subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia English English

body:
On 19/09/05, Jack & Naree <jack.macdaddy at gmail.com> wrote:
> Yes, it was me, I did rant, I do apologise, but I'm just pissed off with
> proper English being treated like this.
> You have Wikipedia in Klingon, in tiny tribal languages, and now in Scots
> (and I'm Scottish btw) - which is basically as similar to correct English as
> American-English is - at least I think most native English-speakers can
> probably read it.

I think this is a sheltered understanding brought on by being Scots
and thus having a working comprehension of the dialect in the air -
it's certainly one of the less easy ones for an outsider to encounter.
I have had to explain to Oxford students that what they thought at a
glance was Middle English was, in fact, early modern Scots...

To put it in context, Scots is comprehensible to the average resident
of Chicago if he thinks for a bit, skips a couple of difficult words
("leid" always throws people), and reads it to himself in an accent.
The writing of the average resident of Chicago is far more
comprehensible to most Scots than that.

> Why not? Ok, I ranted, but this not an illegitimate point, why should we
> (and I say that because you have a ".uk" address) be forced to accept
> Americanisms?
> If you're British, do think we should start changing our spellings to
> American ones? Start changing our grammar too?

No, and I think this is a strawman argument. Every article I write has
been in "correct" British English, barring the usual errors and a
couple of stylistic quirks I blame on reading Usenet too long. No-one
has changed the grammar or the spelling; no-one has "forced me" to
accept Americanisms and I very much doubt anyone shall.

> someone at Wikipedia ages ago wrote to me that he thought it was fine for
> articles in the English section to remain in the dialect relevent to their
> subject matter - he basically said, if it's about the UK it can be in
> English, but everything else is to be in American-English, but called
> English - and he said he was British!

The only hard-and-fast rule is that where there is dominant usage of a
particular dialect for a particular topic we use that dialect.

So, an article on a Royal Navy destroyer talks about it being
"armoured", whereas an article on the same ship when in American
service would use "armored". JFK got an _honorable_ discharge from the
Navy, but Ted Heath served in the _Honourable_ Artillery Company.

Where usage is contested - "petrol" or "gasoline" is the most
hard-fought one I can think of - the compromise is simply to use the
first dialect in which the article was written. Hence we have articles
on "Labour (economics)", related to the "Labour movement", which also
has articles on "child labor" and "manual labor". Yes, it looks a
little messy - but they're the same concept, and content is preferable
over form.

As to your citation of "aubergine" and "eggplant" - we have the same
article serving for "Rosa gallica", "Gallic Rose" and "French Rose",
and it smells just as sweet. There is a redirect at Londres for
London, for Beijing at Peking, one at Bombay for Mumbai and one at
Calcutta for Kolkata. It's all just different names for the same
thing.

There are some usages of American English which look glaring to a
British-trained eye - "In 1945, Churchill wrote Truman that..." - but
these can generally be redrafted into a suitably neutral phrasing ("In
a 1945 letter to Truman, Churchill noted ..."), and no-one objects to
that. There are likewise expressions in my usage that look glaring to
an American, but offhand I can't think of any - I see no reason
anything I write shouldn't be restyled to be easily comprehensible to
both.

> I mean there are several issues here: cultural imperialism, ambiguation
> (because of the many differences in American-English and English usage), and
> English learners learning to spell incorrectly and talk like Americans - why
> is it wrong to resist that?

"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that
English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow
words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways
to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary."

The concept of English as a monolithic entity living somewhere in
Kensington from which variants have sprung worldwide is now outdated;
from the point of view of the writers of the first edition of the
Britannica in 1770ish, you and I are speaking a degraded and foreign
language. (Back then, plural's was still an accepted construction!)

Recently, I read Alford's "The Queen's English", dated about 1865. He
angrily writes about Americanisms (though not using that term), about
speakers of English writing various completely wrong barbarisms. Some
are alien to me - I'd never heard of "diocess" for "diocese", but
apparently the /Times/ insisted on using it. He states that
exclamation marks - which he terms "notes of admiration", the term not
having then been invented - are superfluous to the language and should
be abhorred. To describe someone as a "talented" writer is "about as
bad as possible", and likewise the word "gifted".

(Though, interestingly, he approves of verbing nouns, noting that a
century before "to experience" was hated by scholars. Plus ca
change...)

The language changes; there is no sense in fighting it, because one
may as well try to split atoms with a chisel. The era of modern
communications will invariably simplify previously divergent
spellings, just as it has smoothed over the difference in regional
accents in the past, and caused a small number of languages to become
massively dominant. It's all the same process...

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


list: wikipedia-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Jack & Naree

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia English English

body:
It says English for all of them - ASL is listed as a dialect.
The point there is that the UK is listed as the primary and original form,
everything else is subordinate - a spin off.
SIL is focussing on spoken language not on orthography, however.
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_English
A wiki article that clearly states that american english is the primary
language of america.
 and then goes on to use that inaccurate and meaningless term "British
English" to describe differences between AE and E. (ask a Scouser, a Geordie
or a Cockney if they speak British English! They won't know what you mean).
It's appalling inaccurate because there are some vowel sounds in some
dialects in England which are the same as in America - like in Wiltshire for
example. Further, many dialects in England are as different from standard
English than American is - and even more divergent than Australian.
I mean, I want to challenge the term "British English" simply on it's
definition; but that's a digression.
 On 19/09/05, Alphax <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Jack & Naree wrote:
> <snip>
> > If you want to go academic - which is surely the best way to back this
> > whole argument up, you should scan this (ironically american) leading
> > insitute of linguistic research:
> > http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=eng
>
> Interesting, the language I speak is further removed from the langauge
> you speak - I speak a dialect called Australian Standard English, but
> people in the USA just speak English.
>
> Well, join the UK chapter of the WMF (if it's been created yet) and
> things might happen.
>
> --
> Alphax | /"\
> Encrypted Email Preferred | \ / ASCII Ribbon Campaign
> OpenPGP key ID: 0xF874C613 | X Against HTML email & vCards
> http://tinyurl.com/cc9up | / \
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


from_name: James R. Johnson

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia English English

body:
It sounds like you want dialectual words and colloquialisms to form the
basis of your 'English English' wikipedia.

James

-----Original Message-----
From: wikipedia-l-bounces at Wikimedia.org
[mailto:wikipedia-l-bounces at Wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Jack & Naree
Sent: Monday, September 19, 2005 6:12 AM
To: node.ue at gmail.com; wikipedia-l at wikimedia.org
Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia English English

I want American English to have a separate Wikipedia from English English -
this would mean copying
 I typed it in a hurry at the end of my shift with a view to responding to
any response, later.
 I've placed a more detailed post on the helpdesk page. I think, however,
that it's apt that I should go into even more depth here.
 I've asked about English on Wikipedia before and been told that they think
it's acceptable for English articles to be in a mish-mash of dialects and
spellings; but having seen the range of ludicrous languages available -
including variant forms of English: Scots English and Middle English etc...
I've now decided I must make a request and campaign properly for American
English to be given a seperate Wikipedia language from (English) English.
 It's simply infuriating and offensive for the misspellings of a dialect of
English to take precedence over the standard language - I'm sure Spanish,
French and Portuguese speakers would feel similarly; it's cultural
imperialism.
 If you have different forms of Chinese Wikipedia (I'm a graduate of Jap &
Chi so I'm aware of xyz); if you have Wikipedias for dialects and older
forms of English; if you Wikipedias for countries and languages with far
smaller populations, economic/political importance and internet presences;
then the English of the British Isles and Commonwealth - the standard and
original form of English - simply *has* to be the only form of English that
can use the term "English" on Wikipedia.
 Some might say that it is "British English", this term is fallacious (even
if you can find it in a dictionary) no English, British, British Isles or
even Commonwealth native understands or recognises the term - it is both
meaningless and fallacious: there are no "British English" speakers in the
world - there are English (nationality) English (language) speakers, Welsh
English speakers, Scottish English speakers, Irish English speakers, Cornish

English speakers and so on...
Whereas the term "American English" is not.
When I go to Wikipedia English, and type a search for "colour" I should not
expect to be redirected to "color" which is a recent spelling of a dialect
of English that has arisen over the last couple of centuries perhaps - it is

simply *not* *English* it is *American-English*. I'm more than happy for
American-English speakers to have an American-English wikipedia and have all

their weird and wonderful spellings and vocabulary - and it may well turn
out to be the biggest wiki; but I don't want to select Wikipedia English and

type in "Aubergine" and get "Eggplant"; "Nappy" and get "Diaper"; or "Tap"
and get "Faucet", it's simply unacceptable, and against the spirit of
multilingualism and accuracy that wikipedia is supposed to strive for.
Hence I want to campaign in all seriousness that The English Wikipedia is
duplicated, and one is called American-English, the other remaining English,

and the task of correcting spelling, vocab and grammar can begin.
 The Campaign for an English Wikipedia is not about Britain (the fourth
largest economy in the world, a population of about 60m, 55% of whom are
online), it's also about a whole host of other countries and regions (over a

billion people) that do not use American-English, but use English instead as

a lingua franca (many with complete fluency):
Ireland
India
Pakistan
Bangladesh
Sri lanka
Nepal
Singapore
Malaysia
Brunei
(Hong Kong)
(Canada)
Australia
New Zealand
Nigeria
Ghana
Sierra Leone
parts of Cameroon
Uganda
Kenya
Tanzania
Sudan
Zambia
Zimbabwe
RSA
Lesotho
Namibia
Botswana
Malawi
various island nations in the Caribbean plus Belize and Guyana, Indian Ocean

and Pacific British dependencies all over the planet.
 The term Commonwealth English is therefore also apt, but American-English
has no right to usurp the title English, from English! Wikipedia should
reflect this.
 Jack
 York
England
The United Kingdom of Great Britain, Northern Ireland, Crown Dependencies &
Overseas Territories
 On 19/09/05, Mark Williamson <node.ue at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Does your e-mail have a point?
>
> Mark
>
> On 18/09/05, Jack & Naree <jack.macdaddy at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Wikipedia Anglo-Saxon?! Wikipedia Middle English?!! Wikipedia Scot's
> > English?!!!
> > I want Wikipedia English English!!!
> > _______________________________________________
> > Wikipedia-l mailing list
> > Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
> >
>
>
> --
> SI HOC LEGERE SCIS NIMIVM ERVDITIONIS HABES
> QVANTVM MATERIAE MATERIETVR MARMOTA MONAX SI MARMOTA MONAX MATERIAM
> POSSIT MATERIARI
> ESTNE VOLVMEN IN TOGA AN SOLVM TIBI LIBET ME VIDERE
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>
_______________________________________________
Wikipedia-l mailing list
Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia English English

body:
But the issue is (to me, at least), that I can understand you, even if you
spell funny (honour, colour, etc.) and have funny words (lift, pavement
instead of elevator and sidewalk).  And do understand that I'm being
slightly sarcastic here, please don't rant-reply.  Americans have some
spellings, English have some spellings, but we can understand each other,
except when we use our dialect-specific words.  I don't really think it
appropriate to dialectualize the wikipedia unless there's mutual
unintelligibility (as in the Frisian case, I think it was).

James

-----Original Message-----
From: wikipedia-l-bounces at Wikimedia.org
[mailto:wikipedia-l-bounces at Wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Jack & Naree
Sent: Monday, September 19, 2005 6:39 AM
To: wikipedia-l at wikimedia.org
Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia English English

Cool, mockery is for trolls.
 This is not about Balkanisation, it's about separating American-English
from English.
 But come to think of it - yes, have one for every variation you like, and
let natural selection take care of the rest. Just as long as English is
English, and not American.
 Have you seen the "Scot's English" one? Do you not call that Balkanisation?
 If you want to have a legitimate criteria for a language, a different
orthography has got to be a clear one.
In English there are two - American and non-American.
Orthography is the main issue, meaning is another.
 If you want to go academic - which is surely the best way to back this
whole argument up, you should scan this (ironically american) leading
insitute of linguistic research:
 http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=eng
 On 19/09/05, Alphax <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> (note: I've split this into paragraphs for readability)
>
> Jack wrote:
> > I want American English to have a separate Wikipedia from English
> > English - this would mean copying
> >
> > I typed it in a hurry at the end of my shift with a view to
> > responding to any response, later.
> >
> > I've placed a more detailed post on the helpdesk page. I think,
> > however, that it's apt that I should go into even more depth here.
> >
> > I've asked about English on Wikipedia before and been told that they
> > think it's acceptable for English articles to be in a mish-mash of
> > dialects and spellings; but having seen the range of ludicrous
> > languages available - including variant forms of English: Scots
> > English and Middle English etc... I've now decided I must make a
> > request and campaign properly for American English to be given a
> > seperate Wikipedia language from (English) English.
> >
>
> I must remind viewers who are still with us that Balkanisation Is Evil.
>
> > It's simply infuriating and offensive for the misspellings of a
> > dialect of English to take precedence over the standard language -
> > I'm sure Spanish, French and Portuguese speakers would feel
> > similarly; it's cultural imperialism.
> >
> > If you have different forms of Chinese Wikipedia (I'm a graduate of
> > Jap & Chi so I'm aware of xyz); if you have Wikipedias for dialects
> > and older forms of English; if you Wikipedias for countries and
> > languages with far smaller populations, economic/political importance
> > and internet presences; then the English of the British Isles and
> > Commonwealth - the standard and original form of English - simply
> > *has* to be the only form of English that can use the term "English"
> > on Wikipedia.
> >
> > Some might say that it is "British English", this term is fallacious
> > (even if you can find it in a dictionary) no English, British,
> > British Isles or even Commonwealth native understands or recognises
> > the term - it is both meaningless and fallacious: there are no
> > "British English" speakers in the world - there are English
> > (nationality) English (language) speakers, Welsh English speakers,
> > Scottish English speakers, Irish English speakers, Cornish English
> > speakers and so on...
> >
> > Whereas the term "American English" is not.
> >
> > When I go to Wikipedia English, and type a search for "colour" I
> > should not expect to be redirected to "color" which is a recent
> > spelling of a dialect of English that has arisen over the last couple
> > of centuries perhaps - it is simply *not* *English* it is
> > *American-English*. I'm more than happy for American-English speakers
> > to have an American-English wikipedia and have all their weird and
> > wonderful spellings and vocabulary - and it may well turn out to be
> > the biggest wiki; but I don't want to select Wikipedia English and
> > type in "Aubergine" and get "Eggplant"; "Nappy" and get "Diaper"; or
> > "Tap" and get "Faucet", it's simply unacceptable, and against the
> > spirit of multilingualism and accuracy that wikipedia is supposed to
> > strive for. Hence I want to campaign in all seriousness that The
> > English Wikipedia is duplicated, and one is called American-English,
> > the other remaining English, and the task of correcting spelling,
> > vocab and grammar can begin.
> >
>
> I agree completely. Furthurmore, I feel that we shall need an Australian
> English Wikipedia to handle the many words in Australian English which
> differ from English English (and possibly Queensland English, New South
> Wales English, et. al), a South African English Wikipedia to accomodate
> the heavy use of Afrikaans, a New Zealand English Wikipedia to account
> for the lack of vowels, a Canadian English Wikipedia to account for the
> number of French words, a Canadian French Wikipedia to complement it,
> and a Singlish Wikipedia because it has a funny name.
>
> Here's a far better idea: Let's go back to Proto-Indo-European. Imagine
> the amount of server space we could save!
>
> Conversely, imagine a Beowulf cluster of English Wikipedias!
>
> > The Campaign for an English Wikipedia is not about Britain (the
> > fourth largest economy in the world, a population of about 60m, 55%
> > of whom are online), it's also about a whole host of other countries
> > and regions (over a billion people) that do not use American-English,
> > but use English instead as a lingua franca (many with complete
> > fluency):
> >
> <snip overly long list>
> > The term Commonwealth English is therefore also apt, but
> American-English
> > has no right to usurp the title English, from English! Wikipedia should
> > reflect this.
> >
>
> I find your theories interesting/intriguing and wish to subscribe to
> your newsletter/journal.
>
> --
> Alphax | /"\
> Encrypted Email Preferred | \ / ASCII Ribbon Campaign
> OpenPGP key ID: 0xF874C613 | X Against HTML email & vCards
> http://tinyurl.com/cc9up | / \
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>
_______________________________________________
Wikipedia-l mailing list
Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l


from_name: Delirium

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia English English

body:
James R. Johnson wrote:

>But the issue is (to me, at least), that I can understand you, even if you
>spell funny (honour, colour, etc.) and have funny words (lift, pavement
>instead of elevator and sidewalk).  And do understand that I'm being
>slightly sarcastic here, please don't rant-reply.  Americans have some
>spellings, English have some spellings, but we can understand each other,
>except when we use our dialect-specific words.  I don't really think it
>appropriate to dialectualize the wikipedia unless there's mutual
>unintelligibility (as in the Frisian case, I think it was).
>
>
I agree this is a good principle, and it does seem to be followed for
the most part.  In the Chinese case, a little bit of creative
machine-transliteration even made some *non* mutually intelligible
scripts able to coexist on the same Wikipedia (because they happen to be
close enough to a 1-to-1 mapping that 95% of the conversion can be done
automatically).  As far as spreading knowledge goes, consolidating
effort as much as possible makes semse, IMO.

(Although it seems the Scandinavian Wikipedias are going the opposite
direction, creating a separate Wikipedia for each mutually-intelligible
dialect.)

-Mark


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Rowan Collins

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: My Watchlist RSS Feed

body:
On 17/09/05, ?var Arnfj?r? Bjarmason <avarab at gmail.com> wrote:

> > > Isn't it possible to just use HTTP authentication with RSS/Atom feeds?
> > > Or is this a problem for some reason?

[snip]
> > - where Brion points out that even if most RSS readers can use HTTP
> > authentication, MediaWiki can't, so it's not really all that helpful.

> Well that could be fixed.

Yes, but saying "just use HTTP authentication" makes it sound like
this is somehow the easy option. Implementing a whole new
authentication scheme into MediaWiki just to let people have RSS
watchlists isn't something I'd call easy...

Besides, given the range of readers people use to access RSS feeds, is
HTTP-Auth even the best way to go? Think of a web-based aggregator,
for instance, where the user-agent connecting to the MediaWiki server
is essentially a bot on the server, with no visibility to the actual
user - the user will have no chance to respond to an authentication
challenge.

So the obvious alternative is to tell them to put their username and
password into a "user:pass at host" format, to see if that works - but
that means entering the password to their whole account in plain text,
on a site which may or may not be all that trustworthy.

So instead of using the normal password, we let them use a special
"watchlist password", which since they can just use copy-and-paste
might as well be a randomly generated token. And then, to avoid things
not recognising the "user:pass at host" format, we can just put that
random token at the end of a special URL (it's not really logging them
in anyway); in which case, we don't need to bother implementing HTTP
Authentication after all.

And so we've come round full circle - a special URL containing a
randomly generated token.

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia English English

body:
"There are likewise expressions in my usage that look glaring to an
American, but offhand I can't think of any - I see no reason anything I
write shouldn't be restyled to be easily comprehensible to both."

Who says cultural imperialism is a one-way street?  It's not just Americans
who think they're almost always right.

James

-----Original Message-----
From: wikipedia-l-bounces at Wikimedia.org
[mailto:wikipedia-l-bounces at Wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Andrew Gray
Sent: Monday, September 19, 2005 7:30 AM
To: jack.macdaddy at gmail.com; wikipedia-l at wikimedia.org
Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia English English

On 19/09/05, Jack & Naree <jack.macdaddy at gmail.com> wrote:
> Yes, it was me, I did rant, I do apologise, but I'm just pissed off with
> proper English being treated like this.
> You have Wikipedia in Klingon, in tiny tribal languages, and now in Scots
> (and I'm Scottish btw) - which is basically as similar to correct English
as
> American-English is - at least I think most native English-speakers can
> probably read it.

I think this is a sheltered understanding brought on by being Scots
and thus having a working comprehension of the dialect in the air -
it's certainly one of the less easy ones for an outsider to encounter.
I have had to explain to Oxford students that what they thought at a
glance was Middle English was, in fact, early modern Scots...

To put it in context, Scots is comprehensible to the average resident
of Chicago if he thinks for a bit, skips a couple of difficult words
("leid" always throws people), and reads it to himself in an accent.
The writing of the average resident of Chicago is far more
comprehensible to most Scots than that.

> Why not? Ok, I ranted, but this not an illegitimate point, why should we
> (and I say that because you have a ".uk" address) be forced to accept
> Americanisms?
> If you're British, do think we should start changing our spellings to
> American ones? Start changing our grammar too?

No, and I think this is a strawman argument. Every article I write has
been in "correct" British English, barring the usual errors and a
couple of stylistic quirks I blame on reading Usenet too long. No-one
has changed the grammar or the spelling; no-one has "forced me" to
accept Americanisms and I very much doubt anyone shall.

> someone at Wikipedia ages ago wrote to me that he thought it was fine for
> articles in the English section to remain in the dialect relevent to their
> subject matter - he basically said, if it's about the UK it can be in
> English, but everything else is to be in American-English, but called
> English - and he said he was British!

The only hard-and-fast rule is that where there is dominant usage of a
particular dialect for a particular topic we use that dialect.

So, an article on a Royal Navy destroyer talks about it being
"armoured", whereas an article on the same ship when in American
service would use "armored". JFK got an _honorable_ discharge from the
Navy, but Ted Heath served in the _Honourable_ Artillery Company.

Where usage is contested - "petrol" or "gasoline" is the most
hard-fought one I can think of - the compromise is simply to use the
first dialect in which the article was written. Hence we have articles
on "Labour (economics)", related to the "Labour movement", which also
has articles on "child labor" and "manual labor". Yes, it looks a
little messy - but they're the same concept, and content is preferable
over form.

As to your citation of "aubergine" and "eggplant" - we have the same
article serving for "Rosa gallica", "Gallic Rose" and "French Rose",
and it smells just as sweet. There is a redirect at Londres for
London, for Beijing at Peking, one at Bombay for Mumbai and one at
Calcutta for Kolkata. It's all just different names for the same
thing.

There are some usages of American English which look glaring to a
British-trained eye - "In 1945, Churchill wrote Truman that..." - but
these can generally be redrafted into a suitably neutral phrasing ("In
a 1945 letter to Truman, Churchill noted ..."), and no-one objects to
that. There are likewise expressions in my usage that look glaring to
an American, but offhand I can't think of any - I see no reason
anything I write shouldn't be restyled to be easily comprehensible to
both.

> I mean there are several issues here: cultural imperialism, ambiguation
> (because of the many differences in American-English and English usage),
and
> English learners learning to spell incorrectly and talk like Americans -
why
> is it wrong to resist that?

"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that
English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow
words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways
to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary."

The concept of English as a monolithic entity living somewhere in
Kensington from which variants have sprung worldwide is now outdated;
from the point of view of the writers of the first edition of the
Britannica in 1770ish, you and I are speaking a degraded and foreign
language. (Back then, plural's was still an accepted construction!)

Recently, I read Alford's "The Queen's English", dated about 1865. He
angrily writes about Americanisms (though not using that term), about
speakers of English writing various completely wrong barbarisms. Some
are alien to me - I'd never heard of "diocess" for "diocese", but
apparently the /Times/ insisted on using it. He states that
exclamation marks - which he terms "notes of admiration", the term not
having then been invented - are superfluous to the language and should
be abhorred. To describe someone as a "talented" writer is "about as
bad as possible", and likewise the word "gifted".

(Though, interestingly, he approves of verbing nouns, noting that a
century before "to experience" was hated by scholars. Plus ca
change...)

The language changes; there is no sense in fighting it, because one
may as well try to split atoms with a chisel. The era of modern
communications will invariably simplify previously divergent
spellings, just as it has smoothed over the difference in regional
accents in the past, and caused a small number of languages to become
massively dominant. It's all the same process...

--
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk
_______________________________________________
Wikipedia-l mailing list
Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l


from_name: Andrew Gray

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia English English

body:
[oops, accidentally sent it to Andre only. My apologies for the
duplicate - damn gmail!]

On 19/09/05, Andre Engels <andreengels at gmail.com> wrote:

> Actually I think this one is a good advise for those writing Wikipedia
> - usage of exclamation marks often means that you are slipping towards
> POV. Alford's term "note of admiration" explains that well - we should
> not be noting that something is admirable, just tell the facts and
> have the reader decide whether they are admirable or down-to-earth.
>
> Besides, using an exclamation mark in every second line, as some
> people tend to do, is in my opinion bad style in itself, even outside
> Wikipedia.

Not disagreeing with the style - this isn't the context for
exclamation marks at all. However, I think the point holds - the
language changes to the point that a very common piece of punctuation
*doesn't even have a recognisable term* a mere hundred and forty years
ago.

(Incidentally, http://www.issco.unige.ch/staff/clark/SprolacPaper.doc.pdf
has quite an amusing table - frequency counts of !, !!, !!!, !!!! &c
from Usenet.)

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


from_name: Nick Jenkins

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Using MediaWiki to do Wiki source -> HTML as a straight
	string transformation?

body:
> > Can I please ask a unusual question: Is there some way to get
> > MediaWiki to render a page from just the wiki source, and no database?
>
> If you do a bunch of hacking into the internals, probably...
>
> > and without having to delve deeply into the internals of how MediaWiki
> > works.
>
> d'oh! ;)

I actually did something like this with MediaWiki 1.4 (gross hacks on
the internals to get a Wiki-string to HTML string conversion without
requiring database access), but I did not enjoy the experience (in
particular the use of globals, plus the dependency tree in which a
file would include another file or two, which would include another,
etc., plus getting the initialization order right was non-trivial),
and honestly it never worked reliably (from memory it worked sometimes
but not always, almost certainly due to something I stuffed up with a
hack).

I was hoping it might have changed in 1.5 :-(

In case anyone ever feels tempted to repeat the experiment, I started
from an RC of MediaWiki 1.4, and needed these files:
./DefaultSettings.php
./languages
./languages/LanguageUtf8.php
./languages/Language.php
./languages/Names.php
./languages/LanguageEn.php
./Parser.php
./includes
./includes/User.php
./includes/Utf8Case.php
./includes/WatchedItem.php
./includes/Skin.php
./includes/SkinStandard.php
./includes/Image.php
./includes/Feed.php
./includes/RecentChange.php
./includes/SkinPHPTal.php
./includes/LogPage.php
./includes/GlobalFunctions.php
./includes/DatabaseFunctions.php
./includes/UpdateClasses.php
./includes/Database.php
./includes/CacheManager.php
./includes/Title.php
./includes/UserUpdate.php
./includes/ViewCountUpdate.php
./includes/SiteStatsUpdate.php
./includes/LinksUpdate.php
./includes/SearchUpdate.php
./includes/UserTalkUpdate.php
./includes/SquidUpdate.php
./includes/Namespace.php
./includes/MagicWord.php
./includes/LinkCache.php
./includes/Article.php

I also modified some of the above (sorry, I can't easily provide a
diff - I just remember every time I ran into an error with an
undefined variable either bypassing it or hard coding it or making it
use a conditional isset or adding another include - and I kept
repeating this until eventually the errors stopped). (From the
last-modified dates on the files, the modified/hacked files were
probably: Parser.php, Title.php, Skin.php, Language.php,
SkinPHPTal.php, Namespace.php, GlobalFunctions.php, and
DatabaseFunctions.php)

To tie it all together I needed a file like this which would
initialize things in the right order, supply dummy functions to cut
out things I didn't need, include required files, and so forth:
ludo:~nickj/wiki/HTML-validation# cat master.php
<?php

// report any errors at all
error_reporting (E_ERROR | E_WARNING | E_PARSE | E_CORE_ERROR);

/*
** @desc: FakeMemCachedClient imitates the API of memcached-client v. 0.1.2.
** It acts as a memcached server with no RAM, that is, all objects are
** cleared the moment they are set. All set operations succeed and all
** get operations return null.
*/

class FakeMemCachedClient {
        function add ($key, $val, $exp = 0) { return true; }
        function decr ($key, $amt=1) { return null; }
        function delete ($key, $time = 0) { return false; }
        function disconnect_all () { }
        function enable_compress ($enable) { }
        function forget_dead_hosts () { }
        function get ($key) { return null; }
        function get_multi ($keys) { return array_pad(array(),
count($keys), null); }
        function incr ($key, $amt=1) { return null; }
        function replace ($key, $value, $exp=0) { return false; }
        function run_command ($sock, $cmd) { return null; }
        function set ($key, $value, $exp=0){ return true; }
        function set_compress_threshold ($thresh){ }
        function set_debug ($dbg) { }
        function set_servers ($list) { }
}

// we don't want any kind of profiling
function wfProfileIn( $fn = '' ) {}
function wfProfileOut( $fn = '' ) {}
function wfGetProfilingOutput( $s, $e ) {}
function wfProfileClose() {}

// because Debian woody doesn't have a high enough version of LIBXML
to enable XML, which means we have no 'utf8_encode'...
function utf8_encode($x) { return $x; }

// define required for include files to work OK.
define("MEDIAWIKI",true);

// initialize the IP global.
$IP = "";

define( "DB_READ", -1 );     # Read from the slave (or only server)
define( "DB_LAST", -3 );     # Whatever database was used last

// include default settings
require_once ("DefaultSettings.php");

// initialize $wgMemc global (needed by languages).
$wgMemc = new FakeMemCachedClient();

// include MagicWord, needed for the Parser.php to work OK. Should
come before language.php to avoid errors.
$wgMagicWords = array();
require_once("includes/MagicWord.php");

// include Namespace, needed for the Parser.php to work OK. Should
come before language.php to avoid errors.
require_once("includes/Namespace.php");

// Setup languages, needed to get us the $wgLang global, which we need.
require_once("languages/Language.php");
require_once("languages/LanguageUtf8.php");
$wgLangClass = 'LanguageUtf8';
$wgLang = new LanguageUtf8();

require_once("includes/GlobalFunctions.php");

// include Skin, needed for the User.php to work OK.
require_once("includes/Skin.php");

// include User, needed for the Parser.php to work OK.
require_once("includes/User.php");

// include LinkCache, needed for the Parser.php to work OK.
require_once("includes/LinkCache.php");
$wgLinkCache = new LinkCache();

// include Article, needed for the Parser.php to work OK.
require_once("includes/Article.php");

// set up the parse the output
require_once("Parser.php");
$parserOptions = new ParserOptions();
$mParserOptions = $parserOptions->newFromUser( $temp = NULL );

// create a Parser object
$parser = new Parser();

// supply a blank title
$title = NULL;

// make up some text for test purposes
$text = "A [[test]] ''blah''";

// Generate some output, but as an object.
$parserOutput = $parser->parse( $text, $title, $mParserOptions );
// convert the output of the parser to a string.
$output = $parserOutput->mText;

print $output;

?>

> You can't guarantee that without doing template inclusions, though as
> for instance template inclusions can be embedded in HTML attribute
> values (yyyuuuccckkkkk!) and mistakes there are a likely source of
> borken HTML output.

That's true, but I just wanted something simple to catch most HTML
cock-ups, and was willing to accept a small percentage of
false-positives.

> For now we run parsed output through
> the HTML Tidy library for an additional cleanup pass on Wikipedia; this
> is optional in MediaWiki and requires either the tidy executable or the
> PHP extension form.

Ah, OK, interesting. I too was experimenting with using the PHP tidy
extension to do the above checking, but I wanted the errors and their
solutions in order to make a list of them (like the lists used in Wiki
Syntax) so that interested people could fix the data, whereas I
presume you folks just throw the errors away.

On one hand running the output through tidy as you currently do is
good because tidy can be updated as required to detect and fix new
errors, and because it means web browsers will get nice clean output
(but only if you're using MediaWiki to transform the wiki string into
HTML), and because tidy seems fairly quick, but on the other hand
maybe it's slightly bad because it's a run-time solution with added
overhead for something can be fixed once in the data.

However, that doesn't really matter from my perspective. Basically you
folks are already fixing this problem automatically, which means I
don't have to concern myself with this problem any more. To quote
Keith Packard: "this problem is now being fixed by my favourite person
- someone else!" :-)

All the best,
Nick.


body:
This is sounding more and more racist (or ethno-centric) to me...it's just a
bunch of spellings.  You never have to use them, ever!  Just put that extra
'u' in color, and stick an 's' in colorize, and flip the 'e' and 'r' in
center and meter.

-----Original Message-----
From: wikipedia-l-bounces at Wikimedia.org
[mailto:wikipedia-l-bounces at Wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Jack & Naree
Sent: Monday, September 19, 2005 8:31 AM
To: wikipedia-l at wikimedia.org
Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Anglicised English British English

Well I don't want to live in an Americanised world; I'd rather take arms
against a sea of illiterate yanks, than suffer the slings and arrows of
their nauseating makey-uppy drawl. (and yes I do have American friends!)
 I know it's not going to feed the starving children in Africa, but I simply

can't feckin' stand seeing the word "center" and "color" and hearing people
raising the intonation at the end of their sentences.
 American-English is like a giant linguistic fingernail down the English
blackboard.
 On 19/09/05, Giuseppe DAngelo <pippudoz at yahoo.it> wrote:
>
> I love these kinds of debates - the ones that can go around in circles
> until the cows come home. Sure, I get pissed off (AE pissed) at american
> spellings as much as the next bloke - but it doesn't mean I can't follow
> what's going on - nor does it mean that it will ever influence my
pristine,
> strawberries and cream, Oxbridge, very best of the Queen's english - with
a
> name like Giuseppe d'Angelo - you wouldn't expect otherwise would you?
>
> I love the fact that there are a couple of thousand words that might be
> found in wikipedia with two spellings (both equally acceptable). It makes
it
> easier for me to point to my thick skulled paisani and say to them: don't
> worry if a word can be spelled two or three (or five or seven) ways in
> Sicilian - it's the same word and we all understand it regardless of how
you
> want to spell it - it's not as big an issue as you think - look at
English!
> - the language of the lower orders under Norman rule now rules the world -

> but the varieties are as many as teams in the English FA. It hasn't
mattered
> one jot - there are more important things to worry about - like who will
win
> out of the Sydney Swans and West Coast Eagles this Saturday at the MCG and

> will Bazza be rubbed out for a week? And has there truly been a leak in
the
> brownlow voting? Now they're important questions!
> Salutamu
> pippu d'angelo
>
>
>
>
> ---------------------------------
> Yahoo! Mail: gratis 1GB per i messaggi, antispam, antivirus, POP3
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>
_______________________________________________
Wikipedia-l mailing list
Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia English English

body:
On 19/09/05, Mark Williamson <node.ue at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> There is no Wikipedia in "Scot's English". There is a Wikipedia in Scots.

 Aa feckin' speak it bud! and I call it "Inglis".

Now, please list out for me some of the differences between American
> and Commonwealth English which one is likely to see in the average
> encyclopaedia article.

 That would take some time...

> How often will encyclopaedia articles talk about nappies/diapers,
> dummies/pacifiers, lifts/elevators, prams/strollers, or anything else
> where the essential terminology differs?

 more often you seem to realise

The reason there's a separate Wikipedia for Scots is because usage of
> Scots on the English Wikipedia would never be tolerated. However, both
> Commonwealth and American English are tolerated and widely used
> throught the English Wikipedia.
>
> I, for one, am an American who prefers Commonwealth English, but
> having received my education in American spelling (or as you would
> say, "misspelling"), my writing tends to be a jumble of forms rather
> than all one way or all the other. I tend to write "encyclopedia",
> "traveler", "check", "catalog", but "realise", "internationalisation",
> etc. This isn't due to personal preference, but rather habit -- I
> would rather read a document in Commonwealth English, and I try to
> write in it, but since I don't go over my spelling carefully, I tend
> to end up using American spellings most of the time for certain
> lexical items (such as "encyclopedia"), but Commonwealth spellings
> most of the time for others (such as "rationalisation").
>
> See, now, that the most common differences

 qualify "most common"

 are mere differences of
> spelling.

 And I don't want to spell them in a foreign, incorrect way - is that too
much to ask?

And they aren't particularly frequent. How often does
> Wikipedia say "nationalise"/"nationalize", "realise"/"realize"?

 do you really want me to answer that?

Things
> like "kilometres"/"kilometers" are a bit more frequent.
>
> But still, in the past, there haven't been separate Wikipedias for
> such tiny differences. You seem to regard Anglo-Saxon as similar to
> English.

 no, but English is spoken by about 60m people in the British Isles, the 4th
largest economy in the world, and Anglo-Saxon isn't.

 A sample sentence from the Anglo-Saxon Wikipedia, for you to
> decipher (with accents and special characters removed):
>
> "Lundene is heafodburg thaes Geanlaehtan Cynerices and Englalandes,
> and is thara greatostre worulde burga an. Hit haefth seofon millonan
> leoda in Greatrum Lundene (hatte Lundeneras)."
>
> Now is that Balkanisation? "heafodburg"?? Are you kidding me? (in case
> you're wondering, it means "capital"). "cynerice"? do you get that? It
> means "kingdom".

 this is just academic willy waving.

There isn't an actual Wikipedia for Middle English, only a test
> Wikipedia, but it is also a bit hard to understand:
>
> "A dogge is the beste that man hath as a housbeste. Doggen arn 'mannes
> best frend' as the saying goth."
>
> "Hallo. It is trewe, as Briane hath seyde, when thaet man sholde
> scryven as in this cas in middel englisce, that suiche a nam is brodre
> than man wolde thinken, for it refereth to a period of foure hundred
> yaren, in which many different scrives manneren. Peradventure 'twere
> bettre thaet we formed some sort of concordat on this, but I fere
> thaet this coulde forfenden and demarken forcome contributiouns"
>
> Compared to that, American vs Commonwealth differences seem tiny.
>
> Mark

 what a digression.

On 19/09/05, Jack & Naree <jack.macdaddy at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Cool, mockery is for trolls.
> > This is not about Balkanisation, it's about separating American-English
> > from English.
> > But come to think of it - yes, have one for every variation you like,
> and
> > let natural selection take care of the rest. Just as long as English is
> > English, and not American.
> > Have you seen the "Scot's English" one? Do you not call that
> Balkanisation?
> > If you want to have a legitimate criteria for a language, a different
> > orthography has got to be a clear one.
> > In English there are two - American and non-American.
> > Orthography is the main issue, meaning is another.
> > If you want to go academic - which is surely the best way to back this
> > whole argument up, you should scan this (ironically american) leading
> > insitute of linguistic research:
> > http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=eng
> > On 19/09/05, Alphax <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > (note: I've split this into paragraphs for readability)
> > >
> > > Jack wrote:
> > > > I want American English to have a separate Wikipedia from English
> > > > English - this would mean copying
> > > >
> > > > I typed it in a hurry at the end of my shift with a view to
> > > > responding to any response, later.
> > > >
> > > > I've placed a more detailed post on the helpdesk page. I think,
> > > > however, that it's apt that I should go into even more depth here.
> > > >
> > > > I've asked about English on Wikipedia before and been told that they
> > > > think it's acceptable for English articles to be in a mish-mash of
> > > > dialects and spellings; but having seen the range of ludicrous
> > > > languages available - including variant forms of English: Scots
> > > > English and Middle English etc... I've now decided I must make a
> > > > request and campaign properly for American English to be given a
> > > > seperate Wikipedia language from (English) English.
> > > >
> > >
> > > I must remind viewers who are still with us that Balkanisation Is
> Evil.
> > >
> > > > It's simply infuriating and offensive for the misspellings of a
> > > > dialect of English to take precedence over the standard language -
> > > > I'm sure Spanish, French and Portuguese speakers would feel
> > > > similarly; it's cultural imperialism.
> > > >
> > > > If you have different forms of Chinese Wikipedia (I'm a graduate of
> > > > Jap & Chi so I'm aware of xyz); if you have Wikipedias for dialects
> > > > and older forms of English; if you Wikipedias for countries and
> > > > languages with far smaller populations, economic/political
> importance
> > > > and internet presences; then the English of the British Isles and
> > > > Commonwealth - the standard and original form of English - simply
> > > > *has* to be the only form of English that can use the term "English"
> > > > on Wikipedia.
> > > >
> > > > Some might say that it is "British English", this term is fallacious
> > > > (even if you can find it in a dictionary) no English, British,
> > > > British Isles or even Commonwealth native understands or recognises
> > > > the term - it is both meaningless and fallacious: there are no
> > > > "British English" speakers in the world - there are English
> > > > (nationality) English (language) speakers, Welsh English speakers,
> > > > Scottish English speakers, Irish English speakers, Cornish English
> > > > speakers and so on...
> > > >
> > > > Whereas the term "American English" is not.
> > > >
> > > > When I go to Wikipedia English, and type a search for "colour" I
> > > > should not expect to be redirected to "color" which is a recent
> > > > spelling of a dialect of English that has arisen over the last
> couple
> > > > of centuries perhaps - it is simply *not* *English* it is
> > > > *American-English*. I'm more than happy for American-English
> speakers
> > > > to have an American-English wikipedia and have all their weird and
> > > > wonderful spellings and vocabulary - and it may well turn out to be
> > > > the biggest wiki; but I don't want to select Wikipedia English and
> > > > type in "Aubergine" and get "Eggplant"; "Nappy" and get "Diaper"; or
> > > > "Tap" and get "Faucet", it's simply unacceptable, and against the
> > > > spirit of multilingualism and accuracy that wikipedia is supposed to
> > > > strive for. Hence I want to campaign in all seriousness that The
> > > > English Wikipedia is duplicated, and one is called American-English,
> > > > the other remaining English, and the task of correcting spelling,
> > > > vocab and grammar can begin.
> > > >
> > >
> > > I agree completely. Furthurmore, I feel that we shall need an
> Australian
> > > English Wikipedia to handle the many words in Australian English which
> > > differ from English English (and possibly Queensland English, New
> South
> > > Wales English, et. al), a South African English Wikipedia to
> accomodate
> > > the heavy use of Afrikaans, a New Zealand English Wikipedia to account
> > > for the lack of vowels, a Canadian English Wikipedia to account for
> the
> > > number of French words, a Canadian French Wikipedia to complement it,
> > > and a Singlish Wikipedia because it has a funny name.
> > >
> > > Here's a far better idea: Let's go back to Proto-Indo-European.
> Imagine
> > > the amount of server space we could save!
> > >
> > > Conversely, imagine a Beowulf cluster of English Wikipedias!
> > >
> > > > The Campaign for an English Wikipedia is not about Britain (the
> > > > fourth largest economy in the world, a population of about 60m, 55%
> > > > of whom are online), it's also about a whole host of other countries
> > > > and regions (over a billion people) that do not use
> American-English,
> > > > but use English instead as a lingua franca (many with complete
> > > > fluency):
> > > >
> > > <snip overly long list>
> > > > The term Commonwealth English is therefore also apt, but
> > > American-English
> > > > has no right to usurp the title English, from English! Wikipedia
> should
> > > > reflect this.
> > > >
> > >
> > > I find your theories interesting/intriguing and wish to subscribe to
> > > your newsletter/journal.
> > >
> > > --
> > > Alphax | /"\
> > > Encrypted Email Preferred | \ / ASCII Ribbon Campaign
> > > OpenPGP key ID: 0xF874C613 | X Against HTML email & vCards
> > > http://tinyurl.com/cc9up | / \
> > > _______________________________________________
> > > Wikipedia-l mailing list
> > > Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> > > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
> > >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Wikipedia-l mailing list
> > Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
> >
>
>
> --
> SI HOC LEGERE SCIS NIMIVM ERVDITIONIS HABES
> QVANTVM MATERIAE MATERIETVR MARMOTA MONAX SI MARMOTA MONAX MATERIAM
> POSSIT MATERIARI
> ESTNE VOLVMEN IN TOGA AN SOLVM TIBI LIBET ME VIDERE
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia English English

body:
The thing aboot (!) Canada is that there's a steady stream of recent (and
educated) British immigrants as with Australia, maintaining the standards.
I would not be surprised to find Americanisms more a feature of urban
working-class Canadians near the US border.

 On 19/09/05, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
>
> Gerrit Holl wrote:
>
> >Mark Williamson wrote:
> >
> >
> >>Compared to that, American vs Commonwealth differences seem tiny.
> >>
> >>
> >
> >A point that has not yet been remarked in this threat is this:
> >most people who learn English as a foreign language learn to write the
> >traditional, commonwealth spelling.
> >
> This really depends on who you're talking about, and I'm not sure it is
> "most". Most *Europeans* who learn English as a foreign language learn
> the UK spellings; most Asians, in my experience, learn the US spellings.

 Asians - you mean Indians? Pakistanis? Bangladeshis?
 Of course, you mightn't know that in Britain "Asian" means "south Asian"
and the American usage of "Asian" (East Asian) is covered with the word
"Oriental".
Yes lots of Japaneses, Koreans and Filipinos talk like Americans; lots of
Sino-Asians, Thais, Malays, don't.

I'm not sure what you mean by "Commonwealth English", since Canadians
> are in the Commonwealth and use a mixture of US and UK spellings
> ("colourize" is a nice hybrid word). The term seems to mostly have been
> invented at [[en:Commonwealth English]], and is not widely used elsewhere.

 You might see it as an invention, I see it as a spelling error - as would
an American no doubt.

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


from_name: topi

subject: [Wikitech-l] How to implement an [edit] for {{:subpages}} ?

body:
I often use subpages in my wiki. Therefor the subpages shall be edited by
clicking [edit]. This works for pages with enough headings but not for pages
without them..  I  also know solutions, using a template like "edit
subpage". But the next problem the [edit]-buttons are hidden and the
[edit-subpage] buttons are still visible when a user is not logged in.

So i'm looking for a php-solution when using the {{:subpage}} syntax.

Any ideas?

Thanks Heinz


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Anglicised English British English

body:
Well I don't want to live in an Americanised world; I'd rather take arms
against a sea of illiterate yanks, than suffer the slings and arrows of
their nauseating makey-uppy drawl. (and yes I do have American friends!)
 I know it's not going to feed the starving children in Africa, but I simply
can't feckin' stand seeing the word "center" and "color" and hearing people
raising the intonation at the end of their sentences.
 American-English is like a giant linguistic fingernail down the English
blackboard.
 On 19/09/05, Giuseppe DAngelo <pippudoz at yahoo.it> wrote:
>
> I love these kinds of debates - the ones that can go around in circles
> until the cows come home. Sure, I get pissed off (AE pissed) at american
> spellings as much as the next bloke - but it doesn't mean I can't follow
> what's going on - nor does it mean that it will ever influence my pristine,
> strawberries and cream, Oxbridge, very best of the Queen's english - with a
> name like Giuseppe d'Angelo - you wouldn't expect otherwise would you?
>
> I love the fact that there are a couple of thousand words that might be
> found in wikipedia with two spellings (both equally acceptable). It makes it
> easier for me to point to my thick skulled paisani and say to them: don't
> worry if a word can be spelled two or three (or five or seven) ways in
> Sicilian - it's the same word and we all understand it regardless of how you
> want to spell it - it's not as big an issue as you think - look at English!
> - the language of the lower orders under Norman rule now rules the world -
> but the varieties are as many as teams in the English FA. It hasn't mattered
> one jot - there are more important things to worry about - like who will win
> out of the Sydney Swans and West Coast Eagles this Saturday at the MCG and
> will Bazza be rubbed out for a week? And has there truly been a leak in the
> brownlow voting? Now they're important questions!
> Salutamu
> pippu d'angelo
>
>
>
>
> ---------------------------------
> Yahoo! Mail: gratis 1GB per i messaggi, antispam, antivirus, POP3
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia English English

body:
When I went to London, I did have to ask what a secre tree was (any relation
to the oak tree?).  And a labora tree and an observa tree and a 'lie bree'
and the 'straw bree'... :)  Were I able to stay longer, perhaps I would have
understood better.

And at least we pronounce the 'r' at the ends of words. :)

James

PS - note that this is a sarcastic e-mail.  Don't take it that seriously.

-----Original Message-----
From: wikipedia-l-bounces at Wikimedia.org
[mailto:wikipedia-l-bounces at Wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Pawel Dembowski
Sent: Monday, September 19, 2005 10:37 AM
To: wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia English English

>>Americans seem to want to believe that they speak English, and we speak
>>British English in England (meaning Britain!). They are wrong. They speak
a
>>dialect of our language, called American-English, an offshoot from the
main
>>trunk if you will, which has evolved somewhat independently of English.
>> American-English is an out and out dialect of English. How can English
>>English be a dialect of English?
> I presume you are referring to the dialect of the ruling classes.

American pronunciation is definitely more similar to 17th century
English than British RP.

--
Ausir
Wikipedia, wolna encyklopedia
http://pl.wikipedia.org

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


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia English English

body:
On 19/09/05, Jack & Naree <jack.macdaddy at gmail.com> wrote:

> > This really depends on who you're talking about, and I'm not sure it is
> > "most". Most *Europeans* who learn English as a foreign language learn
> > the UK spellings; most Asians, in my experience, learn the US spellings.
>
>  Asians - you mean Indians? Pakistanis? Bangladeshis?
>  Of course, you mightn't know that in Britain "Asian" means "south Asian"
> and the American usage of "Asian" (East Asian) is covered with the word
> "Oriental".

I am rather amused by the juxtaposition that in American usage, Asians
predominantly get taught American English, and in British usage,
Asians predominantly get taught British English...

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


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia English English

body:
On 19/09/05, Andrew Gray <shimgray at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 19/09/05, Jack & Naree <jack.macdaddy at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > > This really depends on who you're talking about, and I'm not sure it
> is
> > > "most". Most *Europeans* who learn English as a foreign language learn
> > > the UK spellings; most Asians, in my experience, learn the US
> spellings.
> >
> > Asians - you mean Indians? Pakistanis? Bangladeshis?
> > Of course, you mightn't know that in Britain "Asian" means "south Asian"
> > and the American usage of "Asian" (East Asian) is covered with the word
> > "Oriental".
>
> I am rather amused by the juxtaposition that in American usage, Asians
> predominantly get taught American English, and in British usage,
> Asians predominantly get taught British English...

 And the irony is, that that's because the difference between AmEn and En is
that Asian has a different meaning - illustrating the point.

--
> - Andrew Gray
> andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia English English

body:
Caroline Ford wrote

>When I went to London, I did have to ask what a secre tree was (any relation
>to the oak tree?).  And a labora tree and an observa tree and a 'lie bree'
>and the 'straw bree'... :)  Were I able to stay longer, perhaps I would have
>understood better.
>
The latter two are types of cheese.  "Lye brie" is very sharply cut. :-)

Ec


from_name: Stan Shebs

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia English English

body:
Alphax wrote:

>Stephen Forrest wrote:
>
>>This is a political consideration, not a linguistic one.  Since this
>>political point is not commonly accepted, it is POV and therefore
>>unsuitable for Wikipedia.
>>
>>
>
>What about the Portuguese Wikipedia? How do they feel?
>
>
Although Brazil and continental forms are both generally accepted
in pt, there are apparently regular eruptions of Brazilians flaming
the continentals over dialect, and vice versa. So not a problem
unique to en...

Stan


list: foundation-l

from_name: Aphaia

subject: [Foundation-l] Speedy deleting images w/o explicit license

body:
On 9/18/05, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> Well, I've been warning about this for a long time.  We used to have a
> lot more untagged images, and a huge and ongoing project got rid of the
> problem for almost all of the good stuff.  What's left is... well, most
> of it has to go away.

Japanese Wikipedia contains a lot of untagged images; once some of
them were listed on the vote for deletion, but survived. In
discussion, the explanation the below was supported by many editors.
"until a certain point, Japanese Wikipedia declared "uploaded images
will be released under GFDL" so untagging isnt equal to that no
information is provided. Those old uploaded images could be considered
under GDFL since the uploadered accepted the condition implicitely."
The consensus of JA community goes so, including images uncredited
(without information of photographer)

My concern is if it is an acceptable solution glrobally, because it
could affect other projects, specially Commons. If not, the current
image policy on Ja should be modified.

The problem was discovered one of those images appeared as Featured
Image on Commons. It was transwikied to Commons as GFDL image by
another editor than the original uploader. Later it was listed as
deletion candidate on Commons and an equivalent was uploaded to
Commons. But I am not sure all those transwikied images from JAWP to
Commons are limited among clearly tagged images by the original
uploaders.

--
Aphaea@*.wikipedia.org
email: Aphaia @ gmail (dot) com


list: wikimedia-l


from_name: Andre Engels

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia English English

body:
On 9/19/05, Andrew Gray <shimgray at gmail.com> wrote:
> He states that
> exclamation marks - which he terms "notes of admiration", the term not
> having then been invented - are superfluous to the language and should
> be abhorred.

Actually I think this one is a good advise for those writing Wikipedia
- usage of exclamation marks often means that you are slipping towards
POV. Alford's term "note of admiration" explains that well - we should
not be noting that something is admirable, just tell the facts and
have the reader decide whether they are admirable or down-to-earth.

Besides, using an exclamation mark in every second line, as some
people tend to do, is in my opinion bad style in itself, even outside
Wikipedia.

Andre Engels


from_name: Gerrit Holl

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia English English

body:
Mark Williamson wrote:
> Compared to that, American vs Commonwealth differences seem tiny.

A point that has not yet been remarked in this threat is this:
most people who learn English as a foreign language learn to write the
traditional, commonwealth spelling. I really like the idea to convert
the entire en.wikipedia to this spelling, but alas, it's not going to
happen. I dislike American English, but I will learn to live with it.
The splitting proposal is indeed exaggerated.

Gerrit.

--
Temperature in Lule?, Norrbotten, Sweden:
| Current temperature   05-09-19 13:39:49   11.9 degrees Celsius ( 53.4F) |
--
Det finns inte d?ligt v?der, bara d?liga kl?der.


from_name: Mark Williamson

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia English English

body:
>  Irrelevent, how?

See, now, this is just what I've been waiting for since the beginning
of this thread. Our little friend here who cares so much about
"correct" spelling and grammar has fouled up our beautiful language by
using an absolutely incorrect spelling, ignorant of the etymology of
the word.

It's "irrelevant". In all English varieties.

Mark

P.S.

That stuff I said about fouling up our beautiful language was a joke.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Giant Message

body:
?

On 19/09/05, Craig Franklin <craig at halo-17.net> wrote:
>
> Ahh, my mistake. My apologies.
>
> - Craig
>
> -------------------
> Craig Franklin
> PO Box 764
> Ashgrove, Q, 4060
> Australia
> http://www.halo-17.net - Australia's Favourite Source of Indie Music, Art,
> and Culture.
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


from_name: Walter van Kalken

subject: [Foundation-l] A hearty welcome to Danny!

body:
Congrats Danny! Now watch out for those hurricanes ;)

Waerth/Walter van Kalken


list: wikien-l

subject: [WikiEN-l] downtime?

body:
On 19/09/05, MacGyverMagic/Mgm <macgyvermagic at gmail.com> wrote:
> Is the English Wikipedia down, or is it a problem on my end?

Looking fine here, though it died (at least for me) briefly last night.

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


from_name: Giuseppe DAngelo

body:
I love these kinds of debates - the ones that can go around in circles until the cows come home.  Sure, I get pissed off (AE pissed) at american spellings as much as the next bloke - but it doesn't mean I can't follow what's going on - nor does it mean that it will ever influence my  pristine, strawberries and cream, Oxbridge,  very best of the Queen's english - with a name like Giuseppe d'Angelo - you wouldn't expect otherwise would you?

I love the fact that there are a couple of thousand words that might be found in wikipedia with two spellings (both equally acceptable).  It makes it easier for me to point to my thick skulled paisani and say to them: don't worry if a word can be spelled two or three (or five or seven) ways in Sicilian - it's the same word and we all understand it regardless of how you want to spell it  - it's not as big an issue as you think - look at English! - the language of the lower orders under Norman rule now rules the world - but the varieties are as many as teams in the English FA.  It hasn't mattered one jot - there are more important things to worry about  - like who will win out of the Sydney Swans and West Coast Eagles this Saturday at the MCG and will Bazza be rubbed out for a week?  And has there truly been a leak in the brownlow voting? Now they're important questions!
Salutamu
pippu d'angelo

---------------------------------
Yahoo! Mail: gratis 1GB per i messaggi, antispam, antivirus, POP3


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia English English

body:
Hei Gerrit,

As far as I remember, Skanwiki doesn't use any sort of interlinguistic
variety, but rather some sentences in each language, depending on the
author.

The Scandinavian test-wikipedia, on the other hand, attempts to use a
sort of linguistic compromise, with words such as "indehold".

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Test-wp/Skandinavisk/Leksikon has some
more words.

I think something similar should be done for Malay and Indonesian...

Mark

On 19/09/05, Gerrit Holl <gerrit at nl.linux.org> wrote:
> Delirium wrote:
> > (Although it seems the Scandinavian Wikipedias are going the opposite
> > direction, creating a separate Wikipedia for each mutually-intelligible
> > dialect.)
>
> Well...:
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Skanwiki
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Test-wp/Skandinavisk/Hovudside
>
> They're creating one wikipedia for three languages - Swedish, Danish and
> Norwegian. That's quite a very different direction, really.
>
> Gerrit.
>
> --
> Temperature in Lule?, Norrbotten, Sweden:
> | Current temperature   05-09-19 20:29:46   10.3 degrees Celsius ( 50.6F) |
> --
> Det finns inte d?ligt v?der, bara d?liga kl?der.
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>

--
SI HOC LEGERE SCIS NIMIVM ERVDITIONIS HABES
QVANTVM MATERIAE MATERIETVR MARMOTA MONAX SI MARMOTA MONAX MATERIAM
POSSIT MATERIARI
ESTNE VOLVMEN IN TOGA AN SOLVM TIBI LIBET ME VIDERE


body:
Jack & Naree wrote:

>Well I don't want to live in an Americanised world; I'd rather take arms
>against a sea of illiterate yanks, than suffer the slings and arrows of
>their nauseating makey-uppy drawl. (and yes I do have American friends!)
>
Then I guarantee you won't want to have anything to do with
WP. The minute you try to "clean up" [[United States Constitution]],
you're going to get into the mother of all edit wars!

Stan


from_name: Tim Starling

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Reboots of doom

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:
> We've had our main fileserver (zwinger) accidentally rebooted a couple
> of times during configuration of new servers today, resulting in downtime.
>
> Everybody, PLEEEEEEEASE be careful when rebooting that you're typing in
> the window you think you are.

I changed the bash prompt for root on zwinger to something distinctive.
It's all very well to say "be careful", but unfortunately our simple
mammalian brains aren't designed to detect when one familiar bit of
english text is replaced by another. Colours, flashing lights, pretty
pictures -- these work better. They allow faster recognition and require
less concentration.

-- Tim Starling


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia English English

body:
Andre Engels wrote:
> On 9/19/05, Andrew Gray <shimgray at gmail.com> wrote:
> > He states that
> > exclamation marks - which he terms "notes of admiration", the term not
> > having then been invented - are superfluous to the language and should
> > be abhorred.
>
> Actually I think this one is a good advise for those writing Wikipedia
> - usage of exclamation marks often means that you are slipping towards
> POV. Alford's term "note of admiration" explains that well - we should
> not be noting that something is admirable, just tell the facts and
> have the reader decide whether they are admirable or down-to-earth.

But we can't be fully NPOV. It's always POV to decide what news is
important enough to be on the frontpage and what isn't, for example.

> Besides, using an exclamation mark in every second line, as some
> people tend to do, is in my opinion bad style in itself, even outside
> Wikipedia.

Absolutely true!
(-:

Gerrit.

--
Temperature in Lule?, Norrbotten, Sweden:
| Current temperature   05-09-19 14:19:50   11.2 degrees Celsius ( 52.1F) |
--
Det finns inte d?ligt v?der, bara d?liga kl?der.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia English English

body:
On 19/09/05, Mike Kuklinski <admin at kuattech.com> wrote:
>
> On 18/09/05, Jack & Naree <jack.macdaddy at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >
> >Wikipedia Anglo-Saxon?! Wikipedia Middle English?!! Wikipedia Scot's
> >English?!!!
> > I want Wikipedia English English!!!
> >
> I am going to to reply to the original post, since the follow-ups are
> irrelevant.

 Irrelevent, how?

American-dialect English (also known as American-English) is more
> related to English of the 17th-18th century than 'Commonwealth-English'
> is.

 What you mean is, the American dialect appears to have retained more
obvious features of C17th English, whilst also evolving new ones of its own.

Neither Commonwealth-English nor American-English are
> 'English-English' or proper English more than the other;

 Whilst neither Commonwealth English nor American-English *are* 'English
English'; but,
Commonwealth English includes English English and the accents and less
divergent dialects of Commonwealth countries, which are more or less the
same as written English English. So you're basically incorrect.
Americans seem to want to believe that they speak English, and we speak
British English in England (meaning Britain!). They are wrong. They speak a
dialect of our language, called American-English, an offshoot from the main
trunk if you will, which has evolved somewhat independently of English.
 American-English is an out and out dialect of English. How can English
English be a dialect of English?
(NB, I'm basing my definition on the written word not the regional spoken
dialects of England).

 if you want
> proper English, look to Shakespearean early Modern English.

 Incorrect, if you want proper English, go to England; that is where the
English language is spoken by the English people, of England.

By the way, I am an American.

 That was fairly obvious from the "get go".

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


from_name: steve v

subject: [WikiEN-l] Delete IAR

body:
Due to a widespread confusion regarding the
application of IAR as a policy, rather than simply an
informal guideline, I propose deleting the third leg
of the so-called policy trifecta.

NPOV was always the prime directive, and some tussles
we came up with the word "civility"(*) to shape a good
secondary. The third leg, although necessary to
satisfy the requirements of standing furniture and
designated "trifecta" was never quite as clear.
Perhaps we should vote if there is actually a third,
and if so what that should be. Drawing from a list of
actual policy, of course and not just this "flimsy
whimsy trumps policy history" nonsense.

SV
*
http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2003-October/007069.html

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
http://mail.yahoo.com


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia English English

body:
On 19/09/05, Alphax <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:

> (Actually, I thought that in Britain "Asian" meant "West Asian"
> (middle-eastern) - where's South Asia? I'm almost in South East Asia...)

Yeah, Asian ~ Indian subcontinent, basically. Pakistan, India. South
Asia is pretty indeterminate - the BBC uses it for Afghanistan through
to Bangladesh - but south-east Asia is Indochina/Indonesia &c.
Australia gets its own classification...

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


from_name: MacGyverMagic/Mgm

subject: [WikiEN-l] downtime?

body:
Is the English Wikipedia down, or is it a problem on my end?

--Mgm


subject: [Wikitech-l] Reboots of doom

body:
On 19/09/05, Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:
> We've had our main fileserver (zwinger) accidentally rebooted a couple
> of times during configuration of new servers today, resulting in downtime.
>
> Everybody, PLEEEEEEEASE be careful when rebooting that you're typing in
> the window you think you are.

We had this problem a few times on the shared server (called 'museum')
in our student digs, which was also acting as broadband router.
Eventually, my housemate replaced 'halt' and 'reboot' with symlinks to
shell scripts, to try and stop it happening again. I guess if you
wanted to be *really* sure, you could use some colourful and flashy
text to highlight the machine name too...

#!/bin/sh

echo    'Hey!'
echo    '(This is museum.)'
echo -n 'Is this really the computer you want to halt? '
read X

if [ "$X" == "y" -o "$X" == "yes" ]; then
        echo Very well, halting...
        /sbin/halt
else
        echo What were you thinking?
fi

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


from_name: Jack & Naree

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia English English

body:
 On 19/09/05, Alphax <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Andrew Gray wrote:
> > On 19/09/05, Jack & Naree <jack.macdaddy at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >
> >>>This really depends on who you're talking about, and I'm not sure it is
> >>>"most". Most *Europeans* who learn English as a foreign language learn
> >>>the UK spellings; most Asians, in my experience, learn the US
> spellings.
> >>
> >> Asians - you mean Indians? Pakistanis? Bangladeshis?
> >> Of course, you mightn't know that in Britain "Asian" means "south
> Asian"
> >>and the American usage of "Asian" (East Asian) is covered with the word
> >>"Oriental".
> >
> >
> > I am rather amused by the juxtaposition that in American usage, Asians
> > predominantly get taught American English, and in British usage,
> > Asians predominantly get taught British English...
> >
>
> You're both wrong, they come to Australia (being closest) and get taught
> Australian English :)
>
> (Actually, I thought that in Britain "Asian" meant "West Asian"
> (middle-eastern) - where's South Asia? I'm almost in South East Asia...)
> South Asia - India, the Raj... as if you didn't know.
> they might talk like Australians, but they write like Pommes, as do you
> all.
> --
> Alphax | /"\
> Encrypted Email Preferred | \ / ASCII Ribbon Campaign
> OpenPGP key ID: 0xF874C613 | X Against HTML email & vCards
> http://tinyurl.com/cc9up | / \
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


subject: [Wikitech-l] How to be careful

body:
I thought I might add to my analysis of the accidental reboot earlier,
with a few opinions about the nature of mistakes.

Jeronim's mistake, if there was one, was relying on "being careful",
usually pictured as a furrowing of the eyebrows and some sort of
commitment to double-checking. The problem is, you can only keep your
eyebrows furrowed for so long. When a task becomes routine, mistakes are
inevitable. For example, when you say a tongue-twister, you can often
get it right the first time. But say it 10 times quickly, and mistakes
are almost impossible to avoid. In general, it's impossible to maintain
concentration when performing a routine task. Add fatigue to the mix,
and mistakes become inevitable.

The objective, then, is not to avoid mistakes. It is to analyse the task
at hand to determine the mistakes that might be made. If you can see a
potential for a dangerous, damaging mistake, change your work practices
to avoid the possibility altogether.

Recognising the potential for mistakes requires experience --
unfortunately we often have to make a mistake before we realise the
dangerous situation we were in. But after we make a mistake, we're in a
position to think of ways to avoid it in the future, and that does NOT
mean resolving to furrow your eyebrows more often.

For example, I once attempted to run this on geoffrin:

% chmod -R wikidev .

but I made a typo and did this instead:

% chmod -R wikidev /

I was being careful at the time, it's unreasonable to expect yourself to
pause for a few seconds every time you want to press enter. I resolved
to never again perform a recursive write operation on "." -- I now make
a habit of using * instead. There are no dangerous keys near *.

Another example of a mistake mitigating device is the automatic syntax
check in sync-file and scap. Coloured bash prompts are a third type -- I
started using them myself so that I would know the difference between my
home computer and a remote computer. Colours and movement aid in fast
recognition. They require less concentration than reading, at a time
when concentration is at a premium.

So in summary, there are three types of mistake mitigation which I use
on a regular basis:

* Good habits -- adopt work practices where common mistakes are not harmful
* Automated double-checking
* Cognitive aids, such as colours and movement

Finally, remember to consider your mental state. Avoid logging in when
fatigued. Take regular rest breaks. *Never* log in when drunk.

Also at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Tim_Starling/Mistakes

-- Tim Starling


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: How to be careful

body:
Tim Starling wrote:
> For example, I once attempted to run this on geoffrin:
>
> % chmod -R wikidev .
>
> but I made a typo and did this instead:
>
> % chmod -R wikidev /

D'oh! I mean chgrp! Oh well, no harm done ;)

-- Tim Starlign


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Desysopping inactive admins

body:
On 19/09/05, Ryan W. (Merovingian) <bigwiki at earthling.net> wrote:
> It was my understanding that they could... or am I wrong?

IIRC bureaucrats can give admin rights, but only... thingy... next
level up... can *remove* them.

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


from_name: geni

body:
On 9/19/05, Ryan W. (Merovingian) <bigwiki at earthling.net> wrote:
> It was my understanding that they could... or am I wrong?
>
> --Ryan

Removeing is stewards only. There is a case for more stewards but I
don't think there will be another election for a while.
--
geni


from_name: Bass, Joshua L

subject: [Wikitech-l] I need to defeat the cache

body:
I ran across this code after looking for a way to force certain pages to
not cache:

   global $wgTitle;
   if ($wgTitle)
     {
     $ts = mktime();
     $now = gmdate("YmdHis", $ts + 60);
     $ns = $wgTitle->getNamespace();
     $ti = wfStrencode($wgTitle->getDBkey());
     $sql = "UPDATE cur SET cur_touched='$now' WHERE cur_namespace=$ns
AND
cur_title='$ti'";
     wfQuery($sql, DB_WRITE);
     }

Where do I put this code? In the extension I am needing it for?
(dynamicpages2)


from_name: DF

subject: [WikiEN-l] Delete IAR

body:
On 9/19/05, Sam Korn <smoddy at gmail.com> wrote:
> On the contrary.  IAR is crucial to Wikipedia,
> because it allows us a "common sense override".
> This means that we can always act in the best
> interests of the encyclopaedia, even when it is not
> directly allowed in policy.
>
> IAR is a vital part of the "Wiki" part of
> Wikipedia, just as NPOV is vital to the "pedia".

I agree with the principle that common sense should
trump bureaucracy, etc., but I have never really liked
the way that IAR is expressed.  (When was the last
time the average person read it, really?)  The current
text reads:

If rules make you nervous and depressed, then simply
use common sense as you go about working on the
encyclopedia. Being too wrapped up in rules can cause
you to lose perspective, so there are times when it is
best to ignore all rules... including this one.

This sounds like the kind of thing one would feed to a
newbie to help them relax, despite which I have never
seen a newbie cite it.  By contrast there are plenty
of admins who will cite IAR to justify various
actions.  I would like to hope that none of them were
doing it because they were "nervous or confused".  As
a policy statement, IAR really ought to say something
more along the lines of:  The ultimate goal of
Wikipedia is create an encyclopedia.  The community
may choose to ignore any rules if they happen to
conflict with this goal.

Maybe having the fluffy stuff is good too, but if IAR
is going to be a core principle is should more clearly
state when and why admins choose to ignore all rules.

-DF


subject: [WikiEN-l] Delete IAR

body:
steve v wrote:

>Due to a widespread confusion regarding the
>application of IAR as a policy, rather than simply an
>informal guideline, I propose deleting the third leg
>of the so-called policy trifecta.
>
>
Let's not. Sometimes it's the only thing that protects us from anal lawyers.

Ec


subject: [WikiEN-l] Delete IAR

body:
DF wrote:

>On 9/19/05, Sam Korn <smoddy at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>>On the contrary.  IAR is crucial to Wikipedia,
>>because it allows us a "common sense override".
>>This means that we can always act in the best
>>interests of the encyclopaedia, even when it is not
>>directly allowed in policy.
>>
>>IAR is a vital part of the "Wiki" part of
>>Wikipedia, just as NPOV is vital to the "pedia".
>>
>>
>
>I agree with the principle that common sense should
>trump bureaucracy, etc., but I have never really liked
>the way that IAR is expressed.  (When was the last
>time the average person read it, really?)  The current
>text reads:
>
>If rules make you nervous and depressed, then simply
>use common sense as you go about working on the
>encyclopedia. Being too wrapped up in rules can cause
>you to lose perspective, so there are times when it is
>best to ignore all rules... including this one.
>
That seems well said.  It's obvious that the rule is easily abused by
sysops with a POV.  In that case the problem is not in the rule.  It
might serve you better to develop a clear definition of "common sense"

>Maybe having the fluffy stuff is good too, but if IAR
>is going to be a core principle is should more clearly
>state when and why admins choose to ignore all rules.
>
>
That would be self-defeating.

Ec


from_name: Phil Boswell

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Re: Re: Criteria for deletion (was: Afd "votes" with
	noreal reasons given)

body:
"Tony Sidaway" <f.crdfa at gmail.com> wrote in
message news:605709b90509170448d62a36a at mail.gmail.com...
On 9/17/05, Michael Snow <wikipedia at earthlink.net>
wrote:
> David Gerard wrote:
> > ... I was a little surprised today when I discovered
> > that my attempt to boldly forge a compromise over a disputed deletion,
> > by merging [[Harry Potter trolling]] to [[Internet troll]], got reverted
> > - fortunately, in a polite and professional manner - on the grounds that
> > this kind of resolution is not allowed while the discussion is underway.
> Oddly enough, I merged the *entire contents* of that article into Harry
> Potter and the Half Blood Prince a few days ago, with barely a squeak of
> complaint. I've given clear instructions on the talk page of the Half
> Blood
> Prince article to the effect that the merge is entirely reversible and
> subject to acceptance by consensus, but after an initial revert (which
> someone restored) it has remained in place. Of course it'll have to be
> unmerged if the second AfD ends with a delete result.

Que? [checks for wax in ears] You mean "if the second AFD ends with a
**keep** result", surely?

The information is valid and verifiable, and deserves to be recorded in
Wikipedia somewhere. If the article dedicated to it should be kept, then it
belongs there; otherwise it eblongs in the article for the book to which it
most recently pertained.

...

That said, I see I am behind the times, and the deletionists have won that
particular round :-(

Won't it be interesting in the future, when someone asks "why isn't there a
Wikipedia article on such-and-such", and our rather lame response is "well,
we didn't think anybody would be interested". <sigh>
--
Phil
[[en:User:Phil Boswell]]


from_name: Paweł Dembowski

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia English English

body:
>>Americans seem to want to believe that they speak English, and we speak
>>British English in England (meaning Britain!). They are wrong. They speak a
>>dialect of our language, called American-English, an offshoot from the main
>>trunk if you will, which has evolved somewhat independently of English.
>> American-English is an out and out dialect of English. How can English
>>English be a dialect of English?
> I presume you are referring to the dialect of the ruling classes.

American pronunciation is definitely more similar to 17th century
English than British RP.

--
Ausir
Wikipedia, wolna encyklopedia
http://pl.wikipedia.org


from_name: Tony Sidaway

body:
On 9/19/05, Phil Boswell <phil.boswell at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> "Tony Sidaway" <f.crdfa at gmail.com> wrote in
> message news:605709b90509170448d62a36a at mail.gmail.com...
> > Of course it'll have to be
> > unmerged if the second AfD ends with a delete result.
>
> Que? [checks for wax in ears] You mean "if the second AFD ends with a
> **keep** result", surely?

If it's deleted then the GFDL tends to prevent the same material being used
in other articles, although the information could be paraphrased and merged
in.

Anyhow someone went ahead and unmerged, and meanwhile someone (albeit
slightly prematurely) closed the second AfD as a delete.


from_name: Delphine Ménard

body:
On 9/18/05, Roberto Frangi <rfrangi at coopetition.it> wrote:
> I prefer to handle a few liars (and they are blocked of course), instead
> of keeping on asking and explaining to people that just.... uploads images.

I agree. And as Wikipedia has proved it so far, there are more people
wanting to do good, than wanting to do bad ;-).

I am all for a STRONG incentive to put a source AND an author (this
"taken by self" on commons makes no sense once the image is
transcluded to other projects.

 A fake source is harder to find for an image than for text anyway, imho.

Delphine
--
~notafish


from_name: Rowan Collins

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia English English

body:
On 19/09/05, Jack & Naree <jack.macdaddy at gmail.com> wrote:
> > American-dialect English (also known as American-English) is more
> > related to English of the 17th-18th century than 'Commonwealth-English'
> > is.
>
>  What you mean is, the American dialect appears to have retained more
> obvious features of C17th English, whilst also evolving new ones of its own.
>
> Neither Commonwealth-English nor American-English are
> > 'English-English' or proper English more than the other;
>
>  Whilst neither Commonwealth English nor American-English *are* 'English
> English'; but,
> Commonwealth English includes English English and the accents and less
> divergent dialects of Commonwealth countries, which are more or less the
> same as written English English.

What is this "English English" to which you refer then, if it is only
"more or less the same" as actual existing varieties of English? Who
speaks or spoke it? You? Your wife? William Shakespere?

> So you're basically incorrect.
> Americans seem to want to believe that they speak English, and we speak
> British English in England (meaning Britain!). They are wrong. They speak a
> dialect of our language, called American-English, an offshoot from the main
> trunk if you will, which has evolved somewhat independently of English.

No. We all speak varieties of a language which has slowly evolved from
the "Germanic" languages of invaders of the British Isles several
centuries ago, diverging and converging according to political
expedience, and being heavily influenced by the mostly unrelated
language of a later wave of invaders from France. I suggest you read
one of the many fascinating accounts of the history of the language -
such as those by Robert McCrumb, David Crystal, or Bill Bryson.

English has evolved in various directions, over many centuries, and is
the product of a diverging evolution dating back much further still.
If you like, it is a dialect of German, which has evolved separately;
ultimately, through its Indo-European roots, it is also a separately
evolved branch of Spanish, and of various Indian languages. But you
couldn't really call it an "offshoot" of those, since they have all
developed entirely in parallel. The difference between a language and
a dialect is subtle, and sometimes controversial, but whether the
variety of English spoken in Sussex and the variety spoken in
Manhattan are dialects or just very closely related languages, they
are both recent [and eternally shifting] developments, and both
equally legitimate branches of an extremely complex grouping generally
known as "English".

In short, there is no "main trunk", never has been, and never will be.

>  American-English is an out and out dialect of English. How can English
> English be a dialect of English?

Because "English" is a term which refers to a language, in all its
dialects and usages, and "English English" is a term you've just made
up to refer to the variety of that language you happen to speak,
and/or of which you happen to approve.

> (NB, I'm basing my definition on the written word not the regional spoken
> dialects of England).

There is no reason for a dialect to be unwritten - commonly cited
vocabulary differences include the word for a small bread roll ("bap",
"barm cake", etc), and I'm sure users of those words would quite
unconciously use them in writing if they weren't carefully conforming
to a particular "standard". The BBC recently had a fascinating
"Voices" season celebrating just how varied our language is.

> >  if you want
> > proper English, look to Shakespearean early Modern English.
>
>  Incorrect, if you want proper English, go to England; that is where the
> English language is spoken by the English people, of England.

"Proper English" is a meaningless term. The first systematic efforts
to standardise English to any extent came with the invention of the
printing press, when it became possible to distribute documents en
masse all across the country (William Caxton wrote an oft-quoted
"prologue" regarding the difficulties of making printed material
understandable by all its readers). The concept of "English grammar"
is largely a construct of scholars who wished English was more like
Latin (to which it is largely unrelated) and attempted to force it
into a similar formal structure. "Correct spelling" is a similarly
artificial construct, mostly related to the mutual intelligibility
problem.

Meanwhile, if you want to use "English" to mean "the language spoken
in England" you will face two problems:
1) this is not how most users of English [or whatever replacement term
you wish to use for the sum of all English dialects] understand the
term; thus you defeat your own aim of using a "proper"/"standard"
language, in favour of using an "idiolect" which requires you to
constantly explain your reasoning
2) there is no one variety of English spoken in England; I think this
point needs little elaboration

Like I say, read some books about the history of English - it's really
quite fascinating, and should correct any misapprehensions you have of
a "pure" English ever having existed, even if you still remain on the
side of the "prescriptivists" who wish to create such a thing.

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Giant Message

body:
> On 19/09/05, Craig Franklin <craig at halo-17.net> wrote:
> >
> > Ahh, my mistake. My apologies.

On 19/09/05, Jack & Naree <jack.macdaddy at gmail.com> wrote:
> ?

He accidentally quoted an entire list digest at the bottom of one of
his replies: http://mail.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2005-September/041645.html

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


from_name: Gerard Meijssen

subject: [Wikipedia-l] English orthographies

body:
Hoi,
To explain to the people on the Wiktionary mailinglist where this comes
from, there is a huge debate on the Wikipedia-l mailinglist about having
a seperate English and American English wikipedia.

In the plans for Ultimate Wiktionary there are three ways in which words
can be destinguished as being of a particular orthography. I will
describe these here and hope to use the energy of this discussion for
this question that needs a resolution at some stage.

1) English, American English and other orthographies are treated as
seperate entities. This means that all words need to exist for each
orthography/dialect. On the plus side it means that descriptions like
etymology and meaning will be in this one orthography as well. This is
also the most easy method to provide information for a spell checker.

2) We treat these variants as belonging to a specific "spelling
authority". This means that one word needs to be only once in the
database. It means that the meanings and etymologies etc can be in any
of the orthographies.. It means that you cannot record the relations
between the words of these different orthographies/dialects. When words
are properly identified, it means that we can use the information for a
spell checker. It does not clearly help you understand what Meanings
exist in a particular varietion of English. This is in my opinion the
weakest option as it does not allow you to identify which meaning is
true for a particular version of English.

3) We can label Meanings as belonging to one of these particular
orthographies. When words are properly identified, it means that we can
use the information for a spell checker.

In my opinion the number 1 option is technically the best solution.
Going for this option is propably less problematic then breaking the
en.wikipedia.org into pieces. Going for this option seems like a lot of
duplication. It does however provide us with the possibility to be more
precise in what makes English different from American, Australian etc.

Please let me know what you think and particularly why.

Thanks,
    GerardM


list: wiktionary-l

subject: [Wiktionary-l] English orthographies


from_name: Andrew Gray

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia English English

body:
On 19/09/05, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:

> If I'm not mistaken, the Quebec dialect of French and the Brazilian
> dialect of Portuguese are considered acceptable in the French and
> Portuguese Wikipedias, respectively.

And the various American dialects of Spanish in es.wikipedia, IIRC.

(As an aside - how different are these dialects from "European
Spanish"? I remember my Spanish teacher telling us that Mexican usage
was easily identifiable as a different form of the same language, but
she said nothing about, say, Argentina)

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


from_name: Pawe³ Dembowski

subject: [Wikipedia-l] English orthographies

body:
Can't we just have a list of checkboxes for each dialect of a given
language for each meaning of a word? For words like "to be" or "dog"
we could just check boxes for every dialect, while we wouldn't for
words like petrol or gasoline...

--
Ausir
Wikipedia, wolna encyklopedia
http://pl.wikipedia.org