body:
Robert Scott Horning wrote:

> I want to add that there is a huge need for open and free (as in
> speech as well as beer) standards.  Even modestly priced standards
> from groups like ANSI or ISO can cost more than $200 a piece, and I've
> seen some fairly general standards documents costing more than
> $100,000 each with some incredibly draconian non-disclosure
> agreements.  Even supposedly public standards like the National
> Electrical Code that governs how buildings are wired with electricity
> can cost a couple thousand dollars... and that is a matter of law that
> you have to live by.

To what extent do these standards have the force of law, particularly in
the United States.  When the United States ratifies a treaty it means
that it has effectively made that treaty a part of the law of the United
States.  Since US laws are excluded from copyright we should be free to
include the standards that have been so adopted into Wikisource.

Ec


list: wikimedia-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [Foundation-l] Request for approval for a wiki for standards


list: wikien-l

from_name: Kurt Maxwell Weber

subject: [WikiEN-l] userbox : insanity ?

body:
On Friday 06 January 2006 16:34, Rob wrote:
> If the concern is technical
> or aesthetic,

If the concern is aesthetic, then there's no reason to set a limit at all.

--
Kurt Weber
<kmw at armory.com>
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from_name: Kelly Martin

subject: [WikiEN-l] userbox : insanity ?

body:
On 1/6/06, Fred Bauder <fredbaud at ctelco.net> wrote:
> How about an arbitrary rule, maximum of 5 userboxes on any user page?

I have seven on mine, and don't see as though I have to give them up.
Someone who speaks more than five languages wouldn't even be allowed
all their babel boxes with that rule.

Kelly


list: wikitech-l

from_name: John McNeil

subject:
[Wikitech-l] create new pages by accessing the database directly
	FAILS

body:
Edward,

I don't have the answer to your questions about making new pages
directly in the database, but I accomplished the same thing in a
SpecialPage I wrote by creating the content and a new Article from
within the SpecialPage code itself. The SpecialPage defines the form,
and posts back to itself. That way you are still in context with all
the globals you need to make new pages easily. My only difficulty
with this is that the $newArticle->insertNewArticle method ends by
telling the new Article to display itself, yanking you out of the
SpecialPage code.

My SpecialPage is derived from BoardVote.php, which used to be
referenced as an example. You can find it here:
http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/wikipedia/extensions/BoardVote/
BoardVote.php?rev=1.3&only_with_tag=MAIN&view=markup

John


subject: [Wikitech-l] Category finder

body:
Magnus Manske wrote:

>Hi,
>
>I worte a little PHP object that takes
>* a list of article IDs
>* a list of categories
>and returns those article IDs which belong to these categories *or their
>subcategories*.
>
>The algorithm is written to minimize the number of read queries when
>parsing the category tree. The maximum number of read queries is the
>"tallest" category tree in the set of articles (times two, one for the
>"parents", one for their page_ids), which IMHO should mostly be below 10
>(I guess it's usually 5 or less, but I have no data to back that up).
>
This problem seems like the top-down counterpart of bottom-up problem of
category tracing an article to the one top category.  Or the similar
problem of using "What links here" to trace back to the Main Page.  In
either case the path length should be the same, and many will find it
amazingly short.  It can probably be estimated from the average number
of direct subcategories in a category.  This yields the simple
exponential equation n^x=T where "n" is the average number of
subcategories in a category, and T is the total number of articles in
the database.  In other words x = log T/log n.  In a simple example with
base 10 logarithms: If each category has 10 sub-categories and there are
1,000,000 articles in the database the average path length will only be
6.  Growing to 10,000,000 only increases that path length to 7.

>So, if the tree depth for an article is 8, and I add more articles to
>search for which all have a depth of 8 or less, no additional database
>queries are neccessary. The individual query will grow in size, though.
>
Yes

>I intend to use it on the Tasks feature search, which is why I put it
>into that extension ("extensions" module, "Tasks/categoryfinder.php").
>But I hope this can be used for other searches as well. The idea is,
>instead of searching for, say, 25 articles, to internally search for
>more (e.g. a few hundred), then filter that set through the
>categoryfinder, until there are 25 matching articles.
>
>Before I start implementing the actual search interface, can anyone tell
>me if that would put too much stress on the DB slaves? Keep in mind that
>limiting several searches to "articles in [[Category:Physics]] and its
>subcategories" appears to be immensely useful, so it might be well worth
>the DB stress from a user standpoint.
>
I suspect that the bottom up problem should be easier, especially in a
strict herarchy where a sub-category only belongs to one category.  This
would give a single tracing back to the source.  Ethnologue uses it in
its website, and so do taxonomic databases.  We show this in our species
taxoboxes, and it is a significant feature in Wikispecies.

When you go in the other direction the size of your results can grow
exponentially, and practically you can only show a limited depth of
categories.  After an initial query you can perform a second more
limited query.  In a sense it suggests that a more organized approach to
categories would be superior to the higgledy-piggledy one that currently
prevails.

Ec


list: foundation-l

from_name: Mark Ryan

subject: [Foundation-l] Wikimedia logo policy

body:
Notafish (Delphine) has told me on my talk page that the 3D masthead I
made for my redesign of the www.wikimedia.org portal (which
incorporates the Wikimedia Foundation logo) violates a
newly-publicised Wikimedia Foundation policy about the use of the
Wikimedia logo.

Delphine also tells me that the file should also be deleted from the
Commons as well. Apparently the policy this image violates is that no
derivative of the logo may be used without the prior approval of the
Foundation.

Is there any chance the Board would approve my derivative of the logo?
The masthead in question is located at:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Foundation_3D.png

and the logo policy that was made public after my logo had been on the
portal for several days is:

http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Wikimedia_visual_identity_guidelines

Forgive me for being a cynic, but was that policy made public solely
as a result of my logo derivative, in order to have it removed from
the portal? Apparently that policy had been on some "Internal Wiki"
for quite some time beforehand. If someone didn't like the logo
derivative I made then they could have just told me.

~Mark Ryan


subject: [Foundation-l] Wikimedia logo policy


from_name: charles matthews

subject: [WikiEN-l] Unused userboxes

body:
"Matt Brown" wrote

>I do suspect in the current climate that will just make a dozen people
start to use it, to protect it.

Something to that.  Attention-seeking behaviour is sometimes best treated by
ignoring it, as parents know.

Charles


from_name: Rob Smith

subject: [WikiEN-l] The userbox fad

body:
*Jay Converse*  said

a new editor come in and join a discussion with old editors can provide a
fresh point of view..."

Since Wikipedia has an aversion to becoming "rule bound", of course
personality is going to win out over process & policies; hence the
"ideological cliques".  And most users don't know beans about the ideology
they've inherited, they just mime others who profess to have some
understanding.

nobs


from_name: Wikiacc

subject: [WikiEN-l] Worthy admins? (was "The userbox fad")

body:
On 1/3/06, Ben Emmel <bratsche1 at gmail.com> wrote:
> I am noticing some of the same issues: Users are slipping through RfA
> without much opposition, but without much community support either. They
> seem to be decent editors, mostly doing work in a small area of Wikipedia,
> and when (self)nominated for adminship, they get their "Wikifriends" to
> support them, and boom! admin tools. Inevitably, wheel warring (large or
> small) will happen from these admins, because they actually don't understand
> or generally support the long-standing policies that we have here.

I don't like saying this, but the scenario described eerily mirrors my
own nomination. (Except for the "Wikifriends" part. I knew few of the
users who voted for me.)
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/Wikiacc)

--
--~~~~
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Wikiacc


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] Useless "developers"

body:
Servien Ilaino wrote:
> Sorry to say, but these developers are kind of useless, aren't developers
> supposed to "develop"... I haven't seen a new wiki for ages, no reactions
> from developers or whatever at all!

The Wikimedia Foundation board has refused to endorse the proposed policy for
new language additions, so things are pretty much frozen until someone clarifies
who has authority to do what and when.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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from_name: Angela

subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Wikimedia logo policy

body:
I agree with Anthere's responses to the other part of your mail, so
I'll just respond to this part:
> Is there any chance the Board would approve my derivative of the logo?

I'd suggest the logo not be hastily deleted since there are dozens of
derivatives and it might set a precedent for deleting those. The
visual guidelines policy is not the same as the policy which says how
derivative logos are to be handled - we don't yet have a policy for
that. Some initial examples are at
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Uses_of_logo_derivatives but it's not
moved much beyond this stage yet. Until we have a policy, we can not
approve your logo, but I would rather it be kept for discussion than
deleted at this stage.

Angela.


from_name: Chris Jenkinson

body:
Gerard Meijssen wrote:
> Hoi,
>
> On Meta the request for a Wikistandards wiki has been revived. The
> request was voiced at a conference of language standards in  Berlin (Dec
> 12-13, 2005). A significant number of people from the language standards
> community have indicated on Meta that they are interested to actively
> support this effort. See:
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposals_for_new_projects#Wikistandards
> Thanks,
>  GerardM

Are these standards you would put on this new wiki anything to do with a
manual of style or writing guidelines?

I also have to ask - is a wiki really the best format for documenting
standards? A standard is supposed to be an immutable document; it can't
just be edited and changed by anyone because that's going to ruin
compatibility.

Chris

--
Chris Jenkinson
chris at starglade.org

"Mistrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful."
  -- Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra


subject: [WikiEN-l] The userbox fad

body:
When a newbie sees on a Policy page, "Edit this page", it's not unlike going
to a crooked horsetrack, one knows what to expect.

nobs

> On 1/7/06, Peter Mackay <peter.mackay at bigpond.com> wrote:
> >
> > But how does a new editor know the difference between policy, policy and
> > policy?


from_name: Delirium

body:
Ray Saintonge wrote:

> To what extent do these standards have the force of law, particularly
> in the United States.  When the United States ratifies a treaty it
> means that it has effectively made that treaty a part of the law of
> the United States.  Since US laws are excluded from copyright we
> should be free to include the standards that have been so adopted into
> Wikisource.

Generally they aren't adopted verbatim into law---instead the law
references the standards, which still remain under copyright.  For
example, the law will include a phrase like "for devices in compliance
with ISO standard xxxxx", but will not actually include the text of said
standard.

-Mark


from_name: Jay Converse

subject: [WikiEN-l] The userbox fad

body:
On 1/7/06, Rob Smith <nobs03 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> *Jay Converse*  said
>
> a new editor come in and join a discussion with old editors can provide a
> fresh point of view..."
>
> Since Wikipedia has an aversion to becoming "rule bound", of course
> personality is going to win out over process & policies; hence the
> "ideological cliques".  And most users don't know beans about the ideology
> they've inherited, they just mime others who profess to have some
> understanding.
>
> nobs
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

Well, in that case, new editors can shift the clique balance of power, to
keep on using that line of thought.  Either way, I think the goal should be
to attract new users to help shape the site rather than kicking people out.

--
I'm not stupid, just selectively ignorant.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Userbox fads

body:
On 1/4/06, Philip Sandifer <snowspinner at gmail.com> wrote:
> The userbox project has become a poisonous
> pit that explicitly targets those who do not like userboxes, and it
> is actively fostering a crusade mentality. This is a systemic
> problem, not one of specific boxes. In short, the project itself
> needs to go.

While your wording may be a bit harsh, it does convey sentiments of
quite a few frustrated Wikipedians.

--
--~~~~
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Wikiacc


subject: [WikiEN-l] userbox : insanity ?

body:
On 1/6/06, Fred Bauder <fredbaud at ctelco.net> wrote:
> How about an arbitrary rule, maximum of 5 userboxes on any user page?
>
> Fred
>
> On Jan 6, 2006, at 1:09 PM, Jimmy Wales wrote:
>
> > Jimmy Wales wrote:
> >
> >> SCZenz wrote:
> >>
> >>
> >>> How about {{User allow fairuse}}?  That seems to be against pretty
> >>> much everything Wikipedia stands for.  If we have so many users who
> >>> think they can *vote* in an unreasonable copyright policy, maybe we
> >>> need unilateral admin action after all.
> >>>
> >>
> >>
> >> I deleted that one myself.
> >>
> >
> > And then, upon a request on my talk page, undeleted it.  I'll let the
> > TfD run its course.
> >
> > I'm in favor of deleting a ton of userboxes, especially those with
> > non-free images, but frankly, I think we should get rid of most of
> > them
> > anyway.  (This is not a decree and I'm trying to stay out of the
> > userbox
> > wars myself.  Mostly.)
> >
> >
> >
> > --Jimbo
> > _______________________________________________
> > WikiEN-l mailing list
> > WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> > To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
> >
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

--
--~~~~
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Wikiacc


subject: [WikiEN-l] Userbox fads

body:
On 1/7/06, Wikiacc <wikiacc at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 1/4/06, Philip Sandifer <snowspinner at gmail.com> wrote:
> > The userbox project has become a poisonous
> > pit that explicitly targets those who do not like userboxes, and it
> > is actively fostering a crusade mentality. This is a systemic
> > problem, not one of specific boxes. In short, the project itself
> > needs to go.
>
> While your wording may be a bit harsh, it does convey sentiments of
> quite a few frustrated Wikipedians.
>
> --
> --~~~~
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Wikiacc
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

For what it's worth, I don't think disbanding the project without creating
some kind of guideline for future userboxes would be a good idea.  The
project has standardized what was before a haphhazard collection of template
naming schemes and such.  What they did needed to be done, and I think it'd
be an insult to all who worked on it to allow it to get back to the way it
was.

--
I'm not stupid, just selectively ignorant.


subject: [WikiEN-l] The userbox fad

body:
On 1/7/06, Sam Spade <samspade.thomasjefferson at googlemail.com> wrote:
>
> > Well, in that case, new editors can shift the clique balance of power,
> to
> > keep on using that line of thought.  Either way, I think the goal should
> be
> > to attract new users to help shape the site rather than kicking people
> out.
> >
> > --
> > I'm not stupid, just selectively ignorant.
>
> Or making them feel so unhappy and powerless that they leave.
>
> Sam Spade
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

That's worse, in my opinion.  [[WP:NOT]] a high school.

--
I'm not stupid, just selectively ignorant.


body:
Delirium wrote:

> Ray Saintonge wrote:
>
>> To what extent do these standards have the force of law, particularly
>> in the United States.  When the United States ratifies a treaty it
>> means that it has effectively made that treaty a part of the law of
>> the United States.  Since US laws are excluded from copyright we
>> should be free to include the standards that have been so adopted
>> into Wikisource.
>
> Generally they aren't adopted verbatim into law---instead the law
> references the standards, which still remain under copyright.  For
> example, the law will include a phrase like "for devices in compliance
> with ISO standard xxxxx", but will not actually include the text of
> said standard.

Such a phrase would make them a part of the law by implication, and thus
not protected.  Of course, before using  any one of them we would need
to make sure that the US has in fact adopted that standard.

Ec


from_name: Sam Spade

subject: [WikiEN-l] Userbox fads

body:
While I like what Jimbo said, and what he agreed w Tony Sidaway
regarding, I should hope he doesn't agree w tony on the following:

One pretty good way to find out would be to take away the user
categories and see how many people leave.  If they mostly stay, we've
gotten rid of things that facilitate the abuse of Wikipedia.  If they
mostly leave, we've unshipped people who were here for the wrong
reasons.  Either way is a win.

This is not only completely illogical, it underscores how out of touch
admins can get. Intentionally taking away a source of joy from large
numbers of users in a bid to see if they'll leave, or if they'll just
accept your hegemony over them... thats pretty much the opposite of my
recipe for success in a volunteer setting.

Sam Spade


subject: [WikiEN-l] Userbox fads

body:
On 1/7/06, Sam Spade <samspade.thomasjefferson at googlemail.com> wrote:
> While I like what Jimbo said, and what he agreed w Tony Sidaway
> regarding, I should hope he doesn't agree w tony on the following:
>
> One pretty good way to find out would be to take away the user
> categories and see how many people leave.  If they mostly stay, we've
> gotten rid of things that facilitate the abuse of Wikipedia.  If they
> mostly leave, we've unshipped people who were here for the wrong
> reasons.  Either way is a win.
>
> This is not only completely illogical, it underscores how out of touch
> admins can get. Intentionally taking away a source of joy from large
> numbers of users in a bid to see if they'll leave, or if they'll just
> accept your hegemony over them... thats pretty much the opposite of my
> recipe for success in a volunteer setting.
>
> Sam Spade
>

And in case it begs the question, my recipe for success in a volunteer
setting involves lots of affirmation, community building, and rewards
(however small). As a psychology student w who places a great deal of
emphasis on behaviour modification, I see a morbid unbalance of
rewards to punishments on this project. Too much ARBCOM, not enough
"editor of the week". In sum, DO NOT arbitrarily take away that which
makes people happy. Don't be reactionary, be adaptive. Less
complaints, blocks and deletions, more praise, mentorship and
barnstars.

Sam Spade


subject:
[Wikitech-l] 2 Questions: "Image-Batch-Upload" and "Refresh wiki
	data"

body:
Jan wrote:
> Hello Brion,
>
> thanks for the tipps.
>
>> refreshLinks.php
>
> I tried to call maintenance/refreshLinks.php, but I always get "Error
> 403". i tried to give 777 to all files in maintenance/*, but without
> success.
> Do I need access to server-commandline?

Yes.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [Wikitech-l] Useless "developers"

body:
--- Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:
> Servien Ilaino wrote:
> > Sorry to say, but these developers are kind of useless, aren't developers
> > supposed to "develop"... I haven't seen a new wiki for ages, no reactions
> > from developers or whatever at all!
>
> The Wikimedia Foundation board has refused to endorse the proposed policy for
> new language additions, so things are pretty much frozen until someone clarifies
> who has authority to do what and when.

Also, simply having an ISO code is not enough justification to have a separate wiki. Our goal is
to create encyclopedias in every language for the purpose of enabling reading and understanding.

Many ISO codes are for mutually intelligible dialects that should not have separate wikis. Even
having different scripts between dialects is not always a reason to have separate wikis since we
have the ability to convert scripts on the fly.

A much better policy needs to be created that takes this into account.

BTW, the developers are most useful and greatly appreciated. Without them we would have no
software and the servers would bog down and become useless. Developing != creating.

-- mav

__________________________________________
Yahoo! DSL ? Something to write home about.
Just $16.99/mo. or less.
dsl.yahoo.com


subject: [WikiEN-l] Trust metric Was: Userbox compromise proposal

body:
I totally agree with the need for this. It's not about replacing human
judgment, it's about giving tools to improve human judgment. For any
proposal to work though, I think we need a way of indicating that an
edit was "bad" in some sense.  In eBay parlance, it would be like
negative feedback. But at least with that, you could start to count the
number of good/bad edits for a user. It would be incredibly handy to
know that a given user was +11,000 (56% good) (in other words, a very
active but controversial user - probably a pain in the arse), as
compared to +300 (99% good) - new, but doing a great job.

Any system can be gamed - you just have to make it not worth anyone's
time.  Google pagerank can be gamed, but it takes a lot of effort and is
very difficult to do cheaply.

Steve

I also very much like this proposal. If nothing else it would clarify
me for who I am, and give certain people alot less room to insult and
stigmatise others based on tarbaby terms like "troll".

Sam Spade


from_name: Ben Emmel

subject: [WikiEN-l] Unused userboxes

body:
On 1/6/06, Zzyzx11 at Wikipedia <zzyzx11 at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> Here's something that crossed my mind:
>
> As the number of userboxes continues to increase, I am starting to see a
> number of them that are currently NOT being used by ANYONE. So in a couple
> weeks from now, if these same userboxes are still not being used on any
> userpage, shouldn't they be put on TFD like any other unused, orphaned
> template? Why or why not?
>
> Zzyzx11 at en.wikipedia.org
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Zzyzx11
> zzyzx11 at hotmail.com
>

Check out [[WP:TFD]] right now. Currently,  there is a whole bunch of
userbox warriors that are going to stall and keep any userbox that comes
their way. In short, the box is going to get kept anyways. An example of
this is {{User fair use}}, which Jimbo himself deleted before being informed
of the TfD debate, which is really irrelevant, considering that we can't
disobey the US copyright law that Wikipedia is legally obligated to fllow.

Looks to me that the userbox editors are disrupting the flow and work of
Wikipedia, but I'd be interested to hear what others think. Those who have
five times as many userbox edits as mainspace edits can't be helping
Wikipedia all that much.

--
Ben Emmel
Wikipedia - User:Bratsche
bratsche1 at gmail.com
"A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees."
-- William Blake


body:
Robert Scott Horning wrote:
> I believe that a wiki is an excellent method of collaborative writing,
> including standards development.  Often when trying to develop a
> standard you need to work on several parts of the standard
> simultaneously, and having revision control and other feedback methods
> found on MediaWiki software is going to be very useful.
>
> As far as making a standard immutable, we already have page protection
> once the standard has been put in place.  This is no different than
> Wikisource where similar kinds of immutable documents already exist.
> That would have to be a community decision as to if a certain page has a
> "final" status and can't be changed any more.
>
> More likely, you would have to have some sort of versioning of documents
> anyway, where you would have a "frozen" official version and a draft
> version that is still a work in progress.  We already have date
> versioning in MediaWiki software anyway, so this is something that
> doesn't even need extra development.

That's a fair point, thanks for the explanation.

Chris

--
Chris Jenkinson
chris at starglade.org

"Mistrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful."
  -- Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra


from_name: Rob

subject: [WikiEN-l] The userbox fad

body:
On 1/7/06, Peter Mackay <peter.mackay at bigpond.com> wrote:
>
> But how does a new editor know the difference between policy, policy and
> policy? He needs to be set straight on the important things, but I can't
> see
> any way of doing that without some sort of discussion.

[[RTFM]]

Policy pages should fufill this function, and if they do not, they should be
rewritten.  Sure, questions are necessary to clarify fine points and
applications in particular instances, but users who refuse to read policy
pages after being directed to them and need basic things explained to them
over and over again or who wish to argue about fundamental policy points are
time-wasting problem users.


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [WikiEN-l] The userbox fad

body:
Andrew Gray wrote:

>There are policies on Wikipedia that are granite, bedrock; that we
>write from a neutral point of view, or that we are an enyclopedia and
>not an academic journal or discussion board.
>
>There are policies on Wikipedia that are a matter of solid consensus;
>our image-licensing policies, or our (admittedly confusing) stance on
>What Dialect Of English To Use.
>
>Then there are policies - well, guidelines - that are fluid, amenable;
>that we abbreviate US as "U.S.", or the minutae of the protection
>policy, or whether or not we italicise certain kinds of terms, or
>obscure naming conventions, or... oh, you could name thousands.
>
>And, to confuse matters, we talk about them all as "policy", hence
>confusion like this.
>
>So, our new guy comes along, and decides he wants to debate policy.
>Good-good; there'll certainly be someone willing to argue with him,
>whatever side he chooses - three geeks, one place, four opinions. And
>he may certainly have a new and innovative viewpoint on his topic.
>
Just because he wants to debate these things does not mean that any of
us needs to feel obliged to engage in that debate.  It should be made
clear to him that silence doesn not imply consent.  He may not really be
a troll, but the "Don't feed the trolls" principle can also work with
other ideas.

>But if he's going to argue over whether we're an encyclopedia, or
>whether we should search-and-replace every instance of "petrol" with
>"gasoline"... then *absolutely nothing* will ever be gained by this
>debate. We're set in our ways, we're not going to change because one
>persuasive guy comes along and suggests it, though he may be damn good
>at doing so.
>
Whether we are an encyclopedia is an unchangeable policy that is
fundamental to our existence, and that is what makes it unchangeable.
Wiktionary and Wikibooks both grew out a fundamental deviation from that
policy.

The petrol/gasoline is, at least theoretically, debatable and
changeable.  It is just highly unlikely that the person who makes such a
suggestion would ever get anywhere with it.  To use the argument that
"*absolutely nothing* will ever be gained by this debate" as an argument
for stopping the debate before it starts prejudges the outcome, and that
detracts from the freeness of Wikipedia.  Let him make his proposal, and
just as quickly ignore him.

>It is good to discuss things. But discussing something that cannot and
>will not be changed is, to my mind at least, a bit of a waste of time.
>I'm all for debating political issues, but I confess to getting a bit
>tetchy when someone tries to debate gravity with me.
>
Gravity is the whole problem with some of these discussions; a little
levity would bring about a significant improvement in tone.

>Anyone remember the guy who wrote to us - it might have been
>wikipedia-l, come to think of it - demanding that we set up an English
>English language wikipedia? Absolutely nothing to be gained by arguing
>with him - it just used up the time of a lot of people, without doing
>anything beneficial, and pissed a few people off. (Goodness knows I
>was one)
>
There is no effective way of arguing with utter cluelessness; it could
have as easily been a dog demanding a woofopedia..  The best way to
argue with them is not to argue at all.  They go away much more quicly
when you say absolutely nothing.

>Arguing over something immutable - doesn't help anyone. Arguing over
>something we are willing to change, from a new viewpoint? Can
>certainly be helpful.
>
To the extent that policies are at all votable those votes should remain
open forever.  Established organizations are prone to group-think based
on their own past experiences.  A newcomer may have a completely
different view of a situation, and should not need to feel frozen from
the debate because he arrived late.  If enough newcomers vote to revoke
that policy, then it's reversed.  There is no reason to fear that very
widely accepted policies will ever be changed by this.  On the other
hand, maybe the more hotly disputed policies need to be kept open until
a more solid consensus can be reached.

Ec


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Wikimedia Visual identity guidelines

body:
Anthere wrote:
> PS : these guidelines have been standing on the internal wiki for at
> least two months. It is high time they become public. If there are
> comments to make on the guidelines until officially approved, please
> hurry making them :-)

Is there any reason this particular policy was discussed on the internal
wiki rather than meta? Not that I'm really active in meta, but it
doesn't really seem that private a topic to me.

Chris

--
Chris Jenkinson
chris at starglade.org

"Mistrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful."
  -- Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra


from_name: XaosFluX

subject: [WikiEN-l] Unused userboxes

body:
I would say so, excepting ones that are part of a series, e.g.
en-1,en-2,en-3,en-4 as someone wanting to join the new level may not be able
to make the template easily.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Zzyzx11 at Wikipedia" <zzyzx11 at hotmail.com>
To: <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
Sent: Friday, January 06, 2006 11:51 PM
Subject: [WikiEN-l] Unused userboxes

> Here's something that crossed my mind:
>
> As the number of userboxes continues to increase, I am starting to see a
> number of them that are currently NOT being used by ANYONE. So in a couple
> weeks from now, if these same userboxes are still not being used on any
> userpage, shouldn't they be put on TFD like any other unused, orphaned
> template? Why or why not?
>
> Zzyzx11 at en.wikipedia.org
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Zzyzx11
> zzyzx11 at hotmail.com
>
> _________________________________________________________________
> Don't just search. Find. Check out the new MSN Search!
> http://search.msn.click-url.com/go/onm00200636ave/direct/01/
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l


from_name: SCZenz

subject: [WikiEN-l] Unused userboxes

body:
On 1/7/06, Ben Emmel <bratsche1 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 1/6/06, Zzyzx11 at Wikipedia <zzyzx11 at hotmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Here's something that crossed my mind:
> >
> > As the number of userboxes continues to increase, I am starting to see a
> > number of them that are currently NOT being used by ANYONE. So in a couple
> > weeks from now, if these same userboxes are still not being used on any
> > userpage, shouldn't they be put on TFD like any other unused, orphaned
> > template? Why or why not?
> >
> > Zzyzx11 at en.wikipedia.org
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Zzyzx11
> > zzyzx11 at hotmail.com
> >
>
> Check out [[WP:TFD]] right now. Currently,  there is a whole bunch of
> userbox warriors that are going to stall and keep any userbox that comes
> their way. In short, the box is going to get kept anyways. An example of
> this is {{User fair use}}, which Jimbo himself deleted before being informed
> of the TfD debate, which is really irrelevant, considering that we can't
> disobey the US copyright law that Wikipedia is legally obligated to fllow.
>
> Looks to me that the userbox editors are disrupting the flow and work of
> Wikipedia, but I'd be interested to hear what others think. Those who have
> five times as many userbox edits as mainspace edits can't be helping
> Wikipedia all that much.

I hope the admin who decides closes the {{User fair use}} debate
evaluates the quality of the arguments made in relation to the
encyclopedia's mission; it'll be deleted then.

SCZenz


subject: [WikiEN-l] The userbox fad

body:
Rob wrote:

>On 1/7/06, Peter Mackay <peter.mackay at bigpond.com> wrote:
>
>
>>But how does a new editor know the difference between policy, policy and
>>policy? He needs to be set straight on the important things, but I can't
>>see
>>any way of doing that without some sort of discussion.
>>
>>
>Policy pages should fufill this function, and if they do not, they should be
>rewritten.  Sure, questions are necessary to clarify fine points and
>applications in particular instances, but users who refuse to read policy
>pages after being directed to them and need basic things explained to them
>over and over again or who wish to argue about fundamental policy points are
>time-wasting problem users.
>
That's still a paternalistic, dictatorial model.  You're closing off the
possibility that they may have better ideas.  That's also precisely
what's wrong with many educational systems who grind children into an
unquestiuning submission to the system.

Ec


from_name: Ashar Voultoiz

subject: [Wikitech-l] Special:Disambiguations is back

body:
Hello,

I have fixed [[Special:Disambiguations]] and recached it on all wikis
running from the florida cluster.

You just have to make sure that the template being used to flag
disambiguation pages is correctly set in:

 [[MediaWiki:Disambiguationspage]]

It must be part of the template: namespace ( aka template:<something> ).

cheers,

--
Ashar Voultoiz - WP++++
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Hashar
http://www.livejournal.com/community/wikitech/
IM: hashar at jabber.org  ICQ: 15325080


from_name: Alphax (Wikipedia email)

body:
Steve Bennett wrote:
<snip>
> Any system can be gamed - you just have to make it not worth anyone's
> time.  Google pagerank can be gamed, but it takes a lot of effort and is
> very difficult to do cheaply.
>

Nah, you just write to every website that you come across "would you
like to exchange links with us?"

--
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


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: userbox : insanity ?

body:
Kirill Lokshin wrote:
> On 1/6/06, Sam Korn <smoddy at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>On 1/6/06, Kirill Lokshin <kirill.lokshin at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>>Good idea.  Is there some way this can be done on a per-namespace
>>>basis, though?  A lot of Wikipedia: pages (e.g. [[Wikipedia:Template
>>>messages]]) transclude a lot of templates; the use of {{tl}} has also
>>>become quite pervasive, both in Wikipedia: and in Talk:
>>
>>{{tl}} should be substituted.
>
>
> Does it work when substituted now?  I know there were some issues with
> that before.
>

Yes, I fixed it (and some templates which were using ~~~~) quite a long
time ago, by changing the <nowiki>s to character entity references...

--
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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list: wikipedia-l

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Serbo-Croatian wikipedia

body:
Dejan Cabrilo wrote:

>Datrio just started a poll on closing Serbo-Croatian wiki, unblocked a
>vandal who blanked dozens of articles, and made up rules that people
>who've been targeting Serbo-Croatian wiki can vote, pretty much
>disregarding all the people involved in the project.
>
>Datrio, may I ask you why??? I really, truly, don't understand. We get
>a vandal, few trolls to support the vandal, and your response is to
>close the wiki!?
>
>
I won't vote because I am not part of that community, but the recent
changes does show that the project is active.  Assuming that the vote
succeeds there would still be enough active and involved people to pass
the criteria for starting a new wiki.  Under those circumstances
wouldn't it be much easier to argue that a dissolution vote is invalid
if it would leave enough people behind to start a new wiki in that same
language.

Ec


subject: [WikiEN-l] The userbox fad

body:
Tony Sidaway wrote:
> On 1/4/06, Tony Sidaway <f.crdfa at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>Have you examined the figures?   This is a massive growth.  Political
>>and belief-based userboxes have increased tenfold since the end of
>>November.  A database check tells me that of our 3500 or so userboxes,
>>1500 were created in December, and a further 250 have been created in
>>the first three days of January alone.
>
>
> Kelly informs me that a large amount of the apparent growth in
> December can be accounted for by cut-and-paste moves of userbox
> templates as they were renamed.  Apparently the userbox people were
> unaware of the fact that a moved template gets a redirect, thus
> preserving the user pages including it.
>

Can you please point them to
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Merging_and_moving_pages so they
don't do it again?

--
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: Anthere

body:
daniwo59 at aol.com wrote:
>
> In a message dated 1/6/2006 8:44:23 PM Eastern Standard Time,
> notafishz at gmail.com writes:
>
> I have  put up the Wikimedia visual identity guidelines on the
> Foundation website.  They were agreed upon by the board, officers and
> local  chapters.
>
>
>
> Where?

Not agreed per board meeting or voted over.

I'll add the policy to the list of policies to be officially agreed upon
at the next board meeting.

Ant

PS : these guidelines have been standing on the internal wiki for at
least two months. It is high time they become public. If there are
comments to make on the guidelines until officially approved, please
hurry making them :-)

RePS : these guidelines are also a first step for further policy about
logo uses, in particular by third parties.

ReRePS : I note a sentence I missed before, stating "Note that no
derivative of the Wikimedia logo will be accepted.". I fear this
sentence will have to be changed because we actually several times
agreed for derivative on the projects, for local use. So, it does not
reflect reality....


from_name: Rob Lanphier

subject: [Wikitech-l] Globals and singletons

body:
Hi Tim,

I wholeheartedly endorse the idea of removing gratuitous globals, even
if I'm only agreeing from the peanut gallery.  Hopefully my response
will spur some conversation from folks that you were probably hoping to
hear from more than me.

It's probably not worth doing in one swell foop, but an agreement on a
direction combined with an incremental approach where cleanup is done as
a part of fixing issues (like you are doing now with $wgLinkCache) seems
like the smart way to go.

More inline:

On Thu, 2006-01-05 at 12:20 +1100, Tim Starling wrote:
> In many cases, use of globals obscures data flow and makes classes less
> flexible, inhibiting reuse. This is patently true in the case of $wgTitle
> and $wgArticle, the existence of which encourage lazy programmers to write
> code which fails in the common case where more than one of these objects
> exist.  At present, these two objects are almost exclusively used in the
> output phase, so it would make sense to make them members of OutputPage or
> Skin instead of globals.

I'm not sure much reuse is gained by replacing $wgTitle with
$wgSkin->mTitle or even $wgSkin->getTitle().  It's just a global with a
bigger name.

That said, I agree with the sentiment. The more that developers can be
encouraged to write code that relies on "a Title object" as opposed to
"the Title object", the better.

> The most extreme anti-global architecture would be one involving application
> objects:
>
> $mw = new MediaWiki;
> $mw->executeWebRequest();
>
> The application object could theoretically be passed to most class
> constructors, providing a form of global context. That, however, would make
> writing new classes a bit tedious. In my experience, it turns out to be
> easier to make the application object a global, and pull it in wherever it
> is needed. This would have advantages when MediaWiki needs to be embedded as
> a library, since it keeps the global scope cleaner, but it's not really more
> flexible than what we're doing now.

I disagree.  If that level of embedding were possible, I think a lot of
unanticipated reuse would fall out from it.  A good example of where
(possibly) unanticipated reuse happened on a big scale is when Gtk
became an independent project from the Gimp.  There are chunks of the
MediaWiki codebase that probably don't need to be married to MediaWiki.

I started thinking about these issues in building Electowidget.  In the
end, I created a light abstraction layer around some MediaWiki services
(the "HostApplicationObject") which made it possible for me to port my
app to other frameworks.

http://electorama.com/2005/electowidget/classdocs/classHostApplicationObject.html

It hasn't proven itself yet.  I've created a minimal standalone object,
and there's a developer who is working on a version for Drupal, so we'll
see how it goes.

The ideal situation for me and other plugin writers would be that
MediaWiki uses a type of hostapp object in its "native" code, such that
other apps could share that same hostapp implementation (or at least
share an API).

> After some thinking, I was forced to admit that there are some cases where
> globals make sense, from a data flow perspective. The clearest example is
> caching. A cache should have the widest possible scope. If you have two
> application objects, you would want them to share the same caches if
> possible. Indeed, it's better if different threads, processes and even
> servers can share their caches.
>
> There are, however, disadvantages to using global variables for this or any
> other similar purpose. The problem is that the use of global variables
> inhibit lazy initialisation. The familiar solution is to use an accessor
> function, and indeed this approach has already been implemented in several
> places in MediaWiki. I would like to make such accessor functions more
> pervasive.
>
> There is also the problem that the global namespace is somewhat crowded.
> Using a global function for an accessor just moves this problem to somewhere
> else.

>  The alternative [to global accessor functions] is to use a static
> class member as an accessor. This concept is well known, and where the
> static object is the only one ever needed, the object is called a
> singleton.

> The disadvantage to the singleton pattern is that it requires the class name
> to be hard-coded throughout the code base, removing some flexibility. We
> could get around that by having base classes construct derived classes, if
> you don't mind the dependency implications.

This may be a good reason to use a global accessor function, like
wfGetDB to get the Database object.  The db code is effectively used as
a singleton (well, perhaps a "poolington" ;-), and seems to work alright
as an approach.

The nice thing about a global function is that you get slightly more
flexibility to rename/redesign the base class.  You can still use a
static variable rather than a global to actually store the object
instance.  The downside is that it's a little less standard; it's nice
for a programmer new to the codebase to see "singleton" right off the
bat rather than need to figure out that they're dealing with something
that's roughly like a singleton.  As far as the global function
namespace being too crowded, one could easily create a generic class
factory if a hierarchy is absolutely required.

> We need to be guided by our applications, and choose the simplest
> architecture which supports all of them. Are we interested in:
>
> * Embedding? Need to avoid namespace pollution.
> * Per-wiki daemons to do background tasks? Need a means for periodically
> refreshing configuration and caches.
> * A daemon that responds to requests for multiple wikis? Needs multiple
> language objects, and a caching system which discriminates between different
> wikis.

These all seem like interesting apps, and I don't think the needs of any
of them are mutually exclusive.  Of course, this conversation is always
amusing, and seems apropos:
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?PrematureGeneralization

...so I also agree that any grand generalization work needs to be app
driven.  My 2c would be prioritize and order the work based on immediate
demand (e.g. sounds like the daemon for multiple wikis is what you're
most interested in), but at least think about all of the apps above as
you/we/others are doing the work.

Rob


body:
Mark Ryan wrote:

Hi Mark

I already explained a bit more to Mark on irc, but to clarify...

> Notafish (Delphine) has told me on my talk page that the 3D masthead I
> made for my redesign of the www.wikimedia.org portal (which
> incorporates the Wikimedia Foundation logo) violates a
> newly-publicised Wikimedia Foundation policy about the use of the
> Wikimedia logo.

> Delphine also tells me that the file should also be deleted from the
> Commons as well. Apparently the policy this image violates is that no
> derivative of the logo may be used without the prior approval of the
> Foundation.

There is an unclear sentence on the guidelines page. It seems to imply
that no derivative will be accepted. While indeed, the reality is that
some derivative exist, but should be approved prior to their use. And
certainly prior to their upload on commons, since these are cp logos.

> Is there any chance the Board would approve my derivative of the logo?
> The masthead in question is located at:
>
> http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Foundation_3D.png

I have no problem with the logo per se, but have a problem with the
place you intend to use it. This page is the wikimedia portal, and
there, should stand only the official logo. Not a derivative imho.

> and the logo policy that was made public after my logo had been on the
> portal for several days is:
>
> http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Wikimedia_visual_identity_guidelines
>
> Forgive me for being a cynic, but was that policy made public solely
> as a result of my logo derivative, in order to have it removed from
> the portal? Apparently that policy had been on some "Internal Wiki"
> for quite some time beforehand. If someone didn't like the logo
> derivative I made then they could have just told me.

The guidelines have been made about 2 months ago.
We were slow in publishing them :-)
I think noone informed you, because no one realised :-)

> ~Mark Ryan

cheers

Ant


subject: [Wikitech-l] Useless "developers"

body:
On 1/7/06, Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:
> The Wikimedia Foundation board has refused to endorse the proposed policy for
> new language additions, so things are pretty much frozen until someone clarifies
> who has authority to do what and when.

"They" have also not opposed the policy, so wouldn't the previous
situation, where the creation of a new wiki was up to whoever had the
server access necessary to do this as long as it met some sort of
community approval (which the proposed policy can be assumed to have),
carry on until the Board objects to it?

Angela


from_name: Dirk Riehle

subject:
Technical wiki standards (was: Re: [Foundation-l] Request for
	approval for a wiki for standards

body:
Hi everyone interested in wiki standards:

If you are talking about technical standards (wiki markup,
interlinking, interchange, etc.):

At WikiSym 2005 (www.wikisym.org) many of the Wiki engine
implementors met (including Brion Vibber) to tackle the issue of
standardizing wiki protocols once more. (Attempts have been there for
ages, but with limited progress.)

Previous attempts were made on a couple of independent sites,
including Ward's Wiki, Meatball, CommunityWiki. None of these sites
was really representative of the whole community, so we decided to
have a new attempt supported by WikiSym and its community, i.e. a
mailing list
(http://www.wikisym.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/wiki-standards) and
a wiki (http://wiki.wikisym.org). The mailing list is working, the
wiki (a MediaWiki installation) has been dormant so far as we are
gearing up only now. Also, we don't really require that the standards
writing process takes place on one particular wiki---rather we felt
it was ok if people do stuff on their own site (or consolidate what's
already there) and the submit it for community review and approval.

To the extent that you are talking about general technical standards
rather than Wikimedia Foundation site standards, and you would like
to ensure that wiki engine implementors are included, I would like to
make the case that a new organization like WikiSym may be a better
place than a WMF site. (More on that if you are in fact talking about
technical standards.)

In any case, I invite everyone to look at the WikiSym site. WikiSym
2006 will take place in Denmark in August and will be co-located with
ACM Hypertext 2006 and sponsored by ACM SIGWEB. CfP will be out real
soon now :-)

Dirk

----
Dirk Riehle, ph: +49 172 184 8755, web: http:/www.riehle.org
Interested in wiki research? Please see http://www.wikisym.org!
Take a Geek's Tour of the Silicon Valley! http://www.ageekstour.com

At 07.01.2006, Gerard Meijssen wrote:
>Hoi,
>
>On Meta the request for a Wikistandards wiki has been revived. The
>request was voiced at a conference of language standards in  Berlin (Dec
>12-13, 2005). A significant number of people from the language standards
>community have indicated on Meta that they are interested to actively
>support this effort. See:
>http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposals_for_new_projects#Wikistandards
>
>Just a few of the people who have expressed interest in working on a
>Wikistandards project run by Wikimedia:
>
>* Professor Alan K. Melby, Brigham Young University, member of the Board
>of Directors and chair of the Translation and Computers committee,
>American Translators Association and many other affiliations, see
>http://www.ttt.org/akm-cv.html
>* Donald A. DePalma, President and CRO: Common Sense Advisory, Inc.;
>author: Business Without Borders, member of the Board of Directors of
>the Globalization and Localization Association (GALA), chair of the
>Language Standards for Global Business Summit, more:
>http://www.commonsenseadvisory.com/about_us/management.php?id=1
>* Keiran Dunne, Assistant Professor of French, Pennsylvania State
>University * Dr. Jennifer DeCamp, principal engineer at MITRE Corporation, a
>federally funded Research and Development Center, where she provides
>software testing and advice on foreign language technology. She has
>worked with localization issues since the 1970s.
>* Peter Reynolds, Lionbridge Technologies, involved with the XLIFF and
>Translation Web Services standards.
>* Tex Texin, Internationalization Architect, Yahoo, Inc. Tex Texin has
>been providing globalization services including training, strategy, and
>implementation to the software industry for many years. See
>http://www.global-conference.com/iuc27/biosabstracts/b058.html
><http://www.global-conference.com/iuc27/biosabstracts/b058.html> for
>details.
>
>The purpose of Wikistandards will be to discuss standards and to
>formulate drafts on the wiki. Informative encyclopaedic texts would be
>written on Wikipedia. As it is of importance for a standard to be known
>and thereby to be a Standard, many people at the conference indicated
>their willingness to translate these articles to other languages for
>other Wikipedias as well. The terminology involved with standards would
>get its place in WiktionaryZ (the name suggested to replace "Ultimate
>Wiktionary").
>
>Wikistandards itself will be a new project in its own right. It does not
>fit into Wikibooks since the discussions and drafts will be original
>works developed by the standards communities. There will be a portal
>dedicated to language standards, but hopefully, we will get other
>standards communities interested as well. Wikistandards will also make
>use of content in our other projects.
>
>One reason why a wiki like this makes sense is because the Wikimedia
>Foundation is known for its NPOV, it is not part of academia or the
>business world and, as importantly, we have a great track record in
>managing large amounts of content. We can hope for great synergies
>between the standards community and the Wikimedia community.
>
>On the most basic level, Wikimedians will help the standards experts to
>learn the ropes, and to structure the wiki in a way that makes sense.
>But we also have a very real need for being involved in or close to
>standardization processes, particularly language standards, as we will
>make increased use of them in our projects.
>
>On the Unicode website, Wikipedia is already the only website that is
>singled out for its use of UTF-8. With the WiktionaryZ project,
>supporting standards will become even more important as we will have ALL
>languages and people from ALL locales using one database. We have
>discussed using standards like CLDR (Common Locale Data Repository) for
>localization and TBX (TermBase eXchange) for exporting terminology. In
>the future we may even make use of TMX (Translation Memory eXchange) to
>integrate WiktionaryZ with industry standard computer-aided translation
>(CAT) tools. Other standards will be relevant for relation types and
>other meta data.
>
>In the process of standardization, Wikimedia will only set one standard
>of its own: a standard of freedom. Any standard we use in our projects
>must be fully documented, free to use and free to implement, or we do
>not consider it a standard in the first place. What better way to ensure
>that than by being involved, as a neutral party, in the standard
>process?
>
>Given that we have a lot of enthusiasm for this project and given that
>it provides us with a win win situation, I do ask for your permission to
>set up this project in the very near future.
>
>Thanks,
>  GerardM
>
>_______________________________________________
>foundation-l mailing list
>foundation-l at wikimedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l


subject:
[Wikitech-l] Fwd: Technical wiki standards (was: Re: [Foundation-l]
 Request for approval for a wiki for standards

body:
I thought this would be of interest here as well. --Dirk

>Date: Sat, 07 Jan 2006 16:37:37 +0100
>To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List <foundation-l at wikimedia.org>,
>Board Wikimedia Foundation <board at wikimedia.org>
>From: Dirk Riehle <dirk at riehle.org>
>Subject: Technical wiki standards (was: Re: [Foundation-l] Request
>for approval for a wiki for standards
>
>Hi everyone interested in wiki standards:
>
>If you are talking about technical standards (wiki markup,
>interlinking, interchange, etc.):
>
>At WikiSym 2005 (www.wikisym.org) many of the Wiki engine
>implementors met (including Brion Vibber) to tackle the issue of
>standardizing wiki protocols once more. (Attempts have been there
>for ages, but with limited progress.)
>
>Previous attempts were made on a couple of independent sites,
>including Ward's Wiki, Meatball, CommunityWiki. None of these sites
>was really representative of the whole community, so we decided to
>have a new attempt supported by WikiSym and its community, i.e. a
>mailing list
>(http://www.wikisym.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/wiki-standards) and
>a wiki (http://wiki.wikisym.org). The mailing list is working, the
>wiki (a MediaWiki installation) has been dormant so far as we are
>gearing up only now. Also, we don't really require that the
>standards writing process takes place on one particular
>wiki---rather we felt it was ok if people do stuff on their own site
>(or consolidate what's already there) and the submit it for
>community review and approval.
>
>To the extent that you are talking about general technical standards
>rather than Wikimedia Foundation site standards, and you would like
>to ensure that wiki engine implementors are included, I would like
>to make the case that a new organization like WikiSym may be a
>better place than a WMF site. (More on that if you are in fact
>talking about technical standards.)
>
>In any case, I invite everyone to look at the WikiSym site. WikiSym
>2006 will take place in Denmark in August and will be co-located
>with ACM Hypertext 2006 and sponsored by ACM SIGWEB. CfP will be out
>real soon now :-)
>
>Dirk
>
>
>----
>Dirk Riehle, ph: +49 172 184 8755, web: http:/www.riehle.org
>Interested in wiki research? Please see http://www.wikisym.org!
>Take a Geek's Tour of the Silicon Valley! http://www.ageekstour.com
>
>
>At 07.01.2006, Gerard Meijssen wrote:
>>Hoi,
>>
>>On Meta the request for a Wikistandards wiki has been revived. The
>>request was voiced at a conference of language standards in  Berlin (Dec
>>12-13, 2005). A significant number of people from the language standards
>>community have indicated on Meta that they are interested to actively
>>support this effort. See:
>>http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposals_for_new_projects#Wikistandards


from_name: Magnus Manske

subject: [Wikitech-l] Category finder

body:
Hi,

I worte a little PHP object that takes
* a list of article IDs
* a list of categories
and returns those article IDs which belong to these categories *or their
subcategories*.

The algorithm is written to minimize the number of read queries when
parsing the category tree. The maximum number of read queries is the
"tallest" category tree in the set of articles (times two, one for the
"parents", one for their page_ids), which IMHO should mostly be below 10
(I guess it's usually 5 or less, but I have no data to back that up).

So, if the tree depth for an article is 8, and I add more articles to
search for which all have a depth of 8 or less, no additional database
queries are neccessary. The individual query will grow in size, though.

I intend to use it on the Tasks feature search, which is why I put it
into that extension ("extensions" module, "Tasks/categoryfinder.php").
But I hope this can be used for other searches as well. The idea is,
instead of searching for, say, 25 articles, to internally search for
more (e.g. a few hundred), then filter that set through the
categoryfinder, until there are 25 matching articles.

Before I start implementing the actual search interface, can anyone tell
me if that would put too much stress on the DB slaves? Keep in mind that
limiting several searches to "articles in [[Category:Physics]] and its
subcategories" appears to be immensely useful, so it might be well worth
the DB stress from a user standpoint. (Damn you, users! ;-)

Magnus


subject: [WikiEN-l] Userbox fads

body:
Matt Brown wrote:
> I think it's inevitable that given the high profile Wikipedia is
> increasingly having, more people are getting involved - and a smaller
> proportion of them are highly interested in developing an
> encyclopedia.  Wikipedia is in one of the "top sites" spots now, like
> it or not.
>

Slightly OT, but I've seen a lot of confusion between the terms "wiki"
and "Wikipedia" due to our high profile; people will call a wiki a
"Wikipedia", people will call Wikipedia "wiki" and people will call
articles "wikis", too.

There's also the added confusion of what is "the Wiki" - is it
Wikipedia, the Portland Pattern Repository (IIRC the "original" wiki),
or Meatball?

--
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: Andrew Gray

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Userbox compromise proposal (Was: Proposal on userbox
	disagreement)

body:
On 07/01/06, Tony Sidaway <f.crdfa at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 1/5/06, Ben Yates <bluephonic at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > To save this from double-posthood, this is a kind of cool development
> > -- the userspace is coming into its own as a separate construct from
> > the encyclopedia.
>
> Why is this cool?

I think he means "cool" in the sense of "particularly interesting",
rather than "beneficial". Wikipedia is not a social experiment, but
sometimes it behaves like an undirected one when we're not looking.

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


from_name: Nicholas Moreau

subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Wikimedia Visual identity guidelines (Anthere)

body:
Good to see Wikimedia going for a visual identity guide.

Could I suggest the official Pantone colours for the logo, even though we
likely never intend to do Pantone printing? It would be handy to have, as
most corporate identity packages specify them.

The "coated" colours would be:
Red: PANTONE 215
Green: PANTONE 347
Blue: PANTONE 660
Grey: PANTONE Cool Gray 11

I can also figure out the uncoated paper colours, if wanted.

May I suggest also creating styleguides for the other logos, also available
strictly on the Foundation website? Finally, this page is a good collection
of other brand guidelines (http://www.brandsoftheworld.com/guidelines/).

Nick Moreau/Zanimum


from_name: Kirill Lokshin

subject: [WikiEN-l] Unused userboxes

body:
On 1/7/06, Sam Korn <smoddy at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 1/7/06, Peter Mackay <peter.mackay at bigpond.com> wrote:
> > Fine. Let's go through all admin user pages, strip out the templates and
> > argue from the moral high ground.
>
> All non-useful ones are removed from mine.  I urge all other admins to
> do the same.

Damn good idea!

I'll point out, though, that some of the most prolific users of
userboxes are admins.

Kirill Lokshin


subject: [WikiEN-l] The userbox fad

body:
On 1/7/06, Peter Mackay <peter.mackay at bigpond.com> wrote:
>
> I'll agree that there are problem users who either do not or will not
> understand or follow policy, but I think you are being disingenuous if you
> are trying to say that most new editors fall into this category, or that
> editors with multiple userboxes automatically fall into this category.

I was not trying to say any such thing.


from_name: Dejan Cabrilo

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Serbo-Croatian wikipedia

body:
Datrio just started a poll on closing Serbo-Croatian wiki, unblocked a
vandal who blanked dozens of articles, and made up rules that people
who've been targeting Serbo-Croatian wiki can vote, pretty much
disregarding all the people involved in the project.

Datrio, may I ask you why??? I really, truly, don't understand. We get
a vandal, few trolls to support the vandal, and your response is to
close the wiki!?

This poll is here:
http://sh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Pijaca-%D0%9F%D0%B8%D1%98%D0%B0%D1%86%D0%B0#Closing_this_Wikipedia


references:
<141.5464ba53.30f0943e@aol.com> <dpoloi$hs7$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<43BFDAFC.50705@starglade.org>

body:
Chris Jenkinson wrote:
> Anthere wrote:
>
>> PS : these guidelines have been standing on the internal wiki for at
>> least two months. It is high time they become public. If there are
>> comments to make on the guidelines until officially approved, please
>> hurry making them :-)
>
>
> Is there any reason this particular policy was discussed on the internal
> wiki rather than meta? Not that I'm really active in meta, but it
> doesn't really seem that private a topic to me.
>
> Chris

to me neither.

Ant


from_name: Jan

body:
Hello!

I have two questions concerning my own MediaWiki-installation (1.5):

1. I need to upload approx. 400 images to my Wiki; all images are in one Folder
(and have different filenames).
I have full access to my wiki as WikiSysop, FTP, and phpMyAdmin/ODBC.
How could i do this?

2. I imported many articles by MediaWiki-XML-Export/Import feature. But my Wiki
didnt realized them; the articles have categorys in the article-text, but they
are not assigned to the categorys. Only when I edit&save an article, it got
assigned. Same thing with the statistics (0 articles), "most wanted articles" =
none ... and so on. How to refresh all articles?

Best regards,
Jan


from_name: Jimmy Wales

body:
Mark Ryan wrote:
> Forgive me for being a cynic, but was that policy made public solely
> as a result of my logo derivative, in order to have it removed from
> the portal?

Oh no no no no!  It was in the works for a long time, and I'm very sorry
the timing made it appear this way.  To my knowledge anyway, no one
really connected this in any way to any work that you're doing.

Apparently that policy had been on some "Internal Wiki"
> for quite some time beforehand. If someone didn't like the logo
> derivative I made then they could have just told me.
>
> ~Mark Ryan
>


from_name: Domas Mituzas

subject: [Wikitech-l] Category finder

body:
Magnus,

> So, if the tree depth for an article is 8, and I add more articles to
> search for which all have a depth of 8 or less, no additional database
> queries are neccessary. The individual query will grow in size,
> though.

Databases aren't about number of queries sent, with our workloads
(ergh, 20000 SQL queries per second on a cluster) query count does
not matter that much. What matters though, is number of rows looked
up by each query, and how hot that data is. Whenever we give users
possibility to hit our disks, we slow our systems down.

> limiting several searches to "articles in [[Category:Physics]] and its
> subcategories" appears to be immensely useful, so it might be well
> worth
> the DB stress from a user standpoint. (Damn you, users! ;-)

For sake of user experience we are in constant fight for and against
features. ;)

*shrug*, just EXPLAIN your queries and take a look how hard it's
going to hit our databases. And try that on our biggest category trees.

Domas


from_name: Edward Z. Yang

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re: 2 Questions: "Image-Batch-Upload" and "Refresh
	wiki	data"

body:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Hi, regarding your Image-Batch-Upload question, I developed an extension
that allows MediaWiki to wire in already uploaded images in a local
folder. This allows you to use FTP to upload all your files, and then
hook them in without the HTTP interface. Alternatively, you can upload a
single tarball and decompress it, then upload the files (even faster but
a bit more clumsy). It's not very well-documented/tested code and it has
problems with wikis that have magic_quotes enabled and filenames with
single quotes in them (I have a patch that fixes that though), so I'm
not ready to release it yet, but if you're interested, send me an email
and I'll hook you up.

It should be *a lot* faster than using pywikipediabot, although if you
already got it to work, no sense beating a dead horse. I use the script
to upload particularly large files, where FTP serves me much better.
- --
 Edward Z. Yang      Personal: edwardzyang at thewritingpot.com
 SN:Ambush Commander Website: http://www.thewritingpot.com/
 GPGKey:0x869C48DA   http://www.thewritingpot.com/gpgpubkey.asc
 3FA8 E9A9 7385 B691 A6FC B3CB A933 BE7D 869C 48DA
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
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POH1g/96EZW156wzgL8ZXKg=
=V9DG
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subject: [WikiEN-l] The userbox fad

body:
On 06/01/06, Sam Spade <samspade.thomasjefferson at googlemail.com> wrote:
>> When they argue about policy with longtime editors who actually know
>> something about policy, they *are* doing harm.  They are wasting the time
>> and trying the patience of someone who is actually contributing to the goal
>> of the project.
>
> This is one of the worst things I have heard said in the context of
> the wikipedia. I politely ask you to rethink and restate this, as I
> assume you did not mean this.

I think I broadly understand the intended meaning.

There are policies on Wikipedia that are granite, bedrock; that we
write from a neutral point of view, or that we are an enyclopedia and
not an academic journal or discussion board.

There are policies on Wikipedia that are a matter of solid consensus;
our image-licensing policies, or our (admittedly confusing) stance on
What Dialect Of English To Use.

Then there are policies - well, guidelines - that are fluid, amenable;
that we abbreviate US as "U.S.", or the minutae of the protection
policy, or whether or not we italicise certain kinds of terms, or
obscure naming conventions, or... oh, you could name thousands.

And, to confuse matters, we talk about them all as "policy", hence
confusion like this.

So, our new guy comes along, and decides he wants to debate policy.
Good-good; there'll certainly be someone willing to argue with him,
whatever side he chooses - three geeks, one place, four opinions. And
he may certainly have a new and innovative viewpoint on his topic.

But if he's going to argue over whether we're an encyclopedia, or
whether we should search-and-replace every instance of "petrol" with
"gasoline"... then *absolutely nothing* will ever be gained by this
debate. We're set in our ways, we're not going to change because one
persuasive guy comes along and suggests it, though he may be damn good
at doing so.

(Indeed, on things like NPOV, we wouldn't change if one _city_ of
persuasive people came along. You get the idea.)

It is good to discuss things. But discussing something that cannot and
will not be changed is, to my mind at least, a bit of a waste of time.
I'm all for debating political issues, but I confess to getting a bit
tetchy when someone tries to debate gravity with me.

Anyone remember the guy who wrote to us - it might have been
wikipedia-l, come to think of it - demanding that we set up an English
English language wikipedia? Absolutely nothing to be gained by arguing
with him - it just used up the time of a lot of people, without doing
anything beneficial, and pissed a few people off. (Goodness knows I
was one)

Arguing over something immutable - doesn't help anyone. Arguing over
something we are willing to change, from a new viewpoint? Can
certainly be helpful.

I hope that's the point Jay meant to make, and I hope if so it seems clearer...

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


from_name: Peter Mackay

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Userbox compromise proposal (Was: Proposal on
	userboxdisagreement)

body:
> From: wikien-l-bounces at Wikipedia.org
> [mailto:wikien-l-bounces at Wikipedia.org] On Behalf Of SCZenz
>
> On 1/7/06, Tony Sidaway <f.crdfa at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On 1/5/06, Ben Yates <bluephonic at gmail.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > To save this from double-posthood, this is a kind of cool
> > > development
> > > -- the userspace is coming into its own as a separate
> construct from
> > > the encyclopedia.
> >
> > Why is this cool?
>
> Agree with Tony on this question.  The userspace is not
> separate from the encyclopedia; if it is, it is getting misused.

Plainly the userspace *is* a different space. Different rules apply. For
example, POV is allowed on user pages, and while we don't shrink from
editing article or talk pages, we don't modify others' user pages. They are
private, personal, full of OR and opinionated in ways that WP is not and can
never be.

If there are different rules and different modes of behaviour and discourse,
then clearly it is a different cyber-region. It would be wise to accept and
understand this, rather than trying to enforce the same standards and rules
that apply to WP.

Having said that, there is considerable overlap, and obiously the userspace
is closer to the articlespace than it is to (say) PhotoBucket or Google.

Peter (Skyring)


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: How to set window title in Special pages

body:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

You should not be inheriting from SpecialPage under most situation. Keep
everything inside the reflectively called function and make sure your
Special Page's title is added to the message cache before you register
the Special Page. More discussion here: [[meta:Talk:Writing a new
special page]]
- --
 Edward Z. Yang      Personal: edwardzyang at thewritingpot.com
 SN:Ambush Commander Website: http://www.thewritingpot.com/
 GPGKey:0x869C48DA   http://www.thewritingpot.com/gpgpubkey.asc
 3FA8 E9A9 7385 B691 A6FC B3CB A933 BE7D 869C 48DA
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
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from_name: Rob

subject: [WikiEN-l] The userbox fad

body:
On 1/7/06, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
>
> Rob wrote:
> >On 1/7/06, Peter Mackay <peter.mackay at bigpond.com> wrote:
> >>But how does a new editor know the difference between policy, policy and
> >>policy? He needs to be set straight on the important things, but I can't
> >>see
> >>any way of doing that without some sort of discussion.
> >>
> >>
> >Policy pages should fufill this function, and if they do not, they should
> be
> >rewritten.  Sure, questions are necessary to clarify fine points and
> >applications in particular instances, but users who refuse to read policy
> >pages after being directed to them and need basic things explained to
> them
> >over and over again or who wish to argue about fundamental policy points
> are
> >time-wasting problem users.
> >
> That's still a paternalistic, dictatorial model.  You're closing off the
> possibility that they may have better ideas.  That's also precisely
> what's wrong with many educational systems who grind children into an
> unquestiuning submission to the system.

How did you know I used to be a teacher? ;)

I'm all for questioning authority as much as the next guy, but is any
purpose really served by indulging a new editor who wishes to argue about
something fundamental like the NPOV policy?  It's not going to change, and
it's time better spent on, say, an encyclopedia.  I usually point people to
the Village Pump if they want to topple one of the pillars of Wikipedia on
their first day here.  Were I in the classroom again I would use the
opportunity for an educational discussion (what we'd call a "teachable
moment") on whatever the student was objecting to or suggesting.  This isn't
a classroom, though, it's an encyclopedia.


subject: [WikiEN-l] The userbox fad

body:
On 1/7/06, Peter Mackay <peter.mackay at bigpond.com> wrote:
>
>
> If a new editor doesn't understand NPOV, then why not explain it to them?
>

Please don't try to twist this into the idea that I am against explaining
things to new editors.  Explaining the rules is one thing, a protracted
argument about their validity is another.


from_name: Sam Spade

subject: [WikiEN-l] Thread breakage

body:
I don't know what your talking about, but if you explain it more
clearly, and in a more polite tone, I may be of some assistance.

Sam Spade

On 1/7/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:
> Sam Spade wrote:
> > I totally agree with the need for this. It's not about replacing human
> > judgment, it's about giving tools to improve human judgment. For any
> > proposal to work though, I think we need a way of indicating that an
> > edit was "bad" in some sense.  In eBay parlance, it would be like
> > negative feedback. But at least with that, you could start to count the
> > number of good/bad edits for a user. It would be incredibly handy to
> > know that a given user was +11,000 (56% good) (in other words, a very
> > active but controversial user - probably a pain in the arse), as
> > compared to +300 (99% good) - new, but doing a great job.
> >
> > Any system can be gamed - you just have to make it not worth anyone's
> > time.  Google pagerank can be gamed, but it takes a lot of effort and is
> > very difficult to do cheaply.
> >
> > Steve
> >
> > I also very much like this proposal. If nothing else it would clarify
> > me for who I am, and give certain people alot less room to insult and
> > stigmatise others based on tarbaby terms like "troll".
> >
> > Sam Spade
> >
>
> Damnit, can you PLEASE stop replying to MY messages, including what
> SOMEONE ELSE wrote, and not quoting it properly?
>
> --
> 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
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>
>
>
>


subject: [WikiEN-l] The userbox fad

body:
On 1/7/06, Peter Mackay <peter.mackay at bigpond.com> wrote:
>
>
> Fine. I was just picking up on your statement: "I usually point people to
> the Village Pump if they want to topple one of the pillars of Wikipedia on
> their first day here."
>
> Just how often does this occur, anyway?

Not an everyday experience, but often enough for it to be annoying.


subject: [WikiEN-l] The userbox fad

body:
> Well, in that case, new editors can shift the clique balance of power, to
> keep on using that line of thought.  Either way, I think the goal should be
> to attract new users to help shape the site rather than kicking people out.
>
> --
> I'm not stupid, just selectively ignorant.

Or making them feel so unhappy and powerless that they leave.

Sam Spade


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Serbo-Croatian wikipedia

body:
Some of my thoughts on this: I of course, think that the vote is
totally invalid. I voted just to show that you can't close a Wikipedia
which is active.

Now, many people don't turn to Bosnian, Croatian, or Serbian
Wikipedias, because they can't identify with any of those. They are
all covering the same linguistic (or at least similar) region, but
simply because they all exist, a bit of bias is assumed by many
editors.

People like me don't identify their nationality nor the language with
either Bosnia, Croatia or Serbia (I happen to be a citizen of one of
those, but that doesn't make much difference). So, if we decide that
we need three projects for something that everybody could understand,
anyway, why don't leave a fourth one as well?

Creating Serbo-Croatian language, and identity to an extent, is as
political as recreating Croatian and Serbian, Bosnian and possibly
even Montenegrin.

Some people don't want Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia to exist, because they
are very anti-Yugoslavian. Others don't want Serbian, Croatian and
Bosnian to exist as separate editions because they are anti-cultural
balkanization, and think that all of those regions share enough in
language written to be able to cooperate without big problems.

Just for example, as Serbian Wikipedia was coming into existence, many
of the articles had very strong Serbian Orthodox POV. This is getting
much better now, and I applaud the hard work of few who are trying to
fight that inherited POV. But still, it is enough for one person to
run across an article on Serbian Wikipedia which is still that biased,
see that it's in cyrillic (most Serbian websites use latin, because
it's accessible to Croatian and Bosnian, as well as Slovenian audience
that way, and using strictly cyrillic is a weak sign of nationalism -
when people deliberately decide they don't want to be accessible to
neighbours).

So, we can either have 4 Wikipedias, and upcoming Montenegrin should
be ready. OR, we can make an overarching Wikipedia for all of those
languages, or like Milosh proposed, a neo-Shtokavian centric one
(which is fine really).

Also, regarding the numbers of Serbian, Bosnian and Croatian
Wikipedias: They also often use each others contents, and many of
those pages are really just date templates.

I think this really needs to be reformed somehow. If that software,
which would transliterate between Cyrillic and Latin, appears, what's
the reason not to have ONE SINGLE Wikipedia for all of those
languages?

Most people who won't like it are POV pushers anyway (who simply don't
want to cooperate with other ethnicities - I can't justify it
otherwise).

Wikipedia is not a cultural project, it's an encyclopedia, aimed at
bringing information to people.


subject: [WikiEN-l] The userbox fad

body:
On 06/01/06, Sam Spade <samspade.thomasjefferson at googlemail.com> wrote:
>> When they argue about policy with longtime editors who actually know
>> something about policy, they *are* doing harm.  They are wasting the time
>> and trying the patience of someone who is actually contributing to the goal
>> of the project.
>
> This is one of the worst things I have heard said in the context of
> the wikipedia. I politely ask you to rethink and restate this, as I
> assume you did not mean this.

I think I broadly understand the intended meaning.

There are policies on Wikipedia that are granite, bedrock; that we
write from a neutral point of view, or that we are an enyclopedia and
not an academic journal or discussion board.

There are policies on Wikipedia that are a matter of solid consensus;
our image-licensing policies, or our (admittedly confusing) stance on
What Dialect Of English To Use.

Then there are policies - well, guidelines - that are fluid, amenable;
that we abbreviate US as "U.S.", or the minutae of the protection
policy, or whether or not we italicise certain kinds of terms, or
obscure naming conventions, or... oh, you could name thousands.

And, to confuse matters, we talk about them all as "policy", hence
confusion like this.

So, our new guy comes along, and decides he wants to debate policy.
Good-good; there'll certainly be someone willing to argue with him,
whatever side he chooses - three geeks, one place, four opinions. And
he may certainly have a new and innovative viewpoint on his topic.

But if he's going to argue over whether we're an encyclopedia, or
whether we should search-and-replace every instance of "petrol" with
"gasoline"... then *absolutely nothing* will ever be gained by this
debate. We're set in our ways, we're not going to change because one
persuasive guy comes along and suggests it, though he may be damn good
at doing so.

(Indeed, on things like NPOV, we wouldn't change if one _city_ of
persuasive people came along. You get the idea.)

It is good to discuss things. But discussing something that cannot and
will not be changed is, to my mind at least, a bit of a waste of time.
I'm all for debating political issues, but I confess to getting a bit
tetchy when someone tries to debate gravity with me.

Anyone remember the guy who wrote to us - it might have been
wikipedia-l, come to think of it - demanding that we set up an English
English language wikipedia? Absolutely nothing to be gained by arguing
with him - it just used up the time of a lot of people, without doing
anything beneficial, and pissed a few people off. (Goodness knows I
was one)

Arguing over something immutable - doesn't help anyone. Arguing over
something we are willing to change, from a new viewpoint? Can
certainly be helpful.

I hope that's the point Jay meant to make, and I hope if so it seems clearer...

--
- Andrew Gray

I like the way you put things far better, but I'd rather see the nubie
complain about NPOV, have it explained to him, and learn about the
foundation issues. Thats not what were talking about tho, were talking
about userboxes, and thats a subject newcomers can and should discuss.
We arn't going to compromise on the important stuff, but I dare say we
have some room for compromise on the userbox issue.

The meta issue here is mentorship vrs. newbie biting, and I fear too
much of the latter and far too little of the former are occuring.

Sam Spade


from_name: Rob Church

body:
A special page should NEVER define a new entry point, ever. Create it
as a proper special page, and use the proper, built-in classes, member
functions, and where needed, the globals.

Telling us what you're trying to *do* would also be a big step, so we
can give pointers.

Rob Church

On 07/01/06, edward hage <edward at confirmat.nl> wrote:
> Hello John, Hendrik,
>
> I also made a SpecialPage, but I did not post back to the page itself. I
> did to a new page where I defined some basic stuff by:
> define( 'MEDIAWIKI', true );
> require_once( '../includes/Defines.php' );
> require_once( '../LocalSettings.php' );
> require_once( '../includes/Setup.php' );
>
> Basically made a new entry-point. I hope this does not cause a
> safety-issue ! (I don't know the do's and dont's about this.)
>
> So now I got all the globals and I can define a database connection like:
> $db = new Database($wgDBserver, $wgDBuser, $wgDBpassword, $wgDBname);
>
> Now I can make the new entries in the tables page,  text and revision (I
> was missing that last table, I found that out and also Rob Church
> pointed me to the existence of   rev_id) .... just installed mediawiki
> last week.
>
> After making the new page and altering 'Userpage' (making a link to the
> new page) I return to Userpage so I can click on my newly made link to
> my new page:
> header('Location: http://server/wiki/index.php/Userpage');
>
> Basically I have everything working, but I have trouble that I don't see
> my link when I return to Userpage. Must have to do with caching in
> mediawiki itself. When I empty my cache on firefox it is still not
> visible. Only workaround now I have is to 'edit' the page, then the link
> is shown.  Tips to resolve this are welcome.
>
> Also another issue is that I created a race condition with the following
> syntax. Hendrik Brummerman pointed me this out. I suspected that
> already, because inbetween performing $sql1 and $sql2 old_id may be
> changed by insertions of other people in the table.  Thanks for the tip.
>
> $sql1 = "insert into text (old_text, old_flags) values ($text, \"utf-8\")";
>
> $sql2 = "select max(old_id) from text"; // result = $page_latest
>
>
> This is a [[Race Condition]]. Please use $dbw->insertId() (in MediaWiki)
> or mysql_insert_id for MySQL databases outside of MediaWiki.
>
>
>
> Thanks, Edward
>
> John McNeil wrote:
>
> > Edward,
> >
> > I don't have the answer to your questions about making new pages
> > directly in the database, but I accomplished the same thing in a
> > SpecialPage I wrote by creating the content and a new Article from
> > within the SpecialPage code itself. The SpecialPage defines the form,
> > and posts back to itself. That way you are still in context with all
> > the globals you need to make new pages easily. My only difficulty
> > with this is that the $newArticle->insertNewArticle method ends by
> > telling the new Article to display itself, yanking you out of the
> > SpecialPage code.
> >
> > My SpecialPage is derived from BoardVote.php, which used to be
> > referenced as an example. You can find it here:
> > http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/wikipedia/extensions/BoardVote/
> > BoardVote.php?rev=1.3&only_with_tag=MAIN&view=markup
> >
> > John
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Wikitech-l mailing list
> > Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
> >
> >
> >
>
>
> --
> CONFIRMAT Mechatronics & product development
> Veluwehof 71
> 5709 KJ Helmond
> http://www.confirmat.nl
>
> ************************************* Disclaimer ***********************************
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>
> The information contained in this message may be confidential and is intended to be exclusively for the addressee. Should you receive this message unintentionally, please do not use the contents herein. Please notify the sender directly by replying this message and destroy all copies of this message and any attachments.
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>


from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Serbo-Croatian wikipedia

body:
--- Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> I won't vote because I am not part of that community, but the recent
> changes does show that the project is active.  Assuming that the vote
> succeeds there would still be enough active and involved people to pass
> the criteria for starting a new wiki.  Under those circumstances
> wouldn't it be much easier to argue that a dissolution vote is invalid
> if it would leave enough people behind to start a new wiki in that same
> language.

Having an active community is NOT the most important reason to have a separate wiki. FAR more
important, given our goal to having encyclopedias that everybody on the planet can read, is to
make sure we consider how closely the proposed wiki's language is to other languages we already
have wikis for.

It is my understanding that Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian are mutually intelligible dialects of
Serbo-Croatian and that the bigest difference is the use of scripts between and/or among them
(which MediaWiki can deal with on the same wiki without forking articles).

In fact, our article on this confirms my suspicion:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differences_in_standard_Serbian%2C_Croatian_and_Bosnian

So a far, far better question is this: Why do we have separate Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian
Wikipedias instead of just one  Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia?

Splitting things up purely for purely political reasons is a grave, let me repeat, GRAVE,
violation of NPOV and does not serve our goal to provide an encyclopedia that the peoples of the
Former Yugoslavia can use and understand.

We need to create a clear policy on the creation and shutdown of Wikipedias and apply that
retroactively to fix this and other similarly horrid mistakes.

-- mav

__________________________________________
Yahoo! DSL ? Something to write home about.
Just $16.99/mo. or less.
dsl.yahoo.com


from_name: Wikipedia Romania (Ronline)

subject: [WikiEN-l] The Wikipedia Ombudsman

body:
Hi to all!

I'd just like to let you know that I have proposed the structure of a
Wikipedia Ombudsman, that would deal with any complaints leading from admin
action and ArbCom cases. I think in recent times there has been a
significant growth in the number of users who have either left the project
or felt very badly treated due to administrator actions and ArbCom rulings.
I'm not trying to blame either the administrator function - I'm an admin
myself - or the ArbCom; however, I think an Ombudsman is necessary to deal
in an effective and fair way with all of the complaints. To compound this, I
think the transparency and accountability of some admin and ArbCom actions
is quite unacceptable, IMO. The Ombudsman structure would seek to redress
this in a neutral and fair way, to ensure more decentralisation and
stability for the community (remember: alienation breeds conflict).

So, please take a read of the Ombudsman proposal, at:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Ombudsman

Please make any comments on the talk page and feel free to add any main
points to the project page.

Thanks,

Ronline
2006. Hea energia aasta.


from_name: M. Anderson

subject: [WikiEN-l] Deletion request and complaint

body:
User: Aubbit
IP address is 68.225.182.79

Hi all,

I don't know how I should go about requesting a
deletion of a specific entry - I tried the FAQ but it
confused me even more. I have a bit of a problem.

I have been accused by admins of 'vandalizing' and
'blanking' a specific Wikientry: Bill Freeman.

I am doing neither. I am a personal friend of Mr.
Freeman, and I find the article extremely offensive,
as do his other friends. The person writing this
article (who reverts it back every time I edit it) is
obviously biased, and is revealing very untrue and
unneccisary information about Mr. Freeman and his
wife.

I merely am trying to edit out the offensive bits,
which keep reappearing the next day. I have read the
policy on 'neutral point of view' and such, and I
believe the user writing the article on Mr. Freeman
has violated that ten times over. Yet I am being
blocked and accused of vandalizing and blanking,
simply because I am trying to protect a friend who
does not deserve an article like that.

If possible, I would like this article deleted for
good, because it does more harm than good. If anyone
could help me with this, or work something out, please
let me know.
Thank you,
Aubbit

__________________________________________
Yahoo! DSL ? Something to write home about.
Just $16.99/mo. or less.
dsl.yahoo.com


subject: [Wikitech-l] Useless "developers"

body:
Let me let you into a secret. Wikimedia's developers, like any others,
don't respond at all well to childish demands, incivility and insults,
unclear "orders" or "instructions" or unreasonable stupidity.

To request the creation of a new wiki, open a new feature request on
BugZilla with the product and other variables set accordingly, give us
the name of said wiki, and point us to (a) a page on Meta where there
is consensus for the creation and (b) a list of pages to be moved over
from another project, if applicable.

Rob Church

On 07/01/06, Servien Ilaino <servien at gmail.com> wrote:
> Sorry to say, but these developers are kind of useless, aren't developers
> supposed to "develop"... I haven't seen a new wiki for ages, no reactions
> from developers or whatever at all!
>
> Why does it say "an open encyclopedia in every language" this is supposed to
> be "an open encyclopedia in every language which is currently created,
> because developers don't want to setup any new ones, and requests are
> pilling!!"
>
> Desde,
> Servien
>
> Original:
>
> Please start the new year with a new wikipedia, we are all so sick of
> waiting for the creation of these wikipedia's... there hasn't been a
> single "recent new wiki". The last must have been about 3 months back
> or so...
>
> There are ones with official ISO codes. Don't disappoint us in this
> new year. We'd all like to get the wiki's started and going! So mark
> this as URGENT in your diary.
>
> Details can be found
> on:http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Approved_requests_for_new_languages
>
> Official ISO code:2.1.1 Nedersaksisch/Dutch Low Saxon (22 support; 3
> oppose [thereof 2
> anon votes])2.1.2 Vlax Romany (11 support, 1 oppose [anonymous])2.1.3
> West Flemish (15 support, 1 object)2.1.4 Ligurian (16 support thereof
> 5 native speakers, 3 oppose)
>
> Non-official2.2.1 Samogitian (?emait??ka) (11)2.2.2 Banyumasan
> (8)2.2.3 Ripuarian (19 support [thereof 3 anonymus votes]; 2
> oppose)2.2.4 Pennsylvania German (17 support; 1 oppose)
>
> Regards,
> Servien Ilaino
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>
>