from_name: Mark Gallagher

subject: [WikiEN-l] Lovely.

body:
G'day Ray,

> Erik Moeller wrote:
>>It's probably also true that there is a fair number of people who are
>>editing Wikipedia under circumstances their boss or supervisor would
>>disapprove of, including *gasp* some members of the nefarious ruling
>>class known as "administrators". For those who intend to continue
>>doing so, using a separate account may be advisable. (Accountability
>>activism strikes again! Let's stalk people so they tell us more about
>>themselves!)
>>
>>Do we have a guideline for dealing with off-wiki harassment? We
>>probably should, and link it from RfA.
>
> The relationship between any Wikipedian and his real life employer are
> not our concern.  Unless editing Wikipedia is a part of his job
> description he should not be doing so during his work time.  If he gets
> fired because of his addictive behaviour it's not our concern.

I agree with you 180%.

That is to say, *yes*:
- Wikipedians should not be editing from work
- The relationship between a Wikipedian and his boss is none of our
   business (*nor* is it the business of Wikipedia Review).

But we aren't the morality police.  It's not our job to get rid of good
editors (or even administrators) who happen to be editing from work.  We
have few enough really good contributors (you think a few thousand is a
lot?  Not in this context, it isn't) without tracking down those we have
and subjecting them to an employment loyalty test by proxy.  And the
very *last* thing we want to do is stand by and applaud while certain
others do the same thing.

Harrassment is an unvarnished Bad Thing.  Those who tracked down
Katefan0 --- who, as has been pointed out repeatedly, was a *bloody
good* administrator --- out of sheer malice towards people like you and
I (I assume Wiktionary admins are no holier than your counterparts
here), who telephoned her boss --- again, out of undirected malice
against admins in general, --- who forced her to leave Wikipedia, and
who invented fictional ethics complaints after the fact in a vain
attempt to justify their behaviour, do not need our encouragement.  The
reverse, it would seem to me, is in order.

Wikipedia has long held that editors' anonymity is sacred.  I choose not
to take advantage of that anonymity, but I respect the right of others
to do so.  When someone's anonymity is removed, and their real lives
exposed to the harrassment of Internet lowlifes, it is not appropriate
for Wikipedia to shrug its shoulders and say "well, if this causes
problems for them, they must have been doing something bad like editing
from work, and it serves them right."

I don't *care* if Katefan0 --- or anyone else --- edited from work.  All
I care about is whether or not they were a good Wikipedian.  I submit
that this is an attitude that others heavily involved in Wikimedia
projects would do well to adopt.

--
Mark Gallagher, who has neither the opportunity nor desire to edit from
work, thank you very much.


list: wikitech-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: River Tarnell

subject: [Wikitech-l] new toolserver root users

body:
hello,

i have given root access on the machines:
  hemlock.knams.wikimedia.org
  zedler.knams.wikimedia.org
(the toolserver servers) to Anders Wegge Jakobsen and Rob Church.  hopefully
they will assist with resolving problems quickly.

	- river.
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: Digital signature
URL: <http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/attachments/20060609/472f58ef/attachment.pgp>


list: textbook-l

from_name: Jon

subject: [Textbook-l] Fw: Game guides (same email but with line breaks)

body:
It would be useful if Jimmy would comment on the questions asked, but I would like to make
the following comments (the numbers refer to Lord Voldemort's initial email):

1, 2. My understanding is that Wikibooks' purpose always has been to provide textbooks.
Article II of the Wikimedia Foundation bylaws says, in part, refers to  "... a collection of e-book
resources aimed specifically toward students (such as textbooks and annotated public domain
books) named Wikibooks".
(see http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_bylaws )

3. The Wikimedia Foundation, operating through its Board, have overall control of Wikibooks
(they set its scope in the Foundation bylaws, and can choose to change this or to close the
project if they see fit). However, subject to this, Wikibookians deal with the day to day editing
of the site, including the setting of site policies (whilst this is subject to them being consistent
with what the WMF says, the WMF is very hands-off in this regard).

4, 5. Games guides are not textbooks. Therefore they do not fit within Wikibooks' purpose.

6, 7. Wikibooks' contributors must work within the defined scope of the project. They are on a
very free rein as to what they do, but they cannot extend this scope. Requests for scope changes
and new Wikimedia projects can be made on Metawiki.

8. "Textbook" has its normal English meaning. There is no special Wikibooks definition of it. A
textbook on games, game design, history of games that would assist someone studying them
would be within Wikibooks' scope. Note, however, that no-one would reasonably describe a
simple games walkthrough as a textbook. They might call it a guide or perhaps, at a push, a
manual, but it would not be a textbook in the normal sense.

9. A straightforward guide on a board game would not normally be described as a textbook.
As for game guides, however, it would be possible to write a detailed textbook on some board
games suitable for students.

10, 11. The talk of an "accredited institution" metric appears to have been suggested mostly by
those speaking out in favour of keeping games guides, with the idea of rubbishing it as providing
too narrow an inclusion criterion. We don't need such a metric - the general test is whether the
book is or is not a textbook (but see my qualification of this below). An "accredited institution"
metric along the lines of "if a subject is studied in a number of accredited institutions it can be
deemed worthy of study" may be acceptable in the sense that textbook subjects meeting that test
should be allowed. However, any such test should not be limiting - there are many worthwhile
subjects for study that do not meet that test that are within Wikibooks' scope.

12. Inevitably the removal of game guides from Wikibooks will see those who only edited those
areas of Wikibooks leave. It will also see those who spent some of their time on Wikibooks on
editing game guides, and some time on textbooks, reduce the time they spend on Wikibooks. On
the other hand, a more focused Wikibooks will help attract other new editors committed to
providing quality open-content textbooks.

13. I would add the following. "Textbook" has its normal English meaning. There are many possible
subject areas and styles for textbooks. The word should be interpreted widely on Wikibooks, but
the meaning should not be stretched so as to include texts that are clearly not textbooks in any sense
of the word. There are also some subjects that are innately inappropriate as subjects of textbooks,
or which would be deemed unsuitable - these are few and far between, but might include textbooks
extolling black (or white) supremacy, a textbook to train people in terrorism, a textbook on a little
recognised constructed language (such as one I have just made up, or which literally only a handful
of people have any interest in). Other than extreme cases such as these (which can be discussed on
WB:VFD), all textbooks should be welcome on Wikibooks.

X. There has not been a suggestion that all "How-tos" were removed. Jimbo has noted that some
"How-tos" should be removed (which was certainly true at the time). This unfortunately, but I believe
erroneously, was picked up by some to mean that all How-tos should be removed.

Y. Eric Moeller's suggestion of renaming Wikibooks to Wikitextbooks has some merit. Although
"Wikitextbooks" is longer and less sexy, it would make clearer to everyone what Wikibooks' scope is.
Many people, particularly on Wikipedia, incorrectly think that any book content is suitable for
Wikibooks. This is a misconception that really should be removed.

Kind regards

Jon
(jguk)


subject: [Textbook-l] Response to Rob's last post

body:
I'd like to comment on some things in Rob's last post.

First, where are examples of people moving How-to material that you believe ought to
remain in Wikibooks to Wikia with a link thereto? I was not aware this was happening.

Second, I do not believe the responses to your suggestion about the possibility of having
a textbook on Doom are consistent with your account here. I think the relevant
discussions are all here:
 http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikibooks:Staff_lounge/Archive_19#Gaming_manual_as_a_textbook

You made a suggestion, Jimbo showed scepticism, but also noted that he was willing
to be convinced otherwise. User:Jtvisona (which is not a Wikibooks user account name)
then suggested that there were serious courses on it (without offering proof). After that,
RobinH, Dragontamer, Lord Voldemort, hagindaz and myself noted that such a textbook
would be possible and would be ok on Wikibooks. Although there were notes that the
current Doom Wikibook was not such a textbook and that it would take a lot of time
to write a textbook on Doom so that you may not wish to see it through, and there was
a suggestion that a wider scope, to consider other strategy games, might be better.

The other commenters, Garrett and Gerard Foley, did not comment on the point explicitly,
but their tone (and the knowledge that they are both keen gamers) suggests they
are not against the idea. Jimbo did not comment again. I therefore think your statement
that there was the "substantial resistance and even outright rejection" that you say there
was.

Kind regards

Jon
(jguk)


list: foundation-l

from_name: Alison Wheeler

subject: [Foundation-l] Would you consider being on the Board?

body:
On Fri, June 9, 2006 17:57, Anthony DiPierro wrote:
> The thing is, the vast majority of those tens of thousands of
> participants don't really care about the foundation.  They just want
> to work on a free encyclopedia/free news reporting service/free image
> repository/whatever.
> It'd be interesting if nothing else to see just what percentage of
> Wikipedians have any desire at all of being Wikimedians.

except that the real thing is, you can't separate the two. Wikipedia (and
Wikibooks, Wiktionary, etc) all exist not by the grace of god, but by the
grace of Wikimedia (Foundation). If someone wants to play rough with a
Wikipedia entry they don't go after the individual editors and try and
trace all the IP addresses, but look to the legal body responsible for
that entry, WMF. As such, whether they are aware they "care about the
foundation" or not, we need to educate them better that they need to.

It's a bit like people who don't vote as they say it isn't relevant to
them. WMF is relevant to *every* editor and reader of every project.

Alison Wheeler


list: wikimedia-l


from_name: Kelly Martin

subject: [Foundation-l] on (re)organizing wikimedia

body:
On 6/9/06, oscar <oscar.wiki at gmail.com> wrote:
> hi all,
>
> i would like to share with you some thoughts on (re)organization.
> i read that there are plans to put a ceo in place to take care of executive
> responsibilities. executive responsibilities are very different from those
> of responsible wikians within the projects. so far these things have not
> been separated at all, that is understandable for a young and growing
> organization, but such cannot last or work well forever.
>
> in my opinion:
> 1. the only way this organization, its projects and mission, its vitality
> and appeal, will survive will be if a strict separation be implemented
> between volunteer-work, executive tasks and their respective supervision.
> 2. separation of executive and project-related responsibilities by
> installing an elected council of representatives from the projects is
> mandatory.
> 3. the task of an appointed board should be supervising the work of the
> executives, it should be a type of board consisting of very professional
> people (the kind which in a way of speaking should have "better things to
> do", if you get my meaning), and in general not deal with the projects at
> all.
> 4. the council of representatives should supervise the projects, advise the
> executive level, and in general not deal with the board at all.
>
> i could be more elaborate in explaining the rationale behind these thoughts,
> but i chose to keep things concise. note however, that i spoke of how
> specific tasks, responsibilities and work can be organized, avoiding the
> who-does-what, which is not of my concern now.
> also these things should definitely not be mixed up.
>
> for what it's worth these are my two euros ;-)
>
> oscar

I was asking today of certain people if there was any document that
formally set out the relationship between the Foundation and the
individual projects operating under it.  I have been told that there
is no such document.  I'm sorely tempted to work on that document,
which would set out what the Foundation does for the projects, what
the Foundation expects from each project, and how the projects will
insure that the Foundation is looking after their interests.

Some other issues came out of that discussion -- such as our
precarious copyright situation -- and those also need to be addressed.

It seems that Oscar's on a similar tack here.

Kelly


list: wikien-l

from_name: Jesse W

subject: [WikiEN-l] To: Jimmy Wales - Admin-driven death of Wikipedia

body:
On Jun 9, 2006, at 5:09 PM, George Herbert wrote:
> On 6/9/06, Jesse W <jessw at netwood.net> wrote:
>> On Jun 9, 2006, at 4:32 PM, Steve Bennett wrote:
>>> We have articles on every single episode of most major TV shows, and
>>> lots of
>>> minor ones. You would never see that in any encyclopaedia.
>>
>> You would not see that in the Encyclopedia of Late 20th Century
>> American Television?  Really?  Or do you mean in any "general"
>> encyclopedia.  Because certainly, Wikipedia reaches the level of a
>> specialized encyclopedia in a number of areas, like television shows -
>> but (I hope), we don't go too much beyond that.
>
> Out of curiosity, why?
I'll turn the question on it's head - what's an example, in your
opinion, of a article topic that would be "beyond a specialized
encyclopedia devoted to a subject to which the topic is a part" (sorry,
little convoluted there, but I hope you get the gist)  I ask, because,
I can't think of a topic like that that would not be, at the same time,
obviously "not encyclopedic", in the opinion of any random person you
cared to ask.  Certainly, an article consisting only of polemic on
Macedonian independence is "beyond a specialized encyclopedia", no
matter what it's subject, but it's also obviously wrong for Wikipedia.
I can't think of a topic which fails the first criteria, without being
obviously unsuitable for Wikipedia.  Can you come up with some
examples?

> What, exactly, does an end-state Wikipedia project look like, to those
> who would want us to stop adding new articles at some point?  How and
> when would you say "stop"?
When we have articles on every topic for which reputable sources can be
found.  Of course, we'd have to start up adding new articles in a year
or so, when a lot of new material has been published, but we could stop
adding articles for a period, while enough new material was published.

Jesse Weinstein


from_name: Death Phoenix

subject: [WikiEN-l] Template HTML fixups coming this week

body:
On 6/9/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 6/9/06, Death Phoenix <originaldeathphoenix at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Hmmm... these templates are almost always substed rather than being
> > transcluded. Will substing the template serve as a workaround for this?
>
> Naturally. Substing any template is equivalent to typing in its text
> by hand. If typing <DIV> foo </DIV> is legal, then typing
> {{subst:divstart}} foo {{subst:divend}} is legal...
>

Wunderbar.


from_name: reason

subject: [Foundation-l] project proposal: Wikireason (debate)

body:
Hello list-readers,

Over a year ago, David Bruhn
(http://wikireason.net/wiki/User:David_Bruhn) made a proposal  that the
Wikimedia Foundation set up a wiki for debating issues
(http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikireason). Around the same time, I
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:AdamRetchless) had set up a wiki
(http://wikireason.net) for the same purpose. David and I discovered
each other's work, decided that we had the same goal, and decided to
develop my wiki site as a demonstration of how wikis can be used for
debate. We hope that the existence of this wiki strengthens our proposal
to the Wikimedia foundation.

With the help of some other participants, we have gotten this project
off of the ground, and overcome the major obstacles to developing this
project. I would like your feedback on the project, especially two issues:

1) Is there much chance of the Wikimedia foundation adopting this project?
2) Would the chance of that happening be improved if we continue
developing the project?

In short, I think that this project deserves to be a sister project of
projects like Wikipedia and Wiktionary because it is of the same scale
and is a general interest project like those. This is illustrated by the
fact that it will have many page names and categories that are identical
to those found in Wikipedia, and debate pages generally link to
Wikipedia pages for background information on the topics of debate.

I also think that Wikireason will complement the existing Wikimedia
foundation projects. I've outlined arguments for this at
http://wikireason.net/wiki/wikireason:Wikireason_and_the_Wikimedia_foundation

Finally, you may like to check out the introductory material that I've
put together (http://wikireason.net/wiki/Wikireason:Introduction). It
needs to be refined, but it should give you the general idea for how I
expect the wiki to work. Of course, I would also appreciate any
suggestions for improving the introductory material, the wiki in
general, or the chances of it being adopted by the Wikimedia foundation.

Thanks,
adam


from_name: Brianna Laugher

subject: [Wikitech-l] Simplified/traditional Chinese on Commons

body:
On 09/06/06, Hsiang-Tai Chien <htchien1225 at yahoo.com.tw> wrote:
> zh-cn: Chinese language used in China, Simplified Chinese
> zh-hk: Chinese language used in Hong Kong, Traditional Chinese
> zh-sg: Chinese language used in Singapore, Traditional Chinese
> zh-tw: Chinese language used in Taiwan, Traditional Chinese
>
> Although they are all Chinese, however, they use different terminologies for the same thing due to the culture changes in the areas. It's not just that simple with Han-S and Han-T. Also not a macro language I think.
>
> I know it might not be easy for an non-Chinese to understand this, but it's the language we live with it day by day.

So are you suggesting we should stick to these distinctions? And we
should have four zh-versions of all pages and templates? Because the
tendency I have noticed is to use "zh-hans" and "zh-hant" which are
nothing official. It would be nice at least if there was some
consistency.

Brianna


from_name: maru dubshinki

body:
On 6/9/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 6/9/06, maru dubshinki <marudubshinki at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > That's close, but not quite it. I think what it is more about is that
> > previously encyclopedias were written by fairly homogenous "elites",
> > if you will, and that the inherent economic limits meant that they
> > were forced to stay within the area of "no-brainers", subjects which
> > were to them obviously encyclopedia-worthy, which they could easily
> > reach consensus on, being fairly homogenous elites. But by the same
> > token, that means that they never had to grapple with any edge issues,
> > whereas we do, as en has by and large exhausted a good many of the
> > obviously encyclopedia-worthy articles (though not all, or else we
> > wouldn't have the missing encyclopedia article project), and so must
> > confront the margins; and of course, Wikipedia is hardly written by a
> > fairly homogenous elite, regardless of whatever it may have started
> > life as, or the realities of its power structure.
>
> Also, we have large numbers of people extremely willing and ready to
> write detailed articles on topics of dubious interest. We have
> articles on every single episode of most major TV shows, and lots of
> minor ones. You would never see that in any encyclopaedia.
>
> Steve

Well, that's sort of what I meant. The usual run-of-the-mill elites
would not concern themselves with such things (although I have heard
of *some* encyclopedias of TV shows and such starting to emerge in the
past half-century), and being homogenous, there would not be a
subfaction interested in such things. Whereas we...

~maru


list: commons-l

subject: [Commons-l] some statistics

body:
On 09/06/06, Magnus Manske <magnus.manske at web.de> wrote:
> Solution A:
> Increase the number of admins, which will increase the number of deletions.

Probably not enough to have a big impact any time soon, and if we were
to increase the numbers so that it did, it would be dangerous. And
also we don't even have the interested candidates to nominate, so...

> Solution B:
> Have a bot automatically delete files in certain categories that have
> been there since X days.

Could be possible for the category that is only used by Orgullobot,
but you wouldn't want to use it for most categories as people can (and
do) tag things maliciously or mistakenly. Manual checking is required
IMO. Sad but true.

Also I don't think anyone would be too happy with a bot that had admin
powers, doesn't seem to go down well. You could have an admin run a
daily script though, I guess. Their talk page would probably be a
world of pain as redlinks jumped up in X wikis. CommonsTicker wouldn't
help except for images tagged in the last couple of weeks.

> Solution C:
> I would expect that most problematic uploads come from new users.
> Disable the creation of new users (or their ability to upload) while the
> total backlog is >X files (no pun intended). Have a messaage displayed
> prominently to put social pressure on the admins ;-)

What do you mean, social pressure? To encourage them to delete stuff?

You are right that most problematic uploads come from newbies (or
oldbies no one has caught yet - there are many of those :( ).

Yet we now have automatic welcoming of all new active accounts, and
automatic logging of those accounts (
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Orgullobot/Welcome_log ). And
we can't even muster up enough people to check these - a week and
there is already a backlog. You don't even have to be an admin to do
this.

Disabling newbie uploads is one idea, or forcing them to pass some
kind of copyright test. But there would be such backlash we could
never do it, plus there's always too many exceptions, different
languages...it's a nightmare. Also someone might be new to the Commons
but well familiar with copyright issues from Wikipedia or similar.

Any more ideas?

I could be happy for Jimbo to run through these with a razor, at least
it will save the Commons from criticism were I to do the same thing :)

Brianna


from_name: Delirium

subject: [WikiEN-l] "refactoring" signatures

body:
Steve Bennett wrote:
> On 6/9/06, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
>
>
>> Aren't our policies already pretty well settled in telling people not to
>> do either one of those things?
>>
>
> Our policies are pretty silly: Use whatever makes sense for the topic.
> If nothing makes sense, use whatever the first major contributor used.
>
> Basically, we actually don't care, but it pisses us off when people
> change from one to the other for no good reason. However, our policy
> doesn't actually give us a way to change from one to the other, even
> if a good reason shows up.
>

I don't see it as making it impossible to change, but rather saying that
violating "whatever makes sense for the topic" is the only good reason
to change from one to the other.

-Mark


from_name: Angela

body:
On 6/9/06, Anthony DiPierro <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:

> You don't honestly believe that everyone interested in a Board
> position saw that message and answered you, do you?

I expect anyone serious about joining the Board this year to be
reading this mailing list. They couldn't possibly have a thorough
enough understanding of what the Foundation is about without doing
that, and for a community representative (as opposed to the outsiders
who may be appointed), I do expect them to be participating in
foundation issues before they're appointed, as well as being active on
the projects.

Angela.


from_name: mboverload

body:
There will always be that news story about 28 murders in po-dunk Kansas and
that city will suddenly shoot from a stub to a featured article.  The
creation of human knowledge never ends, and we will never stop gathering it.

mboverload

On 6/9/06, Jesse W <jessw at netwood.net> wrote:
>
> On Jun 9, 2006, at 5:09 PM, George Herbert wrote:
> > On 6/9/06, Jesse W <jessw at netwood.net> wrote:
> >> On Jun 9, 2006, at 4:32 PM, Steve Bennett wrote:
> >>> We have articles on every single episode of most major TV shows, and
> >>> lots of
> >>> minor ones. You would never see that in any encyclopaedia.
> >>
> >> You would not see that in the Encyclopedia of Late 20th Century
> >> American Television?  Really?  Or do you mean in any "general"
> >> encyclopedia.  Because certainly, Wikipedia reaches the level of a
> >> specialized encyclopedia in a number of areas, like television shows -
> >> but (I hope), we don't go too much beyond that.
> >
> > Out of curiosity, why?
> I'll turn the question on it's head - what's an example, in your
> opinion, of a article topic that would be "beyond a specialized
> encyclopedia devoted to a subject to which the topic is a part" (sorry,
> little convoluted there, but I hope you get the gist)  I ask, because,
> I can't think of a topic like that that would not be, at the same time,
> obviously "not encyclopedic", in the opinion of any random person you
> cared to ask.  Certainly, an article consisting only of polemic on
> Macedonian independence is "beyond a specialized encyclopedia", no
> matter what it's subject, but it's also obviously wrong for Wikipedia.
> I can't think of a topic which fails the first criteria, without being
> obviously unsuitable for Wikipedia.  Can you come up with some
> examples?
>
> > What, exactly, does an end-state Wikipedia project look like, to those
> > who would want us to stop adding new articles at some point?  How and
> > when would you say "stop"?
> When we have articles on every topic for which reputable sources can be
> found.  Of course, we'd have to start up adding new articles in a year
> or so, when a lot of new material has been published, but we could stop
> adding articles for a period, while enough new material was published.
>
> Jesse Weinstein
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


subject: [Textbook-l] Game guides

body:
Robert Scott Horning wrote:

>>Jguk wrote:
>>4, 5. Games guides are not textbooks. Therefore they do not fit within Wikibooks' purpose.
>>

>Define game guides and textbooks, and you might have a point.  The very
>definition of these words is subject to a huge range of interpretations
>and is the real crux of the argument here.  I would agree that a video
>game walk-through is not a textbook, and was something being addressed
>by the video game guidelines/policies before this whole argument turned
>that effort into a farce.  Several video game books did need to either
>be deleted or modified, but it didn't have to be so dramatic, and could
>have been dealt with through more community concensus and editor
>participation.  Again my complaint was that Wikibooks were deleted
>without even so much as a VfD, even when they contained dozens or more
>pages of content from hundreds of different contributors.  That didn't
>have to happen.

This is somewhere where we have a completely different attitude to things: I think it is
important that textbook is not defined, but instead left to have its normal English
meaning. This makes things less restrictive. I also do not see a problem with
not defining it.

Maybe my background explains why I think not defining the term is helpful.
I am a UK tax professional - and the most common decision in deciding whether
a business expense is tax deductible or not is in deciding whether it is revenue
or capital. Revenue is deductible, capital is not. Neither terms are defined in
statute law. There have been many cases, however, on what capital is.

Largely this is not a problem. Transferring the point to Wikibooks - it would
mean that in marginal cases, we would discuss the point on VfD, but it
would also mean that we would allow more content on Wikibooks than if
we had a prescriptive, line-in-the-sand-type rule. The failure of the recent
attempt to suggest an"accredited institution" metric shows the innate problem
of getting a firm definition that will work in every case - a lack of definition
allows for greater flexibility.

>Jguk wrote
>>12. Inevitably the removal of game guides from Wikibooks will see those who
>>only edited those areas of Wikibooks leave. It will also see those who spent
>>some of their time on Wikibooks on editing game guides, and some time on textbooks,
>>reduce the time they spend on Wikibooks. On the other hand, a more focused
>>Wikibooks will help attract other new editors committed to providing quality
>>open-content textbooks.
>>
>I totally disagree on this point, and it is a point that we certainly
>don't see eye to eye on.  I do believe that contributors are leaving
>that have contributed to other areas of Wikibooks, and this is a far too
>callous attitude to hold a certain segment of the Wikibooks community
>with contempt.  Video game books were an excellent way for new
>contributors to "get their feet wet" in editing some content that they
>didn't feel they needed a PhD in order to make some meaningful
>contributions.  Rather than simply outright deletion of this content, we
>should have been pushing to raise the standards of the existing content.

>Also, I see here a huge contempt for new contributors of any kind.  I
>believe that education and patience is a better answer to deal with
>people new to Wikimedia projects, not a brazen removal of their effort
>and a few harsh words or even just two or three words like "not a
>textbook" to explain why their contribution has been deleted.  These new
>contributors is the lifeblood of the project and how Wikibooks will grow
>to be successful.

Indeed, we do disagree greatly here. Far from showing contempt for new
contributors, I have received many notes of thanks for the help I have
given them (some of which can be read on Wikibooks, others were by
personal email). The problem with referring to "a few harsh words" is that
you do not see what is hidden behind the scenes.

In terms of whether we are, in practice, turning large numbers of people away,
I don't think that is true. I regularly look at the alexa.com rankings, and have
been expecting a big dip after the removal of many of our game guides. This
hasn't happened.

>jguk wrote:
>>Y. Eric Moeller's suggestion of renaming Wikibooks to Wikitextbooks has some merit.
>>Although "Wikitextbooks" is longer and less sexy, it would make clearer to everyone what
>>Wikibooks' scope is. Many people, particularly on Wikipedia, incorrectly think that any
>>book content is suitable for Wikibooks. This is a misconception that really should be removed.
>
Rob Horning wrote:

>I think this is the wrong move, and something that was brought up in the
>very beginning of Wikibooks, when it was originally textbooks.wikipedia

>It was felt at the time by the project founder, Karl Wick, that
>Wikibooks could be much more than simply college textbooks.  I can't put
>any words into his mouth, but if you read the archives of this mailing
>list you can see some of the discussions about that point.  As it is, we
>have more than just university-level books, but for almost every age
>group and over a huge variety of subjects.  The very name of the project
>suggests that Wikibooks is about books.... a topic exposition that is
>much longer than an encyclopedia article.  That is why I have long
>contended that any topic on Wikipedia could be expanded into a full
>Wikibook, which is why the current Wikipedia forking policy (to
>Wikibooks) is written the way it is right now.  If a very long Wikipedia
>article is being trimmed down to fit within their 32k article limit, I
>don't see a reason why it couldn't be moved to Wikibooks as a stub to be
>expanded on Wikibooks.  And that is any article on any topic currently
>within the scope of Wikipedia.  Explain why this shouldn't be the case?

I do see the future of Wikibooks as having a much, much wider range of
textbooks than just textbooks for schoolchildren, but I do see the latter
as being an essential core.

I certainly agree that much content from Wikipedia could and should be
honed into good working textbooks. Some Wikibooks (such as the
cookbook and bartending books) already are easy to merge new one-off
Wikipedia pages into.

For other one-and-a-half-pagers, I think there is a difference between whether
they can (and will) be grouped together with other one-and-a-half-pagers
on a similar subject into a meaningful general interest textbook or not. If the
former, we should accept them here, if not, then we should not.

Jon
(jguk)


from_name: Ashar Voultoiz

subject: [Wikitech-l] New diff feature for MediaWiki

body:
Roman Nosov wrote:
> So my question to all Unicode Nazis here is why quote from latin-1
> charset is treated *differently* from slightly different Unicode
> quote?

Because they are different character and the diff engine doesnt
recognize the MS Word one ?  It can be fixed I believe :o)

My editor (vim) use the "regular" single quote when I edit an unicode text.

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


from_name: Mark Williamson

body:
Tim, please see yue: and proposed (and "approved") wuu:

The "words" that don't exist in Mandarin aren't just words -- there
are grammatical differences as well.

And the differing words run very deep -- the Mandarin word for
"where", for example, uses different characters than the contemporary
Cantonese word.

This isn't an issue for zh.wp because it's written only in Baihuawen
(Mandarin-based written standard).

Before the advent of Baihuawen (it was, I believe, invented by the
Nationalists), the written lingua franca of China was Classical
Chinese, quite different grammatically and vocabulary-wise from
Mandarin. Perhaps comparable to Katharevousa and Dhimotiki in Greece.

People might question the use of vernacular Wikipedias, but then, one
could in a similar vein question the use of the Catalan Wikipedia,
since basically all people literate in Catalan are also literate in
either French or Spanish (or both) as well.

One person gave the example of a child -- a child in Hong Kong could
understand articles in the Cantonese Wikipedia if read aloud to them,
but articles read from zh.wp would be confusing and in many cases
incomprehensible (they won't learn Baihuawen until primary school).

There seems to be a common misconception that thruought China,
Baihuawen is read aloud according to the character pronunciations of
the native regional dialect of the reader.

This isn't true, though -- people reading Baihuawen aloud will almost
invariably read it in Mandarin or, in Hong Kong and Macau, Cantonese.

Other varieties are largely oral media. That isn't to say that nobody
writes in Xiang or Wu or Northern Min, or that nobody is literate in
it. Anyone who speaks Xiang and has a rudimentary knowledge of Chinese
characters will be able to read written vernacular Xiang, and there
are certain occasions on which it is written.

And although colloquial writing can be found in every major regional
variety of Chinese, as a popular phenomenon it is limited mostly to
Cantonese, Wu, Minnan, and Hakka for a few reasons: Cantonese and Wu
are both the languages of huge (HUGE) urban centers where people take
pride in their local identity; Minnan and Hakka are used on Taiwan,
which doesn't currently have a rabid government movement to eradicate
local varieties so people who want to develop written forms for the
native languages have had quite a bit of success.

Having said that, most people who write Minnan do not write it in
Peh-oe-ji. There is no single agreed-upon orthography, but most people
use a mixture of Chinese characters and Roman letters (and
occasionally Japanese characters as well). This is not currently
practical for writing an encyclopaedia though, because a huge portion
of the words in the language have no consensus as to what character
should be used to write them.

Mark

On 09/06/06, Tim Starling <t.starling at physics.unimelb.edu.au> wrote:
> Gerard Meijssen wrote:
> > These languagecodes can then have a script associated with them eg
> > cmn-Hans for simplified Chinese. When there are dialects within a
> > language they can be identified as well.
> >
> > Using zh is imho utterly confusing and associating them with countries
> > does not help at all. More than one language is spoken in Taiwan and
> > therefore zh-hans-tw does not cut it. When you replace traditional with
> > simplified, within one language I can understand what you are doing.
> > However when you in essence start moving across languages and is that
> > not the implication when you talk about things having different
> > terminology are you then not trying to provide translations ?
>
> The written language is much more closely standardised than the spoken
> language. Speakers of mutually incomprehensible variants of Chinese
> write in a common script based on Mandarin. Differences in terminology
> do occur, and in some cases, such as "Cantonese colloquial", characters
> are introduced to describe words in the local dialect that do not exist
> in Mandarin. However, these differences are much easier to resolve in
> software than full translation between languages written phonetically.
> For conversion to zh-hk, MediaWiki uses a dictionary of 211 entries in
> addition to the simplified/traditional tables, and for conversion to
> zh-sg, there is only 15 extra entries.
>
> Is it translation? Or is it just an spelling and terminology change,
> like conversion from US English to Commonwealth English? Maybe somewhere
> in between.
>
> -- Tim Starling
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>

--
Refije dirije lanm? yo paske nou posede pw?p bato.


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Anthere

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikia's new CEO

body:
Ray Saintonge wrote:
> Selina . wrote:
>
>
>>On 07/06/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>>>Selina . wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>>Go to https://sos-res.state.de.us/tin/GINameSearch.jsp and search for
>>>>"Wikia" and it says it's "NOT IN GOOD STANDING" - I don't know what that
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>means, but it doesn't sound like a good thing.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>>Wow, that is just staggeringly dishonest.  You do know that people can
>>>click on the link and look for themselves, don't you?
>>>
>>>What it actually says is: "THIS IS NOT A STATEMENT OF GOOD STANDING"
>>>
>>>Wikia is in good standing, but the point this website is making is that
>>>this is not where you look that up.
>>>
>>>
>>
>>(Argh it's so annoying that you can't link directly, I tried messing around
>>with the form input but it says "Illegal attempt", lol, talk about Assuming
>>Bad Faith ;))
>>Sorry, I wasn't being "dishonest" (hey, AGF?) I didn't know the difference,
>>without the explanation it sounds like the meaning's the same ~shrug~ i.e.
>>if the government statement about something is "bad standing" I thought it
>>must be talking about the organisation - my mistake -.-
>>
>
> Bad faith is normally trumped by ignorance, and the kind of misreading
> described could reasonably fall within the wider framework of
> ignorance.  It is not unusual for people's reading abilities to be
> inconsistent with what appears in print.
>
> I did get the "illegal attempt" response when I first tried to access
> the information, and had to restart and accept cookies before I could
> get the block capitals message that Jimbo quoted.  I suppose that Selina
> also failed to read this boilerplate text: "Additional Information is
> available for a fee. You can retrieve Status for a fee of $10.00 or more
> detailed information including current franchise tax assessment, current
> filing history and more for a fee of $20.00."  Did she pay her $10.00?
>
>
>>Fred: Read my other post ("I'm not saying anything bad is going on at all,
>>but there's no way for the public to know if everything's kept secret."),
>>I'm not claiming anything, I misworded that - what I meant is how it COULD
>>be used for Wikia and no one would basically know
>>
>>However I don't think it's that much of a risk I just was surprised it
>>wasn't as open as I thought it would be, and worried when I read stuff
>>posted on WR which sounded pretty dodgy (that topic I referred to -.-) -
>>I've basically satisfied my curiousity and won't bring it up again, it
>>sounds like the fears of others (I never posted in the topic, but read it..)
>>may just be that, worries :)
>>
>
> In situations of this sort perceptions are more influential than facts.
> Although it is less important for Wikia decisions, Wikimedia directors
> who are also Wikia directors, employees or shareholders should declare
> their conflicts of interest and abstain from voting whenever any matter
> concerning Wikia comes up to a vote of Wikimedia directors.  This will
> go a long way toward dispelling erroneous perceptions.
>
> Ec

Fully agree.

Note that voting is not the only issue. Simply going to a conference to
give a talk about Wikipedia, and talking about the two projects at the
same time may lead to unsuitable confusion. Imagine for example that one
is talking to a possible sponsor. Will the sponsor independantly choose
to fund Wikimedia and/or Wikia ?

ant


from_name: brion at pobox.com

subject: [Wikitech-l] MediaWiki automated test run failure 2006-06-10

body:
An automated run of parserTests.php showed the following failures:

Running test Table security: embedded pipes (http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2006-April/034637.html)... FAILED!
Running test Link containing double-single-quotes '' (bug 4598)... FAILED!
Running test message transform: <noinclude> in transcluded template (bug 4926)... FAILED!
Running test message transform: <onlyinclude> in transcluded template (bug 4926)... FAILED!
Running test BUG 1887, part 2: A <math> with a thumbnail- math enabled... FAILED!
Running test Language converter: output gets cut off unexpectedly (bug 5757)... FAILED!
Running test HTML bullet list, unclosed tags (bug 5497)... FAILED!
Running test HTML ordered list, unclosed tags (bug 5497)... FAILED!
Running test HTML nested bullet list, open tags (bug 5497)... FAILED!
Running test HTML nested ordered list, open tags (bug 5497)... FAILED!
Running test Parsing optional HTML elements (Bug 6171)... FAILED!
Running test Inline HTML vs wiki block nesting... FAILED!
Running test Mixing markup for italics and bold... FAILED!

Passed 391 of 404 tests (96.78%) FAILED!


from_name: George Herbert

body:
On 6/9/06, Jesse W <jessw at netwood.net> wrote:
> > What, exactly, does an end-state Wikipedia project look like, to those
> > who would want us to stop adding new articles at some point?  How and
> > when would you say "stop"?
> When we have articles on every topic for which reputable sources can be
> found.

Sure that's your criteria?  I can, with a little effort, get multiple
reputable sources to document my travels to and from work every day (I
could drive by multiple Caltrans, TV and Radio station traffic cams,
take my own GPS log of the trip, video blog it, publish an ISBNed
print-on-demand book of it every day, etc).  I would certainly hope
that nobody felt it Wikipedia-worthy to create [[George William
Herbert's drive to work on Friday, June 10, 2006]].  Much less the
drive home, or the rest of the week and month.

We're past the point that lots of truly mundane boring stuff gets
reputably reliably recorded in an accessable manner, which would pass
the verifyable source test for WP.

We'll get to the point that most truly mundane things in public are so
recorded (hint: England has security cameras everywhere in most major
cities already).

--
-george william herbert
gherbert at retro.com / george.herbert at gmail.com


from_name: Łukasz Garczewski

subject: [Commons-l] some statistics

body:
Brianna Laugher napisa?(a):
> [...] Also someone might be new to the Commons
> but well familiar with copyright issues from Wikipedia or similar.

Single login would take care of this particular issue quite well, I
think. Not to say that turning off newbie uploads is a good idea. Or a
bad one. Carry on. ;)

--
Best,
TOR


from_name: Guy Chapman aka JzG

subject: [WikiEN-l] Objective oversight needed

body:
On Fri, 9 Jun 2006 00:37:54 -0700, you wrote:

>IMO, UniModal is a proposal without a hope in hell, and insufficiently
>different from other PRT ideas to have its own article.

So you say.  But my reduction to a short and hopefully factual
treatment was rapidly reverted to the old version replete with claims
of projected running costs of $0.01 to $0.02 per pod-mile and other
speculation.

No patents, no prototype, no backers, no systems in production. Feel
free to nominate for deletion if you think that means it's
functionally unverifiable :-)

Guy (JzG)
--
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG


body:
On 6/9/06, Kelly Martin <kelly.lynn.martin at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 6/9/06, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Not really. No one wikipedian could really effect something with that
> > much inertia.  With admins picking up increaseing control RFA is one
> > of the last ways none admins can really infulence the project.
> > Realisticaly you are looking at a cold dead hands situation if you
> > want to remove it.
>
> Exactly why it needs to be removed now before it becomes completely
> entrenched.  First we started getting people who wanted adminship to
> have control, and now they have adminship, and are taking control.  We
> should have stopped this a year ago, but we weren't paying attention,
> and now we have a lot of bad admins to show for it.

What do you want to use instead? Personally I don't mind RFA that much.
Although I do think the editcountis is getting out of hand. When I started
looking at it in september I think, the limit most people used was 1000
edits, now I already see oppose votes for less then 3000 edits.

If we have bad admins, perhaps it should be made easier to de-admin them. I
do agree that this should not be done by the community, since that could
turn out to be a lynching. (userbox issue for instance) Perhaps by arbcom?
They don't seem to be that busy anyway. :)

Garion96


from_name: Steve Bennett

subject: [WikiEN-l] Lovely.

body:
On 6/9/06, Matt Brown <morven at gmail.com> wrote:
> An interesting aside: in some US states, including California,
> employees cannot be fired or disciplined for political participation.
> Thus, if your edits are to politics-related articles, you have a
> degree of safety not found if you edit wholly unremarkable and
> uncontroversial stuff ...

Fwiw, in France it's pretty much impossible to get fired for anything.
This helps.

Steve


subject:
[WikiEN-l] "refactoring" signatures (was: cancelation of the
	deletion review of the satanism userbox)

body:
On 6/9/06, Death Phoenix <originaldeathphoenix at gmail.com> wrote:
> *sigh* People pursuing BE and AE should see what it's like to be a writer
> who has to write a certain way because our style guide says so. Our company
> writes in AE, while I personally dislike AE and prefer to write in BE as
> much as possible. I write in AE in my company because I'd likely get fired
> if I didn't.

I am in that exact same situation - I'm employed to write in AmE,
although AusE (or even BE) is my preference. It's confusing, and
mostly manifests itself with words like "behavio[u]r", and
occasionally "level[l]ed" etc.

> I prefer to to write in BE, but when I see people trying to convert American
> articles to BE, such as [[Special Activities Division]], it annoys me
> greatly. Same with British articles to AE (such as [[Harry Potter]]). This
> also applies to articles that could be written in either AE or BE, but were
> first written in one form, and people come to convert it over. I wish I
> could apply a category or template to indicate that the article is written
> in AE, and please piss off with the BE conversions (and vice versa).

I tend to think conversions are a kind of "noise" that should be
justified by a considerable contirbution. A 20 paragraph article that
becomes a 25 paragraph article accompanied by a conversion from BE to
AE seems like a good deal. A conversion with no other redeeming
features tends to grate, however.

Steve


body:
On 6/9/06, Death Phoenix <originaldeathphoenix at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hmmm... these templates are almost always substed rather than being
> transcluded. Will substing the template serve as a workaround for this?

Naturally. Substing any template is equivalent to typing in its text
by hand. If typing <DIV> foo </DIV> is legal, then typing
{{subst:divstart}} foo {{subst:divend}} is legal...

Steve


subject: [WikiEN-l] "refactoring" signatures

body:
On 6/9/06, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:

> Aren't our policies already pretty well settled in telling people not to
> do either one of those things?

Our policies are pretty silly: Use whatever makes sense for the topic.
If nothing makes sense, use whatever the first major contributor used.

Basically, we actually don't care, but it pisses us off when people
change from one to the other for no good reason. However, our policy
doesn't actually give us a way to change from one to the other, even
if a good reason shows up.

Steve


body:
On 6/9/06, maru dubshinki <marudubshinki at gmail.com> wrote:

> That's close, but not quite it. I think what it is more about is that
> previously encyclopedias were written by fairly homogenous "elites",
> if you will, and that the inherent economic limits meant that they
> were forced to stay within the area of "no-brainers", subjects which
> were to them obviously encyclopedia-worthy, which they could easily
> reach consensus on, being fairly homogenous elites. But by the same
> token, that means that they never had to grapple with any edge issues,
> whereas we do, as en has by and large exhausted a good many of the
> obviously encyclopedia-worthy articles (though not all, or else we
> wouldn't have the missing encyclopedia article project), and so must
> confront the margins; and of course, Wikipedia is hardly written by a
> fairly homogenous elite, regardless of whatever it may have started
> life as, or the realities of its power structure.

Also, we have large numbers of people extremely willing and ready to
write detailed articles on topics of dubious interest. We have
articles on every single episode of most major TV shows, and lots of
minor ones. You would never see that in any encyclopaedia.

Steve


from_name: Richard Fan

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Request for the unblock of PatCheng,
	admin abuse by Blnguyen

body:
==Regarding connections between PatCheng and Fenriswolf==

I deny the so-called connections between me and Fenriswolf from GameFAQs. I
feel see this as a mistake based entirely on hearsay, as all evidence was
provided [[User:YINever|YINever]], while I was blocked before I was given a
chance to defend myself. I am neither Fenriswolf, or an account intended to
"stalk" YINever.

=== Regarding my identity ===

I have been a Wikipedia user since 2004 from the NSW high school based
proxies, IPs, ranging from 203.166.9*.2**. IIRC, some of the edits I have
contributed from the proxy includes: [
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=PlayStation_Portable&diff=prev&oldid=13777813],
[
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Titan_%28Warhammer_40%2C000%29&diff=prev&oldid=19558552],
[
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Doom_3:_Resurrection_of_Evil&diff=prev&oldid=14516683],
[http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Xbox&diff=prev&oldid=3024243], [
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Leon_Lai&diff=prev&oldid=7045331],
[
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Chinatowns_in_Oceania&diff=prev&oldid=8320302].
However the proxy based addresses suffered due to the large amount of
vandalism by students, and frequent admin blocks. In October 2005, the
entire proxy was blocked indefinitely, preventing me from further edits,
until January 2006, when I bought my computer. I signed up to Optus internet
in January, and only 211.30.206.232 and 211.30.206.11 are the ones I
recognise. I deny that 211.30.205.254, 202.147.110.6, 203.222.154.162 and
211.30.215.91 are my IPs, as they has stopped editing since September, when
I was editing via proxy. TJive continued to edit past September, [
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Contributions&offset=20051005184424&limit=50&target=TJive],
and can anyone explain why these edits of him are not reverted, if indeed
I'm the "wikistalker"?

=== My actions on Wikipedia ===
I take full responsibilty for the comments I have made talk pages, and I
regret them. Such are said in anger and in no way reflect my character.
However I feel these are misused by Blnguyen to used to present me as some
sort of vandal and POV pusher. According to him:

''He has complained to me that he has a balanced view and wants democracy
but in the diff regarding inciting hatred, he says that the only wrong thing
that Mao ever did was not kill Jung Chang.''

I don't see anything done to users celebrating al-Zarqawi's death [
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Abu_Musab_al-Zarqawi#DING_DONG], which
someone could also argue "incite hatred against Muslims". Such statements
left by me in talk pages does not, and should not reflect my editing of
Wikipedia articles themselves. In at least three cases I have apologised [
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:PatCheng#Good_afternoon], removed my
comments [
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Mao_Zedong&diff=next&oldid=50179221].
In other cases I was not made aware of my insults, or assumed that the have
already been deleted by other users per the "soapbox" rule. Had I been made
aware of the comments I made I would have no problem removing them or
apologising to the persons affected.

I have already been blocked 24 hours previously for such personal attacks. I
should not have been punished twice, as the current dispute is about whether
Fenriswolf is my sockpuppet. As no links how been proven that I somehow
process "100s of IPs", Blnguyen merely used my history of personal attacks
as an excuse to block me indefinitely.

=== TJive/YINever's edit war ===

[[User:YINever|YINever]], TJive's sockpuppet was created on May 30th. He
immediatly tracked down and changed several articles on my watchlist, which
we previously fought over, the most bitter over my removal of a personal
attack on the Epoch Times talk page. [
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:The_Epoch_Times&diff=55936938&oldid=55010411].
>From his insistence to restore the the "web spy" comment, to the userbox on
his user page [
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:YINever&diff=prev&oldid=55876303],
portrayed me not as a legitimate Wikipedia editor, but somehow a "web spy
employed by the Chinese government".

>From my perspective, TJive's edits breaches the NPOV policy, not to mention
his reluctence to use the talk page to solve disputes. I am not the only
editor having problems with TJive, as he and Blnguyen claimed. TJive used
his sockpuppet YINever as well as his many IPs [
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:No_Gun_Ri&diff=57318265&oldid=57289241]
to engage in an edit-war, which he claims as "defending his right to edit",
portraying me as a "wikistalker". I have not edited as anyone else besides
PatCheng, yet I was the one blocked based on YINever's hearsay. TJive has a
previous history of edit wars with over users Ruy Lopez [
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:TJive/Ruy_Lopez] and Comandante.

Here are some of the disputed content:
* "Castro regime" instead of "Cuban government": [
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Carlos_Franqui&diff=prev&oldid=57099570],
[
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ladies_in_White&diff=prev&oldid=57289358
]

* Brief description content removed: [
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Profits_of_Extermination&diff=prev&oldid=57099584],
[
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Freedom_fighter&diff=prev&oldid=57289346
]

* Deletion of sections; incident "alleged" despite evidence, responce only
following user inquiry: [
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Varela_Project&diff=prev&oldid=57099522],
[
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=No_Gun_Ri&diff=prev&oldid=57286458],
[
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Harry_Magdoff_and_espionage&diff=prev&oldid=57104271
]

* Subject of article being a "Nazi", without corrosponding evidence: [
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=George_Bernard_Shaw&diff=prev&oldid=57286503
]

* Subject "committed suicide", not "murdered", despite my attempts to
include both: [
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Eduardo_Chib%C3%A1s&diff=prev&oldid=57284474
]

* Reinsertion of removed personal attacks: [
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:The_Epoch_Times&diff=57287136&oldid=57286754
]

* Article vandalism: [
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Gay_Mafia&diff=prev&oldid=55146203
]

* Tiananmen Square protests as "bloody supression": [
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Chen_Yonglin&diff=prev&oldid=57104207
]

=== Blnguyen's bias ===

[[User:Blnguyen|Blnguyen]] has only been admin since May 29th, and already
has problems with me. I first encountered Blnguyen in April, where he
reverted two of my edits, in which I stated that claims of a Chinese spy
network and kidnapping of foreigners are "alleged", as they are poorly
sourced. He reverted it, saying that it was apparently my "personal
judgement" and "every country has a spy network" [
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=6-10_Office&diff=48215638&oldid=48211093],
[
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Chen_Yonglin&diff=48215303&oldid=48211478].

On June 7th, I reverted a vandal comment on [[Talk:The Epoch Time]] by
[[User:Web spy killer|Web spy killer]], in which he referred me, an
Australian born citizen, as a "Chinese web spy", and telling me to contact
him [
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:The_Epoch_Times&oldid=55008482].
The vandal and his alternate account, [[User:Freereader|Freereader]], has
vandalised both The Epoch Times article and talk pages, blanking negative
sections and other user's comments. It was reverted by the admin Kungfuadam
[
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:The_Epoch_Times&diff=55010411&oldid=55008482],
before being restored by YINever 5 days later [
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:The_Epoch_Times&diff=next&oldid=55010411],
calling it "restore valuable comment in proper place". YINever has since
taken it to himself, posting the vandal's entire comment on his TJive
userpage [[User:TJive/Web spies]]. Ironically he started reverting other
users talk page comments, calling them "personal attacks" [
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Abu_Musab_al-Zarqawi&diff=prev&oldid=57546346
]
I fought YINever's IP addresses to delete the comment, as it breaches the
"assume good faith", "WP is not a soapbox", and "no personal attacks"
policies. Before long Blnguyen blocked me for "violating" the 3 revert rule,
when in fact removal of such personal attacks does not violate the 3RR.
Nevertheless Blnguyen refused to bulge, calling me "pro-CCP" and that
somehow because of my previous comments, I'm not allowed to revert other
user's attacks.[
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:PatCheng&diff=next&oldid=57125579].
Because of this, I was forced to email Kungfuadam, who agreed that my
actions does not violate 3RR, and that I should be given a chance to defend
myself from being blocked indifinitely on ANI. [
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:PatCheng&diff=next&oldid=57352998].
Nevertheless, Blnguyen reblocked me before I could defend myself, claiming
that I was ''proclaimed sockpuppeteer, extensive racist attacks, insults,
personal attacks, stalking; endorsed by other admins'', the exact
corrospondence not disclosed.

According to him:

[
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/Incidents#User_proclaiming_sockpuppetryhere]
''I have not extensively looked at his editing of articles, but giving
the repeated racist comments that he has made, I doubt whether he is here to
write an encyclopedia or to push POV and indulge in ideological
head-banging.''

Here he admitted that he did not read any of my article edits, but assumed
that I'm somehow a threat to Wikipedia because of my talk page comments. He
is obviously blind to my 2000+ other edits, where I have moved articles to
proper headings [
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ALog&type=&user=PatCheng&page=],
my categorization of articles, my removal of article vandalism, and my
involvement in editing the large number of Star Wars articles, of which I
was given a Barnstar for by the admin Deckiller. I have never vandalise one
Wikipedia article, and as show in the forementioned cases proved to be quite
capable of dealing with the Wikipedia community. To cast judgement on my
entire Wikipedia history based on my edit-war with TJive and personal
attacks which I have apologised for, shows his severe prejudice in my block.

This is considered as controversial block as per blocking policy, as I have
a substantial history of valid contributions, and and I seek to appeal.
According to WP:BP ''Indefinite blocks should not be used against isolated
incidents of disruption from IP addresses nor against user accounts that
make a mixture of disruptive and useful edits''.

=== Regarding the identity of Fenriswolf ===

I acquainted Fenriswolf last year on QQ, who claims to be an overseas
Chinese student, and apparently an insider into Chinese politics. It is more
than likely he was responsible for the edits on 211.30.205.254,
202.147.110.6, 203.222.154.162 and 211.30.215.91 in September. These are
registered to OptusNet, a large Australian broadband network.

Previously we have colaborated over the editing of articles, as he composes
the changes, while I post them. Currently, however, Fenriswolf is unable to
edit Wikipedia, as his claims to be using an open proxy. He does, however,
keeps track of TJive's account and sockpuppets, and alerts me whenever a
major change by TJive occurs. We both see TJive's changes and his personal
attitude as a threat to Wikipedia's integrity.

=== Should Fenriswolf's forum post be evidence? ===

The admin automatically accepted Fenriswolf's forum post as "evidence".
According to them, I'm now in procession of "hundreds of IPs" to flood
YINever, even though how a student would have access to such resources is
beyond me. Fenriswolf later "admitted" to "owning" my account, and I become
automatically blocked.

Should Fenriswolf's post be taken seriously? From my Gamefaqs account, I can
see that YINever created the topic to boast at his apparent "victory" in
getting me blocked 24 hours. Fenriswolf later posted there, first claiming
that he has procession of hundreds of IPs, then stealing my password, and
later "owning" my account. I see Fenriswolf's claims as merely a boast to
make YINever believe his exaggerated comments, and later making a fool of
himself. YINever himself takes pleasure in my apparent block, and gloated
over me that I'm some sort of web spy sent to "harass" him. He targets
innocent users such as me and RevolverOcelotX, who was proven [
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_checkuser#PatCheng] to
be a separate user.

I deny being the Wikipedia account of Fenriswolf. According to Fenriswolf's
user page, he created his account in November 2002, when I was in year 9. My
accounts on Gamefaqs are the banned account drag0nwarrior, and Eegah2004, of
which I did not create until early 2005.

==Requests==

I do not regard myself as a "wikistalker" or a "POV pusher", as stated by
YINever and Blnguyen, but a victim of TJive's sockpuppeting and scheming,
and Blnguyen's administrator abuse and bias. I have contributed 2000+ useful
edits to wikipedia, disregarded by Blnguyen, and it would be very unjust to
have my editing previliges wrongfully taken away. I request that this case
be settled in the Mediation Comittee by a more experienced bureaucrat or
administrator.


from_name: Jakob Voss

subject: [Foundation-l] First scientific book about Wikipedia

body:
Hi,

In Germany the first scientific book about Wikipedia has been published:

Frost, Ingo: Zivilgesellschaftliches Engagement in virtuellen
Gemeinschaften. Eine systemwissenschaftliche Analyse des
deutschsprachigen Wikipedia-Projektes. M?nchen: Herbert Utz Verlag,
2006. 152 S., ? 29,00. ISBN 3-8316-0609-9

It's the diploma thesis of Ingo Frost, accesible at
   http://www.cogsci.uos.de/~ifrost/
an english abstract is at
   http://www-lehre.inf.uos.de/~ifrost/offiziell/engl_abstract.html
Wikimedia Germany has supported the printing.

More scientifc works of Wikipedia research can be found at
   http://bibliography.wikimedia.de/

And it's getting more with Wikimania and WikiSym conferences in August.

According to his weblog Andrew Lih is writing a book about Wikipedia so
you will also get a book in English, but we were the first, afaik ;-)

Greetings,
Jakob


subject: [WikiEN-l] A meta-question re "non-negotiable"

body:
Arie van Buuren wrote:
> I also have a not unimportant related question for Jimbo: Am I right in
> interpreting "NPOV is absolute and non-negotiable" as only applying to
> Wikipedia's being written from the neutral point of view as a fundamental
> principle? Or does it also apply to (parts of) [[WP:NPOV]] and related
> policies?
>

That seems like the reasonable interpretation to me, especially since
Jimbo didn't even write that specific text---it's the principle of NPOV
that's non-negotiable, not the specific sentences currently on [[WP:NPOV]].

-Mark


from_name: oscar

body:
hi all,

i would like to share with you some thoughts on (re)organization.
i read that there are plans to put a ceo in place to take care of executive
responsibilities. executive responsibilities are very different from those
of responsible wikians within the projects. so far these things have not
been separated at all, that is understandable for a young and growing
organization, but such cannot last or work well forever.

in my opinion:
1. the only way this organization, its projects and mission, its vitality
and appeal, will survive will be if a strict separation be implemented
between volunteer-work, executive tasks and their respective supervision.
2. separation of executive and project-related responsibilities by
installing an elected council of representatives from the projects is
mandatory.
3. the task of an appointed board should be supervising the work of the
executives, it should be a type of board consisting of very professional
people (the kind which in a way of speaking should have "better things to
do", if you get my meaning), and in general not deal with the projects at
all.
4. the council of representatives should supervise the projects, advise the
executive level, and in general not deal with the board at all.

i could be more elaborate in explaining the rationale behind these thoughts,
but i chose to keep things concise. note however, that i spoke of how
specific tasks, responsibilities and work can be organized, avoiding the
who-does-what, which is not of my concern now.
also these things should definitely not be mixed up.

for what it's worth these are my two euros ;-)

oscar


from_name: Resid Gulerdem

body:
>From: Resid Gulerdem <resid_gulerdem at yahoo.com>
>Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
>To: jwales at wikia.com
>CC: wikien-l at Wikipedia.org
>Subject: [WikiEN-l] [[WP:OURS]] - A proposal for
admin-user relations
>Date: Mon, 5 Jun 2006 03:51:58 -0700 (PDT)
>
> >From: Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com>
> >Reply-To: English Wikipedia
<wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> >To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> >Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] To: Jimmy Wales -
>Admin-driven death of Wikipedia
> >Date: Sun, 04 Jun 2006 18:07:18 -0500
> >
> >Resid Gulerdem wrote:
> > >    The admins are only part of the community now
>and
> > > will stay like that in the future, as far as I
can
> > > see. Are some modifications needed in your
>opinion? I
> > > believe the answer is yes. I do not know if you
>could
> > > see the proposal [[WP:OURS]] I posted on this
list
> > > recently. I think it can be useful and can be
> > > developed further. I tried to outline some
>important
> > > points which may reduce the conflicts between
the
> > > admins and the users. If you saw it, do you
think
>it
> > > is feasible?
> >
> >I see no reference to WP:OURS in google, so I am
>unable to comment.  Can
> >you send it to me?
>
>The proposal [[WP:OURS]] is below. Since I am
>referring to another proposal
[[Wikipedia:Wikiethics]]
>in this proposal, I copy-pasted the updated version
of
>the Wikiethics proposal below too for your
>convenience. Right after the proposals, I provided
>further explanations about them.

Mr. Wales,

I was wondering if you could review the proposals. If
you think that the concerns are valid and that the
suggestions made in the proposals has some merit, I
would be glad to discuss the issue (not the problems
but the possible solutions which I think are
reasonable) further. I have a couple of similar
suggestions that I believe are critical and can be
useful to gently modify the structure of the project
and prepare it for the future if it will be expanding
in the years to come.

Sincerely,

Resid

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


from_name: Netocrat

subject: [Wikitech-l] How often should exceptions be used?

references:
<e659l2$pds$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<f1c3529e0606062319g782ece48l9bf3cb961dcdfc38@mail.gmail.com>
	<e65t64$f4f$1@sea.gmane.org>

body:
On Wed, 07 Jun 2006 16:54:02 +1000, Tim Starling wrote:
> Steve Bennett wrote:
>> On 6/7/06, Tim Starling
>> <t.starling at physics.unimelb.edu.au> wrote:
>>> which is better? Should the backend dictate the error format by
>>> specifying an exception class with a fixed format? Of course, a caller
>>> wishing to override the formatting could catch the exception, but is
>>> that better than the old method of using a success/failure return
>>> value?

If catching the exception to override the formatting would require the
additional 10 lines of boilerplate code that you mention below then that
seems to be a good argument against using an exception class.

>>> Should error handling be completely exception-dominated? Is there any
>>> role for success/failure return values in a language with exception
>>> support?
>>
>> Assuming this is a general question not specifically related to
>> MediaWiki, the general answer is that exceptions should only be used
>> for exceptional circumstances, and likely failures are better off
>> handled with return codes. It's better to use exceptions for weird
>> things like running out of memory, suddenly being unable to access the
>> disk, or an assertion failing, rather than something as banal as a bad
>> filename being supplied, for instance.
>
> Do you have some sort of justification for this view?

I share and have considered that view; here are two justifications:

* consistency.  A caller of a routine that needs to access the routine's
status shouldn't have to ask itself, "now, do I need to handle an
exception, check the return code, or both?"

* clarity.  Due to their automatic propagation, exceptions are capable of
interrupting the normal flow of code in an unusual way that can make it
harder to read, and so should be used sparingly.

A useful policy could be to treat exceptions and their handling as one
part of a debugging and quality-control framework (e.g. throwing
exceptions on assertion failures as the quoted advice suggests), and to
use them only conservatively for other error types.  One set of criteria
for non-debugging and non-QC use might be that the exceptional
circumstance is:
* critical but rare and unexpected, and
* beyond the direct control of the software, and
* a possibility nearly everywhere in the code.

A previous question was:
>>> Should the backend dictate the error format by specifying an exception
>>> class with a fixed format?

If consistency of error formatting is to be implemented - and it seems
like a good idea to me - then it could be achieved by means other than an
exception class.  One possibility is an ErrorFormatter class.  Another is
an advertised and simple protocol for error output based on use of css
classes for styling.

[...]
> PHP has a bug with
> exceptions thrown from within catch blocks, and this means that standard
> exception handling requires some 10 lines of boilerplate, making a try
> block on every entry point less practical still.
[...]

--
http://members.dodo.com.au/~netocrat


from_name: Gerard Meijssen

body:
Hoi,
In many ways the codes you provide are confusing. What I would like you
to do is match the codes that you provide with the ISO-639-3 codes. The
use of zh or zho is problematic, typically Mandarin (cmn) is meant when
people talk about Chinese. Chinese (zho) can be subdevided in the
following languages:

    * Gan Chinese [gan
      <http://www.sil.org/iso639-3/documentation.asp?id=gan>]
    * Hakka Chinese [hak
      <http://www.sil.org/iso639-3/documentation.asp?id=hak>]
    * Huizhou Chinese [czh
      <http://www.sil.org/iso639-3/documentation.asp?id=czh>]
    * Jinyu Chinese [cjy
      <http://www.sil.org/iso639-3/documentation.asp?id=cjy>]
    * Mandarin Chinese [cmn
      <http://www.sil.org/iso639-3/documentation.asp?id=cmn>]
    * Min Bei Chinese [mnp
      <http://www.sil.org/iso639-3/documentation.asp?id=mnp>]
    * Min Dong Chinese [cdo
      <http://www.sil.org/iso639-3/documentation.asp?id=cdo>]
    * Min Nan Chinese [nan
      <http://www.sil.org/iso639-3/documentation.asp?id=nan>]
    * Min Zhong Chinese [czo
      <http://www.sil.org/iso639-3/documentation.asp?id=czo>]
    * Pu-Xian Chinese [cpx
      <http://www.sil.org/iso639-3/documentation.asp?id=cpx>]
    * Wu Chinese [wuu
      <http://www.sil.org/iso639-3/documentation.asp?id=wuu>]
    * Xiang Chinese [hsn
      <http://www.sil.org/iso639-3/documentation.asp?id=hsn>]
    * Yue Chinese [yue
      <http://www.sil.org/iso639-3/documentation.asp?id=yue>]

This list does NOT provide you with all the language spoken in China

These languagecodes can then have a script associated with them eg
cmn-Hans for simplified Chinese. When there are dialects within a
language they can be identified as well.

Using zh is imho utterly confusing and associating them with countries
does not help at all. More than one language is spoken in Taiwan and
therefore zh-hans-tw does not cut it. When you replace traditional with
simplified, within one language I can understand what you are doing.
However when you in essence start moving across languages and is that
not the implication when you talk about things having different
terminology are you then not trying to provide translations ?

Thanks,
    GerardM

> Generally the language codes ahould be all right, however that should be more
> correct form to using the language tags, by defination of language tags, IANA
> ( http://www.iana.org/assignments/language-tags ):
>
> zh: Chinese, only generally "Chinese" or Zhong Wen (??)
>
> zh-hans: Simplified Chinese language
> zh-hant: Traditional Chinese language
>
> zh-cn: Chinese language used in Mainland China
> zh-hk: Chinese language used in Hong Kong
> zh-mo: Chinese language used in Macau
> zh-sg: Chinese language used in Singapore
> zh-tw: Chinese language used in Taiwan
>
> zh-hans-cn: Chinese language used in Mainland China, Simplified Chinese
> zh-hans-hk: Chinese language used in Hong Kong, Simplified Chinese
> zh-hans-mo: Chinese language used in Macau, Simplified Chinese
> zh-hans-sg: Chinese language used in Singapore, Simplified Chinese
> zh-hans-tw: Chinese language used in Taiwan, Simplified Chinese
>
> zh-hant-cn: Chinese language used in Mainland China, Trititional Chinese
> zh-hant-hk: Chinese language used in Hong Kong, Trititional Chinese
> zh-hant-mo: Chinese language used in Macau, Trititional Chinese
> zh-hant-sg: Chinese language used in Singapore, Trititional Chinese
> zh-hant-tw: Chinese language used in Taiwan, Trititional Chinese
>
> Don't forget there are many writing scripts besides the Simplified/Tratitional
> scripts and localised scripts ( and don't dorget there's have script language
> for Maacau too :) ).
>
> regards
> Man


body:
Brianna Laugher wrote:
> On 09/06/06, Hsiang-Tai Chien <htchien1225 at yahoo.com.tw> wrote:
>
>> zh-cn: Chinese language used in China, Simplified Chinese
>> zh-hk: Chinese language used in Hong Kong, Traditional Chinese
>> zh-sg: Chinese language used in Singapore, Traditional Chinese
>> zh-tw: Chinese language used in Taiwan, Traditional Chinese
>>
>> Although they are all Chinese, however, they use different terminologies for the same thing due to the culture changes in the areas. It's not just that simple with Han-S and Han-T. Also not a macro language I think.
>>
>> I know it might not be easy for an non-Chinese to understand this, but it's the language we live with it day by day.
>>
>
> So are you suggesting we should stick to these distinctions? And we
> should have four zh-versions of all pages and templates? Because the
> tendency I have noticed is to use "zh-hans" and "zh-hant" which are
> nothing official. It would be nice at least if there was some
> consistency.
>
> Brianna
Hoi,
Well actually, zh-Hans and zh-Hant are less confusing than the other
codes and they are absolutely official; these suffixes indicate the
script used. In my understanding of Chinese, it is possible to replace
one script with another, therefore zh-hk can be written in simplified if
you so choose.
Thanks,
   GerardM


from_name: Death Phoenix

subject: [WikiEN-l] "refactoring" signatures

body:
On 6/10/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 6/10/06, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
> > I don't see it as making it impossible to change, but rather saying that
> > violating "whatever makes sense for the topic" is the only good reason
> > to change from one to the other.
>
> Not surprisingly, that rarely helps. Most topics are not strongly
> associated with one form of English or another. How about this
> scenario: The original "contributor" writes 2 paragraphs in AmE.
> Later, a group of British editors decides to expand the article to 40
> paragraphs. According to our guidelines, they would not be justified
> in changing to BE.
>
> As I see it, the change just has to be justfied by some tangible
> benefit. Here, the benefit is clear - great expansion of the article.
>

Good writers should also be able to write in a style contrary to their own:
in this case, writing AE when BE is their preference.


subject: [WikiEN-l] "refactoring" signatures

body:
On 6/10/06, Death Phoenix <originaldeathphoenix at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 6/10/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > On 6/10/06, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
> > > I don't see it as making it impossible to change, but rather saying
> > that
> > > violating "whatever makes sense for the topic" is the only good reason
> >
> > > to change from one to the other.
> >
> > Not surprisingly, that rarely helps. Most topics are not strongly
> > associated with one form of English or another. How about this
> > scenario: The original "contributor" writes 2 paragraphs in AmE.
> > Later, a group of British editors decides to expand the article to 40
> > paragraphs. According to our guidelines, they would not be justified
> > in changing to BE.
> >
> > As I see it, the change just has to be justfied by some tangible
> > benefit. Here, the benefit is clear - great expansion of the article.
> >
>
> Good writers should also be able to write in a style contrary to their
> own: in this case, writing AE when BE is their preference.
>

Although your example would be a good example of when AE to BE would be
acceptable.


from_name: Arie van Buuren

body:
Several months ago the [[WP:NPOV]] policy was edited declaring this and
two other policies "non-negotiable":
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia%3ANeutral_point_of_view&diff=38528394&oldid=38423362

This is true in article space, but seemed to restrict future consensus in
project space. After discussion on the [[WP:NPOV]] talk page I've edited the
three policy pages and hope the changes wil stick/be improved:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia%3ANeutral_point_of_view&diff=57829917&oldid=57696459

I'm posting this here to hopefully get some additional input. Please let me
know your thoughts.

I also have a not unimportant related question for Jimbo: Am I right in
interpreting "NPOV is absolute and non-negotiable" as only applying to
Wikipedia's being written from the neutral point of view as a fundamental
principle? Or does it also apply to (parts of) [[WP:NPOV]] and related
policies?

Thanks,

Arie [[User:Avb]]


from_name: Gregory Maxwell

subject: [Foundation-l] Eloquence #01 - libelous info

body:
On 6/10/06, Erik Moeller <eloquence at gmail.com> wrote:
> > 3) Who is developing plans to address such issues?
> I'm working on it.

You're an amazing guy. Saving the world, but you've still got time to
extol your virtues and keep the useless threads alive. Amazing.


from_name: Erik van den Muijzenberg

body:
On 10-jun-2006, at 2:44, oscar wrote:

> 3. the task of an appointed board should be supervising the work of
> the
> executives, it should be a type of board consisting of very
> professional
> people (the kind which in a way of speaking should have "better
> things to
> do", if you get my meaning)
>

I'm sorry, but I don't.

Plus I don't understand why "this whole organization, its projects
and mission, its vitality and appeal", would collapse if the
separation "between volunteer-work, executive tasks and their
respective supervision" would not be implemented as strict as you
would like it to be.

> , and in general not deal with the projects at
> all.
> 4. the council of representatives should supervise the projects,
> advise the
> executive level, and in general not deal with the board at all.

Again I don't understand why such a strict separation should be
necessary.

> i could be more elaborate in explaining the rationale behind these
> thoughts,

I think that would be a good idea.

So far all you have come up with was "I want a strict separation".
You can't convince people if you don't make clear why such a strict
separation should be necessary in the first place.

> but i chose to keep things concise. note however, that i spoke of how
> specific tasks, responsibilities and work can be organized,

You mean *should* be organized, in order to prevent a total collapse,
right?
("the only way this organization (...) will survive").

IMHO rather strong words and little explanation, Oscar.

Erik vdMb aka Muijz


subject: [WikiEN-l] "refactoring" signatures

body:
On 6/10/06, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
> I don't see it as making it impossible to change, but rather saying that
> violating "whatever makes sense for the topic" is the only good reason
> to change from one to the other.

Not surprisingly, that rarely helps. Most topics are not strongly
associated with one form of English or another. How about this
scenario: The original "contributor" writes 2 paragraphs in AmE.
Later, a group of British editors decides to expand the article to 40
paragraphs. According to our guidelines, they would not be justified
in changing to BE.

As I see it, the change just has to be justfied by some tangible
benefit. Here, the benefit is clear - great expansion of the article.

Steve


body:
On 6/10/06, Jesse W <jessw at netwood.net> wrote:
> You would not see that in the Encyclopedia of Late 20th Century
> American Television?  Really?  Or do you mean in any "general"
> encyclopedia.  Because certainly, Wikipedia reaches the level of a
> specialized encyclopedia in a number of areas, like television shows -
> but (I hope), we don't go too much beyond that.

I still find it hard to imagine a specialised encyclopaedia listing
all the couch gags in Simpsons episodes, or detailed plot summaries
with "quotes" for every episode of Futurama or "Clerks: The Animated
Series" etc etc. If someone can prove me wrong, go for it.

Steve


body:
On 6/10/06, George Herbert <george.herbert at gmail.com> wrote:
> Sure that's your criteria?  I can, with a little effort, get multiple
> reputable sources to document my travels to and from work every day (I
> could drive by multiple Caltrans, TV and Radio station traffic cams,
> take my own GPS log of the trip, video blog it, publish an ISBNed
> print-on-demand book of it every day, etc).  I would certainly hope
> that nobody felt it Wikipedia-worthy to create [[George William
> Herbert's drive to work on Friday, June 10, 2006]].  Much less the
> drive home, or the rest of the week and month.

The basic implicit criteria that most people seem to use are:
- to be an article, some relatively notable third party news source
(take very broadly) must have found it worth writing a story about
- all information in the article must be verifiable

Therefore your trip would satisfy the second criteria (the information
could be added to the article) but would fail the first, because no
one else found your trip notable.

Steve


from_name: Steve Summit

subject: [WikiEN-l] "refactoring" signatures

body:
Steve Bennett wrote:
> Not surprisingly, that rarely helps. Most topics are not strongly
> associated with one form of English or another. How about this
> scenario: The original "contributor" writes 2 paragraphs in AmE.
> Later, a group of British editors decides to expand the article to 40
> paragraphs. According to our guidelines, they would not be justified
> in changing to BE.

It would really help -- pardon me for engaging in a bit of
wistful thinking here -- if people wouldn't get so worked up
about the whole AmE/BrE thing.

If someone gratuitously rewrote a bunch of my own purple prose
into the other style, I'd just laugh, or shake my head.  What's
the harm?  It's certainly nothing to get roiled up into a revert
war over, or a big, wonky policy debate.

There seem to be lots of American editors who think that British
English is *wrong*, and likewise British editors who think that
American English is *wrong*.  (They rarely come out and say this
explicitly, but the vigor with which they debate a change from
one to the other suggests that's how thy really feel, deep down.)
But, of course, it's not that one or the other is Right or Wrong;
they're just different.

(The problem's just as bad over on Wiktionary, where there are
stubbornly, defiantly distinct pages for `color' and `colour'.
Huge, repetitive, internecine arguments regularly erupt, whenever
anyone has the temerity to suggest that the two entries be merged
somehow since they're "obviously" just two spelling variants
for "the same" word.)


from_name: Tim Starling

body:
Thanks to everyone for your comments. It seems my own intuition on this
more or less agrees with what everyone was saying. The code I committed
before this thread took off was more or less going in the right
direction, although there are some places where exceptions have been
used as a stopgap, and they should probably be migrated to use return
values at some stage.

Gregory Szorc wrote:
> If something wrong happens in a function, you call trigger_error() and pass
> an error message and severity constant.  I override PHP's error handler with
> set_error_handler().  In my custom error handler function, if the error
> severity is great enough to warrant program termination, I throw an
> exception.  If not, the error simply gets logged or handled in its own way.
> Basically, I use exceptions to terminate program execution and return types
> to alter program execution.

The basic problem I was facing was that the original MediaWiki code used
program termination in patently inappropriate places. The best and most
commonly used error page function, OutputPage::errorpage(), exited the
program after outputting its text. The task at hand was to remove all of
these exit() calls, to support applications such as an HTTP server
embedded in MediaWiki. Also, customised handling of unexpected database
query errors was desired, and exceptions were the obvious means to do that.

I replaced most of the program terminations in error exits with a return
to normal program flow. In certain cases where it looked a bit
difficult, I used an exception instead, but that can be fixed at a later
date.

For unexpected code branches which appear to be unreachable through
ordinary user action, the previous code exited with a backtrace; I
replaced these with an exception throw to produce similar behaviour.

For the benefit of extensions and other unmigrated code, the old
interfaces such as OutputPage::errorpage() and wfDebugDieBacktrace()
simulate the old behaviour by throwing an exception, thus avoiding an
unexpected return of control.

-- Tim Starling


from_name: Ashar Voultoiz

subject: [Wikitech-l] customising namespace - 2 (Rotem Liss)

body:
Claudi Meneghin wrote:
> Many thanks: only a question more, please: these language/message
> files, LanguageLmo.php, and MessagesLmo.php. are to be placed at
> which  URL?
>
> http://lmo.wikipedia.org/MessageLmo.php or
> http://lmo.wikipedia.org/wiki/MessageLmo.php ?
>
> Are they compatible with the existing Mediawiki? Many thanks.
> Sincerely Yours, Claudi

Hello Claudi,

You have to submit a bug report so we can add support for Lmo language
in MediaWiki.

Just open a bug on http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/ with a title like
'Support for Lmo language' and attach the two files. Make sure they are
encoded using utf-8.

You can also have a look at our localisation guide, but it is more about
fixing existing language files:

   http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_localisation

cheers,

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


subject: [WikiEN-l] [[WP:OURS]] - A proposal for admin-user relations

body:
On Sat, 10 Jun 2006 02:49:39 -0700 (PDT), you wrote:

>I was wondering if you could review the proposals. If
>you think that the concerns are valid and that the
>suggestions made in the proposals has some merit, I
>would be glad to discuss the issue (not the problems
>but the possible solutions which I think are
>reasonable) further. I have a couple of similar
>suggestions that I believe are critical and can be
>useful to gently modify the structure of the project
>and prepare it for the future if it will be expanding
>in the years to come.

Don't tell me: one of them calls for the removal of images which a
small minority of editors find offensive from articles on important
events, and another one calls for administrators to be prevented from
blocking users who unilaterally remove content they find offensive
despite overwhelming consensus to keep it?  Am I close?

Guy (JzG)
--
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG


from_name: Michael Keppler

body:
>> Should error handling be completely exception-dominated? Is there any
>> role for success/failure return values in a language with exception support?

1) No.
2) Yes.

> the general answer is that exceptions should only be used
> for exceptional circumstances, and likely failures are better off
> handled with return codes.

I fully agree with that. Don't use exceptions for something you
regularly _expect_ to happen in your software like in the example of the
first post.
The reasons I know are:
* You mask the control flow of the application. Some other developer
reading your code will easier understand some if-else structure instead
of a block of code, where the control flow is dictated indirectly by
exception handling.
* Exception handling has high runtime costs in most languages (if it
actually occurs), as far as I know. But I don't know, if that's also
true for PHP.
* From personal experience with foreign code I'd say: If exception
handling is used very often throughout the code of a project, then
people tend to put exception handling around _everything_, even if there
is actually no chance to handle the exceptional event in a meaningful
way and it would be better to just return an error, to terminate the
code or to have some other fallback strategy.

Ciao, Michael.


body:
>From: Guy Chapman aka JzG <guy.chapman at spamcop.net>
>Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
>To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
>Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] [[WP:OURS]] - A proposal for
admin-user relations
>Date: Sat, 10 Jun 2006 11:26:02 +0100
>
>On Sat, 10 Jun 2006 02:49:39 -0700 (PDT), you wrote:
>
> >I was wondering if you could review the proposals.
If
> >you think that the concerns are valid and that the
> >suggestions made in the proposals has some merit, I
> >would be glad to discuss the issue (not the
problems
> >but the possible solutions which I think are
> >reasonable) further. I have a couple of similar
> >suggestions that I believe are critical and can be
> >useful to gently modify the structure of the
project
> >and prepare it for the future if it will be
expanding
> >in the years to come.
>
>Don't tell me: one of them calls for the removal of
images which a
>small minority of editors find offensive from
articles on important
>events, and another one calls for administrators to
be prevented from
>blocking users who unilaterally remove content they
find offensive
>despite overwhelming consensus to keep it?  Am I
close?
>
>Guy (JzG)

Hey this guy I know a little,

I realized that when you are civil you express
yourself better :) No, you are far from being close to
the core of the proposals. How would I rephrase your
statement:

One of them [[WP:ETH]] calls for better consideration
of the controversial issues by taking good care of
ideas from minorities (which can be cartoon removal in
JP case and user box issue in Satanism case).
Nevertheless the proposal put excessive emphasis on
the consensus. So in JP case no change can be done
based on the proposal if it is a major concern for
you. You know that in the civil societies the level of
respect to the minorities encircle the limits
of their civility. The proposal also tries to show the
distinction between 'no censorship' and 'having no
editorial standards'. I hope that, that may eliminate
the hypocrisy around 'no censorship'. And I
have to say that this is just one minor point among
~20 more important suggestions in that proposal.

The other one [[WP:OURS]] calls for a balance between
user right and admin privileges, tries to set up more
and efficient bridges between 'community' and
'encyclopedia' components of Wikipedia, and aims the
enhancement of the community spirit of Wikipedia. It
states that users can be blocked by their mentors
which may know them better and have likely good
relations with. If another admin believes in the
necessity of a block s/he should talk to the mentor
first who may know the rules and their applicability
better. It only restricts indefinite ban which should
be considered analogous to the death penalty in real
life. Needless to say that most civil societies ban
'the death penalty' itself from their judiciary
system.

It is not surprising to me that you -like a few
others- are interpreting the proposals around some
specific discussions you have in mind. That even
ironically block yourself from considering the
proposals as a whole: more dangerous situation from
blocking another user unjustly. Am I close?

Resid

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


body:
I wrote:
> Thanks to everyone for your comments. It seems my own intuition on this
> more or less agrees with what everyone was saying. The code I committed
> before this thread took off was more or less going in the right
> direction, although there are some places where exceptions have been
> used as a stopgap, and they should probably be migrated to use return
> values at some stage.

Maybe I should add that the reason I was unsure was because of the
common practice of standard libraries in languages such as Java to throw
exceptions at the drop of a hat, thus forcing the programmer to either
inefficiently duplicate validity checks on parameters before calling, or
to put try/catch blocks around every damn call.

That's not to say I support PHP's error model unconditionally, where
unnecessary warnings encourage programmers to use the incredibly evil @
operator. But at least you can find a substring of a string without
having exceptions thrown at you. I guess that's an advantage of weak
typing more than anything -- PHP consistently uses specially typed
returns to indicate errors.

-- Tim Starling