is some weird cultural consensus that can be observed by watching
what newspapers do.

--
Daniel P. B. Smith, dpbsmith at verizon.net alternate:
dpbsmith at alum.mit.edu
"Elinor Goulding Smith's Great Big Messy Book" is now back in print!
Sample chapter at http://world.std.com/~dpbsmith/messy.html
Buy it at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1403314063/

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from_name: Arno M

subject: [WikiEN-l] Lord Kenneth

body:
"I don't get this user. Why are they redirecting their user pages to
[[User:Lord Kenneth]] and even editing Lord Kenneth's user page, if they
are not the same user? Admittedly, we can never be sure, but from what I
gathered Lord Kenneth specifically denied being the same as Kenne??"

Lord Kenneth is another user who has hate lists ( or what he calls the wall of shame) on his user page in which he personally attacks other users, and who gets away with it.

The question again must be asked - how much longer will this be tolerated?

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subject:
[WikiEN-l] Historian: origin of apparent "policy" re recipes and
	how-tos?

body:
NOT a rhetorical question.

I've been very puzzled by an apparent consensus or policy--one with
which I obviously do not agree--that recipes in particular, and
didactic or "how-to" articles in general, do not belong in Wikipedia. I
can give cogent-to-me reasons for not agreeing with this. But I don't
want to discuss that now.

Here's what I want to know. Is this an example of a difficult,
carefully-threshed-out consensus that newer Wikipedians, having not
participated in that consensus, may be unaware of?

(And if so why isn't it documented on any of the policy pages I've been
able to find?)

--
Daniel P. B. Smith, dpbsmith at verizon.net alternate:
dpbsmith at alum.mit.edu
"Elinor Goulding Smith's Great Big Messy Book" is now back in print!
Sample chapter at http://world.std.com/~dpbsmith/messy.html
Buy it at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1403314063/

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from_name: daniwo59 at aol.com

subject: [WikiEN-l] I just blocked someone for 9999 hours

body:
I have just blocked Yammy Yamathorne for 9999 hours. I did not go through
Quickpolls. I have no regrets.

This user created a page, [[The Lyceum]], based on the [[Akhmad Kadyrov]]
page, in which he claimed that the "super smart kids" in his school are planning
to bring down Wikipedia. The page itself was an act of vandalism, and I have
deleted it (without going through Speedy Deletions).

This is an increasing problem here on Wikipedia. As we grow, we are no longer
able to monitor the Recent Changes adequately. If I recall correctly, Horace
had been vandalized for two weeks recently before someone noticed.

I am proposing the following radical solutions:

1. Empower sysops to make on-the-spot decisions and act accordingly. If most
people don't trust them to act wisely, they should not be sysops.
2. Reinvigorate Seth Ilys's New Pages Patrol and expand it to include Recent
Changes in general. Lots of crap is getting through, as well as considerable
the duplication of articles.
3. Stiffen penalties. If a group of people (like a school) are planning to
damage Wikipedia, it will last longer than 24 hours.
4. Act quickly and decisively with POV pushers. I recently received an email
from a colleague at work, that was forwarded to her. Someone posted to a
professional mailing list, asking them to join Wikipedia en masse to ensure that
certain articles maintain their point of view. Their POV is often close to my
own, however, I am disturbed that a group can potentially band together to push
a particular POV, regardless of what it is. At one point, such a group will
succeed. (I have forwarded the email to Jimbo, but will say no more about it to
protect the confidence of my colleague).
5. Put together a SMALL group of trusted users to consider ways to redefine
Wikipedia, considering the remarkable growth spurt we are experiencing. This
can be a blessing, but it can also lead to our complete collapse. I propose that
Jimbo select the users and oversee the process, since he is the one person
who is trusted by everyone and whose authority is (more or less) unchallenged.

Danny
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subject: [WikiEN-l] I just blocked someone for 9999 hours 1 more thing

body:
I also propose doing this without pontificating about it for six months. That
is six months of potential damage to Wikipedia.

Danny
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from_name: Sheldon Rampton

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: troubled

body:
Couldn't this whole problem be addressed simply by creating a
separate article, with a title such as [[Abu Ghraib/Photos of
abuse]]? The [[Abu Ghraib]] article itself could include one or two
of the photos, plus a link to the separate article where the other
photos appear. Presumably anyone who visits an article titled [[Abu
Ghraib/Photos of abuse]] would know to expect that they will be
viewing disturbing images.

--Sheldon Rampton


subject: [WikiEN-l] Our Old Friend Plautus Satire

body:
Plautus Satire apprently moved onto another site,
www.badastronomy.com, and began stirrign up anohter
storm there.

A discussion of him, and Wikipedia, can be found

on http://www.badastronomy.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?p=245449

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from_name: Christopher Mahan

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: troubled

body:
--- Sheldon Rampton <sheldon.rampton at verizon.net> wrote:
> Couldn't this whole problem be addressed simply by creating a
> separate article...

I would prefer putting them at the bottom of the article. After the
heading: Warning: some people might find the photos below offensive.
Or not.

I personally think that since we're not a newspaper, we should not
apply to ourselves rules which newpapers apply to themselves.

I personally think that if I wrote an article on the treblinka
extermination camp (which I did), that photos of the camp and
(however disturbing) the condition of the prisoners should not be
seen as "cruel" and "gross". The text itself does that (read about
the beating to death with shovels and the chopping off of women's
breasts with cavalry sabers if you want gross and disturbing.)

A clitoris, for God's sake, might be titillating, or not, but is
certainly not cruel, gross, or disturbing. Half the population of the
planet has one. It would be like disallowing pictures of teeth, or
ears, or belly buttons or toes.

Remember please that this encyclopedia must stand the test of time,
and not be seen by future generation as the epitome of everything
that was wrong with society at the beginning of the 21st Century.

Please go read up on Voltaire, Rousseau, and Baudelaire, and perhaps
the Bill of Rights of the United States Constitution and its
Preamble.

These documents stood the test and hatred of time especially because
they address core issues without self-censorship, but rather with
exhuberance.

=====
Christopher Mahan
chris_mahan at yahoo.com
818.943.1850 cell
http://www.christophermahan.com/

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subject: [WikiEN-l] Plautus 2

body:
Further to this, I've belatedly noticd the page
numbers at the top left hand corner - apparently he
was posting to them as the same time as us. The pages
include several references to post to wikipedia.

But the most recent page still makes interesting
reading - one writer discusses how we (and in
particular) Raul handled him.

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from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: I just blocked someone for 9999 hours 1 more thing

body:
Arwel Parry wrote:

> While I'm discussing this case, I would like to argue that we have
> been far too lenient with people who make edits concerning fictitious
> subjects as if they were real. I'm quite happy for people to discuss
> Tolkienisms and Star Trekisms if they make it clear that it's "In the
> universe of J.R.R. Tolkien...." or "In the Star Trek universe...", but
> it's not acceptable they write about them as if they were in our
> world. In the case in point, the poster had a "thing" about Olli Freyr
> Oskarsson, who is a real footballer who plays for the obscure
> Icelandic team, Thor Akureyri; however in the "Championship Manager"
> computer game he is apparently a very desirable player and this poster
> seemed to be writing about this players' performance in one his game
> campaigns! While to someone on this side of the pond with an interest
> in football, it's obviously preposterous to write about Huddersfield
> Town winning the Champions League, I wouldn't expect someone in the US
> to realise that, just as I would have no idea if someone was posting
> rubbish about baseball or NFL or NHL teams. I feel we need to have a
> stronger reaction against posters who wilfully post disinformation,
> whether "just as a joke" or otherwise.

What is sometimes even more disturbing about some of this stuff is less
that it is wilfull disinformation, but that some of these posters
confuse the video game world with reality.  For them it IS realiity.
 The effects of that approach go well beyond damage to occasional
Wikipedia articles.

Ec


from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: troubled.

body:
Anthere wrote:
> Among the three cited above, penis pictures, torture and humiliation are
> said informative enough, so that we display the pictures directly.
> However, a clitoris is not something informative enough, so, it should
> be hidden.

I think this is inconsistent.

> If a picture is informative, we keep it. If not, we trash it.
>
> If a picture is extremely offensive, we trash it.
> If a picture is generally considered offensive, we apply similar
> standard to all pictures generally considered offensive.
> If a picture is not offensive, we show it.

I think this is exactly correct.  The problem, of course, is that it
is not possible to come up with detailed standards for what is and is
not offensive.

But clearly, I think, the treatment of 'penis' and 'clitoris' should
be the same.

> The argument that the clitoris image is not informative enough, as an
> argument for it to be hidden is a NON-ARGUMENT. Either it is informative
> and we apply it the same standard than to all offensive pictures. Or it
> is not informative, and we trash it.

It could even be argued that a clitoris image is significantly more
informative than a penis image, since (it is said) many men with poor
sexual education do not know how to find it.

--Jimbo


subject: [WikiEN-l] Servers down?

body:
KNOTT, T wrote:

>
>
> in which he claimed that the "super smart kids" in his school are
> planning to bring down Wikipedia?
>
>
> He didn?t say how did he? Because I can?t get wikipedia, wikibooks, or
> meta . There is a note saying servers will be down at 2 -3 tomorrow
> morning UTC but that?s hours away. Could it be DOS attack or am I
> being paranoid?
>
It sounds like a variation on a theme from fiction where the visitor
announces that he will turn off the sun if the natives don't behave.  An
eclipse, about which he had previous knowledge then just happens at his
command.  The problem is that such a phenomenon at any given place is
not that common.  Mark Twain used that idea in his "Connecticut Yankee
in King Arthur's Court"; he was very effective at trolling the credulity
of others.

Ec


from_name: Mark Richards

subject: [WikiEN-l] Review - re  I just blocked someone for 9999 hours

body:
I don't necessarily oppose the principle of giving
sysops more power to act quickly, but if this is
given, it must be with more opportunity for the
community to review those decisions. Kind of a
retroactive Votes for Deletion if you like.

For example, if you quickly delete a page, and ban a
user in a way that is not currently supported by
policy, your action should be listed for a week for
people to comment on, and reviewed if necessary.

Mark

--- daniwo59 at aol.com wrote:
> I have just blocked Yammy Yamathorne for 9999 hours.
> I did not go through
> Quickpolls. I have no regrets.
>
> This user created a page, [[The Lyceum]], based on
> the [[Akhmad Kadyrov]]
> page, in which he claimed that the "super smart
> kids" in his school are planning
> to bring down Wikipedia. The page itself was an act
> of vandalism, and I have
> deleted it (without going through Speedy Deletions).
>
> This is an increasing problem here on Wikipedia. As
> we grow, we are no longer
> able to monitor the Recent Changes adequately. If I
> recall correctly, Horace
> had been vandalized for two weeks recently before
> someone noticed.
>
> I am proposing the following radical solutions:
>
> 1. Empower sysops to make on-the-spot decisions and
> act accordingly. If most
> people don't trust them to act wisely, they should
> not be sysops.
> 2. Reinvigorate Seth Ilys's New Pages Patrol and
> expand it to include Recent
> Changes in general. Lots of crap is getting through,
> as well as considerable
> the duplication of articles.
> 3. Stiffen penalties. If a group of people (like a
> school) are planning to
> damage Wikipedia, it will last longer than 24 hours.
>
> 4. Act quickly and decisively with POV pushers. I
> recently received an email
> from a colleague at work, that was forwarded to her.
> Someone posted to a
> professional mailing list, asking them to join
> Wikipedia en masse to ensure that
> certain articles maintain their point of view. Their
> POV is often close to my
> own, however, I am disturbed that a group can
> potentially band together to push
> a particular POV, regardless of what it is. At one
> point, such a group will
> succeed. (I have forwarded the email to Jimbo, but
> will say no more about it to
> protect the confidence of my colleague).
> 5. Put together a SMALL group of trusted users to
> consider ways to redefine
> Wikipedia, considering the remarkable growth spurt
> we are experiencing. This
> can be a blessing, but it can also lead to our
> complete collapse. I propose that
> Jimbo select the users and oversee the process,
> since he is the one person
> who is trusted by everyone and whose authority is
> (more or less) unchallenged.
>
> Danny
> > _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

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subject: Sex and violence (was Re: [WikiEN-l] Re: troubled.)

body:
I am baffled as to why a clitoris would be considered
comparable in any way to torture. I guess I am baffled
as to why 'sex and violence' so frequently appear in
the same sentence.
Mark

--- Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> I hope everyone will agree that the pictures on the
> following articles
> are potentially offensive for some readers
>
> * penis on penis article
> * clitoris on clitoris article
> * Torture and humiliation pictures on the prison
> article
>
> Among the three cited above, penis pictures, torture
> and humiliation are
> said informative enough, so that we display the
> pictures directly.
> However, a clitoris is not something informative
> enough, so, it should
> be hidden.
>
> I would like that we stop applying double standards
> on the encyclopedia.
>
> If a picture is informative, we keep it. If not, we
> trash it.
>
> If a picture is extremely offensive, we trash it.
> If a picture is generally considered offensive, we
> apply similar
> standard to all pictures generally considered
> offensive.
> If a picture is not offensive, we show it.
>
> All offensive pictures should be treated the same
> way and displayed the
> same way. Either we decide we do not care about
> hurting some
> sensibilities, we display them, and we do this for
> ALL offensive
> pictures. Or we decide we could care a bit, and we
> put a link to it,
> instead of full display in the page.
>
> The argument that the clitoris image is not
> informative enough, as an
> argument for it to be hidden is a NON-ARGUMENT.
> Either it is informative
> and we apply it the same standard than to all
> offensive pictures. Or it
> is not informative, and we trash it.
>
> Now, if a clitoris picture is something not
> interesting, I also would
> like that same standards are applied to all human
> genitals. If we remove
> the clitoris, we remove the penises as well.
>
>
>
> Fred Bauder a ?crit:
> > Pictures of the clitoris are not displayed to
> avoid pandering to purient
> > interests which apparently (I have not followed
> this debate) outweighs the
> > information value.
> >
> > While there may be a few readers who might enjoy
> pictures of torture and
> > putting many of them on Wikipedia would be wrong
> there is such a strong
> > history of people lying about torture that we
> would not want to part of
> > suppression of evidence. Thus there is a very high
> information value. (We
> > finally caught a few of these sonsabitches). There
> is a point of view
> > problem as 99.9% of torture is not photographed
> thus displaying pictures of
> > American torture only (as pictures of Saudi
> Arabian or Israeli or Turkish or
> > Tibetan or [put in your own despotic regime]
> torture are not available)
> > gives a somewhat false impression. It takes a
> pretty dumb criminal to take
> > pictures (or let others take pictures) of
> themselves while they are
> > committing a crime.
> >
> > Fred
> >
> >
> >>From: Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com>
> >>Reply-To: anthere9 at yahoo.com, English Wikipedia
> <wikien-l-g2DCOkC13y2GglJvpFV4uA at public.gmane.org>
> >>Date: Tue, 11 May 2004 02:51:44 +0200
> >>To: wikien-l at wikipedia.org
> >>Subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: troubled.
> >>
> >>We censor pictures of clitoris on the english
> wikipedia.
> >>We censor clitoris pictures, while billion of
> humans on Earth have a
> >>clitoris, and that is something perfectly normal
> to have.
> >>
> >>We censor clitoris for the motive that people
> could be shocked.
> >>
> >>However, we do not censor pictures of torture and
> humiliation. Forgive
> >>me, but I am troubled.
> >>
> >>No, I do not think everything should be shown,
> especially soon after
> >>they happen. Just as some criminal trials of WWII
> horors were recorded,
> >>but the records preserved for several years before
> being shown publicly.
> >>This in memory of the deads. Even though we know
> what happened.
> >>
> >>So, explain to me why we show shocking images of
> human humiliation,
> >>while we cant display clitoris, because chaste
> eyes would be shocked ?
> >>
> >>
> >>Fred Bauder a ?crit:
> >>
> >>>They belong. If they allowed picture taking at
> the Colorado State
> >>>Penitentiary or in a prison in France they would
> belong too. Their
> >>>importance is that most torture in prisons
> happens without pictures being
> >>>taken. These pictures have to stand in place of
> the hundreds or even
> >>>thousands of similar situations that don't get
> recorded. Or is that too
> >>>creative?
> >>>
> >>>Fred
> >>
> >>
> >>_______________________________________________
> >>WikiEN-l mailing list
> >>WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> >>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-
> >
> > l
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

__________________________________
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subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: troubled.

body:
I wonder whether you could have a sub-page with
exactly the same text but with the pictures, so that
you would have a link at the top to 'switch on the
pictures'. It would be kind of tricky to maintain I
suppose.
Mark

--- Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
> Weighing in on this issue, I think the pictures are
> on the borderline of
> what we should put inline, but should probably stay.
>  The sexually
> explicit parts have been blurred out anyway, so
> they're not problematic
> on that account.
>
> I like the way [[clitoris]] has been handled
> generally (no pun
> intended), though perhaps there's a better way of
> doing it.  Having it a
> simple link makes it so that anyone can easily find
> it (an on-site link,
> so it doesn't depend on an external server), but so
> that people who are
> reading the article don't have to have it in their
> peripheral vision the
> whole time if they find it uncomfortable for
> whatever reason.
>
> Conceptually disturbing images are somewhat
> different than graphic
> ones.  People might be disturbed by pictures of
> concetration camps, but
> these are more conceptually disturbing than graphic,
> and are fairly
> integral to an article on, say, the [[Holocaust]].
> On the other hand,
> if there were gruesome pictures of medical
> experiments being performed,
> we might want to put those on as linked instead of
> inline.
>
> The main reason I'd favor that approach is that
> otherwise there'll be
> whole sections of Wikipedia that people are somewhat
> afraid to visit,
> especially in public areas.  Someone should be able
> to read [[torture]]
> without seeing graphic images of torture; they
> should be able to read
> [[automobile accident]] without seeing bloody
> corpses plastered on the
> roadway, and so on.  If the picture might be useful,
> they ought to be
> able to see it, but that should be up to them.
>
> But back to the point, I think the [[Abu Graith]]
> images in particular
> are okay, though perhaps some better placement is
> possible.  Although
> I've wrangled on that page a bit myself, I do think
> they currently come
> across in a moderately documentary tone, rather than
> a pursuasive tone
> intended to shock the reader into a particular
> action.
>
> -Mark
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

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body:
Mark Richards wrote:

>I don't necessarily oppose the principle of giving
>sysops more power to act quickly, but if this is
>given, it must be with more opportunity for the
>community to review those decisions. Kind of a
>retroactive Votes for Deletion if you like.
>
>For example, if you quickly delete a page, and ban a
>user in a way that is not currently supported by
>policy, your action should be listed for a week for
>people to comment on, and reviewed if necessary.
>
It's difficult to review a page that has been deleted like that.

Ec


body:
--- Mark Richards <marich712000 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> I don't necessarily oppose the principle of giving
> sysops more power to act quickly, but if this is
> given, it must be with more opportunity for the
> community to review those decisions. Kind of a
> retroactive Votes for Deletion if you like.
>
> For example, if you quickly delete a page, and ban a
> user in a way that is not currently supported by
> policy, your action should be listed for a week for
> people to comment on, and reviewed if necessary.

This is what this mailing list is for (public record, more so than
the pedia itself) and gives ample time for all interested parties to
discuss). He did post this here.

=====
Christopher Mahan
chris_mahan at yahoo.com
818.943.1850 cell
http://www.christophermahan.com/

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list: wikitech-l

from_name: Tim Starling

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: zwinger raid 1

body:
Ricky Beam wrote:
> Ok.  There's your problem: your hdparm is too freakin' old.

Shaihulud suggested that this might be the problem, so I upgraded it to
5.5 on curly. It didn't help.

-- Tim Starling


from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [Wikitech-l] Multilingual interface

body:
Brion wrote:
>First, it won't interact at all well with $wgUseDatabaseMessages,
>since we have no way to distinguish which language a defined
>message is intended to reach. Now, it's possible to just make the
>two modes mutually exclusive, so you get the hardcoded messages
>if in non-default language. That's probably ok.

Could page sections be used for this? For example, if there is a ==fr== section
on a MediaWiki custom message page, then when a person selects French as their
language interface, then whatever is in the ==fr== section will get displayed
for that message. If there is no ==fr== section then the default French message
is shown. If that won't scale, then there could be a [[/fr]] subpage instead.

Just some ideas...

--- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

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body:
Mark Richards wrote:

>I am baffled as to why a clitoris would be considered
>comparable in any way to torture. I guess I am baffled
>as to why 'sex and violence' so frequently appear in
>the same sentence.
>
To paraphrase that great American philosopher, George Carlin, "It's OK
to fuck your enemy; just don't fuck your lover."  It's a question of
morality.  On American TV they may be showing the torture pictures from
the Sadaamite jail, but any suggestion on these pictures that the
prisoners might have genitals needs to be blurred to avoid offending the
morals of decent religious folks.  The administration strongly objected
to pictures of returning dead American soldiers.  These weren't pictures
of mutilated bodies - just rows of flag-draped coffins.  For many, the
video game world has to be real; without that some would be left with
the unpatriotic illusion that when you pull on the trigger real people
are being killed.

Perhaps the painted nails on the fingers that spread the labia to show
the clitoris were a detraction from the purpose of that article, but so
too would be an excess of pictures to illustrate the tortures at Abu
Ghraib, as was the excess of pictures about Rachel Corrie.  But we can't
ignore any of these images altogether.

Ec


body:
daniwo59 at aol.com wrote:
> 1. Empower sysops to make on-the-spot decisions and act
> accordingly. If most people don't trust them to act wisely, they
> should not be sysops.

In this case, you had a case of obvious vandalism and a threat to do
more.  Policy already supports you 100% in this, and we absolutely
should make it clear to all sysops that this is perfectly fine.

(Actually, I just re-read the vandalism policy, and it doesn't quite
say that, does it?  Well, it should.)

> 3. Stiffen penalties. If a group of people (like a school) are
> planning to damage Wikipedia, it will last longer than 24 hours.

I think that's sensible.

> 4. Act quickly and decisively with POV pushers. I recently received
> an email from a colleague at work, that was forwarded to
> her. Someone posted to a professional mailing list, asking them to
> join Wikipedia en masse to ensure that certain articles maintain
> their point of view. Their POV is often close to my own, however, I
> am disturbed that a group can potentially band together to push a
> particular POV, regardless of what it is. At one point, such a group
> will succeed. (I have forwarded the email to Jimbo, but will say no
> more about it to protect the confidence of my colleague).

*nod* -- The issue here is subtle but potentially a huge deal, as
follows.

Each of us has come to the project individually, and so whatever POV
we may have, we don't imagine that we could get away with pushing it.
I mentioned the other day that I think a lot of our gun rights
articles have a pro-gun bias, but I have to admit that the main reason
I looked at them in the first place was to check for anti-gun bias,
which I care about as a personal issue of interest to me.

Because we have come here individually, we have come mostly because of
our interest in the encyclopedia _per se_, as opposed to a particular
narrow agenda.  (Not true for everyone, obviously, but I'm speaking in
generalities.)

It would be unfortunate if it became common practice for groups of
people to come _with a specific agenda_, as a group.

(I agreed with pretty much everything else Danny said, too, I just
omitted it because I didn't have much comment.)

--Jimbo


subject:
[WikiEN-l] Re: Historian: origin of apparent "policy" re
	recipesand	how-tos?

body:
Timwi wrote:

> KNOTT, T wrote:
>
>>> If so many people want them, why not make a new project --
>>> WikiHowto? Either that, or extend the scope of Wikibooks slightly.
>>
>> It's within the scope of wikibooks.
>
> In what way? I can see there's a cookbook on Wikibooks, so if I wanted
> to write a recipe I guess I would add it there, but what if I want to
> write just a single howto on something I found out (say, how to
> install something in Linux)?

A Wikipedia article is fine for that.  I believe that Jimbo expressed
himself on that vision back in the times when Larry was still around.

Ec


subject:
[WikiEN-l] Re: Historian: origin of apparent "policy" re
	recipes	and how-tos?

body:
Imran Ghory wrote:

>On Tue, 11 May 2004, Anthere wrote:
>
>>~You miss the point. Many people do consider many recipees are
>>encyclopedic, as some have cultural value.
>>
>The central basis on which I argue on vfd when these things come up is
>that wikipedia should be descriptive not prescriptive. Instructive works
>come under the remit of wikibooks so that is where they should go.
>
>So a description of how a food is made is encyclopedic, but instructions
>on how to make that food are not encyclopedic.
>
The descriptive/prescriptive distinction is very narrow in this case.  I
prefer to avoid a pompous definition of what is encyclopedic.

Ec


from_name: David Friedland

subject:
[WikiEN-l]
	Re: Naming policy for places (Mav and Ed, please confirm)

body:
Danny wrote:

> Okay, I have a problem with this. The problem is that this is an old
> debate that is being rehashed. A long time ago, before Nohat or RickK
> were active on Wikipedia, there was serious discussion and debate about
> this. I am sure that Mav, Ed Poor, and a few others remember. I wish I
> could find the debates, but right now I can't.

It seems to me that if any policy stops being supported by consensus
then it ought to be revisited. Indeed, the current policy was never
supported by consensus, as I explain below.

> Now, it could be that the wrong choice won the vote (and there was a
> vote). On the other hand, we are opening up an old can of worms where
> consensus had been reached. This in itself is not a problem, so much as
> the implications are. In 2 years from now, when the current users are
> mostly gone, a new generation of users might well challenge the new
> naming convention we decide on now and come up with a new one--or
> perhaps the old one. It can happen again and again.

I would like to note that after reviewing the vote at

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Naming_conventions_(city_names)/Archive_3

the only aspects of my proposed policy that overturn the results of this
  vote are the particular votes on cities in the US and Canada, which
were decided by 4-2 votes. I don't think that anyone would agree that a
4-2 vote represents consensus. Not only is it a ridiculously small
number of people, but it's only 66% support.

Also, I would like to add that the previous discussion is only concerned
by the ambiguous names portion of the proposed policy, whereas the
proposed policy concerns places that have multiple names and provides a
mechanism for dealing with cases where which name should be used is
disputed. Further, it is a broader policy in that it applies to all
geographical place names, and not just cities.

> When we decided on the naming convention, there may not have been even
> 50,000 articles on Wikipedia. It happened before Zoe added capitals for
> all the countries, because she had to redo many of them manually to meet
> the new standards of the naming convention. Wikipedia is much larger
> now. Bots aside, we have many times more articles, and we will continue
> to grow. Reopening this can of worms will only impede real progress. We
> have a system. Let's stick to it, and we can discuss particular
> instances of potential exceptions on a case by case basis.

The problem is that those discussions of particular exceptions
invariably lead to discussions of how the policy should be changed,
especially because the current policy doesn't provide a mechanism for
dealing with disputes. What is needed is a firm policy on how the
disputes about article names can be settled, which is something that my
proposed policy provides. Also, I hope you're not suggesting that
discussions of old policies should never be re-opened. That seems like
an ultra-conservative perspective on policy that is probably not shared
by most.

> BTW, another example of a convention that was broken and which has
> exploded again is the East Prussia series of articles. We had worked out
> (twice) a naming standard (with teh help of JHK), which was ignored by
> new users who knew nothing about the bitter debates that led to an
> acceptable compromise.
>
> Essentially, what I am saying is that what newer users might not realize
> is that certain conventions that they take for granted were decided
> after a long grueling process. Let's not keep redoing that again and
> again, any time someone who is not aware of that history joins Wikipedia.

While I am sympathetic to the desire not to reopen old discussions, the
problem lies in the fact that the results of old discussions were
incomplete and inconclusive. I was aware of the previous discussion and
consulted it while drafting the policy I have proposed. The policies
that were supported by a large number of people (no pre-emptive
disambiguation, commas as disambiguator) are included in the proposed
policy. Only those aspects of the policy which were decided by a tiny
group have been reversed by the proposed policy. Furthermore, the only
item that was supported by consensus (more than 70% of the vote) was the
proposal to use [City, Nation] as the standard disambiguation format,
and that was decided 6 to 2. All the others were decided by less than
70% majority, which is not really consensus.

The facts remain that a Hobbesian state of nature exists for certain
disputes and the current policy doesn't really address how to handle
them. I recommend that a solid policy be adopted. If you don't like the
policy I've proposed, then vote against it, or preferably, let's discuss
how to improve it. If lots of people don't like it and it doesn't get
70% support, then it won't get adopted and the current policies (or lack
of policies) will continue to be in effect.

- David


from_name: KNOTT, T

body:
No, a few people discussed it on the how to talk page. Most people have never shown much of an interest in how to type article, so we just decided amongst ourselves really. It was decided that the recipes should be moved first, we'd worry about the other stuff later. Then people started complaining that stuff was being deleted, so then every recipe started going through VfD. In the meantime people still put How tos on VfD claiming they are unencylopedic.

As a contributor of lot's of How to pages my own opinion is that I don't care if it's wikipedia or wikibooks, I just want them somewhere, and I don't want people adding VfD notes on them.

-----Original Message-----
From: Daniel P.B.Smith [mailto:dpbsmith at verizon.net]
Sent: 11 May 2004 11:53
To: daniwo59 at aol.com
Cc: wikien-l at Wikipedia.org
Subject: [WikiEN-l] Historian: origin of apparent "policy" re recipes andhow-tos?

NOT a rhetorical question.

I've been very puzzled by an apparent consensus or policy--one with which I obviously do not agree--that recipes in particular, and didactic or "how-to" articles in general, do not belong in Wikipedia. I can give cogent-to-me reasons for not agreeing with this. But I don't want to discuss that now.

Here's what I want to know. Is this an example of a difficult, carefully-threshed-out consensus that newer Wikipedians, having not participated in that consensus, may be unaware of?

(And if so why isn't it documented on any of the policy pages I've been able to find?)
--
Daniel P. B. Smith, dpbsmith at verizon.net alternate: dpbsmith at alum.mit.edu
"Elinor Goulding Smith's Great Big Messy Book" is now back in print!
Sample chapter at http://world.std.com/~dpbsmith/messy.html
Buy it at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1403314063/

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from_name: Constans, Camille (C.C.)

subject: UTF-8 conversion was  [Wikitech-l] Multilingual interface

body:
--
Camille Constans
Apprenti ing?nieur production maintenance
Ma?tre d'apprentissage : Jean Lhomme

>-----Message d'origine-----
>De : wikitech-l-bounces at Wikipedia.org
>[mailto:wikitech-l-bounces at Wikipedia.org]De la part de Brion Vibber
>Envoy? : mardi 11 mai 2004 07:48
>? : Wikimedia developers
>Objet : Re: [Wikitech-l] Multilingual interface
>
>
>Nikola Smolenski wrote:
>> Yes. One can use all languages in same encoding (all
>Latin-1, all Latin-2,
>> all UTF-8...) but can not mix encodings. It is trivial to
>convert any language
>> to UTF-8, except for the linktrail which is not used anyway.
>Wikisource,
>> Wikibooks and Wiktionary are in UTF-8 already, so I don't
>think it will be a
>> problem for them.
>
>All the remaining latin-1 language files will have to be
>upgraded to do
>that, or appropriate run-time upconversion added.

I have an idea, we had converted the frwiki by converting all the dump in one time. I took around 2 hours for 2.5GB of dump
We could convert only all tables except old. And running a script which convert old later. Old will be in broken iso-8859 for a few day. I wrote a small php script to convert old from iso-8859-1 to utf-8, cause I broke old on de.wiktionary during the conversion to utf-8 (I forgot that old is gzipped, converting a binary is not very good:) )


from_name: Pierre Abbat

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: The fun never stops

body:
On Monday 10 May 2004 01:07, Anthere wrote:
> Yes, that sounds reasonable.
>
> Did I miss Mother's Day ??? I don't remember I got flowers...

Pistille got them.

phma
--
li fi'u vu'u fi'u fi'u du li pa


body:
Calm down Danny. You are overreacting.

Firstly you don't need quickpolls, and you don't need to go through speedy deletions.

But you don't need to be so harsh either. This is just some kid mucking about. We deal with this kind of thing all the time. (well I do anyway) I go through a procedure

1)       Talk page. You must warn them on their talk page first. It's only polite. Tell him he can't take down wikipedia, so give up. Invite him to contribute properly.
2)       Talk page again. Stern warning this time
3)       delete nonsense articles and protect real ones as necessary, explain what you are doing
4)       Block for 24 hours
5)       Block for longer if necessary

I rarely get to stage 5

-----Original Message-----
From: daniwo59 at aol.com [mailto:daniwo59 at aol.com]
Sent: 11 May 2004 12:18
To: wikien-l at Wikipedia.org
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] I just blocked someone for 9999 hours 1 more thing

I also propose doing this without pontificating about it for six months. That is six months of potential damage to Wikipedia.

Danny
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from_name: Charles Matthews

body:
Danny wrote

>[Deletion story]

>This is an increasing problem here on Wikipedia. As we grow, we are no
longer able to monitor the Recent Changes adequately. If I recall correctly,
Horace had been vandalized for two weeks recently before someone noticed.

>I am proposing the following radical solutions:

>1. Empower sysops to make on-the-spot decisions and act accordingly. If
most people don't trust them to act wisely, they should not be sysops.
>2. Reinvigorate Seth Ilys's New Pages Patrol and expand it to include
Recent Changes in general. Lots of crap is getting through, as well as
considerable the duplication of articles.
>3. Stiffen penalties. If a group of people (like a school) are planning to
damage Wikipedia, it will last longer than 24 hours.
>4. Act quickly and decisively with POV pushers. I recently received an
email from a colleague at work, that was forwarded to her. Someone posted to
a professional mailing list, asking them to join Wikipedia en masse to
ensure that certain articles maintain their point of view. Their POV is
often close to my own, however, I am disturbed that a group can potentially
band together to push a particular POV, regardless of what it is. At one
point, such a group will succeed. (I have forwarded the email to Jimbo, but
will say no more about it to protect the confidence of my colleague).
>5. Put together a SMALL group of trusted users to consider ways to redefine
Wikipedia, considering the remarkable growth spurt we are experiencing. This
can be a blessing, but it can also lead to our complete collapse. I propose
that Jimbo select the users and oversee the process, since he is the one
person who is trusted by everyone and whose authority is (more or less)
unchallenged.

I'd like to respond to these points.

First, though, a comment: I don't personally feel there are current 'bad
content'/'problem user' crises.  Certainly not on the scale that server
problems cause (20% drop in traffic, and probably at least that in fresh
postings).

In detail:

1. OK - but if this is done in a provocative way, who's to say it will
decrease malicious vandalism?

2. Article duplication is the inevitable consequence of filling up topics.
Needs someone knowledgeable, who knows an area.  I do spend more and more
time on this, myself.

3. It is quite hard to damage as much as 0.01% of Wikipedia.  Let's keep
this in perspective, while assuming that vigilance is going to be needed.

4. I think we'd notice these things, and get to the bottom of them in time.

5. Not my decision.  As I said, 'collapse' seems hyperbolic to me, right
now.

Charles


from_name: Anthere

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: troubled.

body:
I hope everyone will agree that the pictures on the following articles
are potentially offensive for some readers

* penis on penis article
* clitoris on clitoris article
* Torture and humiliation pictures on the prison article

Among the three cited above, penis pictures, torture and humiliation are
said informative enough, so that we display the pictures directly.
However, a clitoris is not something informative enough, so, it should
be hidden.

I would like that we stop applying double standards on the encyclopedia.

If a picture is informative, we keep it. If not, we trash it.

If a picture is extremely offensive, we trash it.
If a picture is generally considered offensive, we apply similar
standard to all pictures generally considered offensive.
If a picture is not offensive, we show it.

All offensive pictures should be treated the same way and displayed the
same way. Either we decide we do not care about hurting some
sensibilities, we display them, and we do this for ALL offensive
pictures. Or we decide we could care a bit, and we put a link to it,
instead of full display in the page.

The argument that the clitoris image is not informative enough, as an
argument for it to be hidden is a NON-ARGUMENT. Either it is informative
and we apply it the same standard than to all offensive pictures. Or it
is not informative, and we trash it.

Now, if a clitoris picture is something not interesting, I also would
like that same standards are applied to all human genitals. If we remove
the clitoris, we remove the penises as well.

Fred Bauder a ?crit:
> Pictures of the clitoris are not displayed to avoid pandering to purient
> interests which apparently (I have not followed this debate) outweighs the
> information value.
>
> While there may be a few readers who might enjoy pictures of torture and
> putting many of them on Wikipedia would be wrong there is such a strong
> history of people lying about torture that we would not want to part of
> suppression of evidence. Thus there is a very high information value. (We
> finally caught a few of these sonsabitches). There is a point of view
> problem as 99.9% of torture is not photographed thus displaying pictures of
> American torture only (as pictures of Saudi Arabian or Israeli or Turkish or
> Tibetan or [put in your own despotic regime] torture are not available)
> gives a somewhat false impression. It takes a pretty dumb criminal to take
> pictures (or let others take pictures) of themselves while they are
> committing a crime.
>
> Fred
>
>
>>From: Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com>
>>Reply-To: anthere9 at yahoo.com, English Wikipedia <wikien-l-g2DCOkC13y2GglJvpFV4uA at public.gmane.org>
>>Date: Tue, 11 May 2004 02:51:44 +0200
>>To: wikien-l at wikipedia.org
>>Subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: troubled.
>>
>>We censor pictures of clitoris on the english wikipedia.
>>We censor clitoris pictures, while billion of humans on Earth have a
>>clitoris, and that is something perfectly normal to have.
>>
>>We censor clitoris for the motive that people could be shocked.
>>
>>However, we do not censor pictures of torture and humiliation. Forgive
>>me, but I am troubled.
>>
>>No, I do not think everything should be shown, especially soon after
>>they happen. Just as some criminal trials of WWII horors were recorded,
>>but the records preserved for several years before being shown publicly.
>>This in memory of the deads. Even though we know what happened.
>>
>>So, explain to me why we show shocking images of human humiliation,
>>while we cant display clitoris, because chaste eyes would be shocked ?
>>
>>
>>Fred Bauder a ?crit:
>>
>>>They belong. If they allowed picture taking at the Colorado State
>>>Penitentiary or in a prison in France they would belong too. Their
>>>importance is that most torture in prisons happens without pictures being
>>>taken. These pictures have to stand in place of the hundreds or even
>>>thousands of similar situations that don't get recorded. Or is that too
>>>creative?
>>>
>>>Fred
>>
>>
>>_______________________________________________
>>WikiEN-l mailing list
>>WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
>>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-
>
> l


from_name: Arwel Parry

body:
I agree with Theresa. We had a case a couple of nights ago where a new
anonymous poster was adding misleading information to [[Football
(soccer)]] among others. Start at stage one with the template "use the
sandbox for your tests next time" message on his talk page, and revert
all his edits. Forty minutes later he's still at it, so put an "OI!!
KNOCK IT OFF!!..." message on his talkpage (from his edits he was
obviously British so would understand the language!), with a warning
he'd be banned if he carries on; revert again. Result, no more is heard
from this anon.

While I'm discussing this case, I would like to argue that we have been
far too lenient with people who make edits concerning fictitious
subjects as if they were real. I'm quite happy for people to discuss
Tolkienisms and Star Trekisms if they make it clear that it's "In the
universe of J.R.R. Tolkien...." or "In the Star Trek universe...", but
it's not acceptable they write about them as if they were in our world.
In the case in point, the poster had a "thing" about Olli Freyr
Oskarsson, who is a real footballer who plays for the obscure Icelandic
team, Thor Akureyri; however in the "Championship Manager" computer game
he is apparently a very desirable player and this poster seemed to be
writing about this players' performance in one his game campaigns! While
to someone on this side of the pond with an interest in football, it's
obviously preposterous to write about Huddersfield Town winning the
Champions League, I wouldn't expect someone in the US to realise that,
just as I would have no idea if someone was posting rubbish about
baseball or NFL or NHL teams. I feel we need to have a stronger
reaction against posters who wilfully post disinformation, whether "just
as a joke" or otherwise.

Arwel

In message
<C88C309EC75BC245876B4647FFD6FBCCA075E5 at emailserv.queens.harley>,
"KNOTT, T" <tknott-Ek59Oj94Ld+1Qrn1Bg8BZw at public.gmane.org> writes
>Calm down Danny. You are overreacting.
>?
>Firstly you don?t need quickpolls, and you don?t need to go through
>speedy deletions.
>?
>But you don?t need to be so harsh either. This is just some kid mucking
>about. We deal with this kind of thing all the time. (well I do anyway) I go
>through a procedure
>?
>
>1)?????? Talk page. You must warn them on their talk page first. It?s only
>polite. Tell him he can?t take down wikipedia, so give up. Invite him to
>contribute properly.
>2)?????? Talk page again. Stern warning this time
>
>3)?????? delete nonsense articles and protect real ones as necessary,
>explain what you are doing
>
>4)?????? Block for 24 hours
>
>5)?????? Block for longer if necessary
>?
>I rarely get to stage 5
>?
>?
>?
>-----Original Message-----
>From: daniwo59-YDxpq3io04c at public.gmane.org
>[mailto:daniwo59-YDxpq3io04c at public.gmane.org]
>Sent: 11 May 2004 12:18
>To: wikien-l-g2DCOkC13y2GglJvpFV4uA at public.gmane.org
>Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] I just blocked someone for 9999 hours 1 more
>thing
>?
>I also propose doing this without pontificating about it for six months. That
>is six months of potential damage to Wikipedia.
>?
>Danny
>

--
Arwel Parry
http://www.cartref.demon.co.uk/


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Consumerium and 142

body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:
>>Be absolutely clear: you are making real-world enemies here,
>>Tim Starling. And many real-world enemies do in fact go so far
>>as to kill to protect what they value.
>
>
> Sigh. So far this guy has issued veiled death threats to Larry, Jimbo, me, and
> now Tim (there are probably others I missed).
>
> I've already filed a report to the FBI on 24/142/Craig Hubley's threat on me,
> but have never heard back from them. Perhaps if others also file reports then
> something may get done.

I thought about filing a report. I even rang up the Canadian police and
asked them about it, and they told me to contact my local police. But I
didn't, in the end. This was a couple of months ago by the way -- that
wasn't clear in my original email.

Making veiled threats is part of 142's standard trolling repertoire. It
often creates a bit of a stir, in which case he denies it and claims
that he is the victim of paranoia, racism, bias or whatever. He has
conveniently outlined this tactic for us at:

http://develop.consumerium.org/wiki/index.php/Spun_threat

What would be really useful is if we could get him kicked off Sympatico.
Then he would have to use a smaller ISP, hopefully corresponding to a
smaller range block. I've had 3 or 4 complaints from Halifax residents
about not being able to edit Wikipedia. Sympatico has a fairly strict
Acceptable Use Policy:

http://service.sympatico.ca/ServiceDesk/ServiceDesk-Content.cfm?SDID=632&SDCategoryID=113&page=1

Regarding the "driven off by trolls" philosophy, Mark Richards wrote:
 > This is kind of different to the way the term 'troll'
 > has been used before isn't it? As far as I can see,
 > this is an attempt by an advocacy group to get their
 > point of view to dominate certain articles - my
 > understanding was that we were using the term 'troll'
 > to mean users who post to deliberately stir up
 > controversy.
 > This highlights the fine line between points of view
 > we disagree with (and how to integrate them into
 > articles while maintaining an NPOV) and users who have
 > nothing to add except conflict.
 > Mark

No, it's an attempt by a single person who identifies as a troll to
redefine the term in order to give himself a rationalisation for his
behaviour. Hurting people for fun can eventually lead to pangs of
conscience, even for 142. So he attempts to justify it in terms of
righteous promotion of his beliefs. The actual activities he conducts,
however, are still the same.

-- Tim Starling


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: troubled

body:
I understand. Thanks for the explanations :-)

So, we should make an extra effort not to be deciding our editorial
content through the pov of Boston Globe :-)

-------

Daniel P.B.Smith a ?crit:
>     From: Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com>
>
> [snippages]
>
>     We censor pictures of clitoris on the english wikipedia.
>     We censor clitoris pictures, while billion of humans on Earth have a
>     clitoris, and that is something perfectly normal to have.
>
>     We censor clitoris for the motive that people could be shocked.
>
>     However, we do not censor pictures of torture and humiliation. Forgive
>     me, but I am troubled.So, explain to me why we show shocking images
>     of human humiliation,
>     while we cant display clitoris, because chaste eyes would be shocked ?
>
>
> It troubles me, too.
>
> If you want an _explanation..._ as opposed to a justification... I'd say
> that many Wikipedians seem to implicitly judge the suitability of
> pictures in Wikipedia by applying the standards of major U.S.
> newspapers. As of today, I can't imagine the Boston Globe printing a
> photograph of a clitoris; I _can_ imagine it printing a carefully
> stylized diagram of one, although I'm not sure whether they ever have.
> And they _have_ printed some of the abuse pictures, with genitalia blurred.
>
> The New York Times used to, and I believe still does bear the slogan
> "All the news that's fit to print." I suspect many people follow the
> judgements of the New York TImes. I don't say this is right, I'm saying
> I think it's what many of us do.
>
> I don't mean that newspapers specifically are arbiters; I mean that
> there is some weird cultural consensus that can be observed by watching
> what newspapers do.
>
> --
> Daniel P. B. Smith, dpbsmith at verizon.net
> alternate: dpbsmith at alum.mit.edu
> "Elinor Goulding Smith's Great Big Messy Book" is now back in print!
> Sample chapter at http://world.std.com/~dpbsmith/messy.html
> Buy it at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1403314063/
>
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l


subject:
[WikiEN-l] Re: Historian: origin of apparent "policy" re recipes
	and how-tos?

body:
It is unfortunately not a consensus at all; which explain it is not in
policy pages. If you find it in policy pages, then that is a non
consensual policy.
This case is rather the perfect example of a "bullying" process from one
side :-)
It might be pointed to newer Wikipedians as an example of what "not to do".

-----

Since I am at it, advertisement time... I invite you to consult the page
I maintain on the french wikipedia :

http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recettes_du_mois

Careful, that is a special page in Wikipedia space, where we are a bit
pov and citing authors as well :-)

I consider it a bit like a barn raising page ;-)

Anthere

Daniel P.B.Smith a ?crit:
> NOT a rhetorical question.
>
> I've been very puzzled by an apparent consensus or policy--one with
> which I obviously do not agree--that recipes in particular, and didactic
> or "how-to" articles in general, do not belong in Wikipedia. I can give
> cogent-to-me reasons for not agreeing with this. But I don't want to
> discuss that now.
>
> Here's what I want to know. Is this an example of a difficult,
> carefully-threshed-out consensus that newer Wikipedians, having not
> participated in that consensus, may be unaware of?
>
> (And if so why isn't it documented on any of the policy pages I've been
> able to find?)
>
>
> --
> Daniel P. B. Smith, dpbsmith at verizon.net
> alternate: dpbsmith at alum.mit.edu
> "Elinor Goulding Smith's Great Big Messy Book" is now back in print!
> Sample chapter at http://world.std.com/~dpbsmith/messy.html
> Buy it at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1403314063/
>
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l


from_name: Timwi

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: user style preview

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:

> Timwi wrote:
>
>> There seems to be a bug in the feature, though. If I specify anything
>> other than text/css, it returns text/x-wiki. In particular, I think
>> text/plain really should work. It would make bot automations *so* much
>> simpler to be able to retrieve the wiki code of any page like that.
>
> Sorry, text/plain is unsafe. Several popular browsers (IE/Win and
> Safari, at least) will interpret documents served as text/plain *as
> HTML* if they *look like* HTML.

Geez. Why does anyone use that rubbish?  :/


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Peter Gervai

subject: [Wikipedia-l] someone please install wiki-hu.png to hu:

body:
attached the bugfixed logo, please drop into hu:.

thanks.
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from_name: Pedro Fortuny

body:
I agree with Theresa; even though it is quite slower and burdening, it
really is more honest (assume good faith until the user proves he cannot
be trusted).

Anyway, the thing is really annoying.

Pedro.

* KNOTT, T <tknott at qcl.org.uk> [2004-05-11]:
>
>    Calm down Danny. You are overreacting.
>
>
>    Firstly  you  don't  need quickpolls, and you don't need to go through
>    speedy deletions.
>
>
>    But  you  don't  need  to  be  so  harsh either. This is just some kid
>    mucking  about.  We deal with this kind of thing all the time. (well I
>    do anyway) I go through a procedure
>
>
>    1)        Talk page. You must warn them on their talk page first. It's
>    only polite. Tell him he can't take down wikipedia, so give up. Invite
>    him to contribute properly.
>
>    2)       Talk page again. Stern warning this time
>
>    3)        delete nonsense articles and protect real ones as necessary,
>    explain what you are doing
>
>    4)       Block for 24 hours
>
>    5)       Block for longer if necessary
>
>
>    I rarely get to stage 5
>
>
>
>
>    -----Original Message-----
>    From: daniwo59 at aol.com [mailto:daniwo59 at aol.com]
>    Sent: 11 May 2004 12:18
>    To: wikien-l at Wikipedia.org
>    Subject:  Re:  [WikiEN-l] I just blocked someone for 9999 hours 1 more
>    thing
>
>
>    I  also  propose  doing  this  without  pontificating about it for six
>    months. That is six months of potential damage to Wikipedia.
>
>
>    Danny

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

--
Pedro Fortuny Ayuso: http://pfortuny.sdf-eu.org
Colegio Mayor Pe?afiel, Universidad de Valladolid
C/ Estudios 6, 47005 Valladolid, Spain -->        www.cmpenafiel.org
pfortuny at sdf-eu.org                         Tfn. Nr. 34  983  298277


subject: [Wikitech-l] warning message

body:
Thanks for the neat language specific message displayed on top of rc :-)

ant


body:
Imran Ghory wrote:

>On Tue, 11 May 2004, Ray Saintonge wrote:
>
>>>So a description of how a food is made is encyclopedic, but instructions
>>>on how to make that food are not encyclopedic.
>>>
>>The descriptive/prescriptive distinction is very narrow in this case.  I
>>prefer to avoid a pompous definition of what is encyclopedic.
>>
>Not really, the instructive case tells you how to make a specific version
>of a food product but the descriptive case tells you how it is made in
>general.
>
>To look at a very simple case consider boiling rice, a specific recipe
>could tell you to use a kettle to pre-boil water, another could state the
>entire procedure should be done on a hob, yet another could suggest using a
>microwave. And that's before you start considering things such as whether
>you should add salt and how much you should add.
>
>On the other hand a descriptive version could just be "the rice is heated
>in boiling water".
>
These descriptions of different procedures for prparing rice are clearly
all encyclopedic, though that last sentence may be too superficial for
inclusion.

Ec


body:
Daniel P.B.Smith wrote:

> I've been very puzzled by an apparent consensus or policy--one with
> which I obviously do not agree--that recipes in particular, and didactic
> or "how-to" articles in general, do not belong in Wikipedia.

If so many people want them, why not make a new project -- WikiHowto?
Either that, or extend the scope of Wikibooks slightly.

Timwi


subject:
[WikiEN-l] Re: Historian: origin of apparent "policy" re
	recipesand how-tos?

body:
>If so many people want them, why not make a new project -- WikiHowto?
Either that, or extend the scope of Wikibooks slightly.

It's within the scope of wikibooks.

Theresa


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: I just blocked someone for 9999 hours

body:
daniwo59 at aol.com wrote:

> I am proposing the following radical solutions:
[...]

Most of what you suggest is to combat trolling or vadalism, but one
thing you mention -- duplication of articles -- almost always happens by
accident rather than malice.

To combat that, I think we really should make more redirects when pages
are created. Just the other day, I was going to start an article on
http://www.memory-alpha.org/ and called it [[MemoryAlpha]] without
realising that there was already [[Memory Alpha]]. There should have
been a redirect!

So, I was wondering if the New Pages Patrol (which I think is a good
idea even though I don't have time to participate in it before my exams)
should include the "duty" of creating redirects from alternative names,
titles, spellings, etc.etc.etc.

Timwi


subject: [WikiEN-l] Servers down?

body:
" in which he claimed that the "super smart kids" in his school are planning to bring down Wikipedia"

He didn't say how did he? Because I can't get wikipedia, wikibooks, or meta . There is a note saying servers will be down at 2 -3 tomorrow morning UTC but that's hours away. Could it be DOS attack or am I being paranoid?

Thresa
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list: foundation-l

from_name: hcheney

subject: [Foundation-l] First Past the Post

body:
I am extremely concerned about the use of the
plurality first past the post system. Generally, such
systems encourage the establishment of two opposing
sides and the use of tactical voting, which is not in
the spirit of Wikipedian consensus building.

Considering the large number of well respected
candidates running, the vote will probably be narrowly
divided, and a small dedicated group of users or
sockpuppets could usurp this election.

I very strongly urge an adoption of Instant Runoff
Voting-Single Transferable Vote (similar to the method
used to elect the President of Ireland). Unlike First
Past the Post, IRV-STV will eliminate candidates that
lack a clear mandate and will favor consensus building
candidates.

--H. "Dick" Cheney

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Win a $20,000 Career Makeover at Yahoo! HotJobs
http://hotjobs.sweepstakes.yahoo.com/careermakeover


list: wikimedia-l

subject: [Foundation-l] First Past the Post


body:
That's a sensible idea IMO.

Theresa

-----Original Message-----
From: Timwi [mailto:timwi at gmx.net]
Sent: 11 May 2004 14:37
To: wikien-l at wikipedia.org
Subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: I just blocked someone for 9999 hours

daniwo59 at aol.com wrote:

> I am proposing the following radical solutions:
[...]

Most of what you suggest is to combat trolling or vadalism, but one
thing you mention -- duplication of articles -- almost always happens by
accident rather than malice.

To combat that, I think we really should make more redirects when pages
are created. Just the other day, I was going to start an article on
http://www.memory-alpha.org/ and called it [[MemoryAlpha]] without
realising that there was already [[Memory Alpha]]. There should have
been a redirect!

So, I was wondering if the New Pages Patrol (which I think is a good
idea even though I don't have time to participate in it before my exams)
should include the "duty" of creating redirects from alternative names,
titles, spellings, etc.etc.etc.

Timwi

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


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Historian: origin of apparent "policy" re

body:
dpbsmith at verizon.net wrote:

>>From: Imran Ghory <imran at bits.bris.ac.uk>
>>
>>The central basis on which I argue on vfd when these things come up is
>>that wikipedia should be descriptive not prescriptive. Instructive works
>>come under the remit of wikibooks so that is where they should go.
>>
>>So a description of how a food is made is encyclopedic, but instructions
>>on how to make that food are not encyclopedic.
>>
>Yes, that's a nice clear bright-line _distinction_, but the problem is that
>apparently there is NOT a consensus or a policy that "wikipedia should be
>descriptive not prescriptive."
>
Such niceties are not a consideration in the attempts of the VfD crowd
to maintain the intellectual purity of the Wikipedia.

>Quoting from the American Heritage Dictionary, the word "encyclopedia" is
>derived from 'enkuklios paideia, made up of enkuklios, "cyclical, periodic,
>ordinary," and paideia, "education," and meaning "general education."
>Copyists of Latin manuscripts took this phrase to be a single Greek word,
>enkuklopaedia, with the same meaning, and this spurious Greek word became the
>New Latin word encyclopaedia, coming into English with the sense "general
>course of instruction," first recorded in 1531.'
>
>Encyclopedia = "everything-teacher" or "general course of instruction" or
>"universal textbook of everything." That doesn't exclude prescriptive
>articles in my opinion.
>
The word "textbook" is significant.  That's too often their excuse for
shuffling good encyclopedic material to Wikibooks.

>Well, OK, I didn't really want to argue the point here, so this will be my
>last word on this. I just wanted to know if there was some history,
>consensus, policy on this that, as a newcomer, I didn't know about.
>
There is some old history from at least 2 years ago favoring a broad
interpretation to include practical subjects, but I would have a hard
time finding it.

Ec


from_name: Brion Vibber

body:
Constans, Camille (C.C.) wrote:
> I have an idea, we had converted the frwiki by converting all the dump in one time. I took around 2 hours for 2.5GB of dump
> We could convert all tables except old, the biggest and the longest. And running a script which convert old later. Old will be in broken iso-8859 for a few day. I wrote a small php script to convert old from iso-8859-1 to utf-8, cause I broke old on de.wiktionary during the conversion to utf-8 (I forgot that old is gzipped, converting a binary is not very good:) )
>
> What do you think about ?

That would be really problematic, it would interfere with user
contributions lists and history, diffs, etc, could cause data corruption
on reversions (auto and manual), and you'll have to be very careful to
avoid double conversions.

I'd recommend strongly against it.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [WikiEN-l] Stringtime at last ...

body:
Amid the discouragement, and patchy server timeouts, I'd like to point out
the 100+ edits on current [[string theory]] supplied by [[User:Lumidek]], in
the past 48 hours.  I have tentatively identified this as [[Lubos Motl]].
Anyway, this is highly interesting stuff and as far as I can see
authoritative.

Charles

http://www.speakingasaparent.com/


from_name: dpbsmith at verizon.net

body:
>From: Imran Ghory <imran at bits.bris.ac.uk>

>The central basis on which I argue on vfd when these things come up is
>that wikipedia should be descriptive not prescriptive. Instructive works
>come under the remit of wikibooks so that is where they should go.

>So a description of how a food is made is encyclopedic, but instructions
>on how to make that food are not encyclopedic.

Yes, that's a nice clear bright-line _distinction_, but the problem is that
apparently there is NOT a consensus or a policy that "wikipedia should be
descriptive not prescriptive."

Quoting from the American Heritage Dictionary, the word "encyclopedia" is
derived from 'enkuklios paideia, made up of enkuklios, "cyclical, periodic,
ordinary," and paideia, "education," and meaning "general education."
Copyists of Latin manuscripts took this phrase to be a single Greek word,
enkuklopaedia, with the same meaning, and this spurious Greek word became the
New Latin word encyclopaedia, coming into English with the sense "general
course of instruction," first recorded in 1531.'

Encyclopedia = "everything-teacher" or "general course of instruction" or
"universal textbook of everything." That doesn't exclude prescriptive
articles in my opinion.

Well, OK, I didn't really want to argue the point here, so this will be my
last word on this. I just wanted to know if there was some history,
consensus, policy on this that, as a newcomer, I didn't know about.


from_name: Christopher Mahan

subject: [WikiEN-l] Grievance

body:
--- Matt McLauchlin <matt_mcl at sympatico.ca> wrote:
> Is there any official way to file a grievance against another user?
> [[User:Chameleon]] has just insulted my religion in
> [[Talk:Zaragoza,
> Spain]]. I find this unacceptable behaviour.

you just did.

Montrealais has already addressed Chameleon about this.

=====
Christopher Mahan
chris_mahan at yahoo.com
818.943.1850 cell
http://www.christophermahan.com/

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Win a $20,000 Career Makeover at Yahoo! HotJobs
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from_name: K Forstner

subject: [WikiEN-l] Servers down

body:
Ha! I'm not the only one! "Server will be down for maintenance on 2004-05-12 from about 02:00 to 03:00 UTC" it says, and it's stupid!

Anyway, let's have a break!

KF

  ----- Original Message -----
  From: KNOTT, T
  To: English Wikipedia
  Sent: Tuesday, May 11, 2004 3:39 PM
  Subject: [WikiEN-l] Servers down?

  " in which he claimed that the "super smart kids" in his school are planning to bring down Wikipedia"

  He didn't say how did he? Because I can't get wikipedia, wikibooks, or meta . There is a note saying servers will be down at 2 -3 tomorrow morning UTC but that's hours away. Could it be DOS attack or am I being paranoid?

  Thresa

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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  WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
  http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
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from_name: Toby Bartels

subject: [Foundation-l] First Past the Post

body:
>I very strongly urge an adoption of Instant Runoff
>Voting-Single Transferable Vote (similar to the method
>used to elect the President of Ireland).

If we're not careful, then we'll get into big religious wars
about what is the best method of voting in this situation.
Many people think that IRV is unnecessarily complex,
while agreeing that FPTP is still indefensibly simple.

Although I'm personally a big fan of transferable vote systems,
if we really want to get a clear consensus to do away with FPTP,
then it may be best if all of the FPTP opponents agree up front
that any voting system chosen from instant runoff, approval voting,
and Condorcet (with any specified method for resolving Condorcet ties)
is an acceptable, consensus-building voting system, while FPTP is not.

-- Toby


subject: [Foundation-l] First Past the Post


subject: [WikiEN-l] Stringtime at last ...

body:
I can confirm the identification in the previous mail: see ongoing
(positive) threads in sci.physics.strings.

Charles


from_name: Tim Starling

subject:
[Wikitech-l]
	Re: UUIDs: help transwiki, unifying user tables, etc...

body:
Ray Kiddy wrote:
>
> I wanted to make a suggestion. It may be a bit obvious, but I have not
> seen it mentioned.
>
> Can we have a UUID column on the tables? There are many ways of
> generating these. Essentially, it is a host identifier, a time stamp and
> some randomness thrown on top. Do a google search for a more exact
> definition, or for code to generate UUIDs in whatever programming
> language you desire.
 >
> If we did that, then the eventual consolidation of different languages'
> wikipedias would be possible. Users would be transferrable, since every
> user would have an unique id created on the host onto which they first
> logged in. Any edit could have a separate UUID. Archiving of past edits
> could be safely accomplished. Any wiki-page could cite another without
> worry.

You don't need a large random number to get an ID which is unique
Wikimedia-wide. You just need to concatenate the database name and the
local user ID.

> There are still many issues to be dealt with as the data in various
> wiki-entities gets moved around, but if we start establishing a standard
> that all things known about in the wiki-universe have a UUID, then we
> would know when some different corpora of data were transferrable. It
> would be when they have valid UUIDs.

There are many ways to implement the merging of user databases. This is
just one of them. You are being distracted by a technical concept
instead of considering the optimal user experience.

In terms of what the user sees, here is what you seem to be suggesting:

* Users can log on to any wiki
* Two different people may have the same name (this is implied in the
fact that you don't use the username for the unique ID)
* Hence, usernames are no longer sufficient to specify the editor of a
given article
* To work around this, we make UUIDs visible to the users. But they are
so long and ugly that we must obscure them
* Imposters with the same name but a different UUID are free to operate
* In order to ban such users, or view their contributions, users must
quote the UUID

* Citing an edit is possible using its UUID
* Edit UUIDs are made visible so that users can do this
* One wiki page cites another using the edit UUID
* The cited page is updated to correct an error, but this is not fixed
in the citation URL, which is linked to a static version

There are two basic schemes which have previously been suggested for
user tables. I think I would prefer either of them over the user-visible
UUIDs you suggest.

1. Merged accounts, project-wide namespace. Multiple accounts with the
same name are merged into one. Conflicts where two people have the same
name are fixed by asking the users to change their names, or by deleting
inactive accounts. Editors can be specified by name project-wide.

Problems: UTF-8 names on ISO 8859-1 wikis, administrative overhead in
the conversion and conflict resolution stage

2. Linked accounts. Similar to the IRC services concept, linked accounts
have an entry in the user table of each wiki where they are active. They
are linked either by specifying a "master" account, or by specifying an
ID in a global table. New accounts linked to the master are created
automatically when the user visits a wiki that they haven't visited
before. This is favoured by some users of smaller wikis, who feel that
it is their right to use short, common names, used only on their own wiki.

Problems: Harder for users to manage their accounts, having both global
and local user preferences is complex.

In terms of unique IDs for edits, the introduction of a revision ID is
planned for MediaWiki 2.0. This will be an auto-increment ID local to
the wiki not a global random ID, but again, it can be made unique by
adding the database name if desired.

-- Tim Starling


from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: troubled.

body:
Anthere-
> We censor pictures of clitoris on the english wikipedia.

It was not censored, it was moved away. I had repeatedly argued against
that, but the outcome of the vote was:
9 people in favor of embedding a photo in the article
8 people in favor of using a drawing in the article and linking to a photo
1 person in favor uf using neither a drawing nor a photo

Of the 9 people in favor of keeping a photo in the article, 2 didn't want
to use the *particular* photo that we have, which they argued looks like
retouched pornography (and indeed it does, if you look at earlier versions
of the image). So that makes "embed drawing, link to photo" the strongest
position.

No such vote was held on the Abu Ghraib article.

I agree with you that our policies should be consistent. My suggestion
would be:
* picture that is universally considered offensive -> link
* picture that is considered offensive by some, not by others -> embed

One should never err on the side of censorship. I consider the acts that
were committed in Abu Ghraib offensive, but not the photos of these acts.

Regards,

Erik


body:
>-----Message d'origine-----
>De : wikitech-l-bounces at Wikipedia.org
>[mailto:wikitech-l-bounces at Wikipedia.org]De la part de Brion Vibber
>Envoy? : mardi 11 mai 2004 07:48
>? : Wikimedia developers
>Objet : Re: [Wikitech-l] Multilingual interface
>
>
>Nikola Smolenski wrote:
>> Yes. One can use all languages in same encoding (all
>Latin-1, all Latin-2,
>> all UTF-8...) but can not mix encodings. It is trivial to
>convert any language
>> to UTF-8, except for the linktrail which is not used anyway.
>Wikisource,
>> Wikibooks and Wiktionary are in UTF-8 already, so I don't
>think it will be a
>> problem for them.
>
>All the remaining latin-1 language files will have to be
>upgraded to do
>that, or appropriate run-time upconversion added.

I have an idea, we had converted the frwiki by converting all the dump in one time. I took around 2 hours for 2.5GB of dump
We could convert all tables except old, the biggest and the longest. And running a script which convert old later. Old will be in broken iso-8859 for a few day. I wrote a small php script to convert old from iso-8859-1 to utf-8, cause I broke old on de.wiktionary during the conversion to utf-8 (I forgot that old is gzipped, converting a binary is not very good:) )

What do you think about ?

Shaihulud


from_name: Rick

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: troubled.

body:
Exactly.  I have tried several times to get those quotes out of there, they're completely POV, but they keep getting inserted.  They're nonsense, and have no place in this article.

RickK

Jimmy Wales <jwales at bomis.com> wrote:

The article in its present state needs a lot of work, of course. As
an example, there is a series of quotes from George W. Bush about war
crimes *committed by the Iraqis* with the droll suggestion that "These
statements may or may not represent the positions that his
administration will take regarding the Abu Ghraib prison situation."

That statement seems designed to be a swipe against the Bush
administration rather than a neutral assessment of the probabilities.
The reader is invited to imagine Bush plausibly saying "These are war
crimes, but we should excuse them." It's just editorial.

--Jimbo

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subject: [WikiEN-l] Naming policy for places

body:
I refuse to participate as I've learned from past history that people will do just whatever they feel like doing, regardless of whether they win the vote or not.

HOWEVER, I strongly suggest that you indicate what the rules are up front:  What is consensus, what is the minimum number of votes.  Even then, it will probably be ignored, but at least you set ground rules early.

RickK

David Friedland <david at nohat.net> wrote:
In the wake of the recent naming policy poll, which was sparked by the
debate on [[Talk:Kiev]] as well as the poll on the New York City talk
page, it cannot be denied that a firm policy needs to be adopted
regarding the naming of articles about places.

The current policy at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Naming_conventions_(city_names)
is neither supported by consensus nor complete enough to handle the
variety of problems with these articles' names.

I have drafted a proposed policy on the naming of articles about
geographical places. I expect that there are some aspects of it which
will be controversial, and some aspects which will be changed, but I
have tried to justify the particulars of the policy. It is formulated as
a set of principles and rejected principles.

It includes a proposed policy for dealing with disputes about article
names, which would work for any kind of article, not just articles about
places.

The draft proposal is at

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Geographical_names_naming_policy_(proposed)

I propose a 4-week discussion and revision period followed by a two week
binding voting period with a 70% majority rule. There will be separate
votes for each section: "Multiple names", "Ambiguous names", and
"Exceptions and naming polls". There will also be a separate vote about
whether the naming polls policy shall apply to all articles or just to
geographical place articles if it is adopted.

Unless there is strong objection to this voting proposal, the voting
period will begin at midnight UTC June 11 and end at midnight UTC June 25.

For discussions about the details of the policy, please discuss on the
relevant talk page. You can voice your objections to the voting proposal
either here on the list or on the wiki.

I strongly urge that we have congenial discussion and make compromises
in the proposed policy so that the vote will succeed, because I believe
having a firm policy on naming will go a long way towards reducing the
amount of energy expended on naming debates.

- David

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subject:
[WikiEN-l] Re: Historian: origin of apparent "policy" re recipesand
	how-tos?

body:
KNOTT, T wrote:

>>If so many people want them, why not make a new project -- WikiHowto?
>>Either that, or extend the scope of Wikibooks slightly.
>
> It's within the scope of wikibooks.

In what way? I can see there's a cookbook on Wikibooks, so if I wanted
to write a recipe I guess I would add it there, but what if I want to
write just a single howto on something I found out (say, how to install
something in Linux)?

Timwi


subject: [WikiEN-l] I just blocked someone for 9999 hours

body:
I deleted that nonsense yesterday.  If it returns, it should be immediatley deleted again.

RickK

daniwo59 at aol.com wrote:
I have just blocked Yammy Yamathorne for 9999 hours. I did not go through Quickpolls. I have no regrets.

This user created a page, [[The Lyceum]], based on the [[Akhmad Kadyrov]] page, in which he claimed that the "super smart kids" in his school are planning to bring down Wikipedia. The page itself was an act of vandalism, and I have deleted it (without going through Speedy Deletions).

This is an increasing problem here on Wikipedia. As we grow, we are no longer able to monitor the Recent Changes adequately. If I recall correctly, Horace had been vandalized for two weeks recently before someone noticed.

I am proposing the following radical solutions:

1. Empower sysops to make on-the-spot decisions and act accordingly. If most people don't trust them to act wisely, they should not be sysops.
2. Reinvigorate Seth Ilys's New Pages Patrol and expand it to include Recent Changes in general. Lots of crap is getting through, as well as considerable the duplication of articles.
3. Stiffen penalties. If a group of people (like a school) are planning to damage Wikipedia, it will last longer than 24 hours.
4. Act quickly and decisively with POV pushers. I recently received an email from a colleague at work, that was forwarded to her. Someone posted to a professional mailing list, asking them to join Wikipedia en masse to ensure that certain articles maintain their point of view. Their POV is often close to my own, however, I am disturbed that a group can potentially band together to push a particular POV, regardless of what it is. At one point, such a group will succeed. (I have forwarded the email to Jimbo, but will say no more about it to protect the confidence of my colleague).
5. Put together a SMALL group of trusted users to consider ways to redefine Wikipedia, considering the remarkable growth spurt we are experiencing. This can be a blessing, but it can also lead to our complete collapse. I propose that Jimbo select the users and oversee the process, since he is the one person who is trusted by everyone and whose authority is (more or less) unchallenged.

Danny
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