from_name: Ben Yates

body:
Mediawiki article content is contained in DIVs, not TABLEs, so most browsers
will load the content as it streams across the phone line rather than
waiting for the entire page to download before rendering. (I'm not sure how
Internet Explorer does it, though; does anyone know?)

On 11/15/05, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> Does "the entire world does not have broadband" mean anything to you?
> Ok so 32 is probably a little low for an article size limit but 40+
> and popular culture/trivia are second on my list of things to kill
> (the first being random quotes about the subject wikiquote is thata
> way)
>
>
--
Ben Yates
Wikipedia blog - http://wikip.blogspot.com


list: wikien-l

source: pipermail-mbox

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Re: Re: Wikipedia's provable anti-expertise bias (was
	Howdidthis happen (comixpedia??))

body:
There's plenty of possible analysis on the interplay between popular culture
and a particular non-pop-like thing. So yes, stubs at first, but almost
certainly not permastubs.

On 11/15/05, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 11/15/05, Phil Boswell <phil.boswell at gmail.com> wrote:
> > So factor it out into a separate article, rather than simply throw it
> away.
> > If there is sufficient information in [[X#X in popular culture]] to
> cause a
> > noticeable delay in loading the article, then maybe an article [[X in
> > popular culture]] should be created.
> >
>
> I have no wish to create permastubs
>
>
> --
> geni
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

--
Ben Yates
Wikipedia blog - http://wikip.blogspot.com


from_name: Snowspinner

body:
On Nov 15, 2005, at 12:12 PM, geni wrote:

> On 11/15/05, Phil Boswell <phil.boswell at gmail.com> wrote:
>> So factor it out into a separate article, rather than simply throw
>> it away.
>> If there is sufficient information in [[X#X in popular culture]]
>> to cause a
>> noticeable delay in loading the article, then maybe an article [[X in
>> popular culture]] should be created.
>>
>
> I have no wish to create permastubs
>

If the problem with the content is that it's making the article too
long, it seems like a spin-off would necessarily not be a permastub.

-Phil


from_name: jkelly at fas.harvard.edu

subject: [WikiEN-l] Synonymous article ID replacing redirects

body:
  Perhaps I am missing something, but wouldn't organizing articles in this
fashion simply push the argument back upon every article that links to the one
with the contentious name?

  Right now we have a situation in which these debates can be more-or-less
solved by knowing what the subject's "Wikipedia article name" is, and informing
people to not link through a redirect.  If Ivory Coast/Cote d'Ivoire become
equivalent at the backend level, won't the same argument then erupt in the
"List of African countries" article, the "List of UN members" article, and the
"List of places with Ivory in their name" article?

                            Jkelly

>
> G'day Tony,
>
> > There's no reason why there should be two or more separate articles,
> > with people squabbling about which one should be the main article and
> > which the redirect, if both exist and have precisely the same article
> > id.  The synonym creation would also have to operate for the
> > corresponding talk namespace.
>
> Why ... it's so crazy, it's brilliant!


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Rowan Collins

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: [WikiEN-l] Markup; html

references:
<813E7CE2-EDB7-4067-B670-7EDE950EA713@specialbusservice.com>
	<f3fedb0d0511141707m2fe242fau@mail.gmail.com>
	<2C7C96A3-78CF-4A96-B0A0-82798A55D9A2@specialbusservice.com>
	<f3fedb0d0511141721q3d8d07d8u@mail.gmail.com>
	<5AD37ECD-581D-406B-B1F7-FC2110EF5850@specialbusservice.com>
	<43794096.5010506@tonal.clara.co.uk>

body:
On 15/11/05, Neil Harris <neil at tonal.clara.co.uk> wrote:
> Maybe templates should be HTML-cleaned as independent entities before
> transclusion / substitution into the larger page? Or would that not work
> because the code doesn't work that way, or break existing uses?

Well, people have a tendency to do things like put just the openning
of a <div> (with appropriate attrbiutes) or parts of a table's markup
into separate templates. In most cases, this *could* be done by having
a single template with parameters for the middle bits I should think,
but switching to pre-rendering templates separately (which would be
nice from a programming point of view) would break things as they are
now. I think.

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


from_name: charles matthews

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Tower of Babel - Voting to ignore MoS,
	NCs for language reasons.

body:
Justin Cormack wrote

> I think it is an inevitable trend; there is
no reason now not to use local names and the world is becoming more
internationalized.

My question is, what makes WP look better (more professional,
better-informed, that sort of thing)?

For example, Mumbai.  English is an official language in India, no?  So we
can get the official English-language name by following the Indian
government.  This should be painless, and absolutely no reason to get bogged
down in side issues.

Charles


from_name: David Gerard

subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia's provable anti-expertise bias

body:
kosebamse wrote:
>Alphax alphasigmax at gmail.com wrote at Tue Nov 15 12:15:00 UTC 2005:

>>What worries me is that with our growing popularity, we're going to have
>>more experts arriving on our doorstep, trying to write articles on their
>>specialist areas, and leave in disgust when some 2-bit moron votes "d,
>>nn. cruft".

>As far as I can say, that has always been a serious problem. It's not a
>matter of elitism. An expert who is used to discussing his views  with
>well-informed people on an academic level will not enjoy the experience of
>having to defend basic and established knowledge of his field against
>schoolkids whose only expertise is with video games. I am offering no
>opinion on the desirability of it, but the latter probably form a very
>sizable fraction of our user base.

The problem here is the degree of it. The assumption of bad faith that
appears to be far too common on AFD has led to an expert being *driven
off* Wikipedia by people who are not only proudly ignorant, but are
doing their best to get anti-expert bias made policy and the way
things work around here.

- d.


from_name: kosebamse at gmx.net

subject: [WikiEN-l] Totally unscientific investigation...

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote on Sun Nov 13 03:48:10 UTC 2005:

>you took any random 20 articles and compared them to their predecessors
>2 years ago, virtually _all_ articles would have improved.

I agree. However, to judge a reference work, do you go by the best, or the
worst, or the average quality? I think most readers would judge us by their
first few impressions. As soon as they stray away from the featured article
on the front page, or happen to run into the random pages, their impression
will be not favorable. That's what I tried to find to out with my twenty
random pages.

>> A thought experiment: if we were the editorial committee of an
>>encyclopedia to be written from scratch and were given Wikipedia's
>>current content as a basis (but not the user base), what would we do? I
>>guess we would put our energy into improving the material, i.e.
>>rewriting/deleting/merging most of it. But we would not try to acquire
>>more articles of that quality. (Ah wait, we ARE the editorial committee
>>of an encyclopedia to be written from scratch...)

>I think this is a brilliant observation. :-)

>I absolutely do think that acquisition of huge numbers of additional
>stubs on increasingly narrow topics ought not to be a priority, and
>certainly ought not to be allowed to get in the way of quality
>improvement on existing articles.

But it IS getting in the way. I have recently spent several hours patrolling
the newpages and recent changes, and that was a very sobering experience.
While I have no statistics (would be an interesting topic, though), I
estimate that more than ninety percent of the newpages by anonymous
contributors are unsalveageable. Of the rest, a sound majority qualifies for
merging or heavy reworking. Plus an unbelievable amount of vandalism. I
spent most of my time writing {{test}}, {{test2}}, {{test3}}, and {{test4}}
messages at high speed, deleting, reverting and occasionally blocking a
vandal. I can't remember seeing more than a few new pages by anonymous
editors that resmbled anything remotely interesting or well-written. There
were also many pages by newly-logged-in users that were no better. To
summarise, the signal-to-noise ratio on recent changes is depressingly low,
and many qualified editors spend hours and hours trying to pick the few
jewels out of mountains of dirt.

If we look at the continuum of quality ranging from the average anon's
average "Phil is gay" contribution to well-researched work by well-informed
people, it is reasonable to assume that even above the newpages level there
is a great body of contributions with a negative benefit-versus-work-needed
balance. In my opinion, it far too great.

>(At the same time, of course, it's worth pointing out that there's an
>easy mental trap to fall into... assuming that time people are spending
>working on obscure fancruft could in any way be diverted into increasing
>the quality of other articles.  That's probably not true.)

Yes. (Warning: heresy ahead) I would simply reply that we could do without
these people. Along with the vandals and trolls and clueless kids, they
waste the time and energy that we should spend improving our encyclopedia.
They waste an _enormous_ amount of time and energy while not helping us
much.

Another thought experiment: What if we shut down new page creation for a
year? Simply declare 2006 the year of quality improvement and accept no new
pages until 2007. We might lose may good editors. We might lose many
_potential_ good editors. We would drop in the Alexa ranking. We might lose
donations (although I doubt it). But we could start lifting the quality of
the average article to where it belongs, and we would have a chance to lift
our reputation beyond the "public toilet" image that has deservedly been
bestowed upon us.

So much for the heresy. Now flame me. Kosebamse

--
Highspeed-Freiheit. Bei GMX superg?nstig, z.B. GMX DSL_Cityflat,
DSL-Flatrate f?r nur 4,99 Euro/Monat*  http://www.gmx.net/de/go/dsl


from_name: Alphax (Wikipedia email)

subject: [WikiEN-l] disputing block: 69.108.172.162, lysdexia

body:
Autymn D.C. wrote:
> On 14 Nov 2005, at 05.00, Alphax (Wikipedia email) wrote:
>
>> By your own admission: YHBT. YHL. HAND.
>
>
> Informing people is not losing.  If the law worked here as it did on Wp,
> then some admin could've banned you indefinitely for trolling.  I still
> want back on.  Why is no one doing anything for me?
>

There are plenty of admins that *could have* unblocked you. The fact
that none of them have says something about your behaviour and suggests
that the block was warranted.

--
Alphax - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax
Contributor to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia
"We make the internet not suck" - Jimbo Wales
Public key: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax/OpenPGP
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body:
geni wrote:
>On 11/14/05, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:

>> Case where this happened really badly: webcomics. We now have a
>> project fork, Comixpedia, entirely caused by AFD. You may recall
>> extensive discussion surrounding this on this list a few weeks ago.

>You relise I don't view the existance of Comixpedia (other than their
>choice to use CC) as a bad thing. Wikipedia needs these subject
>specific spinoffs. I hope to see more of them.

They *should* be called WikiProjects, so they can keep the material in
Wikipedia where it's useful.

Are you honestly saying you think driving an expert off Wikipedia to
found a fork of the community, and the process by which it happened,
is *good*? Or are you saying the end justify the means - whatever it
takes to achieve a subject fork?

- d.


from_name: geni

body:
On 11/15/05, Tony Sidaway <f.crdfa at gmail.com> wrote:
> This doesn't seem very satisfactory to me.  I'm always bumping into
> people who know nothing about lisp except that they don't like the
> language's ubiquitous brackets and they consider this to be such a
> grave failing in a programming language that it renders lisp almost
> useless, and that lisp is an interpretive language that must always be
> slow in execution.  Should the articles about programming languages
> then be exiled to a specialist wiki?
>

That is not myy point. I'm sure you can hadle these people. Others
perhaps cannot. Forks also allow the coverage of unencyopedic topics
until they become encyopedic

> It is certainly true that a specialist is better able to detect
> hoaxes, but I don't see how this can be used as an argument for moving
> all articles about programming languages, web comics, pokemon or
> whatever to a specialist wiki, which would almost inevitably have
> fewer editors competent in the subject than the much larger and more
> popular English language Wikipedia.  It is also the case that I'm
> competent in rather more subjects than programming languages, so it
> would be very inconvenient to deal with a number of fragmented wikis.
> Hoaxes aren't common enough to justify splitting the wikipedia, nor is
> the presence of the odd blithering ignoramus a problem.

Where did I suggest splitting the wiki?

There are a number of wikimedia projects. If other groups want to
carry out projects who are we to stop them?

--
geni


subject:
[WikiEN-l] WikiProjects vs the community splitting (was "Oh,
	Yuck: The Encyclopedia of Everything Nasty")

body:
geni wrote:

>Forks allow people with a common interest to work quitely on a project
>sorounded only by those who share their interests. For some this
>enviroment may be more productive.

We have WikiProjects to create such an environment, and they have the
added bonus of keeping the content usable within Wikipedia (so that,
e.g., the creators of a community fork aren't so damn pissed off with
their treatment here they pick an incompatible license as a
"fuck-you").

What is there that a community fork achieves that a WikiProject does
not, in your view?

- d.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: "Oh, Yuck: The Encyclopedia of Everything Nasty"

body:
On 11/15/05, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> geni wrote:
> >On 11/15/05, Michael Snow <wikipedia at earthlink.net> wrote:
>
> > If it's not GFDL, then it is by definition not a fork of Wikipedia
> > content. Either that or it's a violation of the license.
>
> >As I said true forks are unlikely because the initial bulk of material
> >you pick up will be beyond your rescourses to handle. What you see are
> >the result of "wikipedia has some coverage of subject X but we want to
> >do it in a different way" sometimes this means more of it, sometimes
> >this means original reseach and some times this means POV.
>
>
> This is hairsplitting over the definition of the word "fork". It's a
> fork because the guy was trying to work within Wikipedia to write
> encyclopedic articles and was driven off by anti-expert bias and
> assumption of bad faith on AFD.
>
> Comixpedia is not a fork of *content* - it's a fork of the
> *community*. That is why that such a thing could happen is a BIG RED
> FLASHING DANGER SIGNAL.
>
>
> - d.

Not really. Comixpedia has different policies to wikipedia. Even if
you wanted to you could not reasonably stop that. I'm involved with
scepticWiki no sane change to wikipedia policy could prevent that from
being seperate.

--
geni


subject:
[WikiEN-l] Timeline of Comixpedia fork (was "Oh,
	Yuck: The Encyclopedia of Everything Nasty")

body:
geni wrote:
> David Gerard wrote:

>> This is hairsplitting over the definition of the word "fork". It's a
>> fork because the guy was trying to work within Wikipedia to write
>> encyclopedic articles and was driven off by anti-expert bias and
>> assumption of bad faith on AFD.
>> Comixpedia is not a fork of *content* - it's a fork of the
>> *community*. That is why that such a thing could happen is a BIG RED
>> FLASHING DANGER SIGNAL.

>Not really. Comixpedia has different policies to wikipedia. Even if
>you wanted to you could not reasonably stop that. I'm involved with
>scepticWiki no sane change to wikipedia policy could prevent that from
>being seperate.

You keep ignoring the point: Comixpedia wouldn't *exist* except it was
a community forking from Wikipedia.

That it has different policies came *after* the fact of the community
fork, and the reasons for the fork. Don't get your timeline mixed up
here.

- d.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: How did this happen (comixpedia??)

body:
On 11/15/05, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> Oh, it's much better than that. There is in fact a real genuine actual
> peer-reviewed academic journal on comics called ImageTexT
> (http://www.english.ufl.edu/imagetext/). One of the managing editors
> is Phil Sandifer, who you will know better as Snowspinner. In a
> jawdropping assumption of bad faith (which is, of course, the reason
> why AFD is so poisonous to the Wikipedia community in its present
> form), the AFD regulars did their damnedest to get coverage in it
> excluded from the webcomics guidelines *because* Snowspinner was the
> editor. The excuse was that he was too involved or too close or knew
> too much or something.
>
> This was after they'd driven off a previous comics expert for knowing
> more than them on the topic, leading him to say "you people are
> clearly idiots" and form Comixpedia.
>
> geni will, if he reads back, agree that this is closer to the
> chronology of what actually happened in the formation of the comics
> inclusion guidelines: (1) provably bad AFD, (2) deliberate attempt to
> exclude academic expert for being an expert, (3) guidelines then
> formed such that the bad AFD would have led to a deletion.
>
> (Don't take my word for it - read the talk page, it's amazing. Note in
> particular the direct assertion that editors who confess to knowing
> *NOTHING* on a topic should have their opinions count just as much as
> an actual provable expert, for the purposes of achieving "consensus" -
> remembering that the AFD jargon meaning of "consensus" is a two-thirds
> vote. Therefore, that a two-thirds majority of editors who
> *admittedly* know nothing at all about a topic can get the topic
> excluded from Wikipedia altogether over the objections of experts on
> said topic. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Webcomics/Notability_and_inclusion_guidelines
> )
>
>
> - d.

So the problem would appear to be people. I belive you are currently
in a position to do something about them. If people are abuseing
process x,y or z deal with them. Trying to chnage the process will
never work becuase people will always be able to come up with
initertive ways to abuse it.

--
geni


subject: [WikiEN-l] Status of article rating feature?

body:
On 11/15/05, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> dpbsmith wrote:
>
> >On my next flight, I hope my pilot will not be using these maps.
>
>
> That's because the maps are marked "ALPHA QUALITY - NOT FINAL
> PRODUCTION VERSIONS" and are written in pencil. Never mind they're in
> the top-40 maps in the world - the project has peaked way too early.
>
> Damn we need the rating feature. What's holding it up right now? List
> please, referring to current version of code. (I know the servers are
> creaking ...)
>
>
> - d.

Do you know if the softwear has been released yet? If not it could be
a way to get it tested.

--
geni


subject: [WikiEN-l] Tower of Babel - Voting remains stupid as well as evil.

body:
On 11/15/05, Tony Sidaway <f.crdfa at gmail.com> wrote:
> It occurs to me that these nomenclature problems could be solved at
> software level by permitting the creation of synonyms, rather than
> redirects.

Technicaly a new opertunity for vandalism but we can hadle that. Sound
like a good idea if it is posible.

--
geni


body:
geni wrote:

> Where did I suggest splitting the wiki?

You suggested it in
http://mail.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2005-November/032619.html
-

"You relise I don't view the existance of Comixpedia (other than their
choice to use CC) as a bad thing. Wikipedia needs these subject
specific spinoffs. I hope to see more of them."

>There are a number of wikimedia projects. If other groups want to
>carry out projects who are we to stop them?

You seem to be wanting to *make* them.

- d.


subject:
[WikiEN-l] Wikipedia's provable anti-expertise bias (was How did
	thishappen (comixpedia??))

body:
"David Gerard" wrote

>If bad, what to do about it? Please discuss.

AfD remains the classic raw wiki experience.

AfD is not

- filtered
- mediated
- sorted by topic
- categorised by policy invoked

or indeed really massaged in any way: it's just a daily list. People
nominate, they add directly to the page.  They want "instant action".  Never
mind the long list of clean-ups stretching back into the past, they want
something _off the site_, or their patience will snap, and they want
attention _now_.

We are told, fairly convincing, that AfD has scaled badly.  Why would it
scale well?  Essentially nothing has been tried.

Filtering: make a 24 hour wait before nominations go public at AfD, so that
admins can do speedy deletes and keeps.

Mediated: sort noms with admin sponsors to delete from those which are not
speedied but have no support either way.

Sort: by relevant WikiProject for example. Nominator's responsibility.  Make
sorted noms a crisper process.

Categorise: why this nomination?

All this is without Sangerising and having people arguing that other people
don't know what they're talking about.

Charles


from_name: Brown, Darin

subject: [WikiEN-l] AfD suggestions

body:
> Message: 4
> Date: Tue, 15 Nov 2005 12:49:12 -0000
> From: "charles matthews" <charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com>
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia's provable anti-expertise bias (was
> 	How did	thishappen (comixpedia??))
> To: "English Wikipedia" <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Message-ID: <005f01c5e9e2$fc09d270$7cac0656 at NorthParade>
> Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed; charset="iso-8859-1";
> 	reply-type=original
>
> Filtering: make a 24 hour wait before nominations go public at AfD, so
> that
> admins can do speedy deletes and keeps.
>
> Mediated: sort noms with admin sponsors to delete from those which are not
> speedied but have no support either way.
>
> Sort: by relevant WikiProject for example. Nominator's responsibility.
> Make
> sorted noms a crisper process.
>
> Categorise: why this nomination?

All excellent suggestions! Have these ideas been raised before? It seems
these *could* go a long way to smoothing things out at AfD.

> All this is without Sangerising and having people arguing that other
> people
> don't know what they're talking about.

Sangerising is one thing. I'm certainly not in favor of worshipping
expertise, credentials, degrees, or elitism. But it's one thing to be
anti-credentialist and anti-elitist, where you're throwing out the
*requirement* that people have credentials to voice an opinion. It's quite
another to *boast* about how ignorant you are on a subject, and still make
decisions based on the ignorance you just declared. I don't consider being
against *that* behaviour to be Sangerising.

Put it this way: I guess I'm "elitist" in the sense that I'm willing (I
hope) to listen to and possibly defer to people on subjects, when they know
more about them or are better informed about them. Where I'd like to think
I'm "anti-elitist" is that I don't hold formal credentials as the only way
to establish expertise. There are many roads to Rome. If someone
demonstrates, by repeated contributions, discussions, and comments, that
they're knowledgeable and informed, then I will listen and tend to defer to
them on that subject. I know I'm not perfect and I don't always hold to this
in practice, but it's what I aim for.

When someone openly boasts their ignorance on a particular subject, but
still insists their voice should carry equal weight on that subject, it
seems to me their not just being anti-credentialist, they're eschewing any
kind of expertise at all, whether it's based on credentials or community
reputation or individual worthiness. So, I don't see being *against* that
kind of behaviour as being pro-credentialist or elitist.

darin


body:
geni wrote:
>On 11/15/05, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:

>> Damn we need the rating feature. What's holding it up right now? List
>> please, referring to current version of code. (I know the servers are
>> creaking ...)

>Do you know if the softwear has been released yet? If not it could be
>a way to get it tested.

It's been in the MediaWiki code base for months and we've been
screaming for it to be switched on (see wikien-l in all that time).

I've directly asked on wikitech-l if there's some reason this feature
is *never* going in and if I should just stop bothering, and been told
that's not the case and that there are things that need fixing first.

But the original developer (Magnus Manske) *still* can't get any clear
list of what needs fixing for it to go in.

So. What's up with Special:Validate?

[cc to wikitech-l]

- d.


subject: [Wikitech-l] [WikiEN-l] Status of article rating feature?


from_name: Tony Sidaway

body:
On 11/15/05, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 11/15/05, Tony Sidaway <f.crdfa at gmail.com> wrote:
> >[rhetorical point on prejudice against lisp motivating a fork for programming languages]
>
> That is not myy point. I'm sure you can hadle these people. Others
> perhaps cannot. Forks also allow the coverage of unencyopedic topics
> until they become encyopedic

Ah, so it's not about fostering a good working environment at all, but
about your belief that some topics are unencyclopedic and this may be
rectified by forking "until they become encyopedic"?  Could you
explain this reasoning a bit more?

>
> Where did I suggest splitting the wiki?
>

Well if webcomic experts depart to form a new community, this is in
effect a split in the community.  One that you appear to think was a
good thing.


body:
On 11/15/05, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> geni wrote:
>
> > Where did I suggest splitting the wiki?
>
>
> You suggested it in
> http://mail.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2005-November/032619.html
> -
>
> "You relise I don't view the existance of Comixpedia (other than their
> choice to use CC) as a bad thing. Wikipedia needs these subject
> specific spinoffs. I hope to see more of them."
>

Spinoffs are not splitting. Assumeing no lisence problems we aquire
all the good stuff anyway.

>
> You seem to be wanting to *make* them.
>
>
> - d.

I have made one.

Wikipedia is meant to be trying to produce an encyopedia. Not a
general collection of data. By encourageing those who want a general
collection of data to make one off project we can then select the
stuff that is relivant to wikipedia and humanity gains another
knowlage base.

--
geni


subject:
[WikiEN-l] Wikipedia's provable anti-expertise bias (was How did
	this happen (comixpedia??))

body:
On 11/15/05, Alphax (Wikipedia email) <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:
> As for the "X in popular culture" plague, I recently (well, a few weeks
> ago) found one of these in one of the first article merges I did. I
> understand that the information has to go *somewhere*; it's just a
> matter of where... should every known appearance of railguns in ficiton
> appear in the "railgun" article, or be spread out between the articles
> on a dozen games, movies and books?
>
My general answer to this one is that X in popular culture makes
useful padding untill the the article isup to a reasonable size. After
that it may be time for it to be culled.

--
geni


body:
On 11/15/05, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> geni wrote:
> > David Gerard wrote:
>
> >> This is hairsplitting over the definition of the word "fork". It's a
> >> fork because the guy was trying to work within Wikipedia to write
> >> encyclopedic articles and was driven off by anti-expert bias and
> >> assumption of bad faith on AFD.
> >> Comixpedia is not a fork of *content* - it's a fork of the
> >> *community*. That is why that such a thing could happen is a BIG RED
> >> FLASHING DANGER SIGNAL.
>
> >Not really. Comixpedia has different policies to wikipedia. Even if
> >you wanted to you could not reasonably stop that. I'm involved with
> >scepticWiki no sane change to wikipedia policy could prevent that from
> >being seperate.
>
>
> You keep ignoring the point: Comixpedia wouldn't *exist* except it was
> a community forking from Wikipedia.

There is no way to conclude this. At best you can state it is unlikely
to have appeared at that moment without community forking.

--
geni


from_name: topi

subject: [Wikitech-l] Extending cur table with further fields

body:
How can i add additional fields (added befor to the cur-table) to mediawiki.
My aim is to add defined additional data to an article and to make use of
the editing and version-system of mediawiki. These additional fields shall
appear within the article.

Thanks Heinz


body:
On 11/15/05, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> geni wrote:
> We have WikiProjects to create such an environment, and they have the
> added bonus of keeping the content usable within Wikipedia (so that,
> e.g., the creators of a community fork aren't so damn pissed off with
> their treatment here they pick an incompatible license as a
> "fuck-you").
>
> What is there that a community fork achieves that a WikiProject does
> not, in your view?
>
A community fork allows people to claim a greater level of ownership
of articles.

--
geni


body:
On 11/15/05, Alphax (Wikipedia email) <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:
> "Hello Ivory Coast government person, what's the name of your country in
> English?"
>
> "C?te d'Ivoire."
>
> *click*
>

India has a population of over 1 billion. English is quite widespread.
As a result thier view of what the english language is quite
significant.  Ivory Coast has a population of ~17,300,000 and is
francophone. As a result what they think doesn't matter much in terms
of figureing out what name is most commmonly used for the country in
english.

--
geni


body:
On 11/15/05, charles matthews <charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:
> Sort: by relevant WikiProject for example. Nominator's responsibility.  Make
> sorted noms a crisper process.

Great so as well as remebering how to list something in the first
place I know have to remeber every single wikipedia wiki project.
Congrats on makeing RC patrol even more complex.

geni


subject: [WikiEN-l] WikiProjects vs the community splitting

body:
geni wrote:
> David Gerard wrote:

>> You keep ignoring the point: Comixpedia wouldn't *exist* except it was
>> a community forking from Wikipedia.

>There is no way to conclude this. At best you can state it is unlikely
>to have appeared at that moment without community forking.

That the founder has said so is pretty conclusive. Perhaps you don't
see that as conclusive.

>> > Where did I suggest splitting the wiki?

>> You suggested it in
>> http://mail.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2005-November/032619.html
>> "You relise I don't view the existance of Comixpedia (other than their
>> choice to use CC) as a bad thing. Wikipedia needs these subject
>> specific spinoffs. I hope to see more of them."

>Spinoffs are not splitting. Assumeing no lisence problems we aquire
>all the good stuff anyway.

The one we're talking about was quite definitely a split. Please try
to keep to the topic (rather than switching from the specific case
under discussion to the general case back to a different specific
case).

>> You seem to be wanting to *make* them.

>I have made one.

I mean "make" as in "force", as should be obvious from the context.

- d.

- d.


body:
On 11/15/05, Matt Brown <morven at gmail.com> wrote:
> I submit that the vast majority of the truly awful pages on Wikipedia
> are very hard to find without the Random Page function, because
> they're very poorly linked into the site.  There are many substandard
> articles on important topics, but much fewer that are utterly
> horrible.
>

My experence of following links around is that it is pretty easy to
stumble upon rubish.

> Frankly, if we did that, I quit.  I'm sure I'm far from alone.

A less extream meausure would be limiting the creation of orphans.
Allows new articles to be created but at the same time in theory ups
the minium level of careing (someone cared enough about the article to
think it should exist).

 --
geni


body:
On 11/15/05, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> geni wrote:

>> What is there that a community fork achieves that a WikiProject does
>> not, in your view?

>A community fork allows people to claim a greater level of ownership
>of articles.

OK. Now, please address the problem:

>> We have WikiProjects to create such an environment, and they have the
>> added bonus of keeping the content usable within Wikipedia (so that,
>> e.g., the creators of a community fork aren't so damn pissed off with
>> their treatment here they pick an incompatible license as a
>> "fuck-you").

As I asked before:

Are you honestly saying you think driving an expert off Wikipedia to
found a fork of the community, and the process by which it happened,
is *good*? Or are you saying the end justifies the means - whatever it
takes to achieve a subject fork?

- d.


body:
On 11/15/05, Tony Sidaway <f.crdfa at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 11/15/05, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On 11/15/05, Tony Sidaway <f.crdfa at gmail.com> wrote:
> > >[rhetorical point on prejudice against lisp motivating a fork for programming languages]
> >
> > That is not myy point. I'm sure you can hadle these people. Others
> > perhaps cannot. Forks also allow the coverage of unencyopedic topics
> > until they become encyopedic
>
> Ah, so it's not about fostering a good working environment at all, but
> about your belief that some topics are unencyclopedic and this may be
> rectified by forking "until they become encyopedic"?  Could you
> explain this reasoning a bit more?
>

I currently have a picture of the structure of an organic molicule in
front of me. It has never been made and nothing has been published on
it. I could probably bash something together based on assumed
properties but it would not be encyopedic. In time though the molicule
probably will be made and if it becomes significant it may become
encyopedic. At that point we could have an article ready to add to
wikipedia.

> Well if webcomic experts depart to form a new community, this is in
> effect a split in the community.  One that you appear to think was a
> good thing.

The community is not the wiki.

--
geni


from_name: Phil Boswell

subject: [Wikitech-l] Signature problems

body:
What the heck happened with signatures since last night? There's a heap of
complaints on [[en:WP:VPT]] from people with complicated, and indeed
not-so-complicated, signatures, which suddenly stopped resolving properly.

My sig is fairly simple: up to a few minutes ago it was non-raw, and
consisted of "Phil]] | [[User talk:Phil Boswell|Talk", which when wrapped
with the traditional "[[User:..." and "]]" worked fine. I have now converted
it to raw and filled in the supposedly automatic bits by hand.

As far as I can tell, the pipe and "[[" symbols after the "]]" were being
converted into numeric HTML entities.

Is this some feature which has blown up in our faces, or has somebody been
fiddling with code, or what?
--
Phil
[[en:User:Phil Boswell]]


subject:
[WikiEN-l] Wikipedia's provable anti-expertise bias (was How did
 this happen (comixpedia??))

body:
Alphax alphasigmax at gmail.com wrote at Tue Nov 15 12:15:00 UTC 2005:

>What worries me is that with our growing popularity, we're going to have
>more experts arriving on our doorstep, trying to write articles on their
>specialist areas, and leave in disgust when some 2-bit moron votes "d,
>nn. cruft".

As far as I can say, that has always been a serious problem. It's not a
matter of elitism. An expert who is used to discussing his views  with
well-informed people on an academic level will not enjoy the experience of
having to defend basic and established knowledge of his field against
schoolkids whose only expertise is with video games. I am offering no
opinion on the desirability of it, but the latter probably form a very
sizable fraction of our user base.

Kosebamse

--
Highspeed-Freiheit. Bei GMX superg?nstig, z.B. GMX DSL_Cityflat,
DSL-Flatrate f?r nur 4,99 Euro/Monat*  http://www.gmx.net/de/go/dsl


body:
On 11/15/05, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Are you honestly saying you think driving an expert off Wikipedia to
> found a fork of the community, and the process by which it happened,
> is *good*? Or are you saying the end justifies the means - whatever it
> takes to achieve a subject fork?
>

I don't think this is the ideal way to active a fork. However I belive
people driveing others off wikipedia (unless they are dissrupting
wikipedia which is a pain to prove) is your area not mine. You have a
mandate to solve the problem of people abuseing the system. If people
are driveing others off wikipedia by abuseing the system why are they
not in front of arbcom? It has to be accepted that there are some
experts who can't cope with being repeatedly question. Such people are
probably better off somewhere other than wikipedia.

--
geni


body:
On 11/15/05, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> geni wrote:
> >On 11/15/05, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >> Damn we need the rating feature. What's holding it up right now? List
> >> please, referring to current version of code. (I know the servers are
> >> creaking ...)
>
> >Do you know if the softwear has been released yet? If not it could be
> >a way to get it tested.
>
>
> It's been in the MediaWiki code base for months and we've been
> screaming for it to be switched on (see wikien-l in all that time).
>
> I've directly asked on wikitech-l if there's some reason this feature
> is *never* going in and if I should just stop bothering, and been told
> that's not the case and that there are things that need fixing first.
>
> But the original developer (Magnus Manske) *still* can't get any clear
> list of what needs fixing for it to go in.
>
> So. What's up with Special:Validate?
>
> [cc to wikitech-l]
>
>
> - d.

What I want to know is if there is anywhere I can download it.

--
geni


subject: [Wikitech-l] Signature problems

body:
On 15/11/05, Phil Boswell <phil.boswell at gmail.com> wrote:
> What the heck happened with signatures since last night? There's a heap of
> complaints on [[en:WP:VPT]] from people with complicated, and indeed
> not-so-complicated, signatures, which suddenly stopped resolving properly.

See http://mail.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2005-November/032692.html

> My sig is fairly simple: up to a few minutes ago it was non-raw, and
> consisted of "Phil]] | [[User talk:Phil Boswell|Talk", which when wrapped
> with the traditional "[[User:..." and "]]" worked fine. I have now converted
> it to raw and filled in the supposedly automatic bits by hand.

This is, more or less, the reason why "raw signatures" were invented
in the first place - playing with the "nickname" to simulate them can
cause all sorts of hideous markup, and a software change made it less
tolerant of some of them. Although this particular change is
inadvertent and temporary, you're probably best sticking with "raw"
mode.

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


from_name: Peter Mackay

subject: [WikiEN-l] opinions

body:
> From: wikien-l-bounces at Wikipedia.org
> [mailto:wikien-l-bounces at Wikipedia.org] On Behalf Of Brown, Darin
> Sent: Tuesday, 15 November 2005 12:51
> To: 'wikien-l at Wikipedia.org'
> Subject: [WikiEN-l] opinions
>
> Geni said:
>
> >>You appear to think that respecting you means that I have to respect
> your opinions. This is not the case.
>
> You appear to think that respecting someone's opinions means
> you have to agree with their opinions. This is not the case.
> It is possible to disagree with someone's opinions and still
> respect their opinions. Saying that you respect someone, but
> you don't respect their opinions is just empty posturing.

Religious beliefs, for example. I might disagree strongly with someone over
what they believe, but that doesn't mean that I don't respect their beliefs.

Beliefs are generally held to be stronger than opinions, but I can still
respect someone's right to hold and defend their opinion.

Peter (Skyring)


body:
On 11/15/05, Matt Brown <morven at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 11/15/05, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On 11/15/05, charles matthews <charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:
> > > Sort: by relevant WikiProject for example. Nominator's responsibility.  Make
> > > sorted noms a crisper process.
> >
> > Great so as well as remebering how to list something in the first
> > place I know have to remeber every single wikipedia wiki project.
> > Congrats on makeing RC patrol even more complex.
>
> It's a newpages patrol job, not a rc patrol job.
>
> Be that as it may, there's no reason it can't be a two-stage process
> where the person nominating for deletion simply tags the article, and
> other people then work on that tagged category and work out what
> should be done.
>
> -Matt

Wikiproject AFD? That soulds like a recipy for conflict that would
worry even me.

--
geni


body:
geni wrote:
> David Gerard wrote:

>> So. What's up with Special:Validate?

> What I want to know is if there is anywhere I can download it.

By downloading MediaWiki and switching it on.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Article_validation_feature says: "The
code is in the module "phase 3", mainly in the file
"includes/SpecialValidate.php"
(http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/wikipedia/phase3/includes/SpecialValidate.php),
and spread through some other files (tab creation etc.)."

- d.


list: foundation-l

from_name: Anthony DiPierro

subject: [Foundation-l] Incubator Wiki for New Wikimedia Projects

body:
On 11/15/05, Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> --- Anthony DiPierro <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:
> > I brought that up earlier, and I'm really not sure what to make of it,
> > because Wikipedia certainly shouldn't be made a part of Wikibooks.  I
> > can think of two possible reasons:
> >
> > 1) Wikibooks is for textbooks, and this should be narrowly construed
> > to mean classical textbooks, not to include any learning resources
> > such as encyclopedias.
> >
> > 2) Wikipedia is too big for Wikibooks (combined perhaps with the fact
> > that Mediawiki is not sophisticated enough to handle both of them
> > under a single project).
>
> Both are true. Also, a collection of articles does not a book make. You can
> bind them together and present them like a book, but they will never be
> something that somebody is going to read cover to cover in sequence. Articles
> are self-contained entities that stand perfectly well on their own. Pages or
> even chapters in a book should be part a much larger self-contained work that
> itself has a specific goal on where it wants to lead the reader.
>
> -- mav

That's actually a good point I didn't think about.  Applying it to
Wikijunior, I think you could actually argue either way depending on
your idea of the scope of the project.  If the point of Wikijunior is
just to make a bunch of educational books based on Wikipedia articles
("Big Cats" I believe was an example title proposed by Theresa), then
Wikibooks is probably appropriate.  More than that, such as trying to
create an entire encyclopedia for kids, and it's probably outside the
scope of Wikibooks.

I think that's a good proposal for where to draw the line - "books" in
Wikibooks should consist of coherent works that it's reasonable to
want to read cover to cover in sequence.  Of course, I remember as a
kid reading volumes of our encyclopedia at home cover to cover, but I
was a weird kid.  :)

Anthony


list: wikimedia-l


body:
geni wrote:

>Wikiproject AFD? That soulds like a recipy for conflict that would
>worry even me.

That's pretty much what we have now.

- d.


body:
On 11/15/05, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> geni wrote:
> > David Gerard wrote:
>
> >> So. What's up with Special:Validate?
>
> > What I want to know is if there is anywhere I can download it.
>
>
> By downloading MediaWiki and switching it on.
>
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Article_validation_feature says: "The
> code is in the module "phase 3", mainly in the file
> "includes/SpecialValidate.php"
> (http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/wikipedia/phase3/includes/SpecialValidate.php),
> and spread through some other files (tab creation etc.)."
>
>
> - d.

Do you know which version that is. Or is it time to start asking on
the dev list?

--
geni


body:
kosebamse wrote:

>What happended to the validation code, by the way? It's been discussed for
>four? five? years now and few people seem to miss it. I can't understand
>that.

I can only suggest you ask on wikitech-l and/or bail up Brion or Tim
on IRC. No-one with the power to switch it on seems to care enough to
bother telling the author (Magnus Manske) why they won't.

- d.


body:
geni wrote:

>Do you know which version that is. Or is it time to start asking on
>the dev list?

That would be 100% more effective than talking about it on wikien-l, I suspect.

- d.


body:
On 11/15/05, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> geni wrote:
>
> >Wikiproject AFD? That soulds like a recipy for conflict that would
> >worry even me.
>
>
> That's pretty much what we have now.
>

Doesn't really worry me at the moment (ok that is partly becuase I
find certian aspects of it darkly amuseing). By setting up a system
where groups have to be informeted you are pretty much forcing people
to think in factions.

--
geni


from_name: Han Dao

body:
Hello, I am an administrator of Comixpedia but also a wikipedian although I
didn't edit as much I used to. The fork true goal is actually cover the
medium of webcomics and serve the webcomic community not to promote
non-notable webcomics. Yes, we were tried of the AfD and the usual reason.

The problem is that most webcomics will be non-notable anyway. However a few
of them brought to AfD, that was actually notable was deleted. (Note that I
cannot give evidence or want to)
A webcomic expert can be helpful but how you actually determine if that
person is actually an expert.

On 11/15/05, Brown, Darin <Darin.Brown at enmu.edu> wrote:
>
> > Message: 6
> > Date: Tue, 15 Nov 2005 18:22:10 +0000
> > From: geni <geniice at gmail.com>
> > Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Re: How did this happen (comixpedia??)
> > To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at wikipedia.org>
> > Message-ID:
> > <f80608430511151022l323eb8bcw2099a3cb40b4c9fc at mail.gmail.com>
> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
> >
> > Well establish some core criteria. At the moment there is nothing I
> > can work from.
> >
> > even a list of things that should be cheaked to see if they estabilish
> > notability
> >
> > (traffic, Author profile, firsts, influence would be a start along
> > with ways to cheack this)
>
> This is up to the webcomics people, yes. What I am saying is that I would
> hope that individual knowledge and expertise would be a *part* (not all)
> of
> the equation of determining notability. Note -- this is not the same as
> *verifiability*. A fact is something verifiable. Notability is a judgment
> that should be based on facts and, I think, knowledgeable opinions. I
> don't
> think it's fair to say knowledgeable opinions have *no* place in
> determining
> notability or that it will lead to a free-for-all. It's used in math and
> scientific subjects all the time, and hasn't led to a free-for-all there.
>
> > > I went there, it's all aimed toward popular music. There is nothing to
> > stop
> > > someone from knocking down a relatively obscure piano concerto because
> > > they've never heard of it or the composer. Notability would come from
> > the
> > > reputation of the concerto in the music community and things that had
> > been
> > > written about it. But there could be very little written about it and
> > still
> > > be notable. You have to rely on judgment. And you can never formalize
> > this
> > > by writing more and more policies.
> > >
> >
> > However since this doesn't seem to happen there is no reason to come
> > up with a general aggrement at this time.
>
> I have to admit, I have trouble understanding what you say a lot of the
> time. What do you mean by "this"? What "happens"? "Agreement" for what? I
> really don't understand what you're saying.
>
> > Haven't a clue. I waiting for that project to make the articles human
> > readerble finishes. In the meantime fear prevernts friverlous AFDs
> > very nicely
>
> Within just the past couple days, people have posted specific examples to
> dispute this.
>
> > > And that makes them experts? I drink coffee most days, but I don't
> think
> > I'm
> > > a coffee expert. I read newspapers, but don't think I'm a journalism
> > expert.
> > >
> >
> > No but it makes you part of the coffee drinking community. How do you
> > deffine a memeber of the webcomic community?
>
> Well, there are certainly different shades of membership, it's not a crisp
> set. Same with anything. It's ridiculous to say anyone who drinks coffee
> is
> a part of a "coffee drinking community". I would say a member of the
> "coffee
> community" is either someone who has researched the topic themselves, has
> experience in the field, has special knowledge about it, or just knows
> more
> than the average joe. But to say that simply picking up a cup of coffee
> and
> drinking it is in the same boat is ridiculous.
>
> Similarly, everyone reads newspapers. But the entire world is not the
> "journalistic community". There are a group of people who have devoted
> parts
> of their lives to this endeavor and have special knowledge about it.
>
> For webcomics, I would say that someone who casually reads them from time
> to
> time, in the way one casually listens to pop songs on the radio or
> casually
> flips through channels on the TV is not really a member of that community.
> Again, there is no clear defining line.
>
> > Not really. The relivant wikiprojects could probably come up with
> > stardards pretty fast which would cover most cases. The fact is that
> > the vast majority of cases go along the same lines with the same
> > issues.
>
> That's not what I was talking about. I was talking about AfD, not
> wikiprojects. And I was saying, *if* the arguments I have seen used at
> AfD,
> were used without fear and applied to math articles, many legitimate ones
> would be in AfD purgatory.
>
> darin
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


body:
> Message: 6
> Date: Tue, 15 Nov 2005 18:22:10 +0000
> From: geni <geniice at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Re: How did this happen (comixpedia??)
> To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at wikipedia.org>
> Message-ID:
> 	<f80608430511151022l323eb8bcw2099a3cb40b4c9fc at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> Well establish some core criteria. At the moment there is nothing I
> can work from.
>
> even a list of things that should be cheaked to see if they estabilish
> notability
>
> (traffic, Author profile, firsts, influence would be a start along
> with ways to cheack this)

This is up to the webcomics people, yes. What I am saying is that I would
hope that individual knowledge and expertise would be a *part* (not all) of
the equation of determining notability. Note -- this is not the same as
*verifiability*. A fact is something verifiable. Notability is a judgment
that should be based on facts and, I think, knowledgeable opinions. I don't
think it's fair to say knowledgeable opinions have *no* place in determining
notability or that it will lead to a free-for-all. It's used in math and
scientific subjects all the time, and hasn't led to a free-for-all there.

> > I went there, it's all aimed toward popular music. There is nothing to
> stop
> > someone from knocking down a relatively obscure piano concerto because
> > they've never heard of it or the composer. Notability would come from
> the
> > reputation of the concerto in the music community and things that had
> been
> > written about it. But there could be very little written about it and
> still
> > be notable. You have to rely on judgment. And you can never formalize
> this
> > by writing more and more policies.
> >
>
> However since this doesn't seem to happen there is no reason to come
> up with a general aggrement at this time.

I have to admit, I have trouble understanding what you say a lot of the
time. What do you mean by "this"? What "happens"? "Agreement" for what? I
really don't understand what you're saying.

> Haven't a clue. I waiting for that project to make the articles human
> readerble finishes. In the meantime fear prevernts friverlous AFDs
> very nicely

Within just the past couple days, people have posted specific examples to
dispute this.

> > And that makes them experts? I drink coffee most days, but I don't think
> I'm
> > a coffee expert. I read newspapers, but don't think I'm a journalism
> expert.
> >
>
> No but it makes you part of the coffee drinking community. How do you
> deffine a memeber of the webcomic community?

Well, there are certainly different shades of membership, it's not a crisp
set. Same with anything. It's ridiculous to say anyone who drinks coffee is
a part of a "coffee drinking community". I would say a member of the "coffee
community" is either someone who has researched the topic themselves, has
experience in the field, has special knowledge about it, or just knows more
than the average joe. But to say that simply picking up a cup of coffee and
drinking it is in the same boat is ridiculous.

Similarly, everyone reads newspapers. But the entire world is not the
"journalistic community". There are a group of people who have devoted parts
of their lives to this endeavor and have special knowledge about it.

For webcomics, I would say that someone who casually reads them from time to
time, in the way one casually listens to pop songs on the radio or casually
flips through channels on the TV is not really a member of that community.
Again, there is no clear defining line.

> Not really. The relivant wikiprojects could probably come up with
> stardards pretty fast which would cover most cases. The fact is that
> the vast majority of cases go along the same lines with the same
> issues.

That's not what I was talking about. I was talking about AfD, not
wikiprojects. And I was saying, *if* the arguments I have seen used at AfD,
were used without fear and applied to math articles, many legitimate ones
would be in AfD purgatory.

darin


from_name: Ryan Hudy

subject: [Wikitech-l] Change "Wikimedia Project" Icon

body:
I'm looking to replace the Wikimedia Project icon (located at the bottom
left of the mediawiki pages: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki) with
another icon within my intranet wiki. I believe I made all the necessary
changes within the files (Skin.php, SkinTemplate.php, Monobook.php,
Commonprint.css, Monobook/main.css) but my icon still isn't showing up. Am I
missing an adjustment/addition in a specific file, and is the Wikimedia
Project icon called as copyrightico?

Ryan


from_name: Peter Jacobi

subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] Re: [WikiEN-l] Tower of Babel - Voting remains stupid	as well as evil.

body:
On the issue of REDIRECT handling:

> >There's no reason why there should be two or more separate articles,
> >with people squabbling about which one should be the main article and
> >which the redirect, if both exist and have precisely the same article
> >id.  The synonym creation would also have to operate for the
> >corresponding talk namespace.
>
>
> Get coding :-D
>
> (This is a really nice idea, IMO, and would save much of the forests
> of redirects and annoyance of double redirects.)

Uli Fuchs' sort-of fork WikiWeise with independently
developed Wiki software has automic DISAMBIGs and
an elaborated scheme of index entries instead of
REDIRECTs. See (for those reading German):

1) http://www.wikiweise.de/wiki/Wikiweise%3ABegriffskl%C3%A4rung
2) http://www.wikiweise.de/wiki/Wikiweise%3AIndizierung

Summary:
1) "Foo ((Bar))" and "Foo ((Baz))" will algorithmically generate a
"Foo" disambig.
2) There is a separate entry field for index entries for the article

Regards,
Peter Jacobi

--
Highspeed-Freiheit. Bei GMX superg?nstig, z.B. GMX DSL_Cityflat,
DSL-Flatrate f?r nur 4,99 Euro/Monat*  http://www.gmx.net/de/go/dsl


subject:
[WikiEN-l] Tower of Babel - Voting to ignore MoS, NCs for language
	reasons.

body:
Tony Sidaway wrote:
<snip>
> I do sometimes wonder where the process of abandonment of English
> proper names of places will lead us, but no doubt in time we would
> all become accustomed to referring to Cymru,

Wales

> Alba,

Erm...

> Euskal Herria,

Erm...

> Deutschland,

Germany

> Espa?a,

Spain

> Confoederatio Helvetica,

Switzerland?

> ?sterreich,

Austria

> and all the rest--and some of us may even understand which country
> we're talking about.
>

And the rest can just smile and nod, and read the article while nobody's
looking! Perfect! :)

--
Alphax - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax
Contributor to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia
"We make the internet not suck" - Jimbo Wales
Public key: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax/OpenPGP

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from_name: dake

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Signature problems

body:
Phil Boswell wrote:
> What the heck happened with signatures since last night? There's a heap of
> complaints on [[en:WP:VPT]] from people with complicated, and indeed
> not-so-complicated, signatures, which suddenly stopped resolving properly.

same on :fr, my signature is f***** up.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Totally unscientific investigation...

body:
Matt Brown morven at gmail.com wrote Tue Nov 15 12:52:34 UTC 2005:

>> But we could start lifting the quality of the average article to where
>>it belongs, and we would have a chance to lift our reputation beyond the
>>"public toilet" image that has deservedly been bestowed upon us.

>You care too much about the public image, frankly.  You hear the
>complaints louder than the praise, and louder than the silent praise
>of all those people who, day after day, use Wikipedia for information.

I hear the complaints and the praise, but I also do a good amount of reading
Wikipedia (indeed, vastly more than writing), and that is another sobering
experience. I would not give a fart about the public opinion if I were
convinced of the quality of our work, but it is my own daily experience that
makes me far from convinced.

>Making the barriers to entry harder is a tempting thought, but among
>these newbies and dabblers are tomorrow's admins and writers.  A small
>proportion of them, granted, but making it harder decreases the flow
>of good people as well as bad people.

I am very well aware of that. My point is that we have long reached a size
where the task of cleaning up and bringing to encyclopedic standard even a
fraction of our articles is already monumental. We'd be well advised to
realize that this is more important than acquiring ever more megabytes of
content that creates more work than it adds encyclopedic knowledge. I am
overlooking nearly three years of Wikipedia's development now, and it is my
belief that among the newbies ( = tomorrow's potential admins) the ratio of
seriously interested users to vandals/trolls/low-potential-users has
declined to an unpleasant dimension. That's of course highly subjective.

Furthermore, if we continue to grow exponentially (how long can we, BTW?),
we will not improve the average quality of our work, as several users have
rightly pointed out. In other words, we'll continue to expand an already
enormous body of mediocre writing. I can see no point in that.

>Yes, I'm an eventualist.  From my point of view, Wikipedia has a long,
>long way to go, and that's not a bad thing.  It's that the sum total
>of useful human knowledge is so vast.  There are many subject areas
>that Wikipedia's coverage is scant or wholly lacking.  Yet, at the
>same time, there are articles on Wikipedia that are better than ANY
>other online resource.  I am sure there are some that are better than
>ANY published article, on or offline.  Isn't that something to feel
>good about?

Yes it is, and it is one of the things that makes one stay despite all the
nuisances. Wikipedia has indeed a long way to go, and an essential
prerequisite to mastering it is to realize that we must work towards
quality, not quantity.

What happended to the validation code, by the way? It's been discussed for
four? five? years now and few people seem to miss it. I can't understand
that.

Kosebamse

--
Lust, ein paar Euro nebenbei zu verdienen? Ohne Kosten, ohne Risiko!
Satte Provisionen f?r GMX Partner: http://www.gmx.net/de/go/partner


from_name: Gordon Joly

subject: [Wikitech-l] Image Upload/Import

body:
At 09:37 -0500 15/11/05, Ryan Hudy wrote:
>I know that tools like mwdumper don't have the ability to upload and
>import images from wikipedia, so I was wondering if anyone has
>written a script in PHP or know of any other tools that perform this
>functionality. I found this topic discussed here:
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2005-May/029745.html
>
>with someone stating they were working on a PHP script to do this,
>but I guess it never happened or it would have probably been passed
>around within the community. Anyone have any additional information
>on this issue?
>
>Ryan
>

I used a suite called "db_backup" and copied the /images/ directory
with no problems at all in rebuilding a MediaWiki website (not
Wikipedia).

The webiste had 300 images at most....

--
Gordo (aka LoopZilla)
gordon.joly at pobox.com
http://pobox.com/~gordo/
http://www.loopzilla.org/


subject:
[Foundation-l] Incubator Wiki for New Wikimedia Projects (was
	Vote to create Wikiversity Vote)

body:
On 11/15/05, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> Anthony DiPierro wrote:
>
> >The process to create a new project is far too difficult.  An
> >incubator wiki would facilitate that process.  The fact that
> >Wikicities is already doing something which you feel has overlap (but
> >then later say wouldn't have any overlap), is really irrelevant.
> >
> The process should be that difficult.  The impetus for new projects
> seems to be more often a reflection of people's inability or
> unwillingness to look for compromise solutions;  it has very little to
> do with an objective need for another project.
>
I think it's more than that.  There are a lot of people who want
Wikipedia to look more like a finished product than a perpetual work
in progress.  Daniel P. B. Smith is one of the most outspoken in this
regard, but there are many others who also feel this way.  If we're
going to reach a compromise, it has to take these points into
consideration.

There needs to be a place where we can experiment with new ideas more
freely.  You could argue that that should be in Wikipedia itself, but
if so then there'd need to be a more static version in place first.
Creating a new test project *is* a compromise.  It's saying "this idea
isn't completely developed yet to where there is a consensus for
including it in the main project, but we're not going to throw it away
just because of that."

> Philosophically I think that an encyclopedia IS a knowledge base, but
> that could just lead us into a lot of unsolvable semantic arguments.

Well, yeah, I'm not going to touch that one right now.

> There are companies out there that can do phone books much better than
> we ever could.

I'd prefer *any* free phone book to the proprietary ones out there
now, so I don't think it'd be hard to do better than the commercial
companies.  Yes, the copyright on this information is legally shaky,
but EULAs and DRM usually fills those gaps.

> Until Wikipedia came along on-line genealogy was already
> perhaps the best self-organized amateur research area on the net.

Again this is largely proprietary and filled with barriers to the
information being free.  I can't think of any other major site which
allows for even the basics of what a wiki could offer.  There may be
some minor sites out there doing this, but Wikimedia could do a much
better job.

> We have had our own 9-11 Wiki, but that has not exactly been a memorial
> success.

I think this is largely because it's not a very expandable project.
The number of dead people in the world is much greater than the number
of people who died in the September 11th tragedy, and the former is
growing every moment.

Anyway, some of these projects will fail, and others will succeed.
There is only so much volunteer time to go around, after all.  But I
don't think it's really possible to figure out which ones are which
without going ahead and trying it.  Perhaps most importantly, the harm
is negligible.  A project which doesn't succeed isn't going to use up
very many resources, after all.

Anthony


body:
On 11/15/05, Anthony DiPierro <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:
> > There are companies out there that can do phone books much better than
> > we ever could.
>
> I'd prefer *any* free phone book to the proprietary ones out there
> now, so I don't think it'd be hard to do better than the commercial
> companies.  Yes, the copyright on this information is legally shaky,
> but EULAs and DRM usually fills those gaps.

BTW, I was thinking more of "yellow pages" than "white pages" here.
The copyright on "yellow pages" is much stronger legally.


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Gerrit Holl

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: "How to get a girl"

body:
Timwi wrote:
> >Besides, how would you cite anything for something like the books
> >mentioned?
>
> There are plenty of potential citations available for books on autism.
> As for the "how to get a girl", there's always psychological studies you
> can cite -- but then again, do you even need cites for such a book?

And what about [1]? It has been very useful for me, but a "textbook"?
Not really. A book on "how to get a girl" could cite
http://www.sirc.org/publik/flirt.html, a publication by the Social
Issues Research Centre. I find it a strange decision to allow only
'textbooks', no other educational books.

[1]
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Bicycles/Maintenance_and_Repair/Wheels_and_Tires/Fixing_a_flat

Gerrit.

--
Temperature in Lule?, Norrbotten, Sweden:
| Current temperature   05-11-15 14:59:59   -3.7 degrees Celsius ( 25.4F) |
--
Det finns inte d?ligt v?der, bara d?liga kl?der.


subject:
[WikiEN-l] Re: Wikipedia's provable anti-expertise bias (was How
	didthis happen (comixpedia??))

body:
"geni" <geniice at gmail.com> wrote in message
news:f80608430511150500t6aaa9acjcb917f2fe5d7d4d2 at mail.gmail.com...
On 11/15/05, Alphax (Wikipedia email)
<alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:
> > As for the "X in popular culture" plague, I recently (well, a few weeks
> > ago) found one of these in one of the first article merges I did. I
> > understand that the information has to go *somewhere*; it's just a
> > matter of where... should every known appearance of railguns in ficiton
> > appear in the "railgun" article, or be spread out between the articles
> > on a dozen games, movies and books?
> My general answer to this one is that X in popular culture makes
> useful padding untill the the article isup to a reasonable size. After
> that it may be time for it to be culled.

I am almost shocked speechless.

Are you seriously suggesting that we should be deleting perfectly good
information simply because you think that a particular article has reached
some threshold size which you consider "big enough"?

Does "Wikipedia is not paper" mean nothing to you?
--
Phil
[[en:User:Phil Boswell]]


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [Foundation-l] Wikisource Copyright

body:
David Newton wrote:

>I've recently been in a discussion on the Wikisource website and I
>would like some definitive answers about the licence that the text of
>Wikisource is under and also about the policy with respect to fair use
>on Wikisource. I've posted this question here as there is no dedicated
>Wikisource mailing list that I can find.
>
In law there is seldom a definitive answer.  If you are looking for a
simple solution it's not going to happen.  If somebody gives you one it
is no solution.  Applying GFDL depends on whether that application is
necessary.  Public domain, fair use and licenses are applied
cumulatively, and not in a mutually exclusive fashion.  When someone
puts a copyright notice on a web page or a book it really only means
copyright to the extent that it is copyrightable; it clearly does not
mean that everything on that page or book is copyright.  It may very
well be that the only thing copyright about a page is its general layout
and format, and that would be reason enough to add a copyright notice.
The public domain or fair use nature of material is not modified by the
application of a GFDL statement.  Being in the public domain obviates
fair use claims.

>The copyright issue has come up over the text of UN resolutions, many
>of which are on the Wikisource website, and also with the British Act
>of Parliament the Hunting Act 2004. The former are placed on the site
>under "fair use" despite the fact that the copyright info page of
>Wikisource says that fair use should not be resorted to for texts
>except in exceptional circumstances, and then only for quotes. There
>are hundreds of resolutions placed on the site, and the UN certainly
>claims copyright over its works if their website copyright notice is
>anything to go by.
>
I am not familiar with the specific British Act or the copyright status
of British law on this, so I will not comment specifically on that.

I think that I was the one who added the "exceptional circumstances"
comment to Wikisource, but I don't remember saying that it should be
limited to quotes.  Wikisource deals with whole texts not just quotes.
The discussion is about whole texts.  The fair use issue would not be
exceptional for quotes; I would suggest looking at how Wikiquote handles
this.

When considering the copyrightability of UN resolutions, or all UN
documents for that matter, what law do you apply?  Is there a UN
Copyright Act?  In the absence of such a law can any UN document be
copyright?

>The British Act of Parliament is under Crown
>copyright as it was passed in 2004. There is a waiver on copyright of
>British statutes allowing them to be reproduced pretty freely, but it
>does have conditions that are incompatible with the GFDL. On
>Wikisource the rather dubious claim is also made that foreign statutes
>and court decisions are not subject to copyright at all in the United
>States.
>
Why dubious?  Uncopyrightable in the interests of public policy is not a
dubious claim

>I agree with them that statute law in the US means federal
>government works are not under copyright and that case law probably
>means local and state government laws and decisions are not under
>copyright, but that does not extend to foreign laws.
>
I don't think that fair use is at all relevant here.  If the material is
in the public domain, there is no need to consider the applicability of
fair use.  "Case law" is a technical term referring to totality of all
judges' decisions.  It is just as applicable to federal law as to state
and local law.

I don't think that the extraterritorial application of US laws is much
of a problem here, even though I find such applications to be
reprehensible.  The law in question would be applicable to the
publication of foreign statutes in the United States.  Every other
country would still have the right to do or not do the same thing, or to
determine whether the putatively offending US publications could be
imported.  To be sure many of these laws were adopted before the
internet became so popular, and when importing implied the existence of
a physical asset.  The politicians are having a hard time grasping the
implications of the internet.

>Given the above I have two main questions:
>
>1. Is Wikisource subject to the same text licensing rules as
>Wikipedia, ie GFDL, public domain or GFDL-compatible text?
>
To the extent that the GFDL provisions are applicable, yes, but let's
not read more into this than is there.  What is relevant in particular
circumstances is a function of the specific facts.

>2. What is the position on fair use at Wikisource?
>
>
That's for Wikisource to determine.  Ask that question on the Scriptorium.

Ec


subject: [Foundation-l] Wikisource Copyright


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Totally unscientific investigation...

body:
"Alphax (Wikipedia email)"
<alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote in message
news:43798F2F.50707 at gmail.com...
> Tony Sidaway wrote:
> <snip>
> > Unless we're adopting an extremely exclusionist approach to Wikipedia
> > entries, such articles don't really belong on AfD at all.  They seem
> > to be a symptom of simple laziness on the part of the nominators.
> Yeah, it's all these damn kids who think that if they've never heard of
> something, it can't be important, but OH NOES! DON"T DELETE MY HIGH
> SCHOOL! :-P

I'm having difficulty discerning whether you're being ironic here, but
yes...that is basically what is happening.

Articles are being nominated purely on the basis of "nn = I never heard of
it" and heaven help the poor sod who attempts to interrupt the process
because the nominator might not have checked carefully enough.
--
Phil
[[en:User:Phil Boswell]]


from_name: thomas

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Wikitech-l Digest, Vol 28, Issue 29

body:
wikitech-l-request at wikimedia.org schrieb:

>Send Wikitech-l mailing list submissions to
>	wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
>
>To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit
>	http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to
>	wikitech-l-request at wikimedia.org
>
>You can reach the person managing the list at
>	wikitech-l-owner at wikimedia.org
>
>When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific
>than "Re: Contents of Wikitech-l digest..."
>
>
>Today's Topics:
>
>   1. <link> elements for interlanguage link information
>      (Evan Prodromou)
>   2. Re: <link> elements for interlanguage link information
>      (?var Arnfj?r? Bjarmason)
>   3. Re: Wiki-to-XML (Magnus Manske)
>   4. Re: Re: Wiki-to-XML (Magnus Manske)
>   5. Re: <link> elements for interlanguage link information
>      (Evan Martin)
>   6. Re: cluster monitoring (Ashar Voultoiz)
>   7. Re: cluster monitoring (Ashar Voultoiz)
>   8. Re: <link> elements for interlanguage link information
>      (Ashar Voultoiz)
>   9. Re: <link> elements for interlanguage link information
>      (Neil Harris)
>  10. Re: cluster monitoring (Tim Starling)
>
>
>----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>Message: 1
>Date: Mon, 14 Nov 2005 10:10:04 -0500
>From: Evan Prodromou <evan at wikitravel.org>
>Subject: [Wikitech-l] <link> elements for interlanguage link
>	information
>To: wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
>Message-ID: <1131981004.29814.52.camel at zhora.1481ruerachel.net>
>Content-Type: text/plain
>
>I was pointed to this section of the HTML 4.0 spec ("Notes on helping
>search engines index your Web site") at W3C recently:
>
>        http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/appendix/notes.html#h-B.4
>
>I was specifically interested in this section, which I quote in full:
>
>        Specify language variants of this document
>
>                If you have prepared translations of this document into
>                other languages, you should use the LINK element to
>                reference these. This allows an indexing engine to offer
>                users search results in the user's preferred language,
>                regardless of how the query was written. For instance,
>                the following links offer French and German alternatives
>                to a search engine:
>
>                <LINK rel="alternate"
>                         type="text/html"
>                         href="mydoc-fr.html" hreflang="fr"
>                         lang="fr" title="La vie souterraine">
>                <LINK rel="alternate"
>                         type="text/html"
>                         href="mydoc-de.html" hreflang="de"
>                         lang="de" title="Das Leben im Untergrund">
>
>I think it'd be useful for most multilingual MediaWiki installations
>that use interlanguage links to have such hidden <link> elements. <link>
>elements aren't rendered in most browsers (Mozilla 1.5+, I think, will
>show links in a menu on the toolbar), but as mentioned they do provide
>some guidance to bots and spiders.
>
>The downside is that they still take up network bandwidth, and for
>oft-interwikied pages on big sites (e.g. Wikipedia) this section could
>run to the 5-10kB size range. (My off-the-cuff estimate for, say,
>articles where each <link> is about 100B, and  there are 50-100
>interwiki links.)
>
>Barring objections I'm going to add a feature to HEAD to render these
><link> elements, controlled by a variable $wgInterLanguageLinkElement ,
>default to false.
>
>~Evan
>
>
>


subject: [Wikitech-l] Set up a PHP-Page including articles from Mediawiki

body:
I'm trying to set up a PHP-Page including articles from my mediawiki and also want to submit articles to the wiki through my page.

Because I dont like to manipulate the mediawikis database, I tried to implement the html form that is used while editing the mediawiki so it will work the same way on my page aswell and encountered some problems.

What kind of possibilities do I have to insert/get data from the mediawiki using  an API (method calls)?

I'm using Mediawiki 1.5.2

Thanks for your help  :)

~Thomas


body:
On 11/15/05, Phil Boswell <phil.boswell at gmail.com> wrote:
> I am almost shocked speechless.
>
> Are you seriously suggesting that we should be deleting perfectly good
> information simply because you think that a particular article has reached
> some threshold size which you consider "big enough"?
>
> Does "Wikipedia is not paper" mean nothing to you?
> --
> Phil
> [[en:User:Phil Boswell]]

Does "the entire world does not have broadband" mean anything to you?
Ok so 32 is probably a little low for an article size limit but 40+
and popular culture/trivia are second on my list of things to kill
(the first being random quotes about the subject wikiquote is thata
way)

--
geni


subject: [WikiEN-l] Fwd: FW: Billboard chart data licensing

body:
On 11/15/05, Brandon Cordy <b.touch at gmail.com> wrote:
> (we should probably move this discussion back to the mail list, but...)
>
> "A lesson to me?" I don't really care either way whether or not Wikipedia
> lists Billboard information; the legality of the issue was something that
> peopel felt should be inquired about (the question has been o nthe table for
> quite some time), and so it was. It's better to research something than to
> turn a blind eye to what very well could be an unallowable use of
> propriatery information.
>

Not from a legal standpoint.

--
geni


from_name: Sam Korn

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: [WikiEN-l] Markup; html

body:
On 11/15/05, Neil Harris <neil at tonal.clara.co.uk> wrote:
> Maybe templates should be HTML-cleaned as independent entities before
> transclusion / substitution into the larger page? Or would that not work
> because the code doesn't work that way, or break existing uses?

As far as my limited understanding of PHP goes, it would not work.
The current technique allows the template to change depending which
page it is included on, by means of the {{PAGENAME}} variable and
others like it.  Not doing this would screw this up.  It might well
also be a greater demand on the servers.

As I say, my understanding is more hypothetical than theoretical, and
I might be wholly wrong.

Caveat lector.

Sam


subject: [WikiEN-l] Probation Committee

body:
I also have difficulties with the current format of the Committee.  I
am wholly in favour of some kind of probation/mentoring arrangement
and a page of people who are prepared to help.  I would myself be very
happy to take part.  However, what has currently been formed is
*another* hierarchical committee.  Why couldn't it be no more than a
list of who is currently prepared to take a probationer on?  Why does
it have to be cases, and organised in a MC/AC-like fashion that
encourages legalism?  This could be done more effectively and more
friendlyly (is that a word?) if it were done more simply.

Sam

On 11/13/05, Carbonite <carbonite.wp at gmail.com> wrote:
> I just came across
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Probation_Committee on recent changes
> and I'm a bit concerned by it. This page was only created about an hour ago
> and already four users have been appointed (by themselves as far as I can
> tell) as a board. The page also claims that "The committee is an auxiliary
> of the Arbitration Committee." Has the ArbCom sanctioned or even heard of
> this committee before? I think the last thing Wikipedia needs at this point
> is another committee or more bureaucracy.
>  Carbonite
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


body:
"Matt Brown" <morven at gmail.com> wrote in
message news:42f90dc00511150452r4a9f2cb5o9d8b0b9a32167aa at mail.gmail.com...
> Yes, I'm an eventualist.  From my point of view, Wikipedia has a long,
> long way to go, and that's not a bad thing.  It's that the sum total
> of useful human knowledge is so vast.  There are many subject areas
> that Wikipedia's coverage is scant or wholly lacking.  Yet, at the
> same time, there are articles on Wikipedia that are better than ANY
> other online resource.  I am sure there are some that are better than
> ANY published article, on or offline.  Isn't that something to feel
> good about?

Would it be really awful if, for something of actual interest to a
reasonable number of people, Wikipedia provided the ONLY consolidated
resource for information?

We have the awesome ability to pull together threads of information to
create a tapestry of knowledge which could inform and delight. We have the
capacity to create the biggest darn tapestry of this kind ever.

Instead entirely too many people are nitpicking about whether we're using
the correct gauge of thread, and whether we're allowed to weave in this
particular manner, making a round of Mornington Crescent sound positively
staid and reasonable.

Some are even burning little holes in it because they don't like some of the
stitches, bringing to mind the "Family Tree of the House of Black" from
Harry Potter.

May the motto of Wikipedia never become "toujours pur"...
--
Phil
[[en:User:Phil Boswell]]


from_name: Justin Cormack

body:
On Tue, 2005-11-15 at 09:50 -0600, Kelly Martin wrote:
> On 11/15/05, Brandon Cordy <b.touch at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Here's an email I got from the Business Development associate at VNU Media:
> >
> > Please tell the appropriate person at Wikepedia to contact me as soon as
> > possible. As Sam noted, the current use of our content on your site is not
> > permissible without a licensing agreement. Therefore we would like to
> > resolve the issue quickly. Thanks again for bringing this to our
> > attention.
> >
> > Best,
> > Ben
>
> It is better to beg forgiveness than to ask permission, especially
> when dealing with people who think you need to pay them money to get
> permission to do things you can do without asking for it in the first
> place.
>
> Let this be a lesson to you.

No its not a lesson. Wikipedia is too big to hide any more. We have
to deal with this sort of thing.

So do we
(a) remove all references
(b) Tell them that they can sue us as they have no legal basis for their
extortion

Better run this past a lawyer asap.

Justinc


from_name: geni

body:
On 11/15/05, Snowspinner <Snowspinner at gmail.com> wrote:
> The popular culture sections are often magnets for irrelevant trivia,
> but I wouldn't say they're in and of themselves bad. The "In modern
> fiction" section of [[Succubus]], for instance, would probably not be
> worse off for losing the bit about Sluggy Freelance and the game
> series in which succubi are a "forgotten, yet remarkable foe."
>
> Which is not to say that either topic is non-notable - just that they
> are not really relevant to a general study of succubi.

It's not so much that it's when an article has become bloated they are
the bit that can be removed with the minium of damage.

>
> You know what's a project we don't have that would be helpful?
> Wikibibliography. A repository for things like "List of media with
> succubi" or "List of songs over seven minutes in length" or "List of
> books about the Vietnam War."
>
> -Phil

Hmmm perhaps but quite a few lists perform a useful index function.
Still if I saw the poject proposed I'd support it.

--
geni


from_name: David Gerard

body:
geni wrote:

>Does "the entire world does not have broadband" mean anything to you?
>Ok so 32 is probably a little low for an article size limit but 40+
>and popular culture/trivia are second on my list of things to kill

You mentioned the Arb Com as someone to deal with this sort of thing.
I suggest you check the case of Robert the Bruce, where systematic
removal of verifiable information from articles was considered the
most heinous of his offences.

What on Earth do you think you're doing? Spin it out to a separate
article if its presence offends your sense of order so grievously.

- d.


subject:
[WikiEN-l] Re: Re: Wikipedia's provable anti-expertise bias (was
	Howdidthis happen (comixpedia??))

body:
"geni" <geniice at gmail.com> wrote in message
news:f80608430511150832l7e4bf905vb81f7b7f6349610b at mail.gmail.com...
On 11/15/05, Phil Boswell
<phil.boswell at gmail.com> wrote:
[geni wrote this to which I then responded]
> > > My general answer to this one is that X in popular culture makes
> > > useful padding untill the the article isup to a reasonable size. After
> > > that it may be time for it to be culled.
> > I am almost shocked speechless.
> > Are you seriously suggesting that we should be deleting perfectly good
> > information simply because you think that a particular article has
> > reached
> > some threshold size which you consider "big enough"?
> > Does "Wikipedia is not paper" mean nothing to you?
> Does "the entire world does not have broadband" mean anything to you?
> Ok so 32 is probably a little low for an article size limit but 40+
> and popular culture/trivia are second on my list of things to kill
> (the first being random quotes about the subject wikiquote is thata
> way)

So factor it out into a separate article, rather than simply throw it away.
If there is sufficient information in [[X#X in popular culture]] to cause a
noticeable delay in loading the article, then maybe an article [[X in
popular culture]] should be created.

If the latter is not what you meant, then you might have phrased yourself a
little more carefully.
--
Phil
[[en:User:Phil Boswell]]


body:
On 11/15/05, Brandon Cordy <b.touch at gmail.com> wrote:
> As far as legal issues go, I was always told it was better to be safe than
> sorry.
>

Safe = Plausible denyabilty

--
geni


body:
On 11/15/05, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> geni wrote:
>
> >Does "the entire world does not have broadband" mean anything to you?
> >Ok so 32 is probably a little low for an article size limit but 40+
> >and popular culture/trivia are second on my list of things to kill
>
>
> You mentioned the Arb Com as someone to deal with this sort of thing.
> I suggest you check the case of Robert the Bruce, where systematic
> removal of verifiable information from articles was considered the
> most heinous of his offences.
>
> What on Earth do you think you're doing? Spin it out to a separate
> article if its presence offends your sense of order so grievously.
>
>
> - d.

If popular culture/Trivia are so important why does [[Hurricane
Katrina]] (to chose a random example) not include either word?

Lets consdir the situation:

The problem: This article is to big and there is no obvious split
Solution. Remove stuff while doing the minium posible damage to the article.

That tends to result in the popular culture/trivia section being the
first to go.

--
geni


from_name: Alphax (Wikipedia email)

subject:
[WikiEN-l] What is going on? Yahoo mail won't allow messages
	to	be replied to. It gives a blank box and won't accept typing

body:
Tony Sidaway wrote:
> Wikipedia doesn't own Yahoo mail. Yet.
>
> Replies work in gmail.

Yeah, I sent him a gmail invite.

--
Alphax - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax
Contributor to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia
"We make the internet not suck" - Jimbo Wales
Public key: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax/OpenPGP
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body:
On 11/15/05, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> If popular culture/Trivia are so important why does [[Hurricane
> Katrina]] (to chose a random example) not include either word?
>
> Lets consdir the situation:
>
> The problem: This article is to big and there is no obvious split
> Solution. Remove stuff while doing the minium posible damage to the article.
>
> That tends to result in the popular culture/trivia section being the
> first to go.

Trivia sections should not exist for their own sake.  If there is no
way to work the facts into the text of the article, it is likely
enough the writer showing off that they knew something or a newbie
thinking this is a fan site.  The details are usually irrelevant (cf.
edit war over mention of Abraham Lincoln in [[Charles Darwin]]), and
it improves the quality of the articles to take them out.

See also: Editor's Barnstar.

Sam


from_name: Matt Brown

body:
On 11/15/05, Sam Korn <smoddy at gmail.com> wrote:
> Trivia sections should not exist for their own sake.  If there is no
> way to work the facts into the text of the article, it is likely
> enough the writer showing off that they knew something or a newbie
> thinking this is a fan site.  The details are usually irrelevant (cf.
> edit war over mention of Abraham Lincoln in [[Charles Darwin]]), and
> it improves the quality of the articles to take them out.

Many times, the trivia belongs elsewhere - not deleted.  Though often
some rigorous editing will get such a section reading much better.

-Matt


body:
On 11/15/05, Phil Boswell <phil.boswell at gmail.com> wrote:
> So factor it out into a separate article, rather than simply throw it away.
> If there is sufficient information in [[X#X in popular culture]] to cause a
> noticeable delay in loading the article, then maybe an article [[X in
> popular culture]] should be created.
>

I have no wish to create permastubs

--
geni


from_name: Andrew Gray

subject: [WikiEN-l] Status of article rating feature?

body:
On 15/11/05, JAY JG <jayjg at hotmail.com> wrote:
> >From: David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com>
> >
> >Damn we need the rating feature. What's holding it up right now? List
> >please, referring to current version of code. (I know the servers are
> >creaking ...)
>
> Indeed they are.  There was a one hour period yesterday when I could not get
> a single page to come up.

I believe that was a specific Collapse Of Things In A Messy And
Technical Manner, rather than just general low-grade crappiness, which
is now resolved. Not sure why it happened, though.

--
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk


body:
On 11/15/05, Ben Yates <bluephonic at gmail.com> wrote:
> Mediawiki article content is contained in DIVs, not TABLEs, so most browsers
> will load the content as it streams across the phone line rather than
> waiting for the entire page to download before rendering. (I'm not sure how
> Internet Explorer does it, though; does anyone know?)

I doubt anyone knows.

Including Microsoft.

Sam


subject: [WikiEN-l] Synonymous article ID replacing redirects

body:
On 11/15/05, jkelly at fas.harvard.edu <jkelly at fas.harvard.edu> wrote:
>   Perhaps I am missing something, but wouldn't organizing articles in this
> fashion simply push the argument back upon every article that links to the one
> with the contentious name?
>
>   Right now we have a situation in which these debates can be more-or-less
> solved by knowing what the subject's "Wikipedia article name" is, and informing
> people to not link through a redirect.  If Ivory Coast/Cote d'Ivoire become
> equivalent at the backend level, won't the same argument then erupt in the
> "List of African countries" article, the "List of UN members" article, and the
> "List of places with Ivory in their name" article?

Purely theoretically (I don't think such a situation will arise), but
that could easily be resolved with the use of a solidus.  As for which
comes first... does anyone *really* care that much?  If you do, I
think you have your priorities mixed up.

Sam


body:
On 11/15/05, Snowspinner <Snowspinner at gmail.com> wrote:
> If the problem with the content is that it's making the article too
> long, it seems like a spin-off would necessarily not be a permastub.
>
> -Phil

I supose we could argue that if we wait long enough some more popular
culture will turn up.
Early on in an artical's evolution triva/popula culture is a simple
way to add a fair bit of stuff. As the article matures it becomes time
to remove the stuff that hasn't managed to intergrate into the main
article.
--
geni


body:
On 11/15/05, Sam Korn <smoddy at gmail.com> wrote:
> Purely theoretically (I don't think such a situation will arise), but
> that could easily be resolved with the use of a solidus.  As for which
> comes first... does anyone *really* care that much?  If you do, I
> think you have your priorities mixed up.
>
> Sam

See [[WP:LAME]]. People do have thier priorities mixed up and there is
nothing you can do about it.

--
geni


body:
On 11/15/05, Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen at shaw.ca> wrote:
> If the "X in popular culture" section is so small that splitting it off
> would make it a stub, how could it possibly be having any significant
> impact on the loading time of the article it's currently in? If it's a
> permastub section then it can stay in the main article without causing
> any harm.

In most cases it isn't a loading time issue. It's more that if you go
beyond 32k people tend to feel the article is too long. This is the
other side side of wikipedia not being paper.

--
geni


from_name: Chip Berlet

subject: [WikiEN-l] People editing their own Wikipedia articles.

body:
For those interested in the complexity of the issues involved when a
Wiki editor is discouraged from editing their own Wikipedia article, but
is facing a concerted effort to fill that article with negative and
dubious material, see the arbitration case I just filed:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_arbitration#Nobs01_a
nd_others_acting_in_concert

And feel free to jump in with discussion denouncing me, supporting me,
or whatever.  It is complicated and messy.

:-)

Cberlet


from_name: Bryan Derksen

body:
geni wrote:

>On 11/15/05, Snowspinner <Snowspinner at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>>If the problem with the content is that it's making the article too
>>long, it seems like a spin-off would necessarily not be a permastub.
>>
>>-Phil
>>
>>
>
>I supose we could argue that if we wait long enough some more popular
>culture will turn up.
>
>
So _then_ would be the time to split it off of the main article. There's
no need to do it earlier if all you've got is a stub's worth so far.

>Early on in an artical's evolution triva/popula culture is a simple
>way to add a fair bit of stuff. As the article matures it becomes time
>to remove the stuff that hasn't managed to intergrate into the main
>article.
>
>
I don't see how having a section "X in popular culture" near the bottom
of the article on X is not "integrated" properly. At least one article
I've worked on  comes immediately to mind ([[alternative biochemistry]])
where the references to works of fiction were initially scattered
throughout the article and were later separated out into their own "in
fiction" section that IMO made for a much better-integrated article. And
if it became large enough to warrant, an [[alternative biochemistries in
fiction]] child article would seem just fine to me.

And in any event, I still don't see any reason why information that was
good to include in Wikipedia at one point in history later becomes
unacceptable without any related policy changes or changes to the
information itself. Rearranging and refactoring it, sure, but not
deleting it.


from_name: Mark Gallagher

body:
G'day Tony,

> On 11/14/05, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
>>On 11/14/05, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>Case where this happened really badly: webcomics. We now have a
>>>project fork, Comixpedia, entirely caused by AFD. You may recall
>>>extensive discussion surrounding this on this list a few weeks ago.
>>
>>You relise I don't view the existance of Comixpedia (other than their
>>choice to use CC) as a bad thing. Wikipedia needs these subject
>>specific spinoffs. I hope to see more of them.
>
> Why does Wikipedia need subject-specific spinoffs?

Worl, it's my view that Wikipedia needs articles on [[Elf Only Inn]].
It does *not* need articles on minor characters from EOI fanfic (if
there is such a thing).

Notable webcomics belong in Wikipedia.  Unconscionable fanwank belongs
in Comixpedia.  Fortunately, with compatible licencing, we can share the
best/worst of both.  That's why I (and I assume geni) don't think of
Comixpedia as a Bad Thing: it's a filter.  Obviously, Comixpedia isn't a
dumping ground for Wikipedia, but if they're willing to take what we
don't want, and if we can import the stuff we do want but didn't
realise, then that's good, surely?

Compare ABP and AFP.

--
Mark Gallagher
"What?  I can't hear you, I've got a banana on my head!"
- Danger Mouse

--
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