subject: [WikiEN-l] Ideas on a methodology

body:
Toby-
> Claudine Chionh wrote:

>> Just to throw something in to the discussion:
>> See <http://www.gnu.org/encyclopedia/>

> This suggests that GNU would be happy
> with our using the name "GNUpedia" --
> and other comments by Jimmy suggest the same.

Do they? Which comments are you referring to? Even so, Jimmy has already
said that he would prefer to use the name Nupedia for a separate sifter
project.

The GNU project is very fixated on use and abuse of the right and wrong
terms. See, e.g.,

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-for-freedom.html
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/linux-gnu-freedom.html

You're not supposed to say "Linux" (they tell you it's OK for the kernel,
but they also frequently object in that context), you're not supposed to
say "intellectual property", you're not supposed to say "open source".

If we call our sifter sister "Gnupedia" they will be constantly on our
back and watching that we don't do something that's not compatible with
the GNU way of life. Will Richard Stallman send us threatening mails to
withdraw his support and create

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/gnupedia-is-not-free.html

if we continue to have the main article about "Linux" under the title
"Linux" and not "GNU/Linux", as he nowadays demands in virtually every
interview he gives?

Yes, I do anticipate that others will be uncomfortable with such a name,
but I'm uncomfortable with it myself.

Regards,

Erik


list: wikitech-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Tomasz Wegrzanowski

subject: [Wikitech-l] New development policy

body:
On Mon, Jul 07, 2003 at 08:34:07AM -0700, Brion Vibber wrote:
> >Have all delelopers agreed to this policy?
>
> Me!

Sure that separation of stable and unstable is nice, but if test suddenly
becomes, well, real code testing place, shouldn't we make some test2 just for
playing with random code not necessarily meant for usage in real Wikipedias
in predictable future ?

> >Why there aren't any coding rules specified (at leased somethin like:
> >no more than 78 chars/line)?
>
> If you'd like to write up a codification of our current code style,
> please do. Some of the basics:
>
> function wfGlobalFunctionName( $notethespace, $anotherparam ) {
>    # <-- indent with tabs
>    global $wgSomeGlobalVar;
>    doMyStuff( $wgSomeGlobalVar, $anotherparam );
> }
>
> class SomeClass {
>    var $mMemberVariable;
>    # Use get/setters if possible
>    # very very short function can be on one line like this:
>    function getMemberVariable() { return $this->mMemberVariable; }
> }
>
> I would however counsel against the sort of cryptic local variable names
> in much of the older code, or the unnecessary duplication of code that
> should be refactored into functions or classes that can be shared.

Why not just: "The code should follow whatever is considered to be
good practice, unless there are reasons to do it some other way".
Wikipedia software isn't any special, so it doesn't need any special
coding rules. And 78 chars / line was important 10 years ago, but is seriously
too small for year 2003. Come on, we're all using hardware that easily
allows over 120 chars per line, not ?


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Paul Ebermann

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Wikipedia Weekly News

body:
> sgilbert at nbnet.nb.ca wrote
> [Date: Sun, 6 Jul 2003 18:23:40 -0300]:
>
> >I've put up a page for working on this at
> >http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Weekly_News , as well a
> >sample newsletter at http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/WWN_sample

"Brion Vibber" skribis:
[Date: Sun, 06 Jul 2003 14:20:21 -0700]

> You must be sending messages from the future, Stephen, cause I don't see
> them. :)

If one compares your message-dates, there is a difference of 3 minutes.
So he sended really from the future ...

Paul


from_name: Thomas Corell

subject: [Wikitech-l] New development policy

body:
Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:

> Why not just: "The code should follow whatever is considered to be
> good practice, unless there are reasons to do it some other way".
> Wikipedia software isn't any special, so it doesn't need any special
> coding rules. And 78 chars / line was important 10 years ago, but is seriously
> too small for year 2003. Come on, we're all using hardware that easily
> allows over 120 chars per line, not ?

I like sometimes to print a piece of code. Without reformating it. And of
course, it was only an example. Nothing we realy have to do.

I'm more interested in things like those I mailed some weeks ago:
http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2003-June/004376.html
(still unanswered, of course ;)

Or the policy should clear the topic of a ''code freeze'', which is never
lifted, but nobody seems to remember that.

All this are proposals, of course. And I certainly don't start editing the
policy on meta whitout a few comments from others here.

--
Smurf

smurf at AdamAnt.mud.de
-------------------------  Anthill inside! ---------------------------


list: wikien-l

from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [WikiEN-l] Ideas on a methodology

body:
Erik wrote:
>...
>If we call our sifter sister "Gnupedia" they
>will be constantly on our back and watching
>that we don't do something that's not
>compatible with the GNU way of life. Will
>Richard Stallman send us threatening mails
>to withdraw his support and create

OK fine. The "g" is too much of a potential political hot potato. I guess "Nu"
is close enough to "GNU" for the purposes of symbolism without making an
explicit political statement (or simply confusion on who really is running
the project). Nupedia it is.

--Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


from_name: Dante Alighieri

subject: [WikiEN-l] Ideas on a methodology

body:
At 08:24 PM 7/7/2003, you wrote:
>Erik wrote:
> >...
> >If we call our sifter sister "Gnupedia" they
> >will be constantly on our back and watching
> >that we don't do something that's not
> >compatible with the GNU way of life. Will
> >Richard Stallman send us threatening mails
> >to withdraw his support and create
>
>OK fine. The "g" is too much of a potential political hot potato. I guess
>"Nu"
>is close enough to "GNU" for the purposes of symbolism without making an
>explicit political statement (or simply confusion on who really is running
>the project). Nupedia it is.
>
>--Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

What... no one has suggested Mavpedia yet? ;)

-----
Dante Alighieri
dalighieri at digitalgrapefruit.com

"The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their
neutrality in times of great moral crisis."
    -Dante Alighieri, 1265-1321


from_name: Claudine Chionh

subject: [WikiEN-l] Ideas on a methodology

body:
Erik Moeller wrote in response to Daniel:
>> I agree completely except for the name of the "stable" Wikipedia
>> distribution; that, IMO, should be the slightly different "GNUpedia."
>> Of course the GNU people esp RMS would have to sign off on our use of
>> the "GNU" brand. If they do not feel comfortable with that then we can
>> use Nupedia.
>
>
> Even if they do (which I somewhat doubt unless we more openly endorse or
>  participate in the GNU project), this would link us strongly to the GNU
>  philosophy.

Just to throw something in to the discussion:

See <http://www.gnu.org/encyclopedia/>

> Our idea for a free encyclopedia is described in The Free Universal
> Encyclopedia and Learning Resource.
>
> Just as we were starting a project, GNUpedia, to develop a free
> encyclopedia, the Nupedia encyclopedia project adopted the GNU Free
> Documentation License and thus became a free commercial project. So we
> decided to merge GNUpedia project into Nupedia. Now, the Wikipedia
> encyclopedia project has adopted the philosophy of Nupedia and taken it
> even further. We encourage you to visit and contribute to the site.

Cheers
Claudine

--
anglican vegetarian pedal-powered esperantist


from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [Wikitech-l] New development policy

body:
Thomas-
> I like sometimes to print a piece of code. Without reformating it.

But that's what code formatters are for. I'm no fan of hard line breaks --
I have a reasonably large screen, and with all the whitespace that's
necessary for well formatted code, I need to make use of it in order to
make basic constructs visible. IMHO this kind of formatting should be done
dynamically as needed.

> I'm more interested in things like those I mailed some weeks ago:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2003-June/004376.html
> (still unanswered, of course ;)

The general answer to questions like this is "just do it". Use your own
best judgment.

> Or the policy should clear the topic of a ''code freeze'', which is never
> lifted, but nobody seems to remember that.

Well, I do remember it, and what Lee originally wrote is
http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=wikitech-l&m=105366788222813&w=2
"I'd like to strongly suggest that we put the software into feature
freeze for at least a week until all the wikis are fully functional
with the latest software, and they can all be updated from the
scripts in the distribution."

We all observed the code freeze for a week as Lee suggested, but nobody
did the necessary updates. Making updates easier is one of the reasons
behind the new development policy.

Regards,

Erik


from_name: Timwi

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: bug (or feauture) in "new articles" special page in es.wiki

body:
> Today I noticed that in the new pages listing, some
> titles are acompinied with the name of the first
> author, but the summary written by the last editor.
> Is this a bug or an intended behaviour?

I don't know if the original author of it intended this behaviour, but
it is at least documented at
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Recent_Changes

Timwi


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] languageNl.php

body:
Andre Engels wrote:

>I have translated the latest additions of the CVS into Dutch. The new
>languageNl.php is attached to this message, with the request for someone
>to upload it.
>
Okay, committed and installed.

>Why is it that even when I translate it, it sometimes does not get on the
>Dutch site? This happened recently with the semi-automatic addition of
>text upon deletion. Is there something else that has to be set, and if so,\
>what and where?
>
Some of the newer stuff isn't in the slightly older software on pliny.
I'm upgrading things to be at a consistent version all around now...

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [WikiEN-l] Page load problems

body:
Michael-
> Once again today, someone is complaining about page load time on the pump.
> I am beginning to suspect that this is a bandwidth problem.  What has been
> done to investigate the reason behind this problem, and what were the
> results of said tests?  I haven't really heard a straight answer from anyone
> saying what the problem is, just speculation.

There are a few improvements that are currently being tested which should
help speed things up. Getting all the wikis on the latest software will
also help, as this includes Brion's caching code. But remember that right
now all the languages, sister projects etc. run on *one* database server
(the web server load is shared, not the db load). We're still working with
very cheap equipment here -- basically not much more than what is under
your desk -- and runing a very high traffic website with that. The English
Wikipedia alone serves up to 250 gigabytes per month (the German wiki adds
up to 40 gigs per month, and so on).

If you told a regular business type that we accomplished all this with
free software and a couple of PCs running Linux, they would probably not
believe you. As great as this is, we'll have to start sharing the DB load
sooner or later.

Regards,

Erik


subject: [Wikitech-l] LanguageDe.php

body:
Thomas Corell wrote:

> Someone found another typo, therefore I made a new update.

Installed.

> Brion, to get the status to a well known point, if the article count
> don't go below 20000 if we change to the new one, I think we should
> switch. I don't know if you can take a look, without changing it.
>
> Than, as far as I know, we should be on the same patch level in en and
> de.

It would jump from 20446 to 23412.

Note also that the old (comma) count is slightly skewed, probably by
some old counter bugs that didn't handle deletions properly, and would
be 20143 if recounted properly.

-- brion vibber


subject: [Wikitech-l] CVS

body:
I thought I had posted this here yesterday, but it's not appearing in
the newsgroup for me. Has it been swallowed? Anyway, I'll post it again.

Hi,

not wanting to sound impatient, but I haven't yet received an answer to
my two questions:

a) What about my patch (the one about the pentuple-apostrophe bug)? Is
    it going to be committed? If not, why not? What do I need to change
    to make it committable?

b) Will I ever get CVS write access or not? If not, am I supposed to
    submit patches to this mailing list? Nobody else seems to do that.

P.S. I've seen the Wiki page on development policy, but it doesn't
answer these specific questions.

Thanks,
Timwi


subject: [Wikitech-l] Access Problem (Database-de)

body:
Thomas Corell wrote:

> 1142: select command denied to user: 'sqluser at localhost.localdomain'
> for table 'cur' (cur is an exaample, old, user etc. don't work too.

Okay, should be working again.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikitech-l] CVS

body:
Timwi wrote:

> b) Will I ever get CVS write access or not? If not, am I supposed to
>    submit patches to this mailing list? Nobody else seems to do that.

Usually if you have a Sourceforge account you can mail the account Brion,
in private.

You can although mail the patches to the mailing list.

--
Smurf

smurf at AdamAnt.mud.de
-------------------------  Anthill inside! ---------------------------


from_name: Kurt Jansson

subject:
[Wikitech-l] bug (or feauture) in "new articles" special page
 in es.wiki

body:
wiki pedista wrote:

> Today I noticed that in the new pages listing, some
> titles are acompinied with the name of the first
> author,
> but the summary written by the last editor.
>
> Is this a bug or an intended behaviour?

It's a bit confusing, but it helps to sort out new articles which have
already been wikified/copyedited/... by others. Maybe there should be a
short explanation on top of the page.

Kurt


from_name: Tim Starling

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Faster link updates

body:
"Erik Moeller" <erik_moeller at gmx.de> wrote in message
news:8pOynqihpVB at erik_moeller...
> Tim-
>
> thanks for coding this. One bug I noticed: When creating and removing a
> link to a non-existent page, the brokenlinks table is not updated
> accordingly, i.e. the removed link is still there. It works fine for
> normal links.

Done. It was an unquoted string in the SQL query which went unreported and
unlogged, since database errors get lost when a redirect is sent.

"Timwi" <timwi at gmx.net> wrote in message
news:TNJFZUQN1VNKJHMK97IGWTSMNHONB63Y.3f08239c at xptoe...
> 06.07.2003 14:21:09, Brion Vibber
<brion at pobox.com> wrote:
>
> > It may be a touch more efficient to do the deletes in one query, such
> > as:
> > $sql = "DELETE FROM links WHERE l_from='{$this->mTitleEnc}' AND l_to
> > IN (". implode( ",", $del) . ")";
>
> Probably not just a touch. :-)
>
> Yeah, I was going to say the same. Do it this way, and then this way
> should always be faster than the old way, so trash it.
>
> I would have loved to do it, but I guess I'm too late :-)

You just want me to do all the work, don't you? :) Done.

-- Tim Starling.


from_name: Colin Brace

subject: [WikiEN-l] Page load problems

body:
On 07/07/03  at 03:18 PM, "webmaster" <webmaster at jumpingjackweb.com> said:

> Once again today, someone is complaining about page load time on the
> pump.  I am beginning to suspect that this is a bandwidth problem.

Just now, page loading times are GLACIAL, especially Recent Changes. It is
a shame, because it makes the system virtually unuseable.

I'll have another go in the morning when the system is usually more
responsive.

--
  Colin Brace | cb at lim.nl
  Amsterdam
  http://www.lim.nl


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Some upgrades...

body:
All the wikis on phase 3 should now be up to date with the same version
running on the English wiki and for the last couple days the German wiki.

Of interest:
* page caching for anonymous users' page views reduces database load
* to accomodate the above, IP address is no longer shown in upper corner
* comma page count is being replaced with pages-with-links count; I'll
be recalculating the present article counts in a bit
* "go" is now default instead of "search"; this is often faster
* various little fixes

The new experimental features on test.wikipedia.org are _not_ installed yet.

If anything's horribly broken, send a note or drop by #wikipedia on
irc.freenode.net in the next couple hours.

There are likely to be new interface text bits that need localizing.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


body:
wiki pedista wrote:

>Today I noticed that in the new pages listing, some
>titles are acompinied with the name of the first
>author,
>but the summary written by the last editor.
>
>Is this a bug or an intended behaviour?
>
Bug! Thanks for the catch.

For the curious, here's the diff where I switched it from using cur to
the recentchanges table and introduced the bug by grabbing the field
from the wrong table:

http://cvs.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/wikipedia/phpwiki/newcodebase/SpecialNewpages.php.diff?r1=1.9&r2=1.10

Fix is installed.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikitech-l] CVS

body:
I have tried to post this to the newsgroup twice, but it never showed up
in it, so I'm attempting to send it through the mailing list. Apologies
if someone receives this several times. Does anyone know why I can't
post this to the newsgroup? (Replying to other postings in the newsgroup
appears to work fine.)

Hi,

not wanting to sound impatient, but I haven't yet received an answer to
my two questions:

a) What about my patch (the one about the pentuple-apostrophe bug)? Is
    it going to be committed? If not, why not? What do I need to change
    to make it committable?

b) Will I ever get CVS write access or not? If not, am I supposed to
    submit patches to this mailing list? Nobody else seems to do that.

P.S. I've seen the Wiki page on development policy, but it doesn't
answer these specific questions.

Thanks,
Timwi


subject: [Wikitech-l] New development policy

body:
Brion-
> On Mon, 7 Jul 2003, Erik Moeller wrote:
>> apologies for the surprise mail. Brion and I discussed this before and it
>> was time to simply implement this in order to move forward.

> To keep the cabal-watchers from worrying, this prior discussion consisted
> of Erik mentioning to me in IM that he thought we should have stable &
> unstable branches in CVS and me agreeing. We did _not_, I repeat, _not_
> secretly plan to round up the other developers in a fake truce meeting
> where we would use poison gas released from the scale model of the
> development tree to kill off our competition. Nothing like that even came
> up.

Of course not. Absolutely not. Never would we plan such a dastardly thing.

On a different note, we may want to discuss these issues in further detail
at a kind of, shall we say, "truce meeting" to alleviate all the remaining
corps^Wconcerns that there may be. I know a nice dark back alley that
would be perfect for the occasion ..

Regards,

Erik


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: New development policy

body:
"Erik Moeller" <erik_moeller at gmx.de> wrote in message
news:8pOypDtSpVB at erik_moeller...
> I have formulated a policy for Wikipedia development here:
>
> http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_policy
>
> In short:
> * We now have a "stable" branch. All Wikipedias should henceforth be
> updated from that branch. It is currently identical to the main (unstable)
> branch, but I'll take some untested features out in the next days.
>
> * NO MORE MANUAL OVERWRITING OF FILES ON TEST.WIKI. Sorry for shouting,
> but this really has to stop. If our Test-Wiki is supposed to be useful, it
> has to be in a consistent state. That means it should only be updated from
> CVS unstable.
>
> * A basic testing procedure. Features will have to run on test.wiki for
> 3-10 days before they are committed to stable.
>
> With this policy in place, it should become much more feasible to keep all
> the Wikipedias up to date. We still need someone to finish the conversion
> script, though -- Italian is still on UseMod, for example, they really
> should be switched over.
>
> Regards,
>
> Erik

This is all great. I was thinking much the same thing myself. CVS and the
test server are much too chaotic at the moment. I was actually thinking of a
stricter development cycle, aimed at producing a series of numbered stable
releases, but I guess continuous development could be okay too, as long as
there are no serious bottlenecks in getting features from conception to
installation.

-- Tim Starling.


from_name: The Cunctator

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Please help test new features

body:
On 7/7/03 7:26 PM, "David Friedland" <david at nohat.net> wrote:

> Erik Moeller wrote:
>
>> I can live with an override function. I am strongly opposed to making
>> authors have to insert a TOC tag manually into articles. For the time
>> being, howeevr, I would like to see examples where the TOC is
>> inappropriate before I implement the override, to avoid having unnecessary
>> added complexity.
>>
> I think part of the problem I've been having with coming up with
> examples where a TOC is inappropriate/needed is that it is currently
> only implemented on the test Wikipedia, and I don't really spend much
> time just "browsing" the test server. I believe that when the TOC
> feature is on the live server, then cases where it needs to be
> overridden will become apparent. Then again, perhaps not.
>
Again, just as the Sticky-Note Main Page should be an optional skin, the TOC
feature should be an optional user function.

*At least* initially. Neither should have been/be inserted as the new
default mechanism.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Ideas on a methodology

body:
Toby Bartels wrote:

> Allowing all of these works easiest if it's the Sifter site,
> not the Wikipedia site itself, where people pick versions.
> The true beauty of this is that somebody that hates our Sifters
> is now free to set up their own Sifter using our Sifter software,
> and choose Wikipedia articles according to their own judgements.

And it doesn't clutter up our user interface. I'm all for it.

Kurt


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: CVS

body:
Timwi wrote:

> I have tried to post this to the newsgroup twice, but it never showed up
> in it, so I'm attempting to send it through the mailing list.

A huge apology to everybody for the triple-sending of the message. The
reason I didn't see it in the newsgroup is because I ignored an earlier
thread titled "CVS", and I titled all these postings the same, so
Mozilla thought they're the same thread.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Page load problems

body:
[crossposted to wikipedia-l]

Brion Vibber wrote:

> When I stare at mysql's process list to see the slowpokes, who comes up
> on top?
>
> Search, search, search.

Some say we need to buy another server, others say the developers need
to speed up the code. I think we need to to both.

We're growing very fast, but we could have grown even faster if we
wouldn't have speed problems since far over a year now. It's not only
that our editors could write more articles in fewer time, many articles
don't get writen because people leave the project out of frustration or
presumably more often don't even start editing. Many edits got lost
because the server didn't respond or people didn't wait long enough.

So the Wikimedia Foundation needs money to buy new servers. Besides
waiting for donations I suggest that we take part in as many bookshop
affiliate programs as possible. It doesn't have the downsides of
banners, because it's totaly unobtrusive and neutral. Many Wikipedians
would visit their favourite online bookstore through our site if they
knew the foundation will profit from it. I can't predict how much money
we will make in the end, but it's worth trying.

Kurt


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: [WikiEN-l] Page load problems


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: CVS

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:

> On Mon, 7 Jul 2003, Timwi wrote:
>
>>not wanting to sound impatient, but I still haven't received an answer
>>to my questions.
>>
>>a) What about my patch (the one about the pentuple-apostrophe bug)? Is
>>    it going to be committed? If not, why not? What do I need to change
>>    to make it committable?
>
> Well, I would like to see it thoroughly tested; basic markup is something
> we try not to break.

I was hoping someone here would test it. I don't have an installation to
test it on. I've been trying all of today to install Apache & PHP, but
as is typical for Linux, it's not possible. (Anyone wanna help me via IM
or IRC or something?)

>>b) Will I ever get CVS write access or not? If not, am I supposed to
>>    submit patches to this mailing list? Nobody else seems to do that.
>
> Everybody else who has CVS access has been a longtime contributor who
> asked for it to facilitate something particular they'd been working on
> (updating language files in several cases). You've sort of popped up out
> of the blue, which is fine, but don't expect to have the keys to the
> source repository handed out instantenously; we don't use a wiki for
> source control yet. ;)

I'm sorry, I wasn't trying to imply that I expected this. I don't. I
only expect that contributions not be ignored ;-) It's just that I saw
it as the only alternative if no-one was going to test and review it for
me, so I was wondering how other newbie contributors are supposed to do it.

> I've added you to the project; feel free to commit the patch and I'll make
> sur it gets on the test server for more live testing.

Thanks, but I seem to be unable to commit the patch:
   cvs [server aborted]: "commit" requires write access to the repository

Did I miss something? (I logged in to the CVS server using my
Sourceforge login and password. The CVS server didn't complain about a
wrong password or anything.)

Greetings,
Timwi


subject: [Wikitech-l] Polish Wikipedia broken

body:
Krzysztof P. Jasiutowicz wrote:

>Please look into problems on the the Polish Wikipedia urgently.
>Saving  newly created articles results in:
>
>
[snip]

>0,616858519435,
>
urrrrgh, localization strikes again -- comma as decimal separator is
very unfriendly to MySQL. :)

You may remember a cousin of this bug that struck when the random page
system was changed a while back. This is a related part and exposes the
same problem when switched into Polish locale. I've changed it to
explicitly use a period to format the number. Should work fine now...

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


body:
Hello,

this will be usually something for Brion:

Since the update the german sysop's can't access the DB using the
AskSQL-page. All tested table-queries results in the error:

1142: select command denied to user: 'sqluser at localhost.localdomain' for
table 'cur' (cur is an exaample, old, user etc. don't work too.

Posible errors: AskSQL uses the wrong user, or the tables missing rights
for that user.

PS: sorry for reporting so late, but I thought after the update, the Asksql
was blocked for reducing server load.
--
Smurf

smurf at AdamAnt.mud.de
-------------------------  Anthill inside! ---------------------------


from_name: Adam

from_email: Adam

subject: [WikiEN-l] GNU FDL infringement

body:
The site has taken wiki material. Within no time at all I found myself reading my own text.

---------------------------------
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subject: [Wikitech-l] LanguageDe.php

body:
Someone found another typo, therefore I made a new update.

Brion, to get the status to a well known point, if the article count don't
go below 20000 if we change to the new one, I think we should switch. I
don't know if you can take a look, without changing it.

Than, as far as I know, we should be on the same patch level in en and de.
--
Smurf

smurf at AdamAnt.mud.de
-------------------------  Anthill inside! ---------------------------


from_name: root

subject: [WikiEN-l] GNU FDL infringement alert!

body:
BURN THEM!  I think RMS would have some interesting input, I am
forwarding the message to him and the FSF.

--
Michael Becker

-----Original Message-----
From: wikien-l-admin at wikipedia.org [mailto:wikien-l-admin at wikipedia.org]
On Behalf Of Oliver Pereira
Sent: Tuesday, July 08, 2003 6.57
To: wikien-l at wikipedia.org
Subject: [WikiEN-l] GNU FDL infringement alert!

Hello,

I've just discovered that a website called called "Malaspina Great
Books"
has "adapted" hundreds of our biographical articles and included them in
their database. They claim copyright of this database ("This database is
maintained by Malaspina Great Books 1995-2003") and make no mention of
having released any of it under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation
License. Clearly they are infringing the terms of the licence. What
should we do about this?

The Malaspina website is at:

http://www.malaspina.com/

See also [[Talk:Galileo Galilei]], which is where I first noted the
fact.

Oliver

+-------------------------------------------+
| Oliver Pereira                            |
| Dept. of Electronics and Computer Science |
| University of Southampton                 |
| omp199 at ecs.soton.ac.uk                    |
+-------------------------------------------+

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


from_name: Toby Bartels

subject: [WikiEN-l] GNU FDL infringement alert!

body:
Oliver Pereira wrote:

>I've just discovered that a website called called "Malaspina Great Books"
>has "adapted" hundreds of our biographical articles and included them in
>their database. They claim copyright of this database ("This database is
>maintained by Malaspina Great Books 1995-2003") and make no mention of
>having released any of it under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation
>License. Clearly they are infringing the terms of the licence. What should
>we do about this?

The bios link to Wikipedia at their ends,
so I'd assume that they're acting in good faith.
We just need to point out to them
that they need to include a notice by each bio
indicating that it's released under the GFDL.
(They don't have to release their entire database,
but we could encourage them to do that as well,
giving their use of our biographies as immediate evidence
of the benefits of free content.)

>The Malaspina website is at: http://www.malaspina.com/

I found an interesting June 2 post in their guestbook
<http://www.iguest.net/cgi-bin/gb.cgi?user=greatbooks>,
where a visitor pointed out an error in Martin Heidegger's bio.
Like usual, that error remains uncorrected on Malaspina --
but of course it had been corrected on Wikipedia months before!
I posted a reply (from me, not from Wikipedia generally);
I also sent it to the email address given by the visitor.

>See also [[Talk:Galileo Galilei]], which is where I first noted the fact.

-- Toby


from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject: [WikiEN-l] GNU FDL infringement alert!

body:
Toby Bartels wrote:
> The bios link to Wikipedia at their ends,
> so I'd assume that they're acting in good faith.

Yes, I would imagine that's right.  Do we have a specific volunteer
to write to them?  Better than, than a half-dozen confusing emails.
:-)

I would advocate a friendly letter that assumes they will want to do
the right thing.  The linkback is good evidence to that effect, and
getting the details of the GNU FDL right is a bit complicated.  :-)

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Please help test new features

body:
Timwi wrote:

>Toby Bartels wrote:

>>Include an option for always (0 headers required)

>I wanna see what a TOC for an article without any headings would look
>like! ;-)

Like this:

+-----------------+
|Table of contents|
+-----------------+

Table of contents

OK, that's a silly option. ^_^

-- Toby


subject: [WikiEN-l] Ideas on a methodology

body:
Later this week, probably on Saturday or Sunday, I'll be releasing my
own vision of our roadmap to 1.0.  This will not be a policy decree or
the law, but just a set of personal milestones that's subject to
community input and revision.  But, I think people will mostly like
it, because I'm going to leave all the controversial stuff out.  :-)

(Controversial stuff means stuff like an actual methodology for
sifting/certifying.  We'll do it somehow, but I'm not going to decree
it this week!)

Magnus Manske wrote:
> Then let's make this happen! How about this:
> * Each article gets a pointer to its "stable" version.
> * A new site (NuNupedia;-) is set up with the wiki software, using the
> same database, with two differences:
> ** No editing, for noone
> ** Instead of displaying the current article, it displays the "stable"
> version
> * On wikipedia, a link "make this the stable version" appears for editors
>
> We'll just have to find a way to determine the editors. That aside,
> would that be a viable concept? I ask because it'd be dead easy to code ;-)
>
> Magnus
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l


subject: [WikiEN-l] Ideas on a methodology

body:
Toby Bartels wrote:
> This suggests that GNU would be happy
> with our using the name "GNUpedia" --
> and other comments by Jimmy suggest the same.
> It seems that there are /Wikipedians/, however,
> who aren't so happy with such a relationship.

Actually, I'm one of them.  The GNU people have their own agenda, and
we have ours.  They quite happily overlap a lot, but we aren't in any
sense at all a sub-project of GNU, and so we shouldn't adopt their
name.

Another factor here is that the GNU people prefer people to say
GNU/Linux rather than just Linux, and the reason is that a huge
proportion of the code in Linux, esp. for utilities that are not in
the kernel itself, is GNU/FSF code.

There's no parallel here.  Almost everything in wikipedia is native
wikipedian.  And the GNU/FSF people have contributed nothing directly,
other than the license and of course the genius concept in the first
place.  :-)

--Jimbo


from_name: koyaanis qatsi

subject: [WikiEN-l] questioning false copyright claims

body:
do we have a boilerplate asking about what we believe
to be false copyright claims?  I ask because a few
weeks ago I visited the site of a university hosting
pictures from the late 1800s and claiming copyright on
them.

As far as I know, simply scanning an image in does
*not* constitute creative input, and does not make the
photo a derivative work eligible for copyright.  I'd
like to go about asking several sites to clarify their
copyright claims, but when I first see something I
strongly suspect to be false and/or greedy, I turn
green and say things like "arrrrgh! smash!"

How should be go about phrasing the question, or has
it been done already?

Thanks,

kq

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from_name: Krzysztof P. Jasiutowicz

subject: [Wikitech-l] Polish Wikipedia broken

body:
Hi,

Please look into problems on the the Polish Wikipedia urgently.
Saving  newly created articles results in:

   Wyst?pi? b??d sk?adni w zapytaniu do bazy danych. Ostatnie, nieudane
   zapytanie to: "INSERT INTO cur
   (cur_namespace,cur_title,cur_text,cur_comment,cur_user,cur_timestamp,c
   ur_minor_edit,cur_counter,cur_restrictions,cur_user_text,cur_is_redire
   ct,cur_is_new,cur_random,cur_touched,inverse_timestamp) VALUES
   (0,'Antropopresja', '\'\'\'Antropopresj?\'\'\' okre?la si? og??
   planowych i nieplanowych dzia?a? cz?owieka, wywo?uj?cych okre?lone
   zmiany w [[przyroda|przyrodzie]]. Wsp??cze?nie okre?lenie to akcentuje
   wp?yw niekorzystny, utrudniaj?cy prawid?owy rozw?j ekosystem?w. Zobacz
   te?: [[podstawowe zagadnienia zwi?zane z ekologi?]].', 'Nowy art',
   '4', '20030708104855', 0, 0, '', 'Kpjas', 0, 1, 0,616858519435,
   '20030708104855', '79969291895144')" wywo?ane zosta?o przez funkcj?
   "Article::insertNewArticle". MySQL zg?osi? b??d "1136: Column count
   doesn't match value count at row 1".

Thanks.
Regards,
Kpjas.


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: morphophonics for wikipedia

body:
steve vertigo wrote:

>PS -- its important to note that Sampa was originally
>designed with only Germanic /Latin languages in mind
>to begin with: "Danish, Dutch, English, French,
>German, and Italian (by 1989); later to Norwegian and
>Swedish (by 1992); and subsequently to Greek,
>Portuguese, and Spanish (1993)."
>
>Plus it just tries to doo too damn much.
>
My further objection to SAMPA is that many of its representations tend
to be counterintuitive.  When it uses an upper case letter to indicate
something other than its minuscule counterpart I get a completely wrong
impression about how the word in question should be pronounced.
 Although I tend to mostly favour IPA, the use of capital letters in the
popular American system to indicate emphasis is very easy to understand
and follow.

Ec


body:
Geoffrey Thomas wrote:

>line across th for
>voiced and no line for unvoiced. This last one is the only thing not
>representable in Unicode;
>
Not so.  Even 8859-1 makes this accomodation because of its need to be
compatible with a modern Western language, i.e. Icelandic.  Thus #0240
is "?" (voiced) and #0254 is "?" (unvoiced).  To enter these in an
e-mail I simply type the number (with its leading zero) while holding
the Alt key.

Ec


subject: [WikiEN-l] GNU FDL infringement alert!

body:
On 7/8/03 11:38 AM, "Kurt Jansson" <jansson at gmx.net> wrote:

> root wrote:
>
>> BURN THEM!  I think RMS would have some interesting input, I am
>> forwarding the message to him and the FSF.
>
> Maybe before "calling the authorities" someone should just send them a
> nice but explicit mail and ask them to mention the GFDL below the text.
>
> Please don't forget that we *want* our articles to spread. It's a
> rudeness that they call it "adapted" and don't point out the licence of
> the articles. But often one or two strict mails can help.
>
Yes. We certainly welcome Russ McNeil to release Malaspina Great Books under
the GFDL. But McNeil certainly needs to do so if he wishes to use Wikipedia
content.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Martin's rewriting of policy pages unilaterally

body:
martin at myreddice.freeserve.co.uk wrote:

>One of the things I disliked about h2g2 was that it could take months to fix
>documentation bugs (that's not figurative: actual months. In one instance, it's been a
>year since the problem was first reported, and it's still not fixed). On Wikipedia, it's a
>matter of minutes, nay seconds. That's great - let's not lose that.
>
This seems to parallel the point that I was making to illustrate
Wikipedia's primary competitive advantage over Britannica.

Ec


from_name: Delirium

body:
koyaanis qatsi wrote:

>do we have a boilerplate asking about what we believe
>to be false copyright claims?  I ask because a few
>weeks ago I visited the site of a university hosting
>pictures from the late 1800s and claiming copyright on
>them.
>
>As far as I know, simply scanning an image in does
>*not* constitute creative input, and does not make the
>photo a derivative work eligible for copyright.  I'd
>like to go about asking several sites to clarify their
>copyright claims, but when I first see something I
>strongly suspect to be false and/or greedy, I turn
>green and say things like "arrrrgh! smash!"
>
>How should be go about phrasing the question, or has
>it been done already?
>
>
When discussing images of out-of-copyright paintings, [[Wikipedia:Public
domain image resources]] suggests "Accurate photographs of paintings
lack expressive content and are automatically in the public domain once
the painting's copyright has expired (95 years after initial
publication). All other copyright notices can safely be ignored."

I think this is probably a good policy -- if you're quite sure that the
copyright notices are invalid and the images are in fact public domain,
just use them and ignore the copyright notices.  Then if someone
complains we can try arguing with their copyright claims, but no need to
pick fights unless we have to.

-Mark


from_name: Oliver Pereira

subject: [WikiEN-l] GNU FDL infringement alert!

body:
Hello,

I've just discovered that a website called called "Malaspina Great Books"
has "adapted" hundreds of our biographical articles and included them in
their database. They claim copyright of this database ("This database is
maintained by Malaspina Great Books 1995-2003") and make no mention of
having released any of it under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation
License. Clearly they are infringing the terms of the licence. What should
we do about this?

The Malaspina website is at:

http://www.malaspina.com/

See also [[Talk:Galileo Galilei]], which is where I first noted the fact.

Oliver

+-------------------------------------------+
| Oliver Pereira                            |
| Dept. of Electronics and Computer Science |
| University of Southampton                 |
| omp199 at ecs.soton.ac.uk                    |
+-------------------------------------------+


from_name: steve vertigo

subject: [Wikitech-l] Sofware changes for Fascile Translation

body:
Sofware changes for Fascile Translation on the
Wikipedia (International)

1. Wikisoftware upgrade for the Simple English
Wikipedia.
2. Means to siphon English wikipedia database to the
Simple English database.
3. Application to facilitat translation from the
English WP to the Simple English WP.
4. Download WKP format textfiles link on each article.

Comment: Some of the recent discussions among the
various mailing lists deal with the
compartmentalization factor of the Wikipedia -- that
language borders represent too much of a relative
challenge to allow for cross-language interest.
Speaking personally, I would do more translation if it
the software were set up to make it easier, so I
simply wouldnt feel alone in doing it.

In a sense, WP's strong English showing in terms of
article count (relative to non-En langa)  is like a
pillar -- one that is increasingly tall, and
increasingly narrow. It's somewhat reminicent of the
saying ( from "Dune Messiah"):

"Here lies a toppled God
His fall was not a small one
We did but build his pedestal
A narrow and a tall one."

Most of us here deal with English as a common language
-- and the Goal is to increase the number of
inter-language "ambassadors" and hence, the number of
non-English speakers.  By these ambassadors, and by
improving the synergy between discussion groups,
article writing, etc. -- The rules of the Wikipedia --
that its attempts to institute controls over the
processes of the Wikipedia, can then be better
disseminated and debated.

Language problems are really problems of
communication, as such can be rectified somwhat by
simplifying communication (not over-simpifying) by
allowing the Simple English WP to take the place of
the English WP as the center of international content.

Generally, it would be proper to simply stipulate that
the English Wikipedia should have a great deal of
leeway in terms of its rules, but since a great many
non-native English speakers can potentially want to
contribute and use English articles, it becomes
necessary to have a sandbox of sorts, to allow for
crude-English seeding of articles, and to port the
English WP to other languages.  In the linguistic
sense, a simplified English language should serve
quite well as a "transformative grammar" -- Chomsky's
(now semi-depricated) description of an innate,
baseline natural language.  In the internationalist
sense, this would be a key step toward increasing WP's
international appeal.

Reason -- to use the Simple English WP as a "pure
language" base - from which a broader range of people
can translate the populous English articles to other
languages.

A translation from say, Chinese to simple English, and
then edited, would be far easier to do than if normal
gramatical standards werent necessary.  Hence, the
real purpose for a Simple Wikipedia is not to "teach
English", (as it until-recently stated) rather to
allow non-English speakers to deal with articles in
English, as well as make it possible to contribute to
them.

*Allow for a simple "port"( like "move page")
functions from the English WP to the Simple WP - (from
Simple to English only if English article doesnt
exist)

* Conversion from English to Simple English (SEmpl?)
should parse language (pw placing wrappers around
unknown terms, and if possible (as announced in some
translation attempts) to , etc.

*Problems: Redundancy/loss of information/increased
rates of poor translation.
These are all fixable. The point is to generate more
interest, and increase cross-langa communication, with
the help of a base.  Simple English may not be a
theoretical ideal for this purpose, but it may be the
only practical choice.

*Requirements: Perhaps, a unified User:name system.
One name carries over all WikiMedia sites. -- This
allows at least a crossover ability to register Edits,
ports and

*Related page activity --  Since each article, though
by a new name, has some relation to activity of that
article accross lingustic lines, it should be
facilitated that each article should have a listed
cross-langa database function --( I know the DB dont
work this way now.) The current DIY langa links are an
obstacle -- for each language, be there a page or not,
there should be a link from each page, and tools to
send text to the Simple English version.  It makes
sense to have this be done page by page -- not
altogether blanket automated from the English WP,
though Im sure we can all agree that the current
software doesnt help this kind of thing out at all.

Client(editing/concordancing/uploading)
The translation of an English Wikipage ideally could
be helped via a fully functional  editing client, and
text highlighting could be a part --as in the VIM
Wikipedia Schema -- though Keynote might also be a
good choice client if implemented correctly. Adding
concordancing ability to this client would save yet
another step the goal of cross-pollenation of
articles.

__________________________________
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subject: [Wikipedia-l] I User:Stevertigo formally request developer level access

body:
I User:Stevertigo formally request
sysop/admin/developer level access to the Arabic
Wikipedia. Among the first issues would be to deal
with the encoding there.  UTF-8 or 1256 are
canditates, but it would require some proper testing.
My Arabic is very limited, though, and hopefully some
changes ought give some life and perhaps credibility
to the Ar.Wikipedia.

I User:Stevertigo formally request sysop/admin
developer level access to the Simple Enlgish Wikpedia.
 Among the first issues would be to deal with finding
a use for the simple. Wikipedia -- among my proposals
(
http://simple.wikipedia.com/wiki.cgi?SEnpl_For_Translation
)
is the possiblitly of using simple English as a base
for translating the vast catalog of English articles
to other languages. By allowing the Simple Wikipedia
to act as a kind of firewall, sandbox, embassy... any
problems arising from the perception that non-English
speakers and English
speakers have of each other, will be mitigated.

If interested, please see the recent changes made to
the Simple.wikipedia -- http://simple.wikipedia.com

__________________________________
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subject: [Wikitech-l] I User:Stevertigo formally request developer level access


subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia more popular than Britannica!

body:
So, this is pretty interesting.  According to Alexa.com, Wikipedia is
now more popular than Britannica.

eb.com is ranked 16,884
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?q=&url=http://www.eb.com/

britannica.com is ranked 3,054
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?q=&url=http://www.britannica.com/

wikipedia.org is ranked 3,012
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?q=&url=http://www.wikipedia.org/


in_reply_to: <20030708191254.63718.qmail@web11505.mail.yahoo.com>; from utilitymuffinresearch@yahoo.com on Tue, Jul 08, 2003 at 12:12:54PM -0700

body:
What exactly are you asking for?

steve vertigo wrote:

> I User:Stevertigo formally request
> sysop/admin/developer level access to the Arabic
> Wikipedia. Among the first issues would be to deal
> with the encoding there.  UTF-8 or 1256 are
> canditates, but it would require some proper testing.
> My Arabic is very limited, though, and hopefully some
> changes ought give some life and perhaps credibility
> to the Ar.Wikipedia.
>
> I User:Stevertigo formally request sysop/admin
> developer level access to the Simple Enlgish Wikpedia.
>  Among the first issues would be to deal with finding
> a use for the simple. Wikipedia -- among my proposals
> (
> http://simple.wikipedia.com/wiki.cgi?SEnpl_For_Translation
> )
> is the possiblitly of using simple English as a base
> for translating the vast catalog of English articles
> to other languages. By allowing the Simple Wikipedia
> to act as a kind of firewall, sandbox, embassy... any
> problems arising from the perception that non-English
> speakers and English
> speakers have of each other, will be mitigated.
>
> If interested, please see the recent changes made to
> the Simple.wikipedia -- http://simple.wikipedia.com
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> __________________________________
> Do you Yahoo!?
> SBC Yahoo! DSL - Now only $29.95 per month!
> http://sbc.yahoo.com
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l


body:
--- Jimmy Wales <jwales at bomis.com> wrote:
> What exactly are you asking for?
>

Im not sure, really -- to deal with each of these at a
software level would require some low-level access --
something Im pretty sure a sysop cant do.  On the
other hand, Im not interested in becoming a full
developer on any of these projects - I dont have the
necessary skills frankly.  But my perception is that
the Dev condintgent is overworked and the less someone
has to ask them for something the better.  Perhaps all
Im asking is for some light to shine on the Ar.wiki
for a couple weeks to get the sw running.

-S

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subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Search function

body:
Toby Bartels wrote:

>John Robinson wrote:
>
>>I thought it ought to be mentioned that the lack of search capability
>>is not just annoying to editors, it reading of the encyclopedia for
>>study virtually impossible, expecially for someone new to the site.
>>
>>Would it be possible to put the Google search box in as had been done
>>in the past?  I realize that's lame in comparison but it's better than
>>nothing.
>>
>
>Yes, please!
>
>It's no good as a long term solution, but it's something.
>And it does work, kind of.
>
More agreement!  With all due respect to our beleaguered coding
volunteers.  If, for example, I want to write a biographical article
about some individual of penumbral fame, I like to be able to search for
other articles from which a link could be made.  That individual needs
all the help he can get if is ever to hope to emerge from the shadows. :-)

Ec


body:
For those with html

For those without -

Quite a little horserace. 8-).

--- Jimmy Wales <jwales at bomis.com> wrote:
> So, this is pretty interesting.  According to
> Alexa.com, Wikipedia is
> now more popular than Britannica.
>

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body:
Jens Frank wrote:

>On Tue, Jul 08, 2003 at 12:10:40AM -0700, Brion Vibber wrote:
>
>
>>Bug! Thanks for the catch.
>>
>>
>
>Feature!
>
>This eases scanning for grafitti pages a lot. Edit comments like "wikified"
>help to sort out which articles have already been proofread.
>
Then rewrite it to be useful about it, counting the number of edits and
who made them.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikitech-l] Problem with installation

body:
Timwi wrote:

> How can I fix this? Where do I enable or set these settings/variables?

Find your php.ini and set register_globals = On.

If you don't have a php.ini, find the php.ini-dist and copy it to
php.ini, probably under /usr/local/lib or /usr/local/etc or some such place.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject:
[Wikitech-l] I User:Stevertigo formally request developer level
 access

body:
steve vertigo wrote:
[snip]

>  Perhaps all
>Im asking is for some light to shine on the Ar.wiki
>for a couple weeks to get the sw running.
>

I set up a he.wikipedia.org stub last night, and ar.wikipedia.org just
now. They're UTF-8 encoded, but don't (yet) have any special code for
explicitly handling right-to-left text beyond sticking a "dir=RTL" on
the HTML. It may be difficult to test this stuff properly until there's
some localized user interface text!

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Jonathan Walther

subject: [Wikitech-l] suggestion for making the sysops job easier

body:
On the Recentchanges page, if a contributor isn't logged in, you can
click on their IP number to see what changes they have made previously.

I suggest putting a link on the IP's contributions page so you can see
the contributions from the entire Class C subnet.  If someone is hopping
around from IP to IP, this should make it much easier to observe their
pattern of behavior, and revert their edits.

Just putting that out there; good luck with your Wikipedia project.

Jonathan

--

    It's not true unless it makes you laugh,
             but you don't understand it until it makes you weep.

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from_name: webmaster

subject: [WikiEN-l] GNU FDL infringement alert!

body:
Oliver, could you please forward the e-mail to the list (or at least me)?  Also, I have no problem doing a little bit of research, and writting him myself if he fails to respond in a positive manner to your request.  Just let me(us) know of the progress.

--
Michael Becker
a.k.a. Mbecker
a.k.a. MB

---------- Original Message ----------------------------------
From: Oliver Pereira <omp199 at ecs.soton.ac.uk>
Reply-To: wikien-l at wikipedia.org
Date:  Tue, 8 Jul 2003 17:57:37 +0100 (BST)
>I've just e-mailed Dr. McNeil (using the contact address given on the
>homepage), actually. But I wasn't *entirely* sure about what he had to do
>to comply with the GFDL, so I might have sounded a bit incoherent. So,
>just the one confusing e-mail, then. ;) It would probably be best if
>someone more articulate and knowledgeable about the law e-mailed him as
>well...
>
>Oliver
>
>+-------------------------------------------+
>| Oliver Pereira                            |
>| Dept. of Electronics and Computer Science |
>| University of Southampton                 |
>| omp199 at ecs.soton.ac.uk                    |
>+-------------------------------------------+
>
>_______________________________________________
>WikiEN-l mailing list
>WikiEN-l at wikipedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


subject: [WikiEN-l] GNU FDL infringement alert!

body:
On Tue, 8 Jul 2003, Oliver Pereira wrote:

> They claim copyright of this database ("This database is maintained by
> Malaspina Great Books 1995-2003")

Oh. The actual copyright symbol didn't transfer when I copied and pasted
the text. Just imagine that there is one before the year in the above
sentence...

Oliver

+-------------------------------------------+
| Oliver Pereira                            |
| Dept. of Electronics and Computer Science |
| University of Southampton                 |
| omp199 at ecs.soton.ac.uk                    |
+-------------------------------------------+


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Problem with installation

body:
On Tue, 8 Jul 2003, Timwi wrote:
> Things seem to work now, except editing an article. If I submit an
> article, I get:
>
>    Warning: Empty regular expression in Language.php on line 1424

Yeah, there's some bug in Tim's date munging code that someone should
look into...

Set $wgUseDynamicDates = false in LocalSettings.php to be sure it's
disabled for now. Or try to fix it. :)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Stan Shebs

subject: [WikiEN-l] More license stuff - www.4reference.net

body:
a.crossman at blueyonder.co.uk wrote:

>While we're talking about the GFDL, www.4reference.net seems to have
>a lot of Wikipedia stuff online. Bizarrely, most of it is non-article
>space stuff like user pages, though some pages are real articles.
>
>Anyway, their pages don't seem to mention the license either. e.g:
>http://www.4reference.net/encyclopedias/wikipedia/HTML.html
>
>They do however mention that they got it from us.
>
>There are many such pages. A google search for:
>site:http://www.4reference.net Wikipedia
>turns them up. Top hit is Mbecker's white board. :-)
>
>Evercat
>
I suspect we'll see more and more of this.  Wikipedia is a
convenient source of free content for sites hoping to increase
traffic so they get ad rates high enough to pay for the bandwidth
charges.  Perhaps every page should be stamped with an invariant
section promoting wikipedia.org as *the* place to get one's
encyclopedia articles. 1/2 :-)

4reference.net doesn't seem to include any of the pictures,
very lame.

Stan


from_name: Tim Starling

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: New development policy

body:
Tomasz said:

> Sure that separation of stable and unstable is nice, but if test suddenly
> becomes, well, real code testing place, shouldn't we make some test2 just
for
> playing with random code not necessarily meant for usage in real
Wikipedias
> in predictable future ?

Hey, that's a good idea, why didn't I think of that? Oh, that's right, I
did:

http://test.wikipedia.org/w/tim/wiki.phtml

(actually it wasn't my idea, there was already a directory there called
"magnus-version" and I took my cue from that)

> Why not just: "The code should follow whatever is considered to be
> good practice, unless there are reasons to do it some other way".
> Wikipedia software isn't any special, so it doesn't need any special
> coding rules. And 78 chars / line was important 10 years ago, but is
seriously
> too small for year 2003. Come on, we're all using hardware that easily
> allows over 120 chars per line, not ?

And Erik said:

> Thomas-
> > I like sometimes to print a piece of code. Without reformating it.
>
> But that's what code formatters are for. I'm no fan of hard line breaks --
> I have a reasonably large screen, and with all the whitespace that's
> necessary for well formatted code, I need to make use of it in order to
> make basic constructs visible. IMHO this kind of formatting should be done
> dynamically as needed.

I was once scarred by having to convert ~5000 lines of code to an 84 column
limit by hand so that it could be printed, so now I tend to use lots of line
breaks. But if anyone declares that some other style is the "Wikipedia
standard", I'll be happy to conform to it.

-- Tim Starling <ua.ude.bleminu.scisyhp at gnilrats.t>


from_name: Kurt Jansson

subject: [WikiEN-l] GNU FDL infringement alert!

body:
root wrote:

> BURN THEM!  I think RMS would have some interesting input, I am
> forwarding the message to him and the FSF.

Maybe before "calling the authorities" someone should just send them a
nice but explicit mail and ask them to mention the GFDL below the text.

Please don't forget that we *want* our articles to spread. It's a
rudeness that they call it "adapted" and don't point out the licence of
the articles. But often one or two strict mails can help.

Kurt


subject: [WikiEN-l] More license stuff - Edmonton Sun

body:
Michael Becker wrote:

>I just realized something, a site I posted on [[Wikipedia:Press
>coverage]] might also be breaking the GFDL.  They list some text from
>one of our pages.  See http://cgi.canoe.ca/Columnists/diotte_jul7.html,
>the SITE FOR SORE EYES article, which was in the Edmonton Sun.  (my
>original link appears to no longer be valid).
>
That's a pretty small excerpt, looks like fair use to me.  It's
not in Wikipedia's interest to get so prickly that reporters and
writers deliberately avoid quoting it - or worse, that newspapers'
and publishers' legal departments order their employees to stay
away from Wikipedia altogether because they're tired of dealing
with accusations of GFDL violations.

Stan


body:
Toby Bartels wrote:

>Eclecticology wrote:
>
>>Erik Moeller wrote:
>>
>>>Things are looking pretty grim for Britannica. Their Java-based software
>>>is a piece of crap, and Encarta has much better marketing. They still have
>>>their original content bonus, but even in terms of content they have
>>>massive weaknesses in some areas (for example, compare their article on
>>>circumcision with ours). I think the Britannica brand will live on, but in
>>>terms of competition we should be more worried about Encarta (and vice
>>>versa).
>>>
>>If only Wikimedia could buy out EB........cheap......Imagine!!
>>
>
>But as EB falls in price, it'll reach first
>the point where Encarta can buy it but we can't.
>If Encarta sees us at that time as a threat,
>then they'll be sure to snap EB up before we can.
>We can't let them sniff us out until we have to cash to buy EB.
>
>How's /this/ for a slogan:
>"Sifterpaedia Britannica(R) -- the free encyclopadia that you can trust"
>^_^ ^_^ ^_^
>
Hmmm, to continue the speculation. :-)

This kind of situation does not lend itself very well to waiting until
we have the cash.  Encarta has a bit of an advantage in that department.
A purchase offer of $1.00 may be more appropriate if it's presented as
an offer which Safra's estate can't refuse.

For interesting background reading see
http://www.businessweek.com/1997/42/b3549124.htm and
http://www.jewishsf.com/bk991210/obsafra.shtml

Our offer also needs to maintain Wikipedia's philosophical integrity.

"Be bold in updating Wikipedia!" ;-)

Ec.


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: New development policy

body:
"Brion Vibber" <brion at pobox.com> wrote in
message news:3F0993B7.8040706 at pobox.com...
> Erik Moeller wrote:
>
> >We still need someone to finish the conversion
> >script, though -- Italian is still on UseMod, for example, they really
> >should be switched over.
> >
> Note that while I'd like to get this done at some point, I'd be quite
> happy if someone else took it over and actually _got_ it done, as I'm
> mostly mired with general maintenance at the moment and just don't have
> the energy to finish this up which will just generate more maintenance
> needs... ;)
>
> The half-finished script is maintenance/archives/importUseModWiki.php

I would think about doing some work on this, but I don't really know what's
involved. I don't know much about the other language Wikipedias, because I
don't have a pliny account.

-- Tim Starling.


subject: [WikiEN-l] GNU FDL infringement alert!

body:
On Tue, 8 Jul 2003, Jimmy Wales wrote:

> Yes, I would imagine that's right.  Do we have a specific volunteer
> to write to them?  Better than, than a half-dozen confusing emails.
> :-)

I've just e-mailed Dr. McNeil (using the contact address given on the
homepage), actually. But I wasn't *entirely* sure about what he had to do
to comply with the GFDL, so I might have sounded a bit incoherent. So,
just the one confusing e-mail, then. ;) It would probably be best if
someone more articulate and knowledgeable about the law e-mailed him as
well...

Oliver

+-------------------------------------------+
| Oliver Pereira                            |
| Dept. of Electronics and Computer Science |
| University of Southampton                 |
| omp199 at ecs.soton.ac.uk                    |
+-------------------------------------------+


body:
On Wed, 9 Jul 2003, Timwi wrote:
> Thanks again for your input. Now that my Wikipedia test server works
> fine (yay!), I was able to test my own patch.

Which reminds me, did you get CVS working?

Note that if you pulled the tree anonymously, you have pull a fresh copy
as a developer and commit from the new tree. Cryptic commands at bottom of
http://sourceforge.net/cvs/?group_id=34373

> PHP seems to have very different operator precedence than both Perl and
> C. (This is my first time doing PHP, does it show? :) ) It does not seem
> to be possible to do this:
> 	return $var == $value ? $one : $two . $three;
> without parentheses.

?: probably should _never_ be used without parentheses, since it's such a
confusing sonuva.

> There's only one final decision left that I need someone to make: How do
> we parse the following input?
>
>    ''line 1
>
>    line 2''
>
> There are three possibilities with my patch as it is now:
>
> 1)  line 1
>

>      line 2                                       (incorrect HTML)

That would be bad. ;)

> 2)  ''line 1
>

>      line 2''                               (shows author what's wrong)

This is current behavior.

> 3)  line 1
>

>      line 2                 (least confusing to readers, but author may
>                                       wonder why '' ... '' didn't work)

I don't think I like this one.

> Of course other things are possible, e.g.
>
> 4)   line 1
>

>       line 2
>
> but that requires slightly more work (especially for line 2).

I don't think things like '' should cross block-level boundaries like
paragraph breaks (though they probably should cross line breaks in source
text that are in the same block). It's easy to mysteriously plunge an
entire page into italics by mistake like that, and hard to track down the
problem.  Localizing the effects localizes the trouble, and makes it
easier to take isolated segments and move them around within and between
pages without breaking formatting.

Another possible rendering is:

line 1

line 2

in which we treat '' as a toggle which is reset at the end of a block.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Michael Becker

body:
Bizarre indeed!  I wonder what warrants an article being stored on their
site.  I also wonder why google has rated my white board #1?  Maybe it
is b/c of the large number of links?  Anyhow, it appears that
www.4reference.net is a much bigger culprit, than Malaspina.com, as far
as not including the GFDL.  I think we need to copy
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:MyRedDice/Abacci_Letter to a generic
GFDL letter page, and also create a page to archive all of the sites
which have used wikipedia as a source, so that we can one day harvest
them for more information (since any article which was contributed to by
wikipedia is perpetually required to use the GFDL).
Actually, I will create these two pages right now, and list them on the
Village Pump.  Where do you suppose these 2 pages should be listed in
addition?

The 2 new pages:
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Standard_GFDL_violation_letter
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Sites_that_use_Wikipedia_as_a_so
urce

--
Michael Becker

-----Original Message-----
From: wikien-l-admin at wikipedia.org [mailto:wikien-l-admin at wikipedia.org]
On Behalf Of a.crossman at blueyonder.co.uk
Sent: Tuesday, July 08, 2003 6.32
To: wikien-l at wikipedia.org
Subject: [WikiEN-l] More license stuff - www.4reference.net

While we're talking about the GFDL, www.4reference.net seems to have
a lot of Wikipedia stuff online. Bizarrely, most of it is non-article
space stuff like user pages, though some pages are real articles.

Anyway, their pages don't seem to mention the license either. e.g:
http://www.4reference.net/encyclopedias/wikipedia/HTML.html

They do however mention that they got it from us.

There are many such pages. A google search for:
site:http://www.4reference.net Wikipedia turns them up. Top hit is
Mbecker's white board. :-)

Evercat
--
Allan Crossman
a.crossman at blueyonder.co.uk
http://dogma.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk

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


subject: [WikiEN-l] Use of Wikipedia articles at Malaspina.com (fwd)

body:
This is the message I sent.

Oliver

+-------------------------------------------+
| Oliver Pereira                            |
| Dept. of Electronics and Computer Science |
| University of Southampton                 |
| omp199 at ecs.soton.ac.uk                    |
+-------------------------------------------+

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Tue, 8 Jul 2003 17:15:39 +0100 (BST)
From: Oliver Pereira <omp199 at ecs.soton.ac.uk>
To: Russ McNeil <russmcneil at malaspina.org>
Subject: Use of Wikipedia articles at Malaspina.com

Dear Dr. McNeil,

I discovered your "Malaspina Great Books" website today, and found that
you have included quite a few biographical articles adapted from Wikipedia
in your database. I'm an editor at Wikpedia, and I should point out that
the articles there are covered by the GNU Free Documentation License (or
GFDL), which says that if you want to copy material covered by this
licence, you need to release your copies under the same licence.

See the "Wikipedia:Copyrights" page at:
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%3ACopyrights

and the text of the GFDL at:
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%3AText_of_the_GNU_Free_Documentation_License

I am not a lawyer, and I'm not sure *exactly* what you have to do to
licence your copies of the articles under the GFDL, but you have to at
least say on each page that the text is licenced under the GFDL, and you
have to link to the text of the GFDL as well. Perhaps you could link to
the copy of the GFDL on the GNU website itself:

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl.html

Perhaps it would be worthwhile asking what you have to do on the WikiEN-L
mailing list <wikien-l at wikipedia.org> or just come along to the Wikipedia
website itself and ask there.

Oliver

+-------------------------------------------+
| Oliver Pereira                            |
| Dept. of Electronics and Computer Science |
| University of Southampton                 |
| omp199 at ecs.soton.ac.uk                    |
+-------------------------------------------+


body:
I just realized something, a site I posted on [[Wikipedia:Press
coverage]] might also be breaking the GFDL.  They list some text from
one of our pages.  See http://cgi.canoe.ca/Columnists/diotte_jul7.html,
the SITE FOR SORE EYES article, which was in the Edmonton Sun.  (my
original link appears to no longer be valid).

--
Michael Becker


body:
I think this warrants a press release!  Could someone that knows at
least something about them start one at
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Press_release:_Wikipedia_surpass
es_Britannica please?

--
Michael Becker

-----Original Message-----
From: wikien-l-admin at wikipedia.org [mailto:wikien-l-admin at wikipedia.org]
On Behalf Of Jimmy Wales
Sent: Tuesday, July 08, 2003 3.18
To: wikien-l at wikipedia.org
Subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia more popular than Britannica!

So, this is pretty interesting.  According to Alexa.com, Wikipedia is
now more popular than Britannica.

eb.com is ranked 16,884
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?q=&url=http://www.eb.c
om/

britannica.com is ranked 3,054
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?q=&url=http://www.brit
annica.com/

wikipedia.org is ranked 3,012
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?q=&url=http://www.wiki
pedia.org/

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


from_name: Jens Frank

subject: [Wikitech-l] bug (or feauture) in "new articles" special page in es.wiki

body:
On Tue, Jul 08, 2003 at 12:10:40AM -0700, Brion Vibber wrote:
> wiki pedista wrote:
>
> >Today I noticed that in the new pages listing, some
> >titles are acompinied with the name of the first
> >author,
> >but the summary written by the last editor.
> >
> >Is this a bug or an intended behaviour?
> >
> Bug! Thanks for the catch.
>
> For the curious, here's the diff where I switched it from using cur to
> the recentchanges table and introduced the bug by grabbing the field
> from the wrong table:
>
> http://cvs.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/wikipedia/phpwiki/newcodebase/SpecialNewpages.php.diff?r1=1.9&r2=1.10
>
> Fix is installed.

Feature!

This eases scanning for grafitti pages a lot. Edit comments like "wikified"
help to sort out which articles have already been proofread.

Regards,

JeLuF


from_name: Timwi

subject: [Wikitech-l] Problem with installation

body:
Hi,

I've just installed the Wikipedia software on my own machine, and I'm
having the following problem. The bottom of the page says:

Warning: Unknown(): Your script possibly relies on a session side-effect
which existed until PHP 4.2.3. Please be advised that the session
extension does not consider global variables as a source of data, unless
register_globals is enabled. You can disable this functionality and this
warning by setting session.bug_compat_42 or session.bug_compat_warn to
off, respectively. in Unknown on line 0

How can I fix this? Where do I enable or set these settings/variables?

Thanks,
Timwi


body:
I agree with Erik's tenor on the issue....

Besides, it helps to have friends who actually link
back to your site, attribute to you whatever content
they get from you and limit their use of your content
to reasonable amounts....

Following that-- its *not nice to insult people who do
something nice for you.  ;)

-SV

Or *to you. :)

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
SBC Yahoo! DSL - Now only $29.95 per month!
http://sbc.yahoo.com


from_name: Toby Bartels

subject: [WikiEN-l] [OT] Stevertigo's webposts again (Was: Wikipedia more popular than Britannica!)

body:
Stevertigo wrote (just as it came to me):

>For those with html
>src="http://traffic.alexa.com/graph?w=379&h=216&r=6m&u=britannica.com/&u=wikipedia.org">

>For those without -
>href="http://traffic.alexa.com/graph?w=379&h=216&r=6m&u=britannica.com/&u=wikipedia.org">

>Quite a little horserace. 8-).

I'm not sure why  is supposed to be more legible to me
than  -- I just copy and paste either to my browser.
^_^

-- Toby


body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:

>So, this is pretty interesting.  According to Alexa.com, Wikipedia is
>now more popular than Britannica.

We should probably keep in mind that Britannica is also available in print.
In fact, that's the brand's traditional medium.

-- Toby


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Announcing Wikimedia Foundation

body:
[This message has been crossposted from <intlwiki-L> to <wikitech-L>.
Replies should go only to <wikitech-L>.]

Timwi wrote in part:

>In addition to this, however, I would like to point out that it is
>widely considered a bad practice to serve the same content under several
>URLs. Currently I can reach the exact same article by going to any of a
>veritable plethora of URLs:

>  http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Dextrose
>  http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Glucose
>  http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dextrose
>  http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glucose
>  http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?search=dextrose&go=Go
>  http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?search=glucose&go=Go

>plus several different capitalisations of the latter two. Those latter
>two I find particularly disturbing. People will link to them and trigger
>the Search algorithm for every visitor, which generates an unnecessary
>impact on the database server. Plus, the searches may not return the
>same article indefinitely.

I think that we want to consider the purpose of the differences.
You've already mentioned the purpose of "Dextrose"/"Glucose";
it's to give us the redirection information.  So that's OK.
I see no purpose to the "search" URIs, so I agree that they should redirect;
and in addition to your point about activating the search algorithm,
also note that the algorithm might not even give the same page next time!
(Don't confuse the two sorts of redirection here:
Wikipedia redirection and HTTP redirection.
I just mentioned both of these in that order.)
Another URI variation that you just barely missed
is capitalisation among the /non/-search URIs --
this serves no purpose under our page capitalisation scheme,
so they should probably redirect to capitalised URIs too.

Then there's the difference between "/w/wiki.phtml?title=" and "/wiki/".
AFAICT, the only purpose of this is to have robots index "/wiki/" URIs,
since "/w/" URIs are set to be unindexed in our <robots.txt> file.
(Those that understand these things will hopefully confirm if I'm right.)
Then I agree with your solution; "/w/wiki.phtml?title=..."
should redirect to "/wiki/..." if no ampersands appear in the ellipsis --
and this could conceivably even increase robots' indexing of our pages.

-- Toby


subject: [Wikitech-l] Right-to-left language support

body:
Just a couple notes... I set up stub Arabic and Hebrew wikis:
http://ar.wikipedia.org/
http://he.wikipedia.org/

When they get set up we'll need right-to-left also for other languages
using these alphabets (Persian, Urdu, Yiddish...)

I've made a few tweaks to help support this... Language::isRTL() should
return true for those requiring right-to-left support, which triggers:

* dir='RTL' attribute on the <html> element
* swap the position of the spacer cell in the topbar/bottombar so it
matches the sidebar
* swap the text alignment of the two cells in the topbar

I've only mucked about with the default skin here; I haven't tested
Cologne Blue yet for instance.

There's a lot of weirdness with punctuation; hopefully localized
interface strings should help make the screen look right. :) Various
portions may need more explicit direction indicators stuck in or other
whatnot.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


body:
Timwi wrote:

>There's only one final decision left that I need someone to make: How do
>we parse the following input?

>  ''line 1
>
>  line 2''

The Wikipedia software currently does:

>2)  ''line 1
>

>    line 2''                               (shows author what's wrong)

which IMO is best anyway.

Once upon a time, it did:

5)   line 1

     line 2

which avoids the "slightly more work [...] for line 2" of (4).

-- Toby


subject: [WikiEN-l] Use of Wikipedia articles at Malaspina.com

body:
Oliver Pereira wrote:

>This is the message I sent.

[Snipped!]

It's perfectly fine that Oliver sent a letter,
since he discovered and his letter was just from him.
We should send one more letter: a form letter
(or something that looks just as official ^_^)
that's worked out on [[meta:]] and can be used again.

-- Toby


from_name: martin at myreddice.freeserve.co.uk

subject: [WikiEN-l] questioning false copyright claims

body:
[[User:MyRedDice/Abacci Letter]]
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:MyRedDice/Abacci_Letter

Abacci did much the same thing, by accident. On the advice of Jimbo I mailed them,
after leaving the letter on Wikipedia for a couple of weeks for folks to edit. Man in
charge (nice man) said "oops" and fixed it. All were happy.

No lawyers were harmed in the making of this email

--Martin "MyRedDice" Harper


from_name: a.crossman at blueyonder.co.uk

body:
While we're talking about the GFDL, www.4reference.net seems to have
a lot of Wikipedia stuff online. Bizarrely, most of it is non-article
space stuff like user pages, though some pages are real articles.

Anyway, their pages don't seem to mention the license either. e.g:
http://www.4reference.net/encyclopedias/wikipedia/HTML.html

They do however mention that they got it from us.

There are many such pages. A google search for:
site:http://www.4reference.net Wikipedia
turns them up. Top hit is Mbecker's white board. :-)

Evercat
--
Allan Crossman
a.crossman at blueyonder.co.uk
http://dogma.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk


body:
Brion Vibber wrote:

> Timwi wrote:
>
>> How can I fix this? Where do I enable or set these settings/variables?
>
> Find your php.ini and set register_globals = On.

Thank you! I didn't know about this file.

Things seem to work now, except editing an article. If I submit an
article, I get:

   Warning: Empty regular expression in Language.php on line 1424

This line in Language.php is:

   $text = preg_replace( $rxYDM, '[[$1]] [[$4 $3]]', $text);

What do I need to do here?

Thanks,
Timwi


from_name: Rotem Dan

subject: [Wikitech-l] Replacing the standard wikipedia logo on the Hebrew wikipedia

body:
Hello everyone, the Hebrew wikipedia is currently having a "logo
contest" for the site's logo and there are already three proposals, I
would like to know how to replace the standard (english) one with the
new one. So I have a number of qustions:

* How to replace the logo if the target (new) file is PNG?
* How to replace the logo if the target is JPG?
* Can we have a different logos for regular articles (with white
background) and a different one for the meta namespace (with yellow
background) assuming IE's problem with transparant colour PNGs isn't
solved (as it probably won't)?

An unrelated question: can I make all links non-underlined by default
for anonymous users? (to make the site more pretty and attractive. As
Hebrew internet indexes currently rate wikipedia in english 3/5 and
everything2 5/5 probably just because of the layout thing, damn its ugly!!)

Some links:

Hebrew wikipedia: http://he.wikipedia.org

Logo contest (just look at the original proposals):
http://he.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D7%95%D7%99%D7%A7%D7%99%D7%A4%D7%93%D7%99%D7%94:%D7%9C%D7%95%D7%92%D7%95_%D7%91%D7%A2%D7%91%D7%A8%D7%99%D7%AA

-- Rotem Dan (p.s: Hebrew wikipedia got 85 articles and 4500 page views
    in the past 4 days and is rapidly getting new participants, as there
are already about 20)


from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [WikiEN-l] This may be true someday soon: GNU/Linux is to MS Windows as Wikipedia is to MS Encarta.

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:
>...
>I think the Britannica brand will live on, but in
>terms of competition we should be more worried
>about Encarta (and vice versa).

Hm. Unix at one time owned the server OS business then an upstart call
MicroSoft offered an adequate product and undercut their prices. So then
Microsoft dominated the server OS market. Then an upstart OS named GNU/Linux
came on the scene that offered an adequate product at zero price. Now
GNU/Linux is doing the same thing to Microsoft that Microsoft did to Unix (as
far as market share is concerned).

The Unix/Microsoft thing now looks like it is playing out in the
Britannica/Microsoft Encarta arena. Will Wikipedia be the Linux of the
encyclopedia world? Will we also be labled "enemy number one" by the people
in Redmond within the next several years? Golly, this GNU thing is a virus.

-- Daniel Mayer


subject: [Wikitech-l] Requests for the Hebrew 'pedia

body:
More things: I would like to remove:

* "Main page", "Recent changes", "Edit this page", "Previous versions"
from both the top and bottom (Which also contains "What links here" and
"Related changes" to remove) -- Simply redundant and confusing, this is
not good website design, I mean, links should be single and clear,
otherwise it's confusing and cluttered.

*"Special pages" drop down box which is practically useless for readers
and many contributors but I would like it to show only for registered
users as they may find these features handy.

* Duplicate language links on bottom, especially on main page, are
simply not needed.

* And a previous request I will list: links wouldn't be underlined by
default as it's rather ugly with hebrew.

I really think the layout is important to get high ranking on editorial
reviews (we are planning to get a news story on a major newspaper and
also and get listed Internet directories with a high ranking), and also,
I wish to make the Encyclopedia simple and easy to read, and the above
layout items aren't making it easier.

-- Rotem Dan


from_name: Thomas Corell

subject: [Wikitech-l] LanguageDe.php

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:
> It would jump from 20446 to 23412.
>
> Note also that the old (comma) count is slightly skewed, probably by
> some old counter bugs that didn't handle deletions properly, and would
> be 20143 if recounted properly.

Than using the new count system will be no problem as the count jumps to
the right direction. It had been problematic if it had jumped to 19* or so,
nearly a week after anouncing the 20k article.

Thanks for doing the updates.
--
Smurf

smurf at AdamAnt.mud.de
-------------------------  Anthill inside! ---------------------------


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Requests for the Hebrew 'pedia

body:
Rotem Dan wrote:

> * "Main page", "Recent changes", "Edit this page", "Previous versions"
> from both the top and bottom (Which also contains "What links here" and
> "Related changes" to remove) -- Simply redundant and confusing, this is
> not good website design, I mean, links should be single and clear,
> otherwise it's confusing and cluttered.

I've found this on CVS, Skin.php
( doBeforeContent())

... (similar to below, but couldn't find)

( doaftercontent() )

$s .= $this->bottomLinks();
$s .= "\n
" . $this->mainPageLink()
. " | " . $this->aboutLink()
. " | " . $this->specialLink( "recentchanges" )
. " | " . $this->searchForm()
. "
" . $this->pageStats();

If I comment out "$s .= $this->bottomLinks();" and ". " | " .
$this->specialLink( "recentchanges" )" on the Hebrew wiki will it work?

(I would have done it myself If I had Developer access and knew how to
use it, does it use SSH, FTP?)

--Rotem


subject: [Wikitech-l] Development tasks

body:
We've really got to work on stabilizing the latest fun fun changes...
and we can start to look at the boring stuff that needs to get done.

Stuff that's maybe not a sexy new Table of Contents or Auto-Generated
Maps or Cool New Language Support or Skin That Doesn't Scare People
Away, but that really needs to get done to keep the wiki running.
Optimization, fixes for race conditions, minor but continuous usability
problems. The stuff no one wants to touch. :)

If something strikes your fancy, please oh please claim one of these for
your own:

http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_tasks

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


body:
Brion Vibber wrote:

> On Tue, 8 Jul 2003, Timwi wrote:
>
>>Things seem to work now, except editing an article. If I submit an
>>article, I get:
>>
>>   Warning: Empty regular expression in Language.php on line 1424
>
> Set $wgUseDynamicDates = false in LocalSettings.php to be sure it's
> disabled for now. Or try to fix it. :)

Thanks again for your input. Now that my Wikipedia test server works
fine (yay!), I was able to test my own patch.

PHP seems to have very different operator precedence than both Perl and
C. (This is my first time doing PHP, does it show? :) ) It does not seem
to be possible to do this:
	return $var == $value ? $one : $two . $three;
without parentheses.

Anyway, just wanted to say that. I've reworked my patch to use
parentheses in some cases, and ifs in most cases (for sake of readability).

There's only one final decision left that I need someone to make: How do
we parse the following input?

   ''line 1

   line 2''

There are three possibilities with my patch as it is now:

1)  line 1

     line 2                                       (incorrect HTML)

2)  ''line 1

     line 2''                               (shows author what's wrong)

3)  line 1

     line 2                 (least confusing to readers, but author may
                                      wonder why '' ... '' didn't work)

Of course other things are possible, e.g.

4)   line 1

      line 2

but that requires slightly more work (especially for line 2).

Thanks for any opinions,
Timwi


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia more popular than Britannica!

body:
james duffy wrote:

> It is worth mentioning that in terms of academic credibility, Encarta
> is not very highly regarded. In fact I have heard it described as a
> triumph of image over substance. But it is great to see wiki doing so
> well. We have /so/ many quality articles and also other than the 32K
> limit, we have greater scope to go into things in more detail.

In terms of user review ratings at Alexa we have 5 out of 5 to Encarta's
3 and EB's 2.5.  Most amazing is that they consider our server to be
fast in the 69th percentile!!!  EB is rated very slow in the 19th
percentile.  Encarta is considered even slower in the 17th percentile!!
 (Maybe it's because the use too much Microsoft software. :-D )

> I think wiki does need as it develops to be able to have some 'final'
> articles that, having reached a clear standard of accuracy,
> readability etc can he removed from the editing process. The downside
> of constant editing is that some articles that reach a high standard
> then can lose that as those who produced the standard leave and
> someone comes on and rewrites it to a lower standard. Wiki's open edit
> policy is its major plus, as it allows us to evolve and update, but
> its downside is reliability. Can I be sure if at 8.17pm I read an
> article /everything/ in it is factual or could I have the bad luck to
> read it just after some user either through not knowing what they were
> doing or deliberately, mucked it up and added in false information?
> For example, Jerusalem's status as the capital of Israel is disputed.
> That is stated on wiki (after a battle!). But what if a reader at 8.17
> reads a version that says in a POV edit it is an 'undisputed' capital.
> Or someone doing an essay on JFK reads an edit at 8.17 that says he
> was the 33rd not the 35th president?

We need to stress this as a virtue.  Being continually afraid that our
data might be full of errors is a losing strategy.  We need to be open
and frank about our errors.  We need to accept the fact that our
articles sometimes do get badly mucked up, and that we depend on our
users to fix this.  If a reader picks up on the simple JFK error and can
make the correction himself, let's just hope that he spells Wikipedia
correctly when he boasts to his friends about it.

> For all their downsides, the 'centainty of standard' is the one major
> plus that Brittanica, World Book, Encarta has. When you read an
> article you are getting a definitive version, not that moment's edit.
> At some stage wiki is going to face a credibility barrier where people
> ask 'but can I be sure that King Edward VI of England actually died on
> that day, or is it a bad edit? How can I be sure W.T. Cosgrave said
> that? How and when we deal with the 'certainty of standard' issue will
> mark the moment we go from being a good secondary source that may give
> a fascinating insight but which just to be sure you might want to
> cross check, just in case, to a /guaranteed/ reliable primary source.

The huge amount of information that is now available to everybody
affects the role of education.  Knowing how to find information has
become more important than the information itself.  Critical thinking is
the most important thing that the schools can teach.  The student who
hasn't learned to question his teachers probably hasn't learned a damn
thing.  There is a down side to that "certainty of standard" in the
complacency that it engenders, and in the consequent abatement of the
critical faculty.  Resorting to authority is a form of logical fallacy.
 For nearly two millenia the church pulled the wool of authority over
people's eyes.  It often did this in the guise of education at a time
when no other institution was available to fill the instructional vacuum.

Though we should certainly strive to have Edward's correct date of death
in Wikipedia, it's not a particularly important fact.  It is sufficient
to put this relatively insignificant boy-king in the context of the mid
16th century.  I am very satisfied with Wikipedia being a good secondary
source.  Any encyclopedia is a secondary source, and those "fascinating
insights" are an important aspect of an encyclopedia's function, and I
certainly hope that readers will be inspired to cross check the data no
matter how authoritative we become.

Perhaps you use the term "promary source" differently than I.  I always
understood "primary sources" to mean original documents and texts.  But
Wikipedia is not a repository of original texts, so it will never be a
primary source.

Eclecticology


body:
Timwi wrote:
> Rotem Dan wrote:
>
>> More things: I would like to remove:
>>
>> * "Main page", "Recent changes", "Edit this page", "Previous versions"
>> from both the top and bottom (Which also contains "What links here"
>> and "Related changes" to remove) -- Simply redundant and confusing,
>> this is not good website design, I mean, links should be single and
>> clear, otherwise it's confusing and cluttered.
>
>
> Why exactly do you want to diverge this heavily from the site design
> that all the other Wikipedias use? That seems inconsistent and confusing.
I would just like to remove some redundant links that already exist on
the quickbar from the pages to make it more clean and user-friendly. I
don't think that would confuse heb-wikipedia users.

> If it's that important to you, you could just set the Hebrew Wikipedia's
> default skin to 'Nostalgia'. This should be possible (Esperanto has
> 'Cologne Blue' as the default, while others use 'Standard').
>
> Timwi

These skins don't work well with RTL layout and bidi text; and also, the
quickbar is set to be on right by default and that only works well with
the default skin.

I've found the PHP code to comment out on skin.php for some of these
changes, I don't know how exactly to update it to the site.

If you would like these change to be on CVS, then I don't know, Making
other versions of skin.php is probably not a good idea, so I can
probably just leave the CVS version as is and as the code gets updated
from CVS I will just recomment out the changes I want. (I guess that's
not really a big deal if skin.php will get updated on all sites, say,
once in two months or so)

There are additional bugs with hebrew support in Konquerer and Mozilla
(page width issues), and TeX formula LTR layout problem users are
complaining about. I would like to try to fix these out. And they will
also make a diversions from CVS but need to get fixed (I will try to
merge them later with appropriate conditionals).

Does the system work with SSH or FTP so I can upload it, or is it
something else?

--Rotem


body:
Actually, it's very easy to hack an instant clutter killer for every
page on default skin (and colonge blue skin, heck with the old
"nostalgic skin", it doesn't even work with hebrew):

Skin.php:

	function doBeforeContent()
	{
...
		$s .= "";

		//$s .= $this->topLinks() ; (commented, bye bye junk on top)
		$s .= "
" . $this->pageTitleLinks();
...
	}

	function doAfterContent()
	{
...
		// $s .= $this->bottomLinks(); (removed duplicate links)
		$s .= "\n
" //. $this->mainPageLink() (removed duplicate link)
		  . " | " . $this->aboutLink()
		//  . " | " . $this->specialLink( "recentchanges" ) (removed duplicate
link)
		  . " | " . $this->searchForm() //(this is duplicate but probably useful)
		  . "
" . $this->pageStats();
...
	}

and that's about it, If I had dev access I would have put it already, I
don't think Hebopedia users would protest :-) --Rotem


from_name: Erik Moeller

body:
Stan-
> Michael Becker wrote:

>> I just realized something, a site I posted on [[Wikipedia:Press
>> coverage]] might also be breaking the GFDL.  They list some text from
>> one of our pages.  See http://cgi.canoe.ca/Columnists/diotte_jul7.html,
>> the SITE FOR SORE EYES article, which was in the Edmonton Sun.  (my
>> original link appears to no longer be valid).
>>
> That's a pretty small excerpt, looks like fair use to me.  It's
> not in Wikipedia's interest to get so prickly that reporters and
> writers deliberately avoid quoting it - or worse, that newspapers'
> and publishers' legal departments order their employees to stay
> away from Wikipedia altogether because they're tired of dealing
> with accusations of GFDL violations.

I strongly agree with this. Copyright law is not trademark law. We can be
selective in our enforcement without losing the copyright.

Regards,

Erik


body:
Brion Vibber wrote:

> On Wed, 9 Jul 2003, Timwi wrote:
>
>>Thanks again for your input. Now that my Wikipedia test server works
>>fine (yay!), I was able to test my own patch.
>
> Which reminds me, did you get CVS working?

Not today; kept having the EOF problem. (Is Sourceforge working on that
problem at all?)

> ?: probably should _never_ be used without parentheses, since it's such a
> confusing sonuva.

With well-chosen indentation, I find it absolutely not confusing at all:

   return  $var == $value1 ? $variable :
           $var == $value2 ? SomeOperation( $variable ) :
           $var == $value3 ? "Literal value" :
                             0;

or something like that.

> I don't think things like '' should cross block-level boundaries like
> paragraph breaks

I agree.

> Another possible rendering is:
>
>
line 1

>
line 2

>
> in which we treat '' as a toggle which is reset at the end of a block.

Of course. :-) I was going to mention this alternative too, but I
forgot. This will also be very easy to code.

Timwi


from_name: koyaanis qatsi

subject: [WikiEN-l] encarta.com

body:
Erik advises us to worry more about how we compare
against encarta.com.  Unfortunately, we can't judge
that: encarta is under msn.com, so alexa compares
wikipedia's popularity to that of msn.com.  And that
doesn't look good for us at all.  :-D

http://traffic.alexa.com/graph?w=379&h=216&r=6m&u=wikipedia.org/&u=www.encarta.com

(or try
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?q=&url=http://www.wikipedia.org/
and type in "www.encarta.com" in the "compare"
box--maybe I'm missing something).

kq

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