subject: [Wikipedia-l] Stable versions policy

body:
Bryan Derksen wrote:
> Magnus Manske wrote:
>
>> Well, if there's a page that is updated regularly, and you want people
>> to always see the latest, probably vandalized, version, then *don't set
>> any version of it as stable*!
>>
>>
> Doesn't this defeat one of the main purposes of stable versions,
> marking a version of frequently-vandalized articles so that our
> readers and mirrors can have some reassurance that what they're
> looking at isn't a pack of blatant lies?
This was for a special case. Usually, IMHO every article, with the
possible exception of new articles about rapidly changing events, should
have a stable version.
>
> I love the idea of stable versions and such, but I really don't think
> it's a good idea to have these new features change the default
> behavior of Wikipedia significantly. Maybe later after we get some
> solid data and experience with how stable versions are turning out we
> could consider making them the default view, but for now I think it
> should be just an option that can be ignored by those who don't want
> to deal with it.
I actually haven't implemented the "view stable as default" mechanism
yet, and there's no technical need for that. Currently, there's only a
header describing what kind of version you see right now, and if there's
an alternative. I won't mind if it stays that way.

The current state of the feature can be seen at:
http://www.magnusmanske.de/wikipeerdia/index.php
>
>> The difference between the current state of wikipedia and wikipedia with
>> stable versions is this: With the former, readers get a wiki to see;
>> with the latter, they get an encyclopedia.
>>
>>
> But our goal isn't to _show_ an encyclopedia to people, it's to get
> people to help us _write_ one. Let Answers.com worry about showing our
> material to people.
Funny.
en.wikipedia.org says in its logo "Wikipedia - the free encyclopedia".
So when normal people (not wikipedians;-) come to that page, what do you
think they expect to see? It's not "Wikipedia, the wiki that develops
texts for the encyclopedia you can see at Answers.com".

The status and the *perception* of wikipedia has changed since 2001.
We're not trying to build an encyclopedia anymore. We /have become/ one.
That should reflect. After all, we're primarily an encyclopedia. The
wiki technology have done miracles for getting us where we are. And
while our growth is continuing both in article count and in depth of the
individual article, we now have a /new responsibility/ to our users.

In 2001, we were not really used as a source of knowledge. That /might/
have started 2002, or later. Today, we are one of the largest
repositories of knowledge. We can now either
1. teach every single one of our potential users in the ways of wikis
and how to use them, look through the page history, and still treat
everything they read with utmost caution, /or/
2. present a random user a good encyclopedia, with the option for more
(current versions, editing, the like)

I'd prefer #1, but, well... :-)

Magnus


list: wikitech-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Stephen Bain

subject: [Wikitech-l] Skins for deletion: Amethyst

body:
On 12/21/05, ?var Arnfj?r? Bjarmason <avarab at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 12/19/05, Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:
> > If there's no objection, I'm going to remove the Amethyst skin from the default
> > set. It's very buggy, and also, um, kinda ugly IMHO. :)
>
> Why not leave it be? There's someone maintaining it and some people
> proabably find it useful.
>
> * Deleted = useful to noone
> * Kept = useful to someone
>
> I go with #2;)

It wouldn't be destroyed, just left out of the default distribution.
That should only include things which will work for everyone.

--
Stephen Bain
stephen.bain at gmail.com


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Magnus Manske

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Stable versions policy

body:
Maru Dubshinki wrote:
> And you don't seem to realize how adversarial and prejudicial the idea of
> stable versions is -
> "Oh, we have an up to date version, but we don't dare show it as the default
> displayed article
>  because our up to date articles are apparently so crappy that they need to
> be specially cleared
> by our editors."
>
Or, you could try something new and use NPOV:
"This is a stable version of this article, which has been checked by an
editor. You can see and a edit newer, unchecked, work-in-progress
version of this article [[here]]".
Not so hard, is it? :-)
> Not to mention the simple effect of making the current revision even harder
> to find- the more work
> a reader has to do to get to something, the less they will read it!
>
"Even harder"? Currently, the current version is the first page to see.
Not so hard, now is it? (I keep repeating that phrase to you - there
might be a pattern).

Under the proposed system, anons would have to (gasp!) click on a link,
an action of unheard difficulty on the web.
If they plan to hand around longer or regularly, they will usually
create a user account, where you can turn that off altogether. Good ol'
times at last!
> For an example: the New York times
> is only, I would estimate, about half again as hard to read as USA Today
> (for an equivalent amount of text);
> yet the NY Times has 1,136,433 (
> http://www.nytco.com/investors-nyt-circulation.html) readers, as opposed  to
>
> more than 2.25 million readers for USA Today. One is easier, and the other
> is not.
>
I pride myself of my rather active imagination, but I can not figure out
what the writing style of the NY Times has to do with stable versions on
wikipedia. And I sincerely doubt that is my fault.

Apologies if I sound too mocking, but
* I really don't see what the fuss is about (didn't read a good argument
against it yet)
* as I wrote in another mail to this list, I don't really insist on
making the stable version the default. Wasn't even my idea, but it made
sense to me.

Magnus


list: wikien-l

from_name: Sherool

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Defamatory Biographies - another problem looming
	forWikipedia?

body:
On Tue, 20 Dec 2005 04:14:33 +0100, Geoff Burling
<llywrch at agora.rdrop.com> wrote:

<snip>
> (And for the record, when I find an article with more than one stub tag
> attached, I always reduce the number to one. Don't like it? Then turn
> the stub into an article, & we'll both be happy.)
<snip>

Obviously *redundant* stub templates can be removed and replaced with more
spesific ones. For example if an article is tagged with
{{US-bio-stub}},{{writer-stub}} and {{US-related-stub}} then the "proper"
thing do to is to remove all those and add the more spesific
{{US-writer-stub}} that transport all the same info and those 3 would
(that's pretty much what the stub sorting project is all about). However
if the subject of the stub belong in 2-3 different categories it should
most defenently have a stub tag for each, unless it's a completely trivial
thing. For example if a politician have also written an auto-biography
(haven't they all) that only sold 500 copies and no one have ever heard
about I would naturaly not suggest putting a {{writer-stub}} tag on a stub
about him/her.

I agree the number should be kept down, but outright removing all but one
template seems exessive, and is actualy counter productive with the goal
of having the stub turned into an article. If the choice is between a stub
with multiple "ugly" tags and a nice clean stub that less people are
likely to find and expand then I'd go with the ugly stub any day.

--
[[User:Sherool]]


from_name: Steve Bennett

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Original research vs.
	Fact-checking(Wikipedia:Biographies of living persons)

body:
> I agree with you Sydey, that biographies should be accurate,
> but taking information straight from the subject constitutes
> original research and since we can't see their identification
> papers it's not verifiable.
>
> How do you suppose we verify the correctness of a given
> birthdate if there's no newspapers or books stating the date
> the subject says is correct.

It occurs to me that in academia, one occasionally sees "personal
correspondance" or "publication forthcoming" cited.  Is there something
wrong with stating "The New York times gives Jim Smith's birthday as 24
May 1964, although Jim has stated that it's 24 May 1965[1]" where [1] is
Personal email to Wikimedia Foundation, 5 Nov 2005.  It's verifiable in
the sense that you could always email Wikimedia and ask them if that's
true.

Steve


from_name: Geoff Burling

subject:
stubification to the max! (was Re: [WikiEN-l] Defamatory
	Biographies - another problem looming forWikipedia?)

body:
On Wed, 21 Dec 2005, Mark Gallagher wrote:
>
> G'day Geoff,
>
> > On Tue, 20 Dec 2005, David Gerard wrote:
> >>Geoff Burling wrote:
> >>>(And for the record, when I find an article with more than one stub tag
> >>>attached, I always reduce the number to one. Don't like it? Then turn
> >>>the stub into an article, & we'll both be happy.)
> >>
> >>PLEASE DON'T DO THIS. Different stubs are subcategories of different
> >>parent categories. Someone from a wikiproject about content will often
> >>go into that project's stub category and start work on stuff they find
> >>there.
> >
> > Are you serious? To repeat myself, how many stub notices does Wikipedia
> > need on any given article? This is the silliest idea I've seen proposed
> > here -- including many I have proposed -- for these & probably many
> > more reasons:
>
> <snip reasons />
>
> Perhaps the developers could dream up some way to add the benefits of
> multiple stub templates (multiple categories) but hide the text of all
> but one template?  Or even some new text --- if there's more than one
> template present with the word "stub" in it, only print the categories
> as well as "This multi-category article is a stub ..." or something.  Or
> perhaps that's too difficult.

That is something I have often wondered. Some kinds of stubs lend themselves
to more than one category -- but were it possible to simply add something
like {{subst:stub}} to an article, & send a flag to all of the categories
that this article needed attention!
>
> > Until reducing multiple stubs becomes a bannible offence, I will
> > continue to do it, based on my editorial discression. you have been warned.
>
> Will you also edit war with the Wikiproject Stub-Sorting people who
> regularly patrol stub categories and will add any templates they deem to
> be "missing" from an article?

Naw, I'm too preoccupied with other things to waste time edit-warring.
And I have found that the best tactic when faced with this kind of
confrontation is to walk away -- then make my changes several months later,
after the miscreant has gotten her/himself banned.
>
> Stub templates, as far as I'm concerned, are the domain of WSS.  Not our
> problem.  If I'm willing to go the extra mile and add exact stub
> templates, I will; if I'm not, I'll just put {{stub}} and let them sort
> it out.  If we don't like how stub categorising is handled, the solution
> is to either participate in WSS and argue with *them*, or to simply
> refuse to participate and stick to plain-jane {{stub}}.  It's not to
> deliberately mess around the work they're doing (as you're proposing,
> and SPUI received a block for a while back for doing).

I suspect that most of them aren't too keen on multiple stub templates
for reasons I've mentioned elsewhere. Until now, no one's even noticed
what I've been doing.
>
> I'm sure there's work elsewhere on Wikipedia of which you're rather proud?
>
I've been trying to corral a decent sampling of articles for
[[Wikipedia:Good articles]]. And I've written a few biographical articles
on Ethiopian people. Why do you ask?

> > [snip]
> >
> >>> When I used to do New Article Patrol on a regular basis, I found myself
> >>>wikifying new articles, rather than tagging them for deletion. (Despite
> >>>the kill-happy reputation of AfD, I found it far easier to subject these
> >>>articles to a scrubbing than listing them.) Then I saw David Gerard's
> >>>comment about 90% of new articles were dreck, & started to suspect my own
> >>>judgement. So I lost interest in that chore.*
> >>
> >>I didn't say 90%, I said 20-30%!
> >
> > You're right. I went back & checked my log of Wiki-EN mail, & I
> > misremembered the figure. (I'm amazed, though, at how many people threw
> > around "90%" when talking about issues.) I sincerely apologize.
>
> It depends how you define "drek".  If "drek" means unsalvagable, then
> I'd agree, no more than 20-30%.  If it means "crap", then (before anon
> users were prevented from creating new articles), I'd say easily 90% of
> new articles created by anons were crap and in need of cleanup, if not
> necessarily nuking from orbit.
>
By "drek" I meant new articles David described in another email as
"shoot-on-sight". People complain that many -- if not most -- of our
articles are mediocre: there are times when I feel many articles on
notable subjects aren't even _that_ good.

Geoff


list: foundation-l

from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [Foundation-l] Day 6 Fund Drive Report

body:
Copied from:
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Fund_drives/2005/Q4/Day_6
-------------------------------------------------------------

A total of 497 donors gave the equivalent of $12,466.34 USD through PayPal on '''Day 6'''
('''Wednesday 21 December''') of the fundraiser. While this is a very small decrease from Day 5
($28.46) it does represent a modestly higher average donation ($25.08 vs $22.72). Moneybookers
donations amounted to about $90, bringing that total to $474.77. No update today on mailed or
money transfer donations.

Grand total for the whole drive at the end of Day 6: $75,641.43

PayPal breakdown for Day 6:
 AUD     118.20     (88.71 USD)
 CAD 	585.97 	   (482.20 USD)
 EUR 	2,497.40   (3,033.57 USD)
 GBP 	735.10 	   (1,318.25 USD)
 JPY 	52,112.00  (470.83 USD)
 USD 	7,072.78
 Total 	12,466.34 USD

Copied from: http://fundraising.wikimedia.org/2005q4/index.php/2005-12-21/report/

==Special thanks to large donors==
The largest donation this day was $500.00 USD and was made by Manoj Padki. There were also many
donors who gave the equivalent of about $100 or more (alphabetical order); Raed Abdullah, David
Bosman, Lindy Do, Rex Fujikawa, Tom Gally, Neil Greenleaves, Hartmut Geissbauer, Peter Goddard,
Ryan Hoffman, Manoj Padki, Graham Laundon, Eugene Mihaliuk, Michael Nadler, William McQueen, Steve
Reseigh, Anand Shukla and 15 anonymous donors.

==Selected donor comments==
Let's all thank everybody who donated on this day by reading their comments.
:Full listing at: http://fundraising.wikimedia.org/2005q4/index.php/2005-12-21/detail/

*"軽くなったらいいなぁ

" by anonymous
*"I am happy to support this fantastic resource. I urge everyone to do the same." by Oliver
Gouldthorpe
*"A wonderful tool for learning. Please keep up the good work!" by anonymous
*"WikiPedia ist wunderbar. Dieser Ansatz wird einiges umw?lzen." by anonymous
*"free is the mind - as should be knowledge" by Christian Schubert
*"Wikipedia is pretty much the best general source on information in the world." by anonymous
*"so much useful information & easily accessible ? keep up the good work" by anonymous
*"Wikipedia is the best starting point for researching any topic." by anonymous
*"Thank you. Freedom has no price." by anonymous
*"You've set up a great infrastructure. The articles will keep getting better!" by anonymous
*"Will donate everytime to a good cause - Knowledge should be free to everyone who seeks it" by
Collin Wu
*"Many thanks for the incredible service; keep up the good work!" by Peter Goddard
*"for the continuance of free knowledge" by anonymous
*"What is the internet without wikipedia ?" by David Bosman
*"Das ist es wert!" by Alexander Buesing

Some of my personal favorites:
*""Knowledge is power" and thanks for making this so accessible." by anonymous
*"This site is a major foundation block in the history of the Internet and our information-rich
future. Please donate if you haven't already -- even $5 from enough people will add up! =)" by
anonymous
*"thanks for opening my eyes to this great planet and its inhabitants"  by anonymous
*"wikimedia is the seed of the New Enlightenment" by Jonathan Mayer
*"Wikipedia gets a big hug from a grad-schooler. I want to have wiki-babies with this website.
Kudos and mega-thanks." by anonymous
*"Indispensable!" by Steve Reseigh

-- Daniel Mayer

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


list: wikimedia-l

subject: [Foundation-l] Day 6 Fund Drive Report


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Day 6 Fund Drive Report


subject:
[WikiEN-l] Original research vs.Fact-checking
	(Wikipedia:Biographies of living persons)

body:
> >(And don't forget you need to verify you're actually talking to the
> >subject to begin with) Mgm
> >
>         We need to use the same methods that other organizations use.
>
>         It is illegal to impersonate someone. Pointing this out will
>         stop most people from falsifying records.

Probably the most extreme the admins would have to do is ask for a faxed
statutory declaration. The local police station or whoever would verify
their ID.

Steve


subject:
[WikiEN-l] Original research
	vs.Fact-checking(Wikipedia:Biographies of living persons)

body:
> If it's a personal email to the Wikipedia Foundation, or to
> our lawyers or something, then that's a different matter. The
> problem is that the Wikimedia Foundation aren't the ones
> putting the facts in the articles. It's if User:RandomName
> puts in a new date of birth and cites at the bottom "Personal
> Correspondence". There's no way we can check if that's true,
> and there's no one to turn to if the article's subject starts
> demanding corrections and accountability.

Definitely. Sorry, I was referring to the case where someone does
contact the foundation, but has no published bio to refer to. Someone
recently (here? On a talk page?) gave the example of themselves, where
their DoB on WP was incorrect, but they couldn't find a published source
to back them up. According to the guidelines, they had no right to
remove it.  If we accept personal correspondance to the foundation as a
verifiable source, then a simple email would suffice.

Steve


from_name: David Gerard

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Defamatory Biographies - another
	problem	loomingforWikipedia?

body:
Conrad Dunkerson wrote:
> Bryan Derksen wrote:

>> Every type of stub I've seen so far has some sort of corresponding
>> non-stub category that the article can be placed in, so whenever I
>> remove extra stub templates I make sure the article's properly
>> categorized. They don't get "lost" that way.

> Hmmm... instead of having a hierarchy of 'categories' and a parallel
> hierarchy of 'stub categories' it might make sense to just have one
> hierarchy and a single generic stub notice. Only drawback I can see is
> that there isn't currently a simple way to identify 'articles in this
> category with a stub notice' or 'articles in category-1 AND category-2'.
> Still, it probably wouldn't be too difficult to have category views with
> 'display only articles also in the Stub category'. Would cut the
> categorization and sorting work significantly.

One of the reasons for stub sorting was that [[Category:Stub]] had tens
of thousands of entries and this was enough to start making things go
funny. It also made it almost impossible to say "hmm ... think I'll go
expand some stubs" unless you're really fond of topics starting with A.

The stub categories are not parallel; each is under a non-stub category.

- d.


from_name: Angela

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Blocking of Kurdish WP in Iran

body:
On 12/21/05, Erdal Ronahi <erdal.ronahi at gmail.com> wrote:

> I had raised this issue before on this list. We can now confirm that
> several major ISPs in Iran have blocked the Kurdish Wikipedia
> (ku.wikipedia.org).

Are you able to use it via proxies? See the help page at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Advice_to_Tor_users_in_China
which might be useful in this case as well.

Reporters Without Borders
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reporters_Without_Borders>) have
advised before on the China issue, but I'm not yet sure if Jimbo is in
contact with them about the blocking of the Kurdish Wikipedia.

Angela.


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Page protection interface updates

body:
I've gone ahead and committed the new page protection UI. This allows seeing
exactly what a page is set to, and logs a bit more information; so no more "hey,
is this page really protected or just protected against moves?".

It's a bit more complex, but hopefully not too scary.

Additionally there's a new level between unprotected/default permissions and
sysop-only; this is set up on en.wikipedia.org and will restrict edits by
unregistered users and accounts less than four days old.

(This is to implement http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:SEMI )

There's now a timestamp field on the user table for the registration date, which
is used to calculate the age (this'll be included on newly registered accounts
but is NULL on older ones).

The age setting replaces the percentage formerly used for the sitewide move
limitations.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikitech-l] Page protection interface updates


from_name: Mark Gallagher

subject:
stubification to the max! (was Re: [WikiEN-l] Defamatory Biographies -
	another problem looming	forWikipedia?)

body:
G'day Geoff,

> On Tue, 20 Dec 2005, David Gerard wrote:
>>Geoff Burling wrote:
>>>(And for the record, when I find an article with more than one stub tag
>>>attached, I always reduce the number to one. Don't like it? Then turn
>>>the stub into an article, & we'll both be happy.)
>>
>>PLEASE DON'T DO THIS. Different stubs are subcategories of different
>>parent categories. Someone from a wikiproject about content will often
>>go into that project's stub category and start work on stuff they find
>>there.
>
> Are you serious? To repeat myself, how many stub notices does Wikipedia
> need on any given article? This is the silliest idea I've seen proposed
> here -- including many I have proposed -- for these & probably many
> more reasons:

<snip reasons />

Perhaps the developers could dream up some way to add the benefits of
multiple stub templates (multiple categories) but hide the text of all
but one template?  Or even some new text --- if there's more than one
template present with the word "stub" in it, only print the categories
as well as "This multi-category article is a stub ..." or something.  Or
perhaps that's too difficult.

> Until reducing multiple stubs becomes a bannible offence, I will
> continue to do it, based on my editorial discression. you have been warned.

Will you also edit war with the Wikiproject Stub-Sorting people who
regularly patrol stub categories and will add any templates they deem to
be "missing" from an article?

Stub templates, as far as I'm concerned, are the domain of WSS.  Not our
problem.  If I'm willing to go the extra mile and add exact stub
templates, I will; if I'm not, I'll just put {{stub}} and let them sort
it out.  If we don't like how stub categorising is handled, the solution
is to either participate in WSS and argue with *them*, or to simply
refuse to participate and stick to plain-jane {{stub}}.  It's not to
deliberately mess around the work they're doing (as you're proposing,
and SPUI received a block for a while back for doing).

I'm sure there's work elsewhere on Wikipedia of which you're rather proud?

> [snip]
>
>> > When I used to do New Article Patrol on a regular basis, I found myself
>>
>>>wikifying new articles, rather than tagging them for deletion. (Despite
>>>the kill-happy reputation of AfD, I found it far easier to subject these
>>>articles to a scrubbing than listing them.) Then I saw David Gerard's
>>>comment about 90% of new articles were dreck, & started to suspect my own
>>>judgement. So I lost interest in that chore.*
>>
>>I didn't say 90%, I said 20-30%!
>
> You're right. I went back & checked my log of Wiki-EN mail, & I
> misremembered the figure. (I'm amazed, though, at how many people threw
> around "90%" when talking about issues.) I sincerely apologize.

It depends how you define "drek".  If "drek" means unsalvagable, then
I'd agree, no more than 20-30%.  If it means "crap", then (before anon
users were prevented from creating new articles), I'd say easily 90% of
new articles created by anons were crap and in need of cleanup, if not
necessarily nuking from orbit.

Cheers,

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

--
No virus found in this outgoing message.
Checked by AVG Free Edition.
Version: 7.1.371 / Virus Database: 267.14.2/208 - Release Date: 20/12/2005


from_name: Tomer Chachamu

subject: [Wikitech-l] Namespace changes ready for code review

body:
On 21/12/05, Rowan Collins <rowan.collins at gmail.com> wrote:
> One thing that I was pondering when you posted about this before is
> whether the "special behaviour" of namespaces like "Image:",
> "Category:", etc could be built into some kind of hooks mechanism. I
> know it seems silly, but I rather like the idea of modularising the
> code so that existing features can be treated as extensions, because
> it means extensions can be written that mimic or replace those
> features.
>
> In this case, people sometimes say they want to develop new namespaces
> for references, or category-like namespaces for blogging, etc; I guess
> some such things could be done through wikidata, but then again,
> wikidata could be attached to namespaces via those same hooks. Maybe.

An excellent idea!

Image:
Category:
Template:
Reference:
*Table:*
Task:
Review:
Poll: (AFD etc)
Collection: (transclude polls; AFD)

The mind boggles. :)


from_name: geni

subject: [WikiEN-l] Well, we have at least one important supporter

references:
<20051209080746.I84073@agora.rdrop.com>
	<op.s132pamfr18sbe@mainframe.mshome.net> <43A9E66C.20007@telus.net>

body:
On 12/21/05, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> Sherool wrote:
>
> > On the topic of webcomic strips I found this a little amusing (it's a
> > few  days old so sorry if it's already been posted, I'm currently up
> > to 836  unread messages from the mailing list :P):
> >
> > http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2005/12/16
>
>
> Wow!! I've been plowing through it the last couple days.  I must be
> doing something right to have my list down to a mere 185. :-)

Try the helpdesk list. I've woken up to over 100 messages.

--
geni


from_name: Brock Batsell

subject:
[Wikitech-l]
	http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_wiki_software

body:
Thomas Gries wrote:
> I updated that page.
> - because MediaWiki is now at version 1.5.3, and
> - has email notification built-in (even when this is still disabled on
> the major project sites).
> T.
Also, could someone more in the know than I look at MediaWiki's entry
for 'Web-server required'?  It currently states 'Apache or IIS with
PHP', which implies that it only works with those two servers, which is
far from the truth.  I personally am running MW on lighttpd, and I know
the upload server is as well, and I know there are at least a few others
MW runs perfectly fine on, but there must have been some reason to list
that there that I'm not aware of.

Thanks,
[[:en:User:Bbatsell]]


body:
On 12/20/05, David Gerard <fun at thingy.apana.org.au> wrote:
> > (And for the record, when I find an article with more than one stub tag
> > attached, I always reduce the number to one. Don't like it? Then turn
> > the stub into an article, & we'll both be happy.)
>
> PLEASE DON'T DO THIS. Different stubs are subcategories of different
> parent categories.

It's possible to add a stub category without adding a stub template.
Perhaps this would be a suitable compromise between those who need the
categories to be there and those who don't want multiple "this is a
stub..." notices on one article? Compare
<http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ambrosius_Stub&oldid=27617688>
with <http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ambrosius_Stub&oldid=27615177>,
for example.

Angela.


from_name: Blackcap

subject: [WikiEN-l] One line summaries of WP Guidelines and Policies

body:
On 12/22/05, David Gerard <fun at thingy.apana.org.au> wrote:

> Precisely. One page with the one-liners, each linking to the full novel.
>
> This won't cram all the OMG INCREDIBLY IMPORTANT detail into everyone's
> heads, but nothing else will either.

We already have this, as I've said, at [[Help:Contents]]. And why have a big
box, when the same text as a first line can be done instead?


subject: [WikiEN-l] SPOV threatens NPOV

body:
> In that, I actually agree.  Wikipedia isn't a judge or critic
> of scientific methodology.  In such cases we should report
> what was done and how the world responded to it.

I admit I haven't read most of this discussion.  However, wouldn't the
normal approach work here?  If reputable science magazines claim a field
is "pseudoscience" and only the field itself claims it is "science",
would we not conclude it is "pseudoscience" simply based on the quality
and range of sources that say so? Or is the issue that we are incapable
of deciding whether "Creation Science Monthly" is a "reputable"
"scientific journal" or not?  If so, how do we decide that *any*
publication is "reputable"?

Steve


from_name: Sam Fentress (Asbestos)

body:
On 12/21/05, sydney poore <poore5 at adelphia.net> wrote:
>
>
> If someone provides valid ID (a mixture of distant and current) and gives
> Wikipedia the correct information, then we should be
> able to confirm it from outside sources. This is
> fact-checking not original research.
> -- Sydney Poore
> Go Bengals!
>
>
But... isn't that the whole point? If we can confirm it from outside sources
then we're not discussing anything here. We all know that if we can confirm
through outside sources then all is good.

The problem is that I, as a normal editor, have no way of verifying anything
when User:Joe_Blog changes something in an article and just cites "Personal
Correspondence". Do I leave it there or not? I say not.

Sam

--
Asbestos
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Asbestos


from_name: Ryan Delaney

body:
This seems like a good middle ground. I have to admit that after creating a
new stub biography, and finding it tagged with three stub templates -- which
took up more space on the page than the article itself -- I removed some of
them impulsively. Still, I very much think it makes the article look silly
to have more stub templates than content. Adding the article to the
categories without using every template could be the best of both worlds.

Ryan

On 12/22/05, Angela <beesley at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 12/20/05, David Gerard <fun at thingy.apana.org.au> wrote:
> > > (And for the record, when I find an article with more than one stub
> tag
> > > attached, I always reduce the number to one. Don't like it? Then turn
> > > the stub into an article, & we'll both be happy.)
> >
> > PLEASE DON'T DO THIS. Different stubs are subcategories of different
> > parent categories.
>
> It's possible to add a stub category without adding a stub template.
> Perhaps this would be a suitable compromise between those who need the
> categories to be there and those who don't want multiple "this is a
> stub..." notices on one article? Compare
> <http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ambrosius_Stub&oldid=27617688>
> with <
> http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ambrosius_Stub&oldid=27615177>,
> for example.
>
> Angela.
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


from_name: Ashar Voultoiz

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Quick patch to images .cvsignore

body:
Edward Z. Yang wrote:
> During my testing, I noticed that under certain conditions a temp folder
> would be created in images/. .cvsignore doesn't tell us to ignore this
> folder... so..
>
> --- C:/Documents and Settings/Edward/My Documents/My
> Webs/jpsband/mediawiki/t/images/.cvsignore
> +++ images/.cvsignore
> @@ -3,4 +3,5 @@
>  thumb*
>  timeline*
>  tmp*
> +temp*
>  ?
>
> I reckon no one would have problems with committing such a patch...

Commited to HEAD :o)

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


body:
Hi all,
  I have begun a project to add a one-line summary of every guideline
and policy to some central place (probably [[WP:RULES]]), as well as
appearing on each policy/guideline page itself.  As I've now run into
some (inevitable?) opposition, I'm asking for opinions, ideas etc here.

I've created a template [[template:Guideline one liner]] which displays
a fairly ugly purple band - improvements welcomed. I then put it on the
following pages with the following summaries.

    * wikipedia:Editing policy: Improve any page without hesitation,
regardless of the state you leave it in. Avoid removing information
wherever possible.
    * wikipedia:Build the web: Link articles sideways to neighbours, and
upwards to categories and contexts to create a useful web of
information.
    * wikipedia:Sign your posts on talk pages: Sign all your posts on
Wikipedia talk pages by typing ~~~~ to be accountable and to help others
understand the conversation.
    * wikipedia:Don't include copies of primary sources: Don't copy
lengthy poems, speeches or other source text into Wikipedia. Put them in
Wikisource if you need to.
    * wikipedia:Subpages: Don't use slashes (/) in the names of articles
to create subpages.
    * wikipedia:Edit summary: Always type at least a brief summary of
the change that you made in the Edit Summary box. Avoid misleading
summaries.
    * wikipedia:Disambiguation: If an article's name is very similar to
another, make a note at the top. If many articles share a name, create a
disambiguation page.
    * wikipedia:Deletion policy: If no page appropriate for Wikipedia
could ever be written on an article's topic, nominate it for deletion.
Otherwise, try and fix it.
    * wikipedia:Semi-protection policy: Pages undergoing frequent
vandalism can be semi-protected to block edits by very new or
unregistered users.
    * wikipedia:No binding decisions: All decisions, including poll
results, can be reversed later as Wikipedia develops.
    * wikipedia:Ownership of articles: You agreed to allow others to
modify your work. So let them.
    * wikipedia:Harassment: Don't make life miserable for other users,
such as by wiki-stalking them, or you may be blocked.
    * wikipedia:Sock puppet: Do not use duplicate accounts to rig votes,
mislead others or circumvent policy. Good-faith uses are fine.
    * wikipedia:Banning policy: Users may be banned for varying times.
They may appeal, but must not circumvent the ban, so don't bait them or
help them to try.

[copied from [[template talk:Guideline one liner]] - some of the terms
are wikilinks]

Criticisms have included that the suggested summaries simplify or
distort the relevant policies, that the template is ugly (I agree :)),
that the template is redundant considering the first sentence is often
(but surprisingly rarely!) a summary of the policy, and that users may
feel they have grasped a whole policy when they've only read a
"powerpoint" bullet point version of it.

I feel that many people never read the guidelines, as there are too
many, and they're not well structured or organised together. By creating
a single page with an accurate, concise summary of each guideline, a
user can get a very good feel for not only how Wikipedia works, but also
how the relevant policies and guidelines are structured, so they know
where to go for more detail.

Certainly putting the summary on certain pages *is* currently redundant,
but that can obviously be fixed by changing the first sentence etc.
Also, one user suggested modifying [[template:policy]] (and related
templates) to make room for this one-line summary, which would certainly
alleviate aesthetic concerns.

So, I would love to hear some ideas and opinions on whether this is a
worthwhile project, how best to implement it, and so on and so forth.
There is a bit of discussion at [[template talk:Guideline one liner]]
already.

Thanks,
Steve ([[user talk:stevage]])


from_name: Ben Garney

subject:
[Wikitech-l] We have a problem (was: Stable version now with
	cache)

body:
Not to butt too violently into this discussion, but...

I am pretty much ecstatic about everything that Mr. Manske has been
working on in the last few weeks. Even if it's never accepted into the
core codebase, as someone who's running his own wiki, just having some
code that's marginally-official or at least run by this mailing list, to
implement features I could really use, is fantastic.

Reviews? Great! Stable versions as an extension? Even better! The Tasks
stuff is also tremendous..

I'm really looking forward to getting back to work after the New Year
and getting a bunch of this stuff integrated. Maybe it's not the final
solution - that's fine, I know how to use merge tools and if I have to I
can write a converter to move my data over. I'm more concerned about
reasonably solid code that people other than me are writing.

So from the perspective of an outside guy trying to run a site on
MediaWiki - awesome job all around, I love seeing useful code being
released often. Magnus' stuff is good, and it builds on a lot of cool
work by many talented people.

I'm sure that there's plenty of activity relating to this discussion
that I am not privy to, and I realize that the core mission for most
people on this mailing list revolves around keeping the wikipedia family
of sites happily up and running, but I don't want to let this discussion
go by without tossing in my two cents as an outside user and say - I
like seeing progress, I like the features I've seen go by recently, and
I like MediaWiki as a whole.

I hope this whole conversation comes to a fruitful resolution, and that
MW maintains its forward motion.

Thanks for reading. I'll go back to lurking now. :)

Ben Garney
Torque Technologies Director
GarageGames.Com,
Inc.

Magnus Manske wrote:

>On Wednesday 21 December 2005 23:46, Brion Vibber wrote:
>
>
>>Magnus, are you working with Tim on this or are you just writing code
>>that's going to be thrown away next week?
>>
>>


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [WikiEN-l] SPOV threatens NPOV

body:
Karl A. Krueger wrote:

>It seems to me that the sides of this debate are somewhat talking past
>each other.
>
I think that I can read that comment as a step forward.  I found the
article that David Gerrard cited to be mostly quite good.  As Karla
McLaren says: "It is not merely, as many surmise, a conflict between
fact-based viewpoints and faith-based viewpoints. Nor is it simply a
conflict between rationality and credulity. No, it's a full-on clash of
cultures that makes real communication improbable at best."  To make her
point she did not once use the term "pseudoscience" in her article. Her
comments about how the skeptic community uses language are significant:

>     It's vital that a way be found to help people in my culture
>     question, think about, and critically interpret the barrage of
>     information and misinformation they receive on a daily basis.
>     However, it's also vital that the information be culturally
>     sensitive. For instance, the first time I visited the skeptical
>     health care Web site called Quackwatch, it felt as if I were
>     walking into enemy territory. "Quack" is a very loaded word-it's a
>     fighting word! Though site owner Dr. Stephen Barrett has every
>     right to call his excellent Web site anything he likes, I wonder
>     why it couldn't have been called, for instance, HealthWatch,
>     HealingInfo, DocFacts, or something equally nonthreatening. Why do
>     I have to type the word "quack" when I want a skeptical review of
>     the choices I make in medical care? And why do I have to spend so
>     much time translating on the skeptical sites I visit-or just
>     skipping over words like scam, sham, quack, fraud, dupe, and fool?
>     Why do I (the sort of person who actually needs skeptical
>     information) have to see myself described in offensive terms and
>     bow my head in shame before I can truly access the information
>     available in your culture?

If a comfortable accomodation is to be found in this subject area, we
need to find language that is acceptable.  When you can let go of the
prejudicial language you will probably find an alternatives community
that is far more accomodating to your ideas than you might have
expected.  From reading her article it is evident that the writer had a
level of insights and skill that her spiritual transformation possible.
This is not characteristic of the majority who believe as she did.  If
they feel a need to review their beliefs the kind of welcome that they
normally get from the skeptical community may effectively drive them
back into beliefs that are familiar to them, or into an institution for
the mentally disturbed.

>I take the opposition to the term "pseudoscience" as based
>on the claim that we should not be judging whether particular
>experiments or observations are done scientifically or not.
>
More or less.  It is not just about "particular" experiments and
observation but about all the experiments and observations, and whether
there are any where good-faith experiments are carried out, and where a
failed experiment will simply cause the experimenter to revise his
hypothesis and plan a new experiment.  That, after all, is what science
is.  Science does not have a 3RR which says that if you continue
experimenting after your third failure you are engaging in
pseudoscience.  Science will take its bad results as a basis for
experimenting further; true pseudoscience will take bad results, and
draw premature conclusions, or worse, ignore the results all together.
As long as there are some practitioners pursuing the scientific method
you cannot fairly extrapolate those selected outcomes to represent the
entire field of study.

>In that, I actually agree.  Wikipedia isn't a judge or critic of
>scientific methodology.  In such cases we should report what was done
>and how the world responded to it.
>
I agree there, and the closer our source is to the original source the
more believable our reporting will be.

>But I've been talking about fields where there _aren't_ any experiments
>or methodology to report on.  There's just speculation, tradition,
>marketing, or religious pronouncement ... and an adherent claiming that
>the noises of same are "scientific".
>
Yes there is.  If we can't find any evidence of scientific
experimentation we can say exactly that.  If the adherents make the
kinds of claims that you envision, and there is evidence for that we can
say that too.  But that's still not enough to draw a conclusion from it all.

>I just don't see what's non-neutral about saying that speculation
>doesn't count as science just because someone says it is.  Or that while
>3000-year-old religious tradition is a fine thing, it isn't a form of
>scientific methodology.
>
At one level "speculation" and "claim" are just synonyms for
"hypothesis"  The 3000 year old tradition predates what we now call the
scientific method, hence the term "ancient science".  It obviously does
not meet today's standards, but they had no way of knowing better.  The
four traditional elements (5 among the Cninese) was as far as they could
go with the tools that they had at the time.  Does the fact that
Aristotle did not supply experimental data with his speculations make
him wrong, or worse unscientific?

>Is it the "pseudo-" prefix, that some people have taken as an imputation
>of criminal fraud?  We could simply say "nonscience" or "not based on
>experiment" or whatever instead.  But I don't think we should fail to
>report the fact that some fields _do_ claim to be "science" for
>political or marketing reasons, even when there's no science around.
>
It's a matter of fraud and a whole lot of other things that the
alternative community believes to be demeaning.  Maybe it's the word
"science" itself that's problematic.  When you use a word, you use all
its meanings: the ones you intend, the ones you consider to be wrong,
and the ones you never eve heard about.  You have absolutely no control
over haw the reader is going to interpret what you say.  Thus in some of
its older forms, science could be any body of knowledge, not just only a
body that was defined by certain rigid rules and requirements.
Traditionally the "seven liberal sciences" were grammar, logic,
rhetoric, arithmetic, music, geometry and astronomy.  There are also a
number of set phrases which include the word science, many of whioh like
"political science"would not fit a rigid definition of "science".  When
you consider most set phrases in which "science" is qualified by another
word most would not be hard sciences.  "Alternative science" carries
with it the connotation of difference from strict science much better
than "political science".  Some terms like "creation science" can even
be oxymorons.

So I agree too that it's important that we make prominent note the fact
when for whatever reason an area of study deviates from mainstream
science including marketing.  But we need to do that in a more nuanced
way than can possibly be stuffed into a single word in a category.  The
degree to which these topics deviate from mainstream science is just too
wide.

Throughout this debate I have never said that I consider any of these
topics a proven science.  I have always been largely sceptical about
many of them, but without ever losing my fascination.  I read once that
the scientific failure of many of these in general, and astrology in
particular was not in their inability to design and test experimental
models, but in their inability to develop credible hypotheses, i.e. in a
different part of the scientific process  than what is generally
stated.  Even if I believe that there are transient phenomena I do not
feel compelled to build a whole science around them.  I can accepy that
there is not enough information upon which to establish an understanding
of any individual phenomenon.  It would be nice to be able to design an
experiment that reproduces a transient phenomenon, but we don't have
enough information upon which to design that experiment.  Some event
just whooshed by and one is left singing, "Something is happening here
but you don't know what it is,  Do you, Mr. Jones?"

Ec


subject: [WikiEN-l] SPOV threatens NPOV

body:
Steve Bennett wrote:

>>In that, I actually agree.  Wikipedia isn't a judge or critic
>>of scientific methodology.  In such cases we should report
>>what was done and how the world responded to it.
>>
>>
>I admit I haven't read most of this discussion.  However, wouldn't the
>normal approach work here?  If reputable science magazines claim a field
>is "pseudoscience" and only the field itself claims it is "science",
>would we not conclude it is "pseudoscience" simply based on the quality
>and range of sources that say so? Or is the issue that we are incapable
>of deciding whether "Creation Science Monthly" is a "reputable"
>"scientific journal" or not?  If so, how do we decide that *any*
>publication is "reputable"?
>
The conclusion may be more easily reached when we deal with the subjects
one by one.  Even if I accept that you have adequately established the
term "pseudoscience" in relation to creationism we will still need to go
through the whole argument again with respect to each subject where the
matter comes up. When it comes to these subjects there is a tendency on
the part of "reputable science magazines" to become self-serving.  The
claims of being "science" within the field itself may only be partial
claims.  The "scientific astrologer" may indeed be performing acceptable
statistical analyses of data, and have as much disdain for the everyday
astrologer as the mainstream scientists does.  Blanket statements tend
to ignore these subtleties.  The reputable magazine that makes such
claims needs to be under an obligation to source the basis for the
claims.  I suspect that many of these magazines would prefer not to deal
with these subjects at all.  It's just not worth it to devote valuable
magazine space trying to disprove something that you already believe to
be false.  nevertheless, a metaanalysis of how reputable magazines
across many fields handle the area would be interesting

I prefer finding ways to circumvent any decision  about the reputability
of a magazine, especially when the only issue has to do with using a
particular label.  By assuming that we can judge the reputability of a
magazine, aren't we just passing the buck from the problem to the
meta-problem?  Let the reader decide about the reputability of "Creation
Science Monthly".  If a reputable magazine claims that something is
pseudoscience let's give a precise citation in the article so that any
reader can try to track it down.  Let's also say whether it was as part
of an original study, or whether it was in the middle of the editor's
monthly rant.  Attaching a simple pseudoscience category label without
proper attestation in the article is not enough.

Ec


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Stable versions policy

body:
Michael Snow wrote:

> This is more confusion of issues. The question is about readers, and
> you respond by talking about editors. Granted, there is some overlap,
> but increasingly we need to acknowledge that the two are distinct
> groups and many in the first group will never be in the second.
>
> The default for readers should be a stable version. The default for
> editors should be the latest version, the one that can be, and needs
> to be, edited. The issue is how to guess whether someone is in a
> particular group.

This seems practical

>> Wikipedia is a work in progress, our goal is to _produce_ an
>> encyclopedia rather than merely _displaying_ one.
>
> True enough, but then you say...
>
>> But our goal isn't to _show_ an encyclopedia to people, it's to get
>> people to help us _write_ one. Let Answers.com worry about showing
>> our material to people.
>
> "Wikipedia is first and foremost an effort to create *and distribute*
> a free encyclopedia of the highest possible quality to every single
> person on the planet in their own language." (emphasis mine)
>
> Our goal is very much to show people an encyclopedia, and trying to
> treat the writing process as if it's wholly separable from this is a
> mistake. If Answers.com, Directmedia, or anyone else wants to help
> with this, that's great, but we have a mission to distribute, and we
> should not abdicate it by saying other people will take care of it.
> Executing core objectives is not something you outsource.

If answers.com is only copying from us they may be very happy to use
stable versions only on their site.


body:
Tomer Chachamu wrote:

>On 21/12/05, Rowan Collins <rowan.collins at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>>One thing that I was pondering when you posted about this before is
>>whether the "special behaviour" of namespaces like "Image:",
>>"Category:", etc could be built into some kind of hooks mechanism. I
>>know it seems silly, but I rather like the idea of modularising the
>>code so that existing features can be treated as extensions, because
>>it means extensions can be written that mimic or replace those
>>features.
>>
>>In this case, people sometimes say they want to develop new namespaces
>>for references, or category-like namespaces for blogging, etc; I guess
>>some such things could be done through wikidata, but then again,
>>wikidata could be attached to namespaces via those same hooks. Maybe.
>>
>>
>
>An excellent idea!
>
>Image:
>Category:
>Template:
>Reference:
>*Table:*
>Task:
>Review:
>Poll: (AFD etc)
>Collection: (transclude polls; AFD)
>
So perhaps there could be a series of options  that the bureaucrat
toggles when he activates a namespace.

Ec


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: which html constructs are evil

references:
<87ek49j5y6.fsf@mat.ucm.es>	<43A701CC.2020809@web.de>	<do8i3i$i3q$1@sea.gmane.org>	<87lkyf3kp6.fsf@mat.ucm.es>	<43A827CE.8020706@web.de>	<873bkmsky3.fsf@mat.ucm.es>	<9f02ca4c0512210434x39e641c5i@mail.gmail.com>
	<43A9AE1D.4090903@thingy.apana.org.au>

body:
David Gerard wrote:

>The advantage of wikitext for mere humans is that it starts working as
>plain text, then you can add wikitext soup to it and you still get a
>result that nontechnical people can read and write.
>
>Wikitext is formally horrible, but seems to work with human editors.
>Wikipedia is one of those wonderful pieces of technology that works for
>technophobes *and* advanced geeks (e.g. Mac OS X, LiveJournal, Firefox)
>- which I think should be a goal of all programs where possible, btw.
>
>People learn wikitext like learning a language. They try stuff and it
>gets meaning across. They learn more and it gets more of the meaning
>across. They gain proficiency as they go.
>
This is perhaps one of the factors in Wikipedia's success.

For people who want to write text only the only essential wiki knowledge
may be to add an extra carriage return to separate paragraphs.

Ec


subject:
[WikiEN-l] Defamatory Biographies - another
	problem	looming	forWikipedia?

body:
Bryan Derksen wrote:

> David Gerard wrote:
>
>> For those revolted by multiple stubs (and I agree that they have all
>> Geoff's listed points against them), the talk page could be workable -
>> they wouldn't be blots on the article warranting {{toomanyboxes}} and
>> they'd still be findable in the relevant stub category. WSS would need
>> collective persuasion that this was a good idea, else they would likely
>> assume it was an error and fix it.
>
> I remember actually trying this way back when and I got yelled at for
> it. I remember this quite clearly because that's the exact time I
> shrugged my shoulders and thought "I'll just delete the extras
> completely, then." :)

Do the people who like all these stub labels ever try to fix these
problems, or do they just have a personal passion with finding work that
others can do? :-)

Ec


body:
David Gerard wrote:

>Steve ran this past me, I objected at first, he went back and did it
>differently and I said "hmm, you were right and I was wrong, go for it".
>
>Steve Bennett wrote:
>
>
>> and that users may
>>feel they have grasped a whole policy when they've only read a
>>"powerpoint" bullet point version of it.
>>
>>
>Any decent policy or guideline needs to be summarisable in a sentence IMO.
>
>This objection falls into the error of assuming that you can solve not
>reading instructions by putting more instructions in.
>
>This is where we get bloated guidelines with every special case outlined
>*right there*.
>
Some years ago the IRS decided that it needed to simplify instructions
by putting everything at the 10th grade reading level.  One effect was
to make the tax guide thicker because thaey had to use smaller words..
For people who already knew how to read this stuff it meant weading
through long-winded paraphrases which many or may not have meant the
same thing that they said before.  Those who could not read it before
were not exactly encouraged by the prospect of reading an even longer guide.

Another of the US Government wonders was the Paperwork Reduction Act.
In some instances it involved adding a separate slip to documents
expressing how much they were commited to reducing paperwork.

Ec


subject:
[WikiEN-l] Original research
	vs.	Fact-checking(Wikipedia:Biographies of living persons)

body:
Sam Fentress (Asbestos) wrote:

>On 12/21/05, sydney poore <poore5 at adelphia.net> wrote:
>
>
>>If someone provides valid ID (a mixture of distant and current) and gives
>>Wikipedia the correct information, then we should be
>>able to confirm it from outside sources. This is
>>fact-checking not original research.
>>Go Bengals!
>>
>>
>But... isn't that the whole point? If we can confirm it from outside sources
>then we're not discussing anything here. We all know that if we can confirm
>through outside sources then all is good.
>
>The problem is that I, as a normal editor, have no way of verifying anything
>when User:Joe_Blog changes something in an article and just cites "Personal
>Correspondence". Do I leave it there or not? I say not.
>
It depends on the kind of information involved.  If it's routine
personal information, it should probably stay.

Ec


subject: [WikiEN-l] Improper block redux

body:
I'm shortening your block, but I agree with Snowspinner. No one is going to
debate the point with you "are deletionists vandals?" because the question
itself is manifestly absurd. Let it go. I would support any admin who blocks
you for 24 hours-1 week for every further infraction after your block
expires. Like David was suggesting, maybe since you can't seem to learn
through discussion, you might learn through induction as you are blocked
repeatedly.

Ryan

On 12/22/05, Kurt Maxwell Weber <kmw at armory.com> wrote:
>
> On Wednesday 21 December 2005 08:47, Kurt Maxwell Weber wrote:
> > Anyway, karmafist has now placed another indef block on me (because he
> > "didn't see it on the logs".  This is getting ridiculous.
>
> And again just now, about an hour after David Gerard unblocked me.
>
> --
> Kurt Weber
> <kmw at armory.com>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>
>
>
>


from_name: Kelly Martin

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Stable versions policy

body:
On 12/20/05, Wikipedia Romania (Ronline) <rowikipedia at gmail.com> wrote:
> About a week ago, something quite signficant happened - anonymous
> users were no longer allowed to start new articles. I said back then
> that that wasn't such a major move, and it's isn't. However,
> let's not let that become a slippery slope for all sorts of new
> policies that seek to restrict the freedom, and by extension
> the success, of Wikipedia.

It's my opinion that the success of the English Wikipedia depends on
getting some controls in place.  Too many of our articles are
degrading in quality precisely because anybody can edit them.

> At the Romanian Wikipedia, we have some of the most liberal
> policies on blocking and vandalism. And, so far, there haven't
> been any major problems - no media reports, no huge glaring
> errors, etc.

What works for rowiki may not work for enwiki.

Remember, our goal here is to write an encyclopedia.  Open editing is
a tool that may or may not benefit that, and each language edition
must make a decision whether or not to allow open editing.  Wikipedia
is absolutely not a free speech forum.

Kelly


from_name: George Jenkins

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Broken 'Create Account' Page

body:
MacGyverMagic/Mgm wrote:

>>Maybe the mechanism which detects the block and inhibits those fields should
>>also display some message stating the reason for their non-appearance and
>>directing the user to somewhere useful...
>>--
>>Phil
>>[[en:User:Phil Boswell]]
>>
>>
>>
>It should indeed.
>
Thanks. That should cause a little less confusion.

However, the next part of my problem is that my compaines IP address
still blocked. Could someone who has the power to unblock IP's please
unblock 202.37.96.11 (See http://www.apnic.net/apnic-bin/whois.pl for
evidence that this is IP is not an open proxy, rather it belongs to my
company, Tait Electronics).

Cheers, George


subject: [WikiEN-l] Verifiability

body:
Ray Saintonge wrote:
> David Gerard wrote:

>> Heh. I have started in a slow way tightening up some of our ridiculously
>> bloated, opaquely-written and special-case-riddled guideline and policy
>> pages; I look forward to the time to really go the hack on the MoS. I
>> think it could be one-third the length without losing a single useful
>> detail. Heck, someone might even want to read it for reasons other than
>> querulousness.

> I have tried similar things at Wiktionary, where I often trace a wide
> circle of "What links here" that ends up where I started.  The problem
> is not just with the people writing imaginative new policies, but also
> with individuals who come along with a great plan to reorganize
> everything.  They start with a lot of enthusiasm, but half way through
> their project they fall off the edge of the earth never to be seen
> again.  Then at least two others develop contradictory policies on the
> same thing on two different pages; this entitles newbies to use
> whichever one they found first to justify whatever action they want to
> take.  One never knows when one will be deleting someone's pet policy>
> Being bureaucrat and the most senior active editor in the project buys
> me a certain amount of sin points, but I would prefer to limit that kind
> of boldness to situations which really matter.  Dear Abby, what would
> you do? :-)

Find people you can sanity-check with. Then start shooting. If you make
a mistake, take it back and make good - this buys a lot of leeway.
Interpret everything per goal, e.g. "We're here to write an encyclopedia".

- d.


body:
Steve ran this past me, I objected at first, he went back and did it
differently and I said "hmm, you were right and I was wrong, go for it".

Steve Bennett wrote:

>  and that users may
> feel they have grasped a whole policy when they've only read a
> "powerpoint" bullet point version of it.

Any decent policy or guideline needs to be summarisable in a sentence IMO.

This objection falls into the error of assuming that you can solve not
reading instructions by putting more instructions in.

This is where we get bloated guidelines with every special case outlined
*right there*.

> I feel that many people never read the guidelines, as there are too
> many, and they're not well structured or organised together. By creating
> a single page with an accurate, concise summary of each guideline, a
> user can get a very good feel for not only how Wikipedia works, but also
> how the relevant policies and guidelines are structured, so they know
> where to go for more detail.

Precisely. One page with the one-liners, each linking to the full novel.

This won't cram all the OMG INCREDIBLY IMPORTANT detail into everyone's
heads, but nothing else will either.

> Certainly putting the summary on certain pages *is* currently redundant,
> but that can obviously be fixed by changing the first sentence etc.

I see nothing wrong with putting the first sentence in a big visible box.

> Also, one user suggested modifying [[template:policy]] (and related
> templates) to make room for this one-line summary, which would certainly
> alleviate aesthetic concerns.

That's a side issue. The question is whether to do this at all. (I say yes.)

- d.


body:
On 12/22/05, Steve Bennett <stevage at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> > We already have this, as I've said, at [[Help:Contents]]. And
> > why have a big box, when the same text as a first line can be
> > done instead? _______________________________________________
>
> I'm having a look at that page (which, being a monobook user, I've never
> seen before), but it doesn't do what I'm trying to achieve.  In terms of
> policies and guidelines, there are links to [[WP:RULES]], [[WP:V]]
> (labelled "why" [cite sources]), [[WP:DR]] and [[WP:MOS]], but that's it
> for policies and guidelines. Also, they're just links, they don't
> summarise what those policies and guidelines mean.

Please, please, fix it. Add little summaries. I heartily encourage you to do
so. The Help namespace could use that. But a box will not help matters.


from_name: Boris Herbinière-Sève

subject: [Wikitech-l] Extensions & Special Pages

body:
Hello,

Working on an extension, I need a custom page with access to another DB,
SQL requests and processing. I guess the best way to integrate this into
mediawiki is through a special page, but I was unable to find any useful
doc (whereas help for extensions on meta-wiki is really useful. Thanks).

Do you have any links, tips or help to point me in the right direction ?

Thanks in advance,

--
Boris Herbini?re-S?ve


from_name: Ilia Alshanetsky

subject: [Wikitech-l] PHP 5.1.2RC1 testing

body:
Hello!

You are receiving this email because your project has been select to
take part in a new effort by the PHP QA Team to make sure that your
project still works with PHP versions to-be-released. With this we hope
to make sure that you are either aware of things that might break, or to
make sure we don't introduce any strange regressions. With this effort
we hope to build a better relation between the PHP Team and the major
projects.

If you do not want to receive these heads-up emails, please reply to me
personally and I will remove you from the list; but, we hope that you
want to actively help us making PHP a better and more stable scripting
language.

The first release candidate of PHP 5.1.2 can be found at
http://downloads.php.net/ilia/php-5.1.2RC1.tar.bz2. This is not a final
RC, but we hope it will be followed by a final RC2 that should be
released in January 2006. At this time I would like to ask you to test
your application against this release and let us know about any issues
that you discover. We are particularly interested in backwards
compatibility breaks and new issues appeared in this release, but were
not present in prior 5.1 versions. If you find any issues, please
contact the PHP QA team at "php-qa at lists.php.net".

In case you think that other projects should also receive this kinds of
emails, please let me know privately, and I will add them to the list of
projects to contact.

regards,

Ilia Alshanetsky
5.1 Release Master


from_name: Anthony DiPierro

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Stable versions policy

body:
On 12/22/05, Lars Aronsson <lars at aronsson.se> wrote:
> I'm surprised that Wikipedia mirrors such as Answers.com don't
> work more like Wikireaders, where a human editor picks useful
> article-versions and leaves the stubs unmirrored.  The added value
> from such an "editor's choice" would be a perfectly valid business
> model.
>

You'd have to spend a whole lot of money to get human editors to pick
the "useful articles".  It might pay off in the really long term, but
it'd require a huge investment.  And due to the GFDL some other
company could just come along and take the results of that huge
investment and drive you out of business anyway.  I'm not at all
surprised no one is doing it.

It's enough of a value add to present a page with results from
multiple different sources, organized without all the editing tools
and other extraneous things useful only for editing.  It's enough of a
filter to just leave out article versions which were reverted within 5
minutes (or some other determined time period).  Until recently the
mirrors tended to perform faster as well.

When I want to read Wikipedia, I go to the mirrors, not to
wikipedia.org.  Wikipedia just doesn't do a very good job of
distributing its product, and it wastes millions of dollars of
donation money trying.

This is not to knock the Wikipedia, which does a great job of
producing articles.  I don't think you'll ever be able to cater to
readers and editors on the same site though (although to some extent
that comes down to a semantics question of what would be considered
"the same site").

Anthony


from_name: Wikipedia Romania (Ronline)

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Stable versions policy

body:
>
> Well, if there's a page that is updated regularly, and you want people
> to always see the latest, probably vandalized, version, then *don't set
> any version of it as stable*!

Well, someone will come and will, anyway.

The difference between the current state of wikipedia and wikipedia with
> stable versions is this: With the former, readers get a wiki to see;
> with the latter, they get an encyclopedia.

Magnus, this is a big shift, you must understand. It is not a minor editing
change. The point is, as you said above, that we're changing our wiki nature
to sort of become half-wiki. With stable versions, particularly if shown as
default, Wikipedia will become a static encyclopedia, with the option to
then edit articles as a secondary structure. Wikipedia is a wiki and should
always stay a wiki. Any systematic form of article protection/anti-wiki
structures outside of temporary bans and stuff like that is a major shift
and IMO goes against the principles of wiki.

Secondly, we really need to have widespread community consensus on this.
It's great to see that so many people are giving their opinions here. I
don't know what the plan is to lauch stable versions - whether they will
simply be included in the new MediaWiki, but I think before it's introduced,
people need to really be aware of this shift.

Picking one example, I think [[en:Geroge W. Bush]] has been protected
> since before the last election, which was a year ago. This is due to
> repeated vandalism. There are several more, though. This could be fixed
> through stable versions.

Well, George Bush isn't protected actually. I mean, maybe it's protected 25%
of the time due to vandalism, but that's only because it goes through
patterns of protected-unprotected-protected, etc. It's not systematically,
permanently protected. Yes, this could be fixed for stable versions, but
only at the cost of effectively locking down the main versions of
potentially more than 800,000 articles!

Ronline


from_name: Guillaume Blanchard

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re: Stable version now with cache (Tim,	this one's
	for you!:-)

body:
As you know the date of the stabelized (validated) revision, why not
simply include the state of the template at the same date ? (just need
to search in template history to found the right one)

Aoineko / Guillaume Blanchard

Magnus Manske wrote:

>Phil Boswell wrote:
>
>
>>Just one question: if a given template is updated, and it is decided that
>>the changes should be propagated, is it possible to do this automagically,
>>or does some poor sod have to go around "re-stabilising" a bunch of
>>articles?
>>
>>
>>
>
>Right now: No.
>
>My initial implementation didn't use caching, because I assumed that as
>templates shouldn't influence the article content, we could just protect
>all templates by default. IMHO that would be reasonable, as templates do
>influence a lot of articles.
>
>Then someone on this list said no, we need to cache the article version
>*as it is at the moment of "stabelizing"*. So what I did was to
>partially run the parser on a version to be "stabelized", namely the
>template replacement (and the <nowiki> and HTML-tag orgy). That
>partially parsed text is then cached, and silently inserted via hook on
>revision loading.
>
>
>Now it's "well, *some* templates should change".
>You can see how I am a little confused. Either an article version is
>good as it is, or it isn't. A template change shouldn't alter that fact.
>If it does, the version in question might not have been worth called
>stable in the first place.
>Implementing the "some" option means a lot of work (implementing a
>front-end for saying which templates should be updated, finding the
>articles that use it, find the *templates* that use it; if template A
>uses template B, and template B is changed and the changes are
>considered safe, should articles using template A be updates, even
>though template A is not considered safe? And so on).
>
>As a site note, when (notice the *when* instead of the *if*, almighty
>roots!) my Tasks feature is going into production, many of the "daily
>management" templates will not be used anymore, which makes changes to
>these obsolete.
>
>
>Magnus
>_______________________________________________
>Wikitech-l mailing list
>Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>
>
>
>


from_name: Magnus Manske

subject: [Wikitech-l] We have a problem (was: Stable version now with cache)

body:
On Wednesday 21 December 2005 23:46, Brion Vibber wrote:
> Magnus, are you working with Tim on this or are you just writing code
> that's going to be thrown away next week?

Dear Brion,

I talked with Tim on this mailing list, where he said that stable
versions and their templates need to be cached, and that he worked on
some kind of patch.

I said OK, since you're working on that, I'll rest my extension.

A few days went by. As not much seemed to happen in this regard, I asked
if someone was working on it. I received no reply.

So I went ahed and did was had been discussed on my own, since noone
seems to do it.

And all I get as a reaction for, yet again, doing what everyone else
just keeps talking about is yor above comment.

This seems to be a pattern. Last year, I realized that we'd need a
review/validation feature, soon. So I went ahed and started implementing
one. I checked it into CVS and kept updating and improving it. Release
erly, release often, the open source mantra. I assumed that, this being
open source, and having 60+ developers listed at sourceforge for
MediaWiki, I would get some help in finishing it.

I didn't, not really. I wrote it up to working status basically on my
own, working in comments from test site users.

I checked in the first version seventeen month ago. SEVENTEEN MONTH! And
all the "help" I got was some vague uneasyness from you about it. At one
point you said something I could work with, namely that you were
concerned about it loading too much data from the database (or something
along that line), which I promptly fixed.

Then, I think it was two weeks ago, you said that, after seventeen month
of hot air, that the validation feature was unsalvagable. So I went
ahead and rewrote it as a feature, which was one of your wishes some
month ago. I have not heard anything about that from you either.

Don't take this as a personal attack. Maybe you're just overworked
(you've done a lot of work to be sure). Maybe you're suffering from a
mild case of Linus-Thorvalds-Syndrome, drowning in the responsibility
for the code. Or maybe you just don't like me; but then, I'm not the
only one to be treated like this, so it can't be that.

What *I* wish for is a process like this:
* Someone writes a major new function/extension to be used on the
Wikimedia sites
* Someone in charge of these sites (Tim, Brion, whoever) says either
** "OK, that's great, we'll use it right away" OR
** "No, we'll never use that, so don't waste your time" OR
** "We would use it if you fix THIS and change THAT"

I once was an author at Nupedia. The approval process was so slow that
few people ever wrote there, let alone got an article through the review
process. A few of my articles made it afer three to four month. It was a
drag, but my article was in the "official" list at the end.

But being largely ignored for SEVENTEEN MONTH, writing code and pushing
for it to be used, and then being told "nope" would make paid
programmers leave a company. I'm sure that, if not you youself, at least
others on this mailing list might imagine what that kind of treatment
can do for the motivation of a volunteer developer.

So, to come back to the original topic, this is *the* chance to answer a
few of my questions:
* Is /anyone/ actively working on a stable version feature?
* If so, is it already more advanced than the code I put into CVS?
* Is there some other reason this can't be done based on my code?

As I have said many times before, I'm not pushing these things because
they are /my/ code. I'm pushing them because IMHO we need them, and
AFAIK my code is the only one currently available that is up to the job.
If I am in error on one of these two, please tell me so, and do it in
clear, simple words, as I see myself unable to convert musings of vague
discomfort into code changes.

Also, again, I have no problem if you think my code is crap. That might
well be the case. *All I want* is that you tell me
* what the problems are
* if Wikimedia would use the code if I were to fix those problems, or if
I shouldn't bother

I'll be on the 22C3, so maybe we could discuss these things in person.

Magnus


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Stable versions policy

body:
Magnus Manske wrote:

> Apologies if I sound too mocking, but
> * I really don't see what the fuss is about (didn't read a good argument
> against it yet)

The fuss is about the fact that under the stable versions policy, Wikipedia
will change from becoming a fully open, free wiki encyclopedia, to a static
encyclopedia with a wiki *option*. It reminds me of both the failed Nupedia
and the structure Encarta announced a few months ago to make itself more
"open".

Ronline


from_name: Erik Moeller

body:
At present, we have lots of people with CVS access, and it's up to each
developer to decide when they commit to CVS HEAD. For example, if I
don't hear back from Brion on the namespace changes soon, I'm going to
give them a final look and merge them into HEAD. Brion usually _does_
react quickly to problematic changes there .. ;-)

Then there's patches by outside contributors without CVS access. I think
these can be dealt with by allowing anyone with CVS access to handle
them, since the assumption is that people with CVS access are
reasonable.  It may be desirable for some developers to take on a formal
reviewer responsibility, so that people can contact them explicitly.

And then there's code that is in HEAD, but it is either an extension, or
it is a site-wide option. In those cases, someone has to make an
explicit decision that the code is ready for use on the Wikimedia sites.
I believe your recent extensions, as well as the old Validate code, fall
into that category.

In those cases, the general procedure tends to be "Wait for Brion" or
"Bug someone on IRC", but it's not immediately clear what the
responsibilities are.

It may make sense to let Brion give some people a formal "code
activator" privilege. These people would be allowed to enable code on
the live sites. Bugzilla could be used to keep track of who is going to
review and possibly activate the code, if anyone. If there are no
volunteers, and the code is generally deemed important and useful, the
responsibility would fall back onto Brion.

This would let you know that someone is indeed going to review your
code, and if they decline to integrate it at the present time, will give
you feedback on what needs to be changed.

What do others think?

Erik


from_name: Robert Treat

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Warning: mysql_query(): 81 is not a valid MySQL-Link
	resource in /home/includes/Database.php on line 374

body:
On Thursday 22 December 2005 11:00, Magnus Manske wrote:
> Heinz wrote:
> > What does this mean:
> >
> > Warning: mysql_query(): 81 is not a valid MySQL-Link resource in
> > /home/includes/Database.php on line 374
> > Unable to free MySQL result
>
Basically it means you don't have a valid db connection (or you aren't
referencing your connection properly).  To figure out why your getting that
message we'd need a bunch more info like-->
> What MediaWiki Version?
> What were you doing when the error occurred?
> Do you use any extensions or hacks?
>
--
Robert Treat
Build A Brighter Lamp :: Linux Apache {middleware} PostgreSQL


from_name: Angela

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re:
	http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_wiki_software

body:
On 12/22/05, Ashar Voultoiz <hashar at altern.org> wrote:
> Thomas Gries wrote:
> > I updated that page.

> Which page ? :o)

Guessing from the subject line,
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_wiki_software>.

Angela.


from_name: Domas Mituzas

body:
Hi Magnus,

> I'll be on the 22C3, so maybe we could discuss these things in person.

Not everyone of us may come to 22C3, but everyone involved in site
operation are discussing our changes in IRC channels constantly. In
real life developers have proper meetings, we can't afford those, so
online communication is preferred. Some features could be discussed
using Skype as well.

Long email threads maybe can be tracked in future, but they do not
help with proper cooperation and collaboration.

So far it was always absolutely efficient and easy to communicate any
changes to other developers on #mediawiki or #wikimedia-tech.

Cheers,
Domas


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Stable versions policy

body:
On 12/22/05, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
> Anthony DiPierro wrote:
> > Wikipedia just doesn't do a very good job of
> > distributing its product, and it wastes millions of dollars of
> > donation money trying.
> It is "long" life the Wikimedia Foundation did never spend millions of
> dollars. Consequently it cannot have wasted this amount of money.

If you count the money that was spent by Wikipedia before it was run
by the WMF it's well over a million.  For just the first quarter of
2006 it's projected at half a million.  But feel free to substitute
"hundreds of thousands" for "millions" if you'd like.

Anthony


subject: [Wikitech-l] Page protection interface updates

body:
Thanks a lot, Brion! This is an excellent and very important new
feature. Could you make it explicit what the reasons are semi-protection
is not enabled globally? Is this just during the testing period, or are
you waiting for some kind of approval to turn it on?

Erik


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Stable versions policy

body:
Wikipedia Romania (Ronline) schrieb:
> Magnus, this is a big shift, you must understand. It is not a minor editing
> change. The point is, as you said above, that we're changing our wiki nature
> to sort of become half-wiki. With stable versions, particularly if shown as
> default, Wikipedia will become a static encyclopedia, with the option to
> then edit articles as a secondary structure. Wikipedia is a wiki and should
> always stay a wiki. Any systematic form of article protection/anti-wiki
> structures outside of temporary bans and stuff like that is a major shift
> and IMO goes against the principles of wiki.

As has been discussed time and again, Wikipedia is not primarily a
*wiki*, or some social experiment. It is an *encyclopedia* which
currently /uses/ a wiki to create content.

So if we have to change the behaviour of the wiki (while keeping it a
wiki, please don't say otherwise, it's just not true) in order or serve
the main purpose of being an encyclopedia, that's what we'll do.

> Secondly, we really need to have widespread community consensus on this.
> It's great to see that so many people are giving their opinions here. I
> don't know what the plan is to lauch stable versions - whether they will
> simply be included in the new MediaWiki, but I think before it's introduced,
> people need to really be aware of this shift.

I completely agree with this.

>
> Well, George Bush isn't protected actually. I mean, maybe it's protected 25%
> of the time due to vandalism, but that's only because it goes through
> patterns of protected-unprotected-protected, etc. It's not systematically,
> permanently protected. Yes, this could be fixed for stable versions, but
> only at the cost of effectively locking down the main versions of
> potentially more than 800,000 articles!

All article versions *are* locked down right now. You can't change any
article version on Wikipedia.
What you *can* do is to add a new version, more or less based on an old one.

Wether we show the stable version by default and link to the latest
version, or the other way around, is a matter of emphasis.

Magnus


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Stable versions policy

body:
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body:
The isNewbie check doesn't seem to work yet. I made an edit to a
semi-protected page with a newly created user:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Eloquence/Sandbox&diff=32350355&oldid=20038782

Erik


from_name: Phil Boswell

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Re: Defamatory Biographies - another
	problemlooming	forWikipedia?

body:
"David Gerard" <fun at thingy.apana.org.au> wrote
in message news:43A9AA56.4030305 at thingy.apana.org.au...
[snip]
> For those revolted by multiple stubs (and I agree that they have all
> Geoff's listed points against them), the talk page could be workable -
> they wouldn't be blots on the article warranting {{toomanyboxes}} and
> they'd still be findable in the relevant stub category. WSS would need
> collective persuasion that this was a good idea, else they would likely
> assume it was an error and fix it.

I suspect that the WSS cr?e will be amongst the most happy recipients of
Magnus' workflow extension.

I forsee the speedy creation of a bot which converts stub notices to tasks
:-)
--
Phil
[[en:User:Phil Boswell]]


from_name: Steve Bennett

body:
Hi,

> We already have this, as I've said, at [[Help:Contents]]. And
> why have a big box, when the same text as a first line can be
> done instead? _______________________________________________

I'm having a look at that page (which, being a monobook user, I've never
seen before), but it doesn't do what I'm trying to achieve.  In terms of
policies and guidelines, there are links to [[WP:RULES]], [[WP:V]]
(labelled "why" [cite sources]), [[WP:DR]] and [[WP:MOS]], but that's it
for policies and guidelines. Also, they're just links, they don't
summarise what those policies and guidelines mean.

It's true that some P&G almost have self-evident titles, like "Sign your
posts on talk pages". Others don't: "Build the web" and "Three revert
rule".

One possible positive side effect of creating such a summarised list is
that it will enable people to spot contradictions between guidelines
more easily. This should reduce the "cite which ever guideline helps
your case" problem.

Steve


from_name: Stephen Bain

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re: Stable version now with cache (Tim,
	this one's for you!:-)

body:
On 12/22/05, Guillaume Blanchard <blanchardg at cavia.com> wrote:
> As you know the date of the stabelized (validated) revision, why not
> simply include the state of the template at the same date ? (just need
> to search in template history to found the right one)

Or store the stable version with all templates subst:ed, and then just
parse it normally when it is displayed.

--
Stephen Bain
stephen.bain at gmail.com


from_name: Effe iets anders

body:
Brion: doesn't look scary at all after translation ;-) thank you!

effeietsanders

2005/12/22, Erik Moeller <erik_moeller at gmx.de>:
>
> The isNewbie check doesn't seem to work yet. I made an edit to a
> semi-protected page with a newly created user:
>
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Eloquence/Sandbox&diff=32350355&oldid=20038782
>
> Erik
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>


from_name: effeietsanders-list

body:
Hi Braion,

doesn't look scary at all (after translation ;-)  )
thank you, this will be more usefull, especially with the protectionlog
under it.

effeietsanders

2005/12/22, Erik Moeller <erik_moeller at gmx.de>:
>
> The isNewbie check doesn't seem to work yet. I made an edit to a
> semi-protected page with a newly created user:
>
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Eloquence/Sandbox&diff=32350355&oldid=20038782
>
> Erik
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>


from_name: Gerard Meijssen

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Stable versions policy

body:
Magnus Manske wrote:
> Wether we show the stable version by default and link to the latest
> version, or the other way around, is a matter of emphasis.
>
> Magnus
Hoi,
Having a stable version makes sense when you want to prepare for a paper
or a DVD version. The latest version is in my opinion the only version
that is a candidate for a new stable version, doing it any other way
will open up a set of problems that is too complex to contemplate.
Indicating that a stable version exists, is really good and it makes
sense to stimulate websites external to Wikipedia to host that content.
This way they ensure that they have stable content, that the likelihood
of problematic content is reduced. It would also mean that our content
would have the same behaviour as the Mediawiki software, the beta
version would be with us and we are continuously working towards
improvement. We publish as things become available or stable.

One implication of this is that we need a separate distribution channel
for our stable content.

 From my perspective there are no reasons that I understand why we
should show the "stable" version to anonymous users of any of the
Wikipedia projects.

Thanks,
    Gerard


subject: [Wikitech-l] Move-protection fix

body:
There currently is a problem with the new Protection UI, which disabled the
precautionary move-protection that was installed on HEAD.

Currently, new pages are created with an empty protection string. To fix it,
all the pages that have that empty string have to be changed to
[move=autoconfirmed] through a conversion script. [move=autoconfirmed] also
needs to be the default string when creating a new page.

Pages with a non-empty protection string should be working properly.

Titoxd


from_name: Pawe³ Dembowski

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Stable versions policy

body:
> One implication of this is that we need a separate distribution channel
> for our stable content.
> Thanks,
>     Gerard

Why don't we call it Nupedia? :)

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


from_name: Andrew Gray

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Page protection interface updates

body:
On 22/12/05, Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:

> There's now a timestamp field on the user table for the registration date, which
> is used to calculate the age (this'll be included on newly registered accounts
> but is NULL on older ones).
>
> The age setting replaces the percentage formerly used for the sitewide move
> limitations.

...hmm. So dos this mean that:

a) All page-move permissions are done on the four-day-old basis as well?
and/or
b) All users currently existing are grandfathered in as "old enough"?
(if so, it'll be moot in four days time, I guess)

Thanks for the changes.

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


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Stable versions policy

body:
Pawe? Dembowski wrote:
>> One implication of this is that we need a separate distribution channel
>> for our stable content.
>> Thanks,
>>     Gerard
>>
>
> Why don't we call it Nupedia? :)
>
>
Hoi,
It is not like Nupedia because of this one essential difference. This
way we distribute BOTH a stable and an unstable version of our content.
It is up to the mirrors what they want to host.
Thanks,
    GerardM


subject: [Wikitech-l] Namespace changes ready for code review

body:
Ray Saintonge wrote:
> Tomer Chachamu wrote:
>
>> On 21/12/05, Rowan Collins <rowan.collins at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>>> One thing that I was pondering when you posted about this before is
>>> whether the "special behaviour" of namespaces like "Image:",
>>> "Category:", etc could be built into some kind of hooks mechanism. I
>>> know it seems silly, but I rather like the idea of modularising the
>>> code so that existing features can be treated as extensions, because
>>> it means extensions can be written that mimic or replace those
>>> features.
>>>
>>> In this case, people sometimes say they want to develop new namespaces
>>> for references, or category-like namespaces for blogging, etc; I guess
>>> some such things could be done through wikidata, but then again,
>>> wikidata could be attached to namespaces via those same hooks. Maybe.
>>>
>>
>> An excellent idea!
>>
>> Image:
>> Category:
>> Template:
>> Reference:
>> *Table:*
>> Task:
>> Review:
>> Poll: (AFD etc)
>> Collection: (transclude polls; AFD)
>>
> So perhaps there could be a series of options  that the bureaucrat
> toggles when he activates a namespace.
>
> Ec
Hoi,
The ease with which new namespaces can be created are in one way really
scary. They will affect the behaviour of a project and it will be too
easy to do just this. When a language version of a project decides to
"go its own merry way" it may mean that the consistency in which
Mediawiki works will go away. If there is one thing that should not
happen is that a user on any level starts messing with namespaces
without prior agreement. Using namespaces is a great way of improving
our environment, it is also a sure way of making an absolute mess when
this is done without careful deliberation.

The English Wikipedia is "leading" the way and it does not ask itself
what the consequences are for the other language versions of the
project. People mistake our mission, to create a great encyclopaedia
with a stable encyclopaedia or a validated encyclopaedia. They are not
necessarily the same thing. The Wiki way is about doing a good thing in
a simple way and in a collaborative way. When we make what we do too
complicated it loses the attributes what makes it work. Some people are
of the opinion that Wikipedia has a "sufficient" size and to those
people I want to point out that the sh.wikipedia for instance has
*2,321* <http://sh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Statistics> articles. That
does not suffice.

Thanks,
    GerardM


from_name: Blackcap

subject: [WikiEN-l] One line summaries of WP Guidelines and Policies

body:
On 12/22/05, David Gerard <fun at thingy.apana.org.au> wrote:
>
> Steve Bennett wrote:
>
> > * Insisting that the first sentence of each page be a summary for the
> > whole guideline. (As opposed to currently, where quite a few start with
> > a background to the problem, rather than the solution)
>
>
> That's a good idea in general. All policy and guidelines should be in
> summary style with a lead section in strict inverted pyramid. This is
> really important.

Seconded.


body:
> Some years ago the IRS decided that it needed to simplify
> instructions
> by putting everything at the 10th grade reading level.  One
> effect was
> to make the tax guide thicker because thaey had to use
> smaller words..
> For people who already knew how to read this stuff it meant weading
> through long-winded paraphrases which many or may not have meant the
> same thing that they said before.  Those who could not read it before
> were not exactly encouraged by the prospect of reading an
> even longer guide.
>
> Another of the US Government wonders was the Paperwork
> Reduction Act.
> In some instances it involved adding a separate slip to documents
> expressing how much they were commited to reducing paperwork.

These are cute examples, but they're not fair analogies.  I'm proposing
replacing a long document which says "Read all these subdocuments. Some
of them are relevant, some of them aren't. Some have been voted on, some
haven't. Oh, and here are a couple of old ones that we're preserving for
"historical interest"", with,
Here are the rules:
*[[WP:3RR]] If you revert a single page more than three times in 24
hours, you may be blocked.
...

Here are the general guidelines we'd like you to follow here:
*[[wikipedia:Edit summary]]: Always type at least a brief summary of the
change that you made in the Edit Summary box. Avoid misleading
summaries.
...

Here's are some tips on how to behave and have a good time here:
*[[wikipedia:Harassment]]: Don't make life miserable for other users,
such as by wiki-stalking them, or you may be blocked.
...

Ie: You don't even need to read the subdocuments to get a pretty fair
idea of what's expected of you here. Obviously you *should* read the
actual policy documents, but most people don't. And this is a hell of a
lot better than nothing.

Can anyone here claim to have read every item on [[Category:Wikipedia
official policy]] (41 articles) and [[Category:Wikipedia guidelines]]
(67 articles, 5 subcategories)?  What if you only had to read one page,
that succinctly summarised each of them? Would you consider it?

Steve


subject:
[WikiEN-l] Original researchvs.
	Fact-checking(Wikipedia:Biographies of living persons)

body:
> >The problem is that I, as a normal editor, have no way of verifying
> >anything when User:Joe_Blog changes something in an article and just
> >cites "Personal Correspondence". Do I leave it there or not?
> I say not.
> >
> It depends on the kind of information involved.  If it's routine
> personal information, it should probably stay.

It also depends on User:Joe_Blog being an entity that allows
verification of its personal correspondance. Anyway we seemed to be
agreed (I think?) that correspondance to the Wikipedia Foundation
(name?) can be cited, so anyone finding incorrect bio information on
themselves has a fairly easy way out - email them and cite it. If they
don't believe you're you, then you may have some more hoops to jump
through.

Steve


from_name: Lars Aronsson

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Stable versions policy

body:
Wikipedia Romania (Ronline) wrote:

> The fuss is about the fact that under the stable versions
> policy, Wikipedia will change from becoming a fully open, free
> wiki encyclopedia, to a static encyclopedia with a wiki
> *option*. It reminds me of both the failed Nupedia and the
> structure Encarta announced a few months ago to make itself more
> "open".

I might not agree with your analogies, but if you voice this
criticism now, others are likely to do the same, and that means it
would be wise to have the counterarguments ready.  Instead of
saying "we should have stable versions", we should state exactly
what the current problem is, so we can tell if the new approach
succeeds or fails to solve it.

In the beginning, someone must have thought "if I only had a free
online encyclopedia...".  What we have now with Wikipedia might
not (yet) fulfill the need of an (all-round) encyclopedia, but it
certainly is a database of many good articles, from where you can
often pick what you need.

Instead of thinking of (the English) Wikipedia as a basket of
850,000 articles in their current version, we can think of it as a
basket of X million article-versions.  Maybe I like the latest
version of the article on Gabon, but the December 3 version of the
article on Angola.  For another article, say Vadsbo (a stub), I
might be frustrated with every version, and this is no different
from a topic where Wikipedia has no article at all.  Every
article-version in this collection of X million is free under
GFDL, and can be used as the basis for new article-versions.
Anybody can add new article-versions to the collection.

Currently Wikipedia works under the assumption that the latest
version of any article is the best one, and the only one that
should be linked from other articles, shown to the public and
indexed by search engines.  It is important that we realize that
this *is* an assumption, it does represent a design choice, and
not necessarily the optimal one.

If I'm compiling a Wikireader or a similar subset of articles, I
might pick my article-versions under very different assumptions.

I'm surprised that Wikipedia mirrors such as Answers.com don't
work more like Wikireaders, where a human editor picks useful
article-versions and leaves the stubs unmirrored.  The added value
from such an "editor's choice" would be a perfectly valid business
model.

--
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se