subject: [Wikipedia-l] Dream a little...

body:
Gerard Meijssen wrote:

>David Gerard wrote:
>
>
>>On 23/10/06, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>>>When the $100 million dollars is spend in the United States, we have
>>>achieved something for the United States.. At this moment the amount of
>>>traffic is slowly but surely moving away from the English language
>>>domination in both our traffic and in in content. Given that there is a
>>>lot available in English in the first place, I expect that we have a
>>>better return on investment from what we do for other languages and
>>>cultures.
>>>The other cultures are underfunded relatively to the huge amounts of
>>>money that are spend on English language content in the first place.
>>>
>>>
>>The reason for changing the laws first in the US is because they tend
>>to pressure the rest of the world into 'harmonising' with their
>>copyright laws.
>>
>>
>Hoi,
>Spending all this money on changing the law in the USA is imho largely a
>waste of money. There are so many productive things that can be done
>with it. There is so much content that is need of preservation. Things
>that are not available in any US repository. There is so much even in US
>repositories that is NOT English that needs preservation.
>
Spending that whole amount trying to change US law would be very
wasteful.  Designating a _small_ part of it to influence what can be
realistically accomplished would not be out of line.  This would apply
to both US and other countries' laws.

For the rest of it I absolutely agree with you.  One impression that I
get from many people's posts is a failure to grasp the enormous scope of
the problem.  While I don't completely oppose copying a novel from
Project Gutenberg to Wikisource, in most cases that only amounts to
moving an existing solution sideways.  There is more benefit to be
gained by adding material that is not yet on line anywhere, or that is
ted up by ridiculous proprietary agreements.

>The Wikimedia Foundation is about content. By doing what we do best, the
>creation of content and making this content available, we make the
>business model of proprietary knowledge more and more problematic. By
>becoming an ever important factor for the availability of knowledge, our
>position will be such that we will have as a consequence increased
>influence on the politics behing copy right. Combine this with the
>growing realisation that science is hampered by the effects of copyright
>the momentum is ours anyway.
>
Absolutely.

>If there was one situation where I would agree that some action was
>warranted, it would be when the USA decides the copyright period yet
>again. This would be a good moment to move the Wikimedia Foundation to a
>more benign country. Being realistic however, it would have more
>symbolic meaning than actual effect given what American judges to
>organisations that are clearly outside their jurisdiction like in the
>Spamhouse case.
>
"Spamhaus" rather than "Spamhouse" for those who are not finding it.

We've got 11 years before the United States again has to deal with
pressure from the Disney Corporation on this.  A lot can happen in the
interim.  We can certainly be more pro-active than waiting for the
opportunity to react to a legislative initiative with which we
disagree.  In such a case as you point out the choice of a "benign"
country would not be that simple; it couldn't be a member of the EU.
There is no model for a large multinational non-profit corporation.  The
kind of move that you suggest can be an important factor in contingency
planning, but that should not imply any kind of absolute commitment to
the action that you suggest.  Building an infrastructure that would
include redundancy and allow for an almost instantaneous move of the
central node to any of several sites or countries seems like a more
sensible plan.  The conceivable scenarios that would require such a move
go well beyond displeasure with US copyright law.

Jurisdiction for internet cases is not a simple issue.  US anti-spam
legislation has been strenghthened since the Spamhaus suit was filed so
it's not clear if the results would be the same.  The US isn't the only
country trying to claim jurisdiction in internet cases.  Some countries
claim that merely having residents who download from a copyright site is
enough to give them jurisdiction.  There is a notable Australian case on
this.

Ec


list: wikitech-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Liz Kim

subject: [Wikitech-l] Search

body:
Is there a way to incorp wiki search + google search??
thank you


from_name: Michael Biven

subject: [Wikitech-l] Is there a best recipe to remove index.php fromthe URL?

body:
After looking and trying  the options suggested in the
"Eliminating_index.php_from_the_url" page I'm at a lose to find one
that works completely.

My situation is that mediawiki is server on SERVER A running on apache
1.3 and is proxied behind SERVER B running Litespeed. And I'm using
aliases to remove index.php from the URL.

Below is a example of how the vhost is setup for the site.

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerAdmin admin at website.com
    DocumentRoot /Library/WebServer/Documents/mediawiki
    ErrorLog /var/log/httpd/wiki.website.com-error_log
    CustomLog /var/log/httpd/wiki.website.com-access_log common
    Alias /community/w /Library/WebServer/Documents/mediawiki/w/
    Alias /community /Library/WebServer/Documents/mediawiki/w/index.php
    Alias /index.php /Library/WebServer/Documents/mediawiki/w/index.php
</VirtualHost>

Everything works except for any special page that still includes the
index.php in its URL (the login link top right  and any new page).
When clicking on any of these pages mediawiki wants to edit the page
Index.php as a new page.

Can anyone point me in the right  direction please?

--
Michael Biven
michael.biven at gmail.com   http://claimid.com/michael-biven
http://biven.org                    http://barcamp.org/BourbonCamp


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Ivo Emanuel Gonçalves

subject: [Wikipedia-l]  Re: Dream a little...

body:
Jimmy Wales jwales at wikia.com wrote:
> I would like to gather from the community some examples of works you
> would like to see made free, works that we are not doing a good job of
> generating free replacements for, works that could in theory be
> purchased and freed.

I'd like to suggest buying Mickey Mouse and Donal Duck, so they'll
finally become public domain and, with some luck, maybe Disney will
stop screwing around with copyright law.

Does anyone else agree?

Best regards,
Ivo Emanuel Gon?alves


list: wikien-l

from_name: Phil Sandifer

subject: [WikiEN-l] Articles for

body:
On Oct 23, 2006, at 4:26 PM, Earle Martin wrote:

> Surely having an article on every "Rugrats" episode ever (to pick a
> random example) is overkill?
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Rugrats_episodes
>
> The list begins as a plain list but descends into a morass of
> redlinks.
>
> What is the usefulness threshold when it comes to writing episode
> articles?

For quite a long time, the classic quote regarding "Wikipedia is not
paper" was that there's no reason we can't have articles on every
episode of the Simpsons.

As a result, we are rather stuck with a consensus for episode
articles. This is often unfortunate - sometimes exceedingly so. (C.f.
the Doctor Who episode articles, which are the main blemish on what
would otherwise be one of the few popular culture areas to really
lack idiotic fancruft.)

-Phil


from_name: Allison Muri

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Dream a little...

body:
What I would very much like to see is the purchase and release of
images that are themselves in the public domain, but are still locked
in a stranglehold by museums and libraries that claim they have
copyright on the photographs of those images. This is particularly
true in the UK where museums and libraries typically charge large
fees for reproductions, then large fees for using the images;
sometimes the claim for copyright of the photographs of materials in
the public domain is also made in the USA--where Bridgeman vs Corel
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgeman_vs_Corel) has set a precedent
but hasn't been endorsed by the Supreme Court; and sometimes this
claim for copyright is made in Canada as well. I don't know a lot
about other countries, but probably there are similar issues all over
the world: large organizations that are supposed to be stewards of
cultural history in fact are hoarders of it. The result is that a
huge portion of our history is too expensive for many people to see
and and admire and study, and oftentimes too expensive or legally too
problematic for scholars to include in their published studies.

APM


list: foundation-l

from_name: Pat Gunn

subject: [Foundation-l] Other mailing lists to summarise

body:
Hello,
As some of you may have noticed, I, along with a few
volunteers who showed up, now have LSS (List Summary Service)
going for foundation-l in English, French, and Spanish:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/LSS

Earlier when I announced it, I said I'd like to wait to get
used to the workload before I took on any other lists. I'm
pretty comfortable with the pace at this point, and would
be willing to take on another list with roughly the same
volume -- if anyone can suggest another list important to
the community that's not too much bigger, I'll start on
it. If anyone has ideas on how to get more eyes on the
list summaries, feel free to put them into practice.

I can't speak for the volunteers willingness to take on
more translation, but I suspect that foundation-l is the
most important list, for community relations, to translate
anyhow (and that translated versions are actually more important
than the English edition because they improve trust between the
other-language communities and the English-dominated foundation
folk). The people who stepped up so far are, from the Spanish
Wikipedia, FAR and Cinabrium, and from the French Wikipedia,
(:Julien:) and Teofilo (with a few smaller edits from other folk).

---
Pat Gunn
mod: csna, bmcm, bmco, cooa, cona, clpd, coom
http://dachte.org
Ceaselessly the river flows, and yet the water is never the same,
while in the still pools the shifting foam gathers and is gone,
never staying for a moment.
        -- Hojoki (poem by 13th century Japanese monk)


list: wikimedia-l


from_name: jkelly at fas.harvard.edu

subject: [WikiEN-l] Articles for

body:
  Hi,

> On Oct 23, 2006, at 4:26 PM, Earle Martin wrote:
>
> > Surely having an article on every "Rugrats" episode ever (to pick a
> > random example) is overkill?
> >
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Rugrats_episodes

  Hm.  I don't if I have much of an opinion about the idea in the abstract, but
I'm pretty sure that [[Chanukah]] shouldn't be a incomprehensible article about
an episode of a television show with a disambiguating header to the holiday.

                     Jkelly


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Dream a little...

body:
Maury Markowitz wrote:

>>Spending all this money on changing the law in the USA is imho largely a
>>waste of money.
>>
>>
>And resources. I contribute to the Wiki to help provide an alternative to
>the marketingspeak and lawyer-writen short-term memory that forms a
>surprising amount of the 'web. Political lobbying is the sort of thing I
>come to the wiki to avoid.
>
Some people don't mind doing that; they even find it fun.  That doesn't
mean that you have to do it when there are so many other things here
that you  might find more enjoyable.

>I still think everyone is much too focused on "big content". I'm much more
>concerned about the huge amount of non-commercial content that gets stamped
>with a copyright without the author having any idea of how that works. I
>have posted on this before, and the answers were always "well that's what CC
>is for". True as that may be, no-one's ever heard of it. _I_ never heard of
>it until coming to the wiki.
>
I'm familiar with your point.  Too many of our colleagues prefer the
risk of castration to the risk of even remotely breaking their
uninformed vision of the law.

>Consider the millions of snapshots that are taken every week and posted on
>the 'net. One or two of them would improve the wiki, I'm sure, but we can't
>use them. Not because the snapshot-taker has any intension of making money,
>but because it was copyrighted "by default" and they are completely unaware
>of it. This has happened to me repeatedly when trying to get images for
>articles. And contrary to the claims here, most librarians and archivists
>are completely unaware of either the problem or the solutions.
>
As things stand that is a political issue.  The law clearly gives them
copyright protection whether they want it or not.  Politicians need to
consider this in dealing with orphan copyrights.  Unfortunately, we have
too many admins whose willingness to deal with the problem shows them to
have all the abilities they need to grovel with politicians.

>So I still think education would be a good use of these funds. Who cares
>about the big media houses when there is so much content out there that's
>free but shackled? Let's try to fix THAT problem, lets make sure people know
>there is a better way.
>
I'm pessimistic.  The best education is for people to go ahead and do it.

Ec


from_name: Graham Pearce

subject:
[Wikitech-l] major accessibility problem recently introduced
	toMediaWiki

body:
Tim Starling Wrote:
> I wonder if Freedom Scientific would be prepared to donate a few licenses
> for the developers.
>
The demos of JAWS are fully functional - they will run for forty minutes and
then the computer must be rebooted to run them again. The last time I checked,
the ILM versions ran like this indefinitely but the "free demo" downloads will
run for 60 days. See:
http://www.freedomscientific.com/fs_downloads/jaws.asp
http://www.freedomscientific.com/fs_downloads/morejaws.asp
http://www.freedomscientific.com/fs_downloads/morejaws2.asp
And for a summary of the new features for each version since 2001, see:
http://www.freedomscientific.com/fs_products/software_jawsfeatures.asp
An ILM license will run JAWS versions 5.1 or above and the Quella license will
run JAWS versions 3.0 to 5.1. There are two versions of JAWS: standard, which
runs on windows 9x/ME/XP home and professional which runs on windows
NT/2000/XP pro. The latter is much more expensive to purchase and maintain.
http://www.freedomscientific.com/fs_products/JAWS_HQ.asp #Purchasing
Information

Window-Eyes is also a widely-used screen reader - it used to be Vocal-Eyes for
DOS. The demo has similar limitations; its address is:
www.gwmicro.com

Graham


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Dream a little...

body:
Ivo Emanuel Gon?alves wrote:

>Jimmy Wales jwales at wikia.com wrote:
>
>
>>I would like to gather from the community some examples of works you
>>would like to see made free, works that we are not doing a good job of
>>generating free replacements for, works that could in theory be
>>purchased and freed.
>>
>>
>I'd like to suggest buying Mickey Mouse and Donal Duck, so they'll
>finally become public domain and, with some luck, maybe Disney will
>stop screwing around with copyright law.
>
>Does anyone else agree?
>
That sounds like an expensive ticket for admission into a sideshow.

Ec


subject:
[Wikitech-l] major accessibility problem recently introduced
	to	MediaWiki

body:
dbenzhuser wrote:
>
> Timwi schrieb:
>
> > I agree with them. I say nuke the floats, and place the span after the
> > section title into the h# element.
>
> Even though I agree with you and would like to see the behavior from de
> and fr to be default, there should be a possibility to switch to the old
> style. Most people on de.wiki like the new position of the links (or at
> least don't dislike it), but there are quiet some people that don't want
> to use it
> (http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spezial:Search?ns2=1&search=oldEditsec
> tionLinks&fulltext=Suche)

I like the way the edit section links are set up on de and fr; there also used
that way on the english wikiversity:
http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Monobook.js
In that configuration, the edit link is read after the section title and no
brackets are read, so I think it makes more sense from an accessibility
standpoint. I also think there should be an option to revert to the old
behaviour, probably in special:preferences so it's easily accessible.

Graham


from_name: Guy Chapman aka JzG

subject: [WikiEN-l] Include both, with sources?

body:
On Sun, 22 Oct 2006 17:47:01 -0600, Bryan Derksen
<bryan.derksen at shaw.ca> wrote:

>> You know about the great road name war of 2006, don't you?  SPUI has a
>> history of doing pretty much what he accuses the IP of.

>Ah. No, I wasn't aware of that. I thought you were talking about _me_
>when you said "another editor", and was quite confused. In that case
>never mind then. :)

Oh hell no - I didn't even consider the possibility of that
interpretation!  Sorry.  No, it's SPUI and the anon who seem to be
competing for the role of immovable object and irresistible force in
this case.

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


from_name: geni

subject:
[Foundation-l] Allegations of Wikipedia plagurism by
	Brandt/Websites he has stirred up sending nasty notices

body:
On 10/23/06, George Herbert <george.herbert at gmail.com> wrote:
> I picked two at random - I can't get to his info page on [[John Glover
> (general)]], and the info on the [[Julius L. Meier]] page does at first
> glance seem a copyvio, but someone seems to have nuked the WP page
> recently.  The text Brandt cites seems to be consistent with Google's cache.
>
> Can someone with an admin bit inform us who's deleting these articles (or if
> that was the only one, that one...)?

Me to a large extent with help from W.marsh.

We sorted this out last night:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:AN#Plagiarism_Detector_Bot

--
geni


body:
On 10/23/06, George Herbert <george.herbert at gmail.com> wrote:
> Are you sure that the removals were appropriate?  On first inspection,
> several of them seemed to be relatively minor and repairable plagarism.

I've been dealing with copyvios for long enough to know what I'm doing
despite what certian people think. In any case due to the GFDL
"fixing" would present issues.
--
geni


from_name: SPUI

subject: [WikiEN-l] Include both, with sources?

references:
<453A37BC.8050701@gmail.com>	<s0pkj21mc8llmrfb6ub5no4n4r9i88mmgg@4ax.com>	<453A7B45.4070309@telus.net>	<453A7EEF.8090505@gmail.com>	<kg9lj25dogmari6a0eh5c6ema2ggmak89m@4ax.com>	<453AA77E.6030602@gmail.com>	<453ADB91.1090707@shaw.ca>	<453ADC5D.30300@shaw.ca>	<pf9nj29o0nun0dr8u2baf4qelt1lfqmqd0@4ax.com>	<453BB04E.8040801@shaw.ca>	<b5knj218t3pnalgq9n2u677f4lkm3gpknc@4ax.com>	<453C02F5.6070602@shaw.ca>
	<453CFC8A.4090403@gmail.com>
	<2dgqj2ppbtbai9a0orksaatdmfn6i32o5e@4ax.com>

body:
Guy Chapman aka JzG wrote:
> On Mon, 23 Oct 2006 13:31:54 -0400, SPUI <drspui at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>>I just posted an email I got from FDOT that confirms what their data shows:
>>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:State_Road_913_%28Florida%29#SQUIDWARD.21
>>The IP claims that this is original research and won't accept it; is he
>>correct?
>
>
> Yes.

Even to back up other information?


from_name: Rory Stolzenberg

subject: [WikiEN-l] Editors, who are not editors

body:
My 14th edit was to an AfD, and nearly all of my current edits (except for
occasional RC patrolling and the first article I've written in months) are
to projectspace. So?

On 10/23/06, Peter Ansell <ansell.peter at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 23/10/06, Oskar Sigvardsson <oskarsigvardsson at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On 10/22/06, Peter Ansell <ansell.peter at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > According to a contribution history from
> > > http://tools.wikimedia.de/~interiot/cgi-bin/Tool1/wannabe_kate , they
> > > do not have any pages in Main space with over 10 edits, 9,7,7 are the
> > > top three. I am wondering why they are here, then I look at Wikipedia
> > > space and the highest page has 407, followed by 382, 326.
> >
> > Those kind of stats, without anything else, doesn't necessarily mean
> > much. If you're a person that do alot of RC-patrol and/or other
> > gnomish activites, you don't usually get that many edits per article.
> > Also, many people do substantial improvements in just one edit (I tend
> > to do that, and thus I have similar numbers). These situations are not
> > uncommon. I know a number users who have improved a thousands of
> > articles with just one edit. Many people edit that way. My point is
> > that you need to look at fuller picture of an editors activites before
> > you can judge him.
> >
> > As some other people have pointed out, if this editor did substantial
> > work before his latest 500 edits, even if that work was just cleanup
> > or RC-patrol and such, he has earned his position in the community.
> > And with that, his rights to influence policy.
> >
> > Again, I can't really say whether this is the case here. I'm just
> > saying, numbers can be decieving.
> >
> > --Oskar
>
> That may be the case if they do have a large number of single edit
> mainspace contributions, but they actually got straight into
> administration issues from the time they arrived, starting with XfD's
> in their first few edits and not stopping up until now.
>
> Maybe my initial summary was wrong. I was simply trying to point out
> that unless you know what the deal is with editing articles, how can
> you deal with the meta issues? Keep in mind this is not what I would
> call a company, its a single class community IMO.
>
> Peter Ansell
> _______________________________________________
> 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: Tim Starling

subject: [Wikitech-l] Password reminder from Wikipedia spam

body:
I've just implemented a per-user limit on password reminder emails. By
default, 24 hours must elapse from one password reminder to the next. I
figure if you've just been sent one password reminder, you don't need
another one, assuming your mail was working. There is also a per-IP limit
which was already implemented, it just needs to be configured properly. The
per-user limit prevents mail-bombing of a given user with multiple password
reminders, and the per-IP limit makes it more difficult to send password
reminders to a large volume of users. Per-IP limits are prone to false
positives due to shared IPs, and can be evaded to some degree by technically
capable users, but the per-user limit is quite secure.

Both features will be enabled on Wikipedia soon, if there are no sensible
objections.

-- Tim Starling


body:
On 10/23/06, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> No need for emotion. When he is helpful (intentionally or otherwise)
> we should take his help, when he is not we should ignore him.
>
> Having a bot check the history isn't so trivial, in any case.

The problem being the increased number of versions although I think
there is talk of working from databse dumps.

--
geni


list: commons-l

from_name: Fredrik Josefsson

subject: [Commons-l] PD-UN template

body:
On behalf of a user who asked a question on Commons:

Question about [[s:en:Template:PD-UN]]
<http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/en:Template:PD-UN> and
its Chinese and French versions hereto. When
Wikisource was a multilingual site accepting all
languages, it had so many UN Security Council
resolutions posted by various users unaware of UN
copyright. As the UN Headquarters is subject to the
same USA laws, works published there are copyrighted
in the same way as works published in the USA.

Works published in the USA between 1978 and 1 March
1989 without copyright notices and without subsequent
copyright registrations are in the public domain in
the USA, but should subsequent copyright registrations
be validly made, the works become copyrighted. I would
like to ask if these works are acceptable here. This
is critical as most, if not all, images at
[[:Category:Stamps of United Nations]] may be indeed
copyrighted.

----

I thought I ask at the mailinglist, see if anyone can
provide an answer...

/ Fred-Chess


from_name: Gerard Meijssen

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Dream a little...

body:
Ray Saintonge wrote:
> David Gerard wrote:
>
>
>> On 23/10/06, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>>> When the $100 million dollars is spend in the United States, we have
>>> achieved something for the United States.. At this moment the amount of
>>> traffic is slowly but surely moving away from the English language
>>> domination in both our traffic and in in content. Given that there is a
>>> lot available in English in the first place, I expect that we have a
>>> better return on investment from what we do for other languages and
>>> cultures.
>>> The other cultures are underfunded relatively to the huge amounts of
>>> money that are spend on English language content in the first place.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>> The reason for changing the laws first in the US is because they tend
>> to pressure the rest of the world into 'harmonising' with their
>> copyright laws.
>>
>>
> I don't see that as necessarily the case.  For a long time US copyright
> law had renewals.  Despite some completely understandable difficulties I
> think this was a good idea in general.  That is gone.  The US also based
> copyright terms on date of publication rather than the death date of the
> author; that too was changed in 1976 to conform with international
> rules.  The US has not (yet) adopted database protection laws that could
> result in keeping some material protected indefinitely even when it is
> already in the public domain.
>
> The EU has done a fine job of building laws to support bureaucracy, and
> there is an unfortunate unwillingness on the part of EU members to adopt
> legislative positions that would run contrary to the bureaucratizing
> trends of the EU administrators.  While it is important to keep US
> legislation moving in the direction of openness, it is as illusory to
> believe that this openness will trickle down to other countries as it is
> to believe in trickle-down economics.  Far more effort needs to be
> directed at the EU, whose administration only magnifies the
> amateurishness of our own AfD clique.
>
> Too often when the issue of making information available to everybody
> the brick wall is not in the US but in the EU.  In many respects other
> activities by the US in other unrelated matters have pointed to an
> abandonment of moral leadership.  The effect of that is toward a
> disinclination on the part of other countries to follow the US lead,
> even when it would be beneficial to do so.  I don't see Europe doing
> anything to accept leadership.  I see one fat orange cat sitting in
> Brussels ignoring its herd of Odies.
>
> Unlike Gerard I don't think this should become a matter of the English
> language versus other languages.  If the issue is a question of laws
> that has nothing to do with the language in which those laws are
> written.  If it has to do with the language of material to be put into
> our databases, there are non-English materials in US depositories that
> can as easily be put into the database.  The fact nevertheless remains
> that it takes people familiar with a language to make informed decisions
> about what should be included.  I understand the lack of support for OCR
> in other scripts, notably those of Asia, but again don't expect people
> whose everyday life is exclusively in a Roman script to have the ability
> to develop that technical support.
>
> Ec
Hoi,
Well as we are dreaming, creating support for the support of OCR for
scripts other than the Roman languages would be a good idea.. Remember
we are dreaming about spending 100.000.000 US. I am sure we will find
developers in countries where there are MANY scripts like Iran that will
be quite happy to help us with this. It is also not hard to find
developers to do a similar thing in Ghana or Nigeria.

Where Ray does not find a reason to spend money in non-Roman language
countries, I find many reasons; there is this obvious need and, you do
buy more developer time for your money. Given the huge amount of data
that is already available for the Roman language cultures, it would very
much open up cultures that are unknown to us. Not only that by being
genuinely interested in other cultures, the world will become more
diverse. It will also benefit the local cultures and it will prevent the
blindness that you get when people do not know their history. Then
again, there are many cultures that have a past that is almost unknown
because of political machinations allowing politicians to play their
game of divide and conquer.

Concluding, spend money on opening up historical documents of the
forgotten and often despised cultures. Spend money on what is considered
our enemies. This way we will not only learn to appreciate other
heritages than our own, we will learn that all human knowledge is our
heritage. I would suggest that that lesson alone is worth $
100.000.000.- It beats going to war in the productivity department.

Thanks,
    GerardM


from_name: David Monniaux

subject: [Commons-l] PD-UN template

body:
Fredrik Josefsson wrote:

>On behalf of a user who asked a question on Commons:
>
>Question about [[s:en:Template:PD-UN]]
><http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/en:Template:PD-UN> and
>its Chinese and French versions hereto. When
>Wikisource was a multilingual site accepting all
>languages, it had so many UN Security Council
>resolutions posted by various users unaware of UN
>copyright. As the UN Headquarters is subject to the
>same USA laws
>
How so? The headquarters are in extraterritorial territory.


from_name: Tomasz Wegrzanowski

body:
On 10/23/06, Jeff V. Merkey <jmerkey at wolfmountaingroup.com> wrote:
>
> Mr. Brandt has posted a long listing of articles to his website making
> allegations of plagurism
> of wikipedia articles from copyrighted sources.
>
> http://www.wikipedia-watch.org/psamples.html
>
> Some editors may want to investigate these claims to determine if the
> articles were copied from
> (Wikipedia -> these sites) or the other way around (these sites ->
> Wikipedia).
>
> I did receive a notice on a couple of the articles I had uploaded to
> Wikigadugi from the XML dumps
> along with some comments about "looking into possible copyright
> infringement" from one of the sites
> Brandt references which brought this matter to my attention in the first
> place.  Someone should probably
> go over these articles and determine if these claims have merit.
>
> I am not going to take down anythig from Wikigadugi right now since I am
> unable to determine if the
> articles were copied FROM Wikipedia or the other way around.

Brandt is nothing more than a troll.

Any genuine anti-plagiarism bot would at least look
at article histories whether the allegedly "plagiarized" part
was added at once (possible plagiarism) or build step by
step (definitely plagiarism the other way). The trollbot
doesn't do that because it's not interested in truth, just
in building an impresive list of mostly false cases to
attract attention.

Just one example (the very first I looked at):
* http://www.wikipedia-watch.org/plagiarism/0233.html
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henryk_Sienkiewicz

The trollbot might have found some actual plagiarism
by chance (with so many cases it isn't completely
unlikely that at least one is genuine), but most of them
are certainly fakes, so I suggest completely ignoring
the troll and the trollbot.

--
Tomasz Wegrzanowski [ http://t-a-w.blogspot.com/ ]


list: textbook-l

from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject: [Textbook-l] Problem with NPOV

body:
Brianna Laugher wrote:
> On 11/09/06, Andrew Whitworth <wknight8111 at hotmail.com> wrote:
>> Jimbo: If you want us to use a specific defintion of "textbook" and
>> "accredited institution", then you are going to have to mandate such
>> definitions to us. At the moment we are picking our way through such
>> matters, with varying degrees of success.
>
> It is my observation that TPTB is very reluctant to offer such
> definitions or mandates, even when requested. "Picking our way through
> such matters with varying degrees of success" -- it seems to be the
> wiki way. Try just making your own definitions (as a project), and I
> guess you'll find out if you've been too WP:BOLD if you notice some
> personal interventions after that. :)
>
> It doesn't seem ideal, but I guess I can understand why they're
> reluctant to define such things. Then the criticism of such things
> also falls to them. The people who are actually running the project
> should take control of its direction at some stage... although
> mandates would make life so easy.

Brianna has hit the nail on the head.  I believe firmly that the
communities are smarter than I am, that I should not be involved to the
level of detail that Andrew is asking for, except in an advisory
capacity more or less like everyone else.

I think that the charter of *what we are looking for* is pretty clear.
Andrew hit the nail on the head when he talked about bogus "accredited"
institutions teaching nonsense that we don't want, and about perfectly
good community centers teaching perfectly sensible stuff without
worrying about being accredited.

That doesn't mean that the "accredited institution" test is useless in
every respect, of course, and I am guessing that he would agree.  But it
does mean that we have to dig into more details.

Some of the main points that I think are important...

-- Wikibooks is something we can get very passionate about, but that
passionate vision is marred if we allow it to become a dumping ground
for stuff people don't want in Wikipedia, or a POV haven for nonsense, etc.

-- Wikibooks has a serious possibility to get independent funding, so
long as it remains focussed on its serious mission of textbooks.  Such
funding can be used to customize and improve the software for wikibooks,
as well as to *purchase and liberate* textbook works that already exist.

Suffice to say: we can get funding for Wikibooks to radically change the
education world if potential funders come to the project and see a
serious project doing good work.  We can not get funding for Wikibooks
if potential funders come to the project and look at it and see a bunch
of nonsense that we did not have the pride to disallow (random crap that
got pushed out of Wikipedia, for example).

Funders are eager to find solutions to important questions facing
education.  They are not eager to fund videogame manuals and pokeman
trivia reference books.

-- Wikibooks needs to focus on actual courses because we passionately
care that our work *actually be used in education*.  In order to get
textbooks adopted by real schools, they must meet curriculum standards.
  It is as simple as that.

-------------

I could go on, but I think you begin to see... there are some basic
standards and concepts, but really we need to work together carefully as
a community to build detailed policies to implement these and other
natural and sensible guidelines.

A fair amount of that work is already done, of course, and it will be a
long and ongoing process.

--Jimbo


from_name: Emmanuel Engelhart

subject: [Wikitech-l] Problem with mwdumper or the last frwiki dump

body:
HI

I have downloaded the last frwiki dump, in particulary:
http://download.wikimedia.org/frwiki/latest/frwiki-latest-pages-meta-history.xml.bz2

I have checked the md5.

I have tried to upload with the following command:

/home/kelson/tools/jre1.5.0_06/bin/java -server -classpath
/home/kelson/tools/mysql-connector-java-5.0.4/mysql-connector-java-5.0.4-bin.jar:/home/kelson/tools/mwdumper.jar
org.mediawiki.dumper.Dumper
--output=mysql://localhost/frwiki?user=*******\&password=********
--format=sql:1.5 frwiki-latest-pages-meta-history.xml.bz2 >& titi

And that's what I have got on stderr :

8 pages (1,26/sec), 1000 revs (157,456/sec)
10 pages (0,712/sec), 2000 revs (142,339/sec)
16 pages (0,712/sec), 3000 revs (133,583/sec)
20 pages (0,631/sec), 4000 revs (126,267/sec)
28 pages (0,759/sec), 5000 revs (135,45/sec)
32 pages (0,744/sec), 6000 revs (139,519/sec)
Exception in thread "main" java.io.IOException: java.sql.SQLException:
Not a valid escape sequence:
{[Mm]sg:/{{/',530,'Orthogaffe','20040603204946',...........

Any idea what goes wrong

Kelson


from_name: Earle Martin

subject: [WikiEN-l] Articles for

body:
Surely having an article on every "Rugrats" episode ever (to pick a
random example) is overkill?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Rugrats_episodes

The list begins as a plain list but descends into a morass of redlinks.

What is the usefulness threshold when it comes to writing episode articles?

--
Earle Martin
            http://downlode.org/
http://purl.org/net/earlemartin/


subject: [WikiEN-l] Articles for

body:
Sorry - post title there should have been "Articles for episodes".

--
Earle Martin
            http://downlode.org/
http://purl.org/net/earlemartin/


from_name: Nick Jenkins

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Code review + testing + comments sought: Internal
	image targets, external image targets, no image target.

body:
Hi All,

There's some functionality I'd welcome any testing of, and any code review comments that anyone would care to make.

The functionality is image linking to something besides the image description page. (a.k.a.
http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=539 )

The four modes are:
# An External link. Example usage: [[Image:Google.gif|link=[http://www.google.com/]]]
# An Internal link. Example usage: [[Image:Wikipedia.gif|link=[[Wikipedia]]]], or
[[Image:Google.gif|link=[[:en:http://www.google.com/]]]]  (yes, there is actually a "http://www.google.com/" redirect on the
Wikipedia, which points to [[Google]] ).
# No link. Example usage: [[Image:Wikipedia.gif|link=none]]
# Linking to the image description page, as per current. To get this, omit the "link=" parameter.

If you don't specify a link, then you just get the current default behaviour. Also the linking for each new type can be enabled or
disabled separately in LocalSettings.php , so if you wanted say internal links + no links, but are worried about spam on external
links, then you can enable just the 2 linking types you want. The default for all three options is off.

Note that the "link=" does not work inside a <gallery>. However, this is consistent with all the other image attributes, like
"right", "center", "thumb", "thumb=", "frame", and "left", none of which work inside galleries either.

There is a temporary test wiki for you to try out on this stuff located at: http://theplaypit.nickj.org/wiki/  . Please feel free to
modify whatever you like, or create any test pages or sandbox pages that you like, as I'm planning on killing that test wiki if/when
these patches or any equivalent functionality patches are checked in (or in two weeks, whichever happens sooner). The only request
I'd make is that you don't destroy the front page, so as to ensure that other people can easily see some examples of it being used
there on the Main Page.

The "svn diff" for the changes against SVN is at: http://files.nickj.org/MediaWiki/image-linking-diff.txt

Also, this diff retains the current "longdesc" attribute for <img> tags (i.e. it's there for current images, and you still get it
for images using link targets). To access this in Firefox, you right-click on an image, go to Properties, and in the popup box it
will say "Description:" and give the URL for the image's description page. This means that you can still get to the image
description page for an image, even if that images is linking off to somewhere else, or has no link. The "longdesc" tag is a W3C
standard img attribute ( for more info see: http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/objects.html#adef-longdesc-IMG ).

I also want to send a big acknowledgement out to Rowan Collins. Rowan, if you're out there somewhere, your patches were extremely
helpful to me - so thank you!

All the best,
Nick.


from_name: Matthew Brown

subject: [WikiEN-l] Deletionist graft

body:
On 10/23/06, ikiroid <ikiroid at gmail.com> wrote:
> Why does it seem like the wikipedia mailing list is used to make implicit
> requests to delete or undelete articles in an under-the-table fashion?

Wikien-l is the place to make dramatic statements, not the place to be
sneaky; its public archived nature makes it pretty bad for that.

-Matt


from_name: ikiroid

subject: [WikiEN-l] Deletionist graft

body:
Why does it seem like the wikipedia mailing list is used to make implicit
requests to delete or undelete articles in an under-the-table fashion?


subject: [WikiEN-l] Deletionist graft

body:
I know. We should tell that to the people trying to join the Cabal through
the mailing list ;-)


from_name: Julian Fleischer

body:
Am Freitag, 20. Oktober 2006 19:25 schrieb Sherool:
> Could we please get the feature eluded to here:
> <http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=5370> turned on for the
> English Wikipedia (and probably the rest of the projects too)? At least
> one vandal seems to have spesialised in spamming people with passwod
> reminders (he must have a bot), and growing number of people have been
> complaining about it. After replying to some threads about it on the admin
> noticeboard on enWiki I seem to have incured the "wrath" of this
> individual as well since I found 112 password reminders in my mailbox
> today.
>
> Sure they are easy to filter out, but we can't let spammers have free
> reign like this. If there is such a "throttle" feature it needs to be
> activated ASAP (how many times a day does the average user forget his
> password?). If nothing else all these mails are a unnessesary strain on
> our mail system. Pluss some users have "threatened" to report it to
> SpamCop and such, and we don't want our mailserver blacklisted now do we?

wouldn't the whole problem be avoided it the user had to fill in his
e-mail-address (which he hopefully hasn't forgot...) when asking for the
password reminding email?

greetz

--
Public Key at http://keys.warhog.net/mediazilla_warhog_net.asc
md5sum: b2bc5b96358bb5f0ab499f7720b999c1
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subject: [Wikitech-l] a table with links to  commons

body:
Hi,

Would it be possible for e.g. Wikipedia pages to have a table for links
to commons (and other projects), in the same way that there is a
languagelinks table?

(This is for building a tool for finding images more easily.)

Thanks


from_name: Simetrical

subject:
[Wikitech-l] major accessibility problem recently introduced to
	MediaWiki

references:
<NDEPLAOJDHOKOBHKHJJOIEKMDLAA.grahamwp@optusnet.com.au>
	<7c2a12e20610221129p13c0e1aalf5ec7f6e0dd2f1aa@mail.gmail.com>
	<ehgnoi$sfd$2@sea.gmane.org>
	<7c2a12e20610221431s5e48d48fl346e927d7adc6ca7@mail.gmail.com>
	<453D81D4.404@pobox.com>

body:
On 10/23/06, Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:
> To be honest, I can't tell the different between the old look and the
> new look. They always have been on the same level to my eye.

In Monobook it's clearly a bit above, at least for h1's and h2's.
There's a very visible gap separating the horizontal rule from the
link.  In most other styles, yeah, the difference is pretty much
invisible.


from_name: Delphine Ménard

body:
Pat,

On 10/23/06, Pat Gunn <pgunn at dachte.org> wrote:

> As some of you may have noticed, I, along with a few
> volunteers who showed up, now have LSS (List Summary Service)
> going for foundation-l in English, French, and Spanish:
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/LSS

[snip]

> I can't speak for the volunteers willingness to take on
> more translation, but I suspect that foundation-l is the
> most important list, for community relations, to translate
> anyhow (and that translated versions are actually more important
> than the English edition because they improve trust between the
> other-language communities and the English-dominated foundation
> folk). The people who stepped up so far are, from the Spanish
> Wikipedia, FAR and Cinabrium, and from the French Wikipedia,
> (:Julien:) and Teofilo (with a few smaller edits from other folk).
>

Just because I don't think I have said it before, I wanted to thank
you and all those who are taking part in this, it is a precious thing
you are doing here.

Cheers,

Delphine

--
~notafish
NB. This address is used for mailing lists. Personal emails sent to
this address will probably get lost.


from_name: Phil Sandifer

subject: [WikiEN-l] Deletionist graft

body:
On Oct 23, 2006, at 10:59 PM, geni wrote:

> On 10/24/06, ikiroid <ikiroid at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Why does it seem like the wikipedia mailing list is used to make
>> implicit
>> requests to delete or undelete articles in an under-the-table
>> fashion?
>
> It's a public mailing list there are far better ways to have things
> deleted under the table.

For some reason, my mind immediately goes to deleting people under
the table.

When BLP meets alcohol abuse!

-Phil


from_name: Platonides

body:
"David Monniaux"
> Hi,
>
> Would it be possible for e.g. Wikipedia pages to have a table for links
> to commons (and other projects), in the same way that there is a
> languagelinks table?
>
> (This is for building a tool for finding images more easily.)
>
> Thanks

Image references to commons are stored in the same way as local image
references are. Given any reference in that table there're three cases:
Local image, commons image and inexistent image (deleted, badname...)

What would help on it is not having a table on each wikipedia, but a
incoming table on common to all wikis.


from_name: Guy Chapman aka JzG

subject: [WikiEN-l] Include both, with sources?

body:
On Mon, 23 Oct 2006 13:31:54 -0400, SPUI <drspui at gmail.com> wrote:

>I just posted an email I got from FDOT that confirms what their data shows:
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:State_Road_913_%28Florida%29#SQUIDWARD.21
>The IP claims that this is original research and won't accept it; is he
>correct?

Yes.

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


subject: [Commons-l] www.wikitheque.fr (.org, .com)

body:
"Brianna Laugher" wrote:
> wikitheque like discotheque?

-theque
>From greek ????
Place where something is saved.
Biblioth?que, filmoth?que...

I wonder why a discotheque is called like that :P


from_name: Tangotango

body:
Hi, I'm in the process of asking the other bootcampers their opinions
regarding this matter. One thing to note that at #wikipedia-bootcamp we have
two bots that report information specific to the English Wikipedia (people
requesting help via the {{helpme}} template, and new topics to the Help
desk, New contributors' help page and Requests for feedback), which may not
be desirable for users of other projects. Therefore, it /might/ be better to
create a new channel, but as I said, I'm still asking around. I'll keep you
posted.

Cheers,

Tangotango

-----Original Message-----
From: foundation-l-bounces at wikimedia.org
[mailto:foundation-l-bounces at wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of effe iets anders
Sent: Monday, October 23, 2006 4:18 AM
To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Proposed guidelines in our IRC channels

Would it be an option to move the channel to #wikimedia-info or a similar
not-so-english-centric-name without losing the people who help others out?
(I though it was possible to make a redirect?) Are you guys very attached to
the channel-name? It's just that -info is easier to remember and find for
non-native english people.

Effeietsanders

2006/10/22, Tangotango <tangotango at wikignome.net>:
> This topic might be a little old, but as a regular in
> #wikipedia-bootcamp, I can definitely say that this channel is
> dedicated to helping users out. We do occasionally get users from
> other Wikimedia projects, and although our level of expertise in
> languages other than English may be lacking depending on the time and
> users active, we are always friendly and attempt to help anyone who
> comes in. The channel is also largely free of off-topic conversation.
>
> If we can get a combination of (1) more experienced and friendly
> Wikimedians with expertise in languages other than English and (2)
> more users from different projects who need help, then I think we
> would do great as a multilingual support channel.
>
> Tangotango
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: geni <geniice at gmail.com>
> Sent: October 13 2006
>
> On 10/13/06, Oldak Quill <oldakquill at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Last time I was using IRC (quite a few months), #wikipedia was the
> juvenile,
> > off-topic channel and #wikipedia-en (the official support channel
> > for
> > en.wikipedia) was largely quiet. But, mainly for non-English
> > speakers, it may be useful to create an multilingual support channel
> > free from
> off-topic
> > conversation.
> >
> > --
> > Oldak Quill (oldakquill at gmail.com)
>
> #wikipedia-bootcamp would probably come closest.
>
> --
> geni
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>
_______________________________________________
foundation-l mailing list
foundation-l at wikimedia.org
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l


subject: [Foundation-l] Proposed guidelines in our IRC channels


from_name: Anthere

subject: [Foundation-l] Board retreat

body:
Hello all,

  I am beginning to see in my inbox a pile of emails wondering what is happening, where we are etc... :)

  So, to make it short, we had last week end a board retreat in Frankfurt (roughly 25 people moved there for the 3 days of the retreat). In my opinion it was very productive. All of us went out of it alive (though... I saw several empty bottles of whisky littering the lobby floor when I left very early on monday... so, maybe not)

  All participants should be soon back home.

  Oscar volunteered to write a report about the Retreat and the decisions which were made, and I presume it should be today or tomorrow. So, heads up everyone, cool pictures and news are on their way !

  I myself drifted a couple of thousands miles to the North (Finland), where I would not be so surprised to see snow soon. More feedback after I get back home on thursday evening.

  Anthere

---------------------------------
 All-new Yahoo! Mail - Fire up a more powerful email and get things done faster.


subject: [Foundation-l] Board retreat


from_name: Erik Moeller

references:
<OHEOKBPIOKBGALOCIOHIAEIOFBAA.bastique@bellsouth.net>
	<453A1BD6.3000604@free.fr>
	<54f6f2050610211211n37d6066eted1d80d6c6dee0fd@mail.gmail.com>

body:
On 10/21/06, Oldak Quill <oldakquill at gmail.com> wrote:
> Would it not be better to get it approved/officialised by Wikimedia
> Foundation for hosting on servers?

I think that would be the way to go if, 6-12 months from now, we
decide that it has been a success and would be useful in other
languages as well. At the moment, I see it as a cool experiment.
--
Peace & Love,
Erik

Member, Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees

DISCLAIMER: Unless otherwise stated, all views or opinions expressed
in this message are solely my own and do not represent an official
position of the Wikimedia Foundation or its Board of Trustees.


from_name: ruthene

subject: [Commons-l] Dream a little...

body:
I'd suggest the source of the software used by CIA to synthesize 100% authentic
sounding speech from voice samples :]


from_name: John Kenney

subject: [WikiEN-l]  School of Hard Knocks, or, what I learnt from my RfA

body:
Greetings all,

I'm not a member of the mailing list, because whenever I look at it I
usually find something that drives me completely insane, but I do
occasionally browse it, and this thread has angered me enough to come out of
hiding.  Both the general state of RfA, which I instinctively avoid but
which is a monstrously horrific place; and the character of Geni's replies
have made me hopping mad.

So first thing's first, I am one of the numerous "paper admins" towards whom
Geni is so condescending.  I almost never block anyone, I don't frequent the
administrators' noticeboard very often, I rarely protect or unprotect
pages.  Here's what I use my admin powers for:

I occasionally do rollback reverts.  I delete pages when I move redirects.
I recently fixed a cut and paste move that I doubt is on many people's
watchlists (it had survived as is for months).  I will occasionally look at
deleted edits, and it's definitely useful to know when a page has been
speedy deleted in a location that has a clearly notable subject.  I move
pages around a fair amount - I would become really, really annoyed if I
didn't have that power.

So, I don't use admin powers very much, and when I do, it's for mostly
uncontroversial things.  I don't think I've ever faced much in the way of
complaints about my use of admin powers.  I've certainly never gone to
arbitration, and I can't think of any instances where I've been RfCed or
anything like that.  I was made an admin some three years ago.  I'm fairly
certain that if I resigned my adminship and requested adminship anew, on the
basis of my use of admin powers, I would not be regranted them.

Point is this - what harm does it do if there's a lot of administrators like
me?  It seems like the current RfA process is essentially designed to
prevent people from getting adminship unless they promise that they're going
to use their Admin powers a lot to "fight vandalism," and jump through a
bunch of hoops.  But isn't it good to have reasonably reliable, restrained
(in terms of admin powers) people who can do simple things like delete
redirects to clear way for moves?

Beyond that, how on earth does answering 50 to 60 random questions proposed
by a bunch of tiresome busybodies help anybody judge who will be a good
admin?  Obviously, the project is gigantic now, and people can't be expected
to be familiar with every editor.  Glancing at the current RfA, Elonka was
the only user currently up who I'd ever heard of before.  But the thing that
should come out of this is that people should only vote when they actually
have personal familiarity with the particular editor.  Quantitative
judgments based on things like number of edits in different domains, and
ass-kissing answers to a bunch of questions, provide just about no useful
information on whether somebody is a good, not insane, editor.  All that
should really be required to be an administrator is that you're relatively
reliable and not insane.  Once you have demonstrated to a sufficient number
of people *who have actually worked on articles with you* that you are
reasonably reliable and not insane, you should get to be an admin.  People
who have never encountered you before should abstain.  This is, so far as I
remember, what generally happened back in those lovely days when I was
chosen as an admin, and when I used to actually read RfA.  I would vote if
somebody I knew was up, and not vote if I'd never come across the person
before.  Now it seems as though everybody voting is basically a RfA junkey,
who spends a great deal of their wikipedia time getting people to jump
through hoops for their amusement.  What possible good is being achieved by
this?

The whole system is a horrifying bureaucratic nightmare.  And, no, this is
not what one has to look forward if one is an admin.  I avoid bureaucratic
nightmares as much as I possibly can, which is "a great deal."  Whenever I
get involved in a bureaucratic nightmare, it is because I choose to do so.
And yet, I'm fairly sure my being an admin is at least of some small use to
wikipedia.  Why shouldn't people be allowed to be an admin if a) they want
to; b) they are not crazy; and c) they have been around long enough to show
a decent number of people they aren't crazy?  Adminship is still officially
"no big deal," but it is clearly "no big deal" in some sense where the "no
big deal" is attained through a nightmarish bureaucratic process.  How can
anybody defend this ridiculousness?

Best to all,

John


from_name: geni

subject: [WikiEN-l] Deletionist graft

body:
On 10/24/06, ikiroid <ikiroid at gmail.com> wrote:
> Why does it seem like the wikipedia mailing list is used to make implicit
> requests to delete or undelete articles in an under-the-table fashion?

It's a public mailing list there are far better ways to have things
deleted under the table.

--
geni


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject:
[Wikitech-l] major accessibility problem recently introduced
 to	MediaWiki

body:
Simetrical wrote:
> On 10/22/06, Timwi <timwi at gmx.net> wrote:
>> I don't understand why they're still floats? I thought the usability
>> study clearly concluded that they shouldn't be, and that the way the
>> German Wikipedia has implemented them now is more usable.
>
> The usability study concluded that people associated them with the
> section above.  This should be fixed by the fact that they're now on
> the same level as the header text.

To be honest, I can't tell the different between the old look and the
new look. They always have been on the same level to my eye.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: MacGyverMagic/Mgm

subject: [WikiEN-l] Deletionist graft

body:
Any hostile elements will be DELETED and you cannot stop us Doctor.
DELETE! DELETE! DELETE!!!

On 10/24/06, Matthew Brown <morven at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 10/23/06, ikiroid <ikiroid at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Why does it seem like the wikipedia mailing list is used to make
> implicit
> > requests to delete or undelete articles in an under-the-table fashion?
>
> Wikien-l is the place to make dramatic statements, not the place to be
> sneaky; its public archived nature makes it pretty bad for that.
>
> -Matt
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Dream a little...

body:
On 10/24/06, Maury Markowitz <maury_markowitz at hotmail.com> wrote:
> Maybe, but you have to hear about it first. I didn't. No one I know has. So
> who HAS heard of CC other than a few wiki-laywers and nerds? Can the number
> of people in the general public that are aware of these issues be
> represented on a handheld calculator?

My handhold calculator handles up to 10^99, so that's not really a
great way of describing it ;)  But I suspect you meant within seven
digits or so, so I suspect no more than a few million people worldwide
have even heard of it, yes.

A fairly large number of people on Flickr use CC licenses, for
example, but almost all of them pick 'non-commercial', since that
option is there and the knee-jerk reaction is 'Of course I don't want
corporations profiting off my work!'.

Some education/evangelism about free content and its benefits is
probably in order.

-Matt


from_name: Sean Barrett

subject: [WikiEN-l] Quitting Wikipedia and wanted you to know why.

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

Parker Peters stated for the record:

> This is the end of my involvement with Wikipedia.

It's like d?j? vu all over again!

- --
 Sean Barrett     | The other side to the Wikipedia that nobody really
 sean at epoptic.com | likes to talk about... is that a large portion of
                  | the content is fairly pornographic, and actually
                  | quite lewd. --Encyclopedia Britannica spokesman
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.2 (MingW32)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

iD8DBQFFPjVS/SVOiq2uhHMRAt5nAJ4xQJ2qNlRA5Ot5PYy9yKqBPs3yyACgiIcA
xbKvrH53ERfjIoA2Bs5LAdM=
=0JAo
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----


from_name: Peter Ansell

subject: [WikiEN-l] Editors, who are not editors

body:
On 23/10/06, Oskar Sigvardsson <oskarsigvardsson at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 10/22/06, Peter Ansell <ansell.peter at gmail.com> wrote:
> > According to a contribution history from
> > http://tools.wikimedia.de/~interiot/cgi-bin/Tool1/wannabe_kate , they
> > do not have any pages in Main space with over 10 edits, 9,7,7 are the
> > top three. I am wondering why they are here, then I look at Wikipedia
> > space and the highest page has 407, followed by 382, 326.
>
> Those kind of stats, without anything else, doesn't necessarily mean
> much. If you're a person that do alot of RC-patrol and/or other
> gnomish activites, you don't usually get that many edits per article.
> Also, many people do substantial improvements in just one edit (I tend
> to do that, and thus I have similar numbers). These situations are not
> uncommon. I know a number users who have improved a thousands of
> articles with just one edit. Many people edit that way. My point is
> that you need to look at fuller picture of an editors activites before
> you can judge him.
>
> As some other people have pointed out, if this editor did substantial
> work before his latest 500 edits, even if that work was just cleanup
> or RC-patrol and such, he has earned his position in the community.
> And with that, his rights to influence policy.
>
> Again, I can't really say whether this is the case here. I'm just
> saying, numbers can be decieving.
>
> --Oskar

That may be the case if they do have a large number of single edit
mainspace contributions, but they actually got straight into
administration issues from the time they arrived, starting with XfD's
in their first few edits and not stopping up until now.

Maybe my initial summary was wrong. I was simply trying to point out
that unless you know what the deal is with editing articles, how can
you deal with the meta issues? Keep in mind this is not what I would
call a company, its a single class community IMO.

Peter Ansell


from_name: Maury Markowitz

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Dream a little...

body:
>I'm pessimistic.  The best education is for people to go ahead and do it.

Maybe, but you have to hear about it first. I didn't. No one I know has. So
who HAS heard of CC other than a few wiki-laywers and nerds? Can the number
of people in the general public that are aware of these issues be
represented on a handheld calculator?

Maury

_________________________________________________________________
Ready for the world's first international mobile film festival celebrating
the creative potential of today's youth? Check out Mobile Jam Fest for your
a chance to WIN $10,000! www.mobilejamfest.com


from_name: Earle Martin

subject: [WikiEN-l] Deletionist graft

body:
On 24/10/06, ikiroid <ikiroid at gmail.com> wrote:
> Why does it seem like the wikipedia mailing list is used to make implicit
> requests to delete or undelete articles in an under-the-table fashion?

If this is at all related to my recent post, I think it's worth asking
people for their opinions here before jumping on teh
deletinator^H^HAfD.

--
Earle Martin
            http://downlode.org/
http://purl.org/net/earlemartin/


from_name: Parker Peters

body:
This is the end of my involvement with Wikipedia.

I just wanted to give one final email to let you all know. If you want to
email me privately, that's fine, but I won't be bothering with the en-l
mailing list anymore, which was my last tie to a once-great project.

I do not take this action lightly. Hanging up my admin hat was one of the
harder things I've ever done, because I used to believe in wikipedia.

However, three things on this list the past couple weeks have convinced me
that Wikipedia is no longer worth it.

The first is Jimbo's rampant bad faith. He sent me a couple emails, and
requested diffs for items I had question on. Since sending him the diffs,
however, he has done precisely jack shit, and has not bothered to respond to
my emails to him requesting a simple update on the matters at hand.

The second is the fact that, in every debate I have seen, the egomaniacs and
power-mad jerks are in control, and every reasonable suggestion or
suggestion that they start being reasonable is instead shouted down by a
chorus of "I'm right and you're not" or dismissive arrogance. I'm not going
to mention a specific name, you know damn well who you are.

The third is this below. I brought up a specific instance, because I was
concerned about it.

What was the response from the clearly abusive administrator in question?

Step 1 - he indef-blocked and then in his emails since, claims that his
reasons are different than the reason he indef-blocked.
Step 2 - he had the talk page of a user locked for "abusing the unblock
template" when in fact, all the user had done is revert abusive removal of
said template.
Step 3 - Sensing that his argument was weak, he all of a sudden came up with
the idea of finding a troll who was from the same city, in this case
"Enviroknot." And lo and behold, as soon as he said "Enviroknot", people
stopped bothering with the thread and stopped bothering to pay any attention
to his rampant abuses including ignoring AGF, BITE, and just being a general
dickwad to non-admin users.

Now I've always thought the "Enviroknot" case was weak, ever since the first
time I read it. But to actually say that out loud in Shittopedia these days
is heresy, apparently. So I kept my mouth shut.

I don't care anymore. This is the kind of abusive crap that goes on every
day that I was talking about, but none of you did shit; instead, you backed
up your buddies in adminship. That's the kind of arrogant crap that has made
this project no longer worth my time.

Jimbo, by your silence, you've proven that you don't really give a shit
about making a good encyclopedia anymore.

Parker Peters, signing off.

On 10/10/06, Parker Peters <onmywayoutster at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Responses inline:
>
> On 10/6/06, Nacon Kantari <naconk at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Well, I've been watching this for a while, so I guess it's time for my
> > side
> > of the story.
> >
> > (apologies as this was copied from a chat transcript)
> > He was originally blocked as an IP editor for making personal attacks in
> >
> > edit summaries
> >
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Front_organization&diff=prev&oldid=76401860
> > Then created an account to bypass 3RR
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Front_organization&diff=77587861&oldid=77587483
> >
> > was blocked and came on IRC contesting the block
> > said that he didn't know who the IP editor was
> > I did a /whois and it was the same IP as the IP editing the article
> > [15:53] * Joins: NoLongerScieno (n=Mike at cpe-70-114-*-*.houston.res.rr.com)
> > <IP removed by me for email, actual available>
> > next weekend, he tried the same thing
> > as [[User:XVidMan]]
> > [19:47] * Parts: XVidman (n=Xvid at cpe-70-114-*-*.houston.res.rr.com) <IP
> > removed by me for email, actual available (both are same)>
> > [18:16] * Joins: ScienoSitter (n=James at cpe-70-114
> > -*-*.houston.res.rr.com)
> > <IP removed by me for email, actual available (different)>
> >
> > According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Enviroknot, this
> > indef-blocked editor edits through houston roadrunner IP
> > addresses.  This is
> > what led me to block all of the accounts as obvious sockpuppets of
> > [[User:Enviroknot]].  Granted, I may have been in error with the block
> > messages, but I fully stand by the blocks.
>
>
> In the first place: none of the accounts did you block as a "sockpuppet of
> [[User:Enviroknot]]." Rather, as I check, you've blocked NoLongerScieno
> indefinitely for "name..", Inshaneee blocked Xvidme first as a "sockpuppet
> of Blainetologist" and then you reblocked as a "sockpuppet of
> NoLongerScieno", and you've blocked ScienoSitter with a reason of " (vandalism-only
> accou{nt)" with a tag on the userpage claiming it's a sockpuppet of
> NoLongerScieno.
>
> From looking at the user talk page, I see at least two incidents where
> you, the blocking admin, removed an unblock request template from the user's
> page.  I don't care what your excuses are, I don't care what your
> explanation is: THAT was out of line, as was OmicronPersei8's removal of the
> unblock template.
>
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:ScienoSitter&action=history
>
> Now, if you're going to bring up the name "Enviroknot", as David Gerard
> did earlier, I've been doing a little research back into the history. Since
> I don't have access to the "secret evidence" side of CheckUser, I've only
> been able to go by the contributions list, and I've yet to find a diff from
> the Enviroknot account that breaks our rules, save for removing templates
> from the userpage.
>
> For that matter, I think the hoarding of "evidence" like this is bad.
> Houston's a huge city. Roadrunner, like it or not, appears to be their
> bigggest ISP, or at least one of the top 2 (SBC/Yahoo appear to be the
> other; Roadrunner's cable modem, SBC is DSL, so they probably have plenty of
> markets where only one or the other is available). It'd be like if we were
> to take Cox Cable or AOL and declare "X vandal always has an IP from Cox,
> therefore all new users from Cox are sockpuppets."
>
> But that's the sort of problem we get, and it directly conflicts with AGF
> and Be Bold too.
>
> Now that you're on the defensive, you're completely willing to try to
> attach the name "Enviroknot" to this based on IP address, even though from
> every supposed "Enviroknot sock" I've been able to hunt down, there isn't an
> edit on Scientology or even a reference to it to be found?
>
> This may be incivil of me, but I think your belated accusation and attempt
> to link that case to yours are very Bad Faith.
>
> I also have a problem with your being the blocking admin in the first
> place, since you were clearly by the page history spending your time edit
> warring with these accounts.
>
> As an ancillary topic, I see that the page for [[User:Enviroknot]] has had
> the ban almost indefinitely extended (all the way through May now), but
> there's a severe lack of diffs or any reason for the extensions, either on
> the user page or on the affected arbcom page. The last one to have anything
> close to proper notation is one from Demi, which states that
> [[User:ForgetNever]] (who was editing on the arabs and anti-semitism page)
> is a sockpuppet of KaintheScion as established by CheckUser... except that
> as I understand how CU works, it shouldn't give any result of the sort for
> the difference in time between when the accounts were killed and created
> respectively.
>
> The previous "extension", placed by Anonymous Editor (who I'll note seems
> to have been involved in edit warring in the past, on the same contentious
> topics) merely bumps it in March with no linking and no reporting
> whatsoever.
>
> The last properly recorded "extension" according to the arbcom discussion
> page is to August 1, 2006. The last one up until Demi's which shows any
> notation whatsoever is by DMcdevit, who put a link to his discussion diff
> with Jayjg into the comment, but didn't bother to report it anywhere else.
>
> Mirv's "addition" of "information" in question shows no evidence linking a
> supposed sockpuppet, has no information notated to the arbcom filing as to
> who the supposed sockpuppet was, and is damning in that we're again hoarding
> up evidence to attack any new editor.
>
> I can't tell if they're a sock, but unless there is some other secret
> function of CheckUser going on we're not being told about, then the only
> "match" is to a huge ISP in a huge city, editing on a similar topic, and
> that dubious "match" is being used to push continual extensions to a block
> in a case that I can't say for sure was even a sockpuppet to start with.
>
> That's very poor form, people.
>
> Also, Parker Peters, if you are IRC user pakaran, we did have a discussion
> >
> > about this.  If not, my apologies.
>
>
> No, I'm not. But I did watch your discussion with the person as they came
> in. Civility is important. Even when you think someone is acting in bad
> faith, even if you think you are right, you need to be civil.
>
> Your conduct was as far from civil as possible.
>
> Parker
>


from_name: Nick Jenkins

body:
Julian Fleischer wrote:
> Am Freitag, 20. Oktober 2006 19:25 schrieb Sherool:
> > At least
> > one vandal seems to have spesialised in spamming people with passwod
> > reminders (he must have a bot), and growing number of people have been
> > complaining about it.
>
> wouldn't the whole problem be avoided it the user had to fill in his
> e-mail-address (which he hopefully hasn't forgot...) when asking for the
> password reminding email?
>
> greetz
>
> --
> Public Key at http://keys.warhog.net/mediazilla_warhog_net.asc

Does that really avoid the problem? Let's use you as an example. And the sake of this hypothetical example, let's suppose I want to
spam you with hundreds of password reminders.

>From your warhog.net domain name, I'll guess your username is [[:en:User:Warhog]]. So I go to that page and it says you're
originally from the German Wikipedia. So now I view the whois record for your domain at http://whois.domaintools.com/warhog.net ,
and sure enough it's in Germany, and the domain owner name matches the name you used in your email, so we can be fairly sure we've
got the right Wikipedia username for our password reset form. Now we just need your email address.

So then we look at http://keys.warhog.net/ and we can get an idea of the email addresses you're using from the filenames. However we
don't see anything with "wikipedia" on it, so we can try resetting your password using all the entries on that list, plus also
wikipedia _at_ the-various-domain-names-you-use-for-email.

Presumably the password reset form tells the user when the email address doesn't match (for legitimate users who have multiple email
addresses and really do need their passwords reset), so we try the above addresses until we get a successful match.

Now, maybe you're using an entirely different address for your Wikipedia account which cannot be predicted using the above approach.
But most people won't be - they either use the same address, or one of a collection of addresses, or they use a predictable format
to their email addresses. And once the spammer has that address, then they can spam you with password resets (at least until you
change it). And now because they know that people are likely to change their email addresses to stop the spamming, rather than being
a chronic pest by sending 100 password resets every couple of days, now they'll probably do a once-only spam-run with thousands of
password resets before you can change your email address.

I'm just not sure having to enter an email address solves the problem. It would slow it down some, but it also forces the spammers
who want to continue to become more like stalkers, which isn't good! ;-)

Anyway, it's probably moot, because it looks like this is fixed now with r17147
 http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/mediawiki-cvs/2006-October/018107.html ).

All the best,
Nick.


from_name: sigmaman

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wish List

body:
Mr Wales wanted it, so I am going to give him mine...

For me, I see two main areas where the money could be spent:

1- Text books copyright buyouts. Primarily historical reference material.

2- Commisioning original photographic and illustrative content for Wikipedia
(under the SA or GFDL, of course).

Let's face, $100 million can buy a lot of stuff. Certain established text
books being licensed under a SA license would do a world of good.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Include both, with sources?

references:
<s0pkj21mc8llmrfb6ub5no4n4r9i88mmgg@4ax.com>	<453A7B45.4070309@telus.net>	<453A7EEF.8090505@gmail.com>	<kg9lj25dogmari6a0eh5c6ema2ggmak89m@4ax.com>	<453AA77E.6030602@gmail.com>	<453ADB91.1090707@shaw.ca>	<453ADC5D.30300@shaw.ca>	<pf9nj29o0nun0dr8u2baf4qelt1lfqmqd0@4ax.com>	<453BB04E.8040801@shaw.ca>	<b5knj218t3pnalgq9n2u677f4lkm3gpknc@4ax.com>	<453C02F5.6070602@shaw.ca>
	<453CFC8A.4090403@gmail.com>
	<2dgqj2ppbtbai9a0orksaatdmfn6i32o5e@4ax.com>
	<453D5222.1090307@gmail.com>

body:
On Mon, 23 Oct 2006 19:37:06 -0400, SPUI <drspui at gmail.com> wrote:

>>>I just posted an email I got from FDOT that confirms what their data shows:
>>>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:State_Road_913_%28Florida%29#SQUIDWARD.21
>>>The IP claims that this is original research and won't accept it; is he
>>>correct?

>> Yes.

>Even to back up other information?

SPUI, you're never going to get me to back your certainty versus
someone else's certainty.  What you are experiencing is exactly what
other editors experienced with you in respect of road names.  The
solution is to find a compromise wording which notes *both* sources
and the backing for each.  That will remain the case until FDOT put up
something public to clarify the position.

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


subject: [WikiEN-l] Deletionist graft

body:
On Mon, 23 Oct 2006 21:56:47 -0500, ikiroid <ikiroid at gmail.com> wrote:

>Why does it seem like the wikipedia mailing list is used to make implicit
>requests to delete or undelete articles in an under-the-table fashion?

Foolish people.  As any fule kno, the way to get an under-the-table
deletion is to email a rouge admin.

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


from_name: Minh Nguyen

subject: [WikiEN-l] Gooooooogle

body:
Steve Block wrote:
> Guy Chapman aka JzG wrote:
>> I have a couple of persistent problem users on my watchlist at the
>> moment, both of whom persistently obfuscate the titles of articles
>> they created and which have since been deleted, in an attempt to keep
>> their shenanigans off the Google results for the subjects (Ecopave and
>> Patrick Buri for the interested).
>>
>> Is there any merit in requesting a change so that user and project
>> space are excluded from the Google indexing?  What about
>> deleted-protected?
>
> I would support only having article and portal space indexed, not even
> having talk pages indexed.  Is there a way of doing it so it would be
> picked up across mirrors too?  I have no idea of how it's done beyond
> the no robots or something command in the headers.  I have a feeling
> this is a perennial though.
>
> Steve block

Would it be possible to set up a Google Sitemap that gives very low
priority to project-space pages? I often find it useful to search for
project pages at Wikipedia, but the built-in search engine doesn't
support some querying features that Google does, like placing phrases in
quotes.

--
Minh Nguyen <mxn at zoomtown.com>
[[en:User:Mxn]] [[vi:User:Mxn]] [[m:User:Mxn]]
AIM: trycom2000; Jabber: mxn at myjabber.net; Blog: http://mxn.f2o.org/


from_name: Steve Bennett

subject: [Wikitech-l] Search

body:
Can you be more specific? Tried searching google for "foo
site:.en.wikipedia.org"?

Steve

On 10/24/06, Liz Kim <lizkim270 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Is there a way to incorp wiki search + google search??
> thank you
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>


from_name: Guy Chapman aka JzG

subject: [WikiEN-l] Gooooooogle

body:
I have a couple of persistent problem users on my watchlist at the
moment, both of whom persistently obfuscate the titles of articles
they created and which have since been deleted, in an attempt to keep
their shenanigans off the Google results for the subjects (Ecopave and
Patrick Buri for the interested).

Is there any merit in requesting a change so that user and project
space are excluded from the Google indexing?  What about
deleted-protected?

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


from_name: Sanford Forte

subject: [Textbook-l] Problem with NPOV

body:
I want to second everything that Jimmy Wales has said. I've spent the
last 5 years - as time permits - participating in this issue, and
dealing with it where the rubber meets the road - lobbying the
California State legislature, lobbying the very top ranks of
teacher's union executives, lobbying non-profits devoted to
publishing workable open source textbook solutions, etc. etc. Combine
that with 12 years in the for-profit academic textbook sector, and
attempting to establish a simple proof-of-concept K-12 project http://
www.opensourcetext.org on my own (which has been difficult, because
there has been a dearth of understanding of the *absolute*
requirements for strict adherence to state curriculum framework
standards, until very recently).

Finally, the meme that helps people who want to publish open source
for *public schools* in America has been successfully spread; that's
essentially been the first part of my long-standing personal goal in
all of this. A second, more market-oriented goal remains.

That said, it bears repeating that public K-12 schools in America
will generally adopt ONLY those books that have been peer reviewed at
the state level, and approved for having met each particular state's
individual curriculum requirements. (some states don't require
curriculum frameworks, but follow other state's standards - an issue
that relates to the private school scenario, mentioned below)

Whether any of us agree with what those curriculum requirements are,
is entirely beside the point - as regards the success of the open
source effort in K-12 public schools in America. (it's a somewhat
different story in other countries, but challenging in somewhat
similar ways).

If someone wants to write a non-standards-based approach to a K-12
subject for *private* schools, go right ahead. In doing so, be aware
that that open source book will NOT be adopted en masse, by any large
entity. It will be a one-at-a-time adoption, by one school at a time
(as by public schools in states without curriculum standards,
mentioned above)

The great irony here is that many people who participate in open
source content directed at public education are thinking not only of
the efficiencies and economies that can be brought to the public
education enterprise, they are also passionately concerned with the
quality of the K-12 enterprise. The latter impulse tends to drive
open source projects to the imagined ideal for a particular topic,
rather than following the strict adherence to curriculum framework
rules mentioned above - with the ultimate result that the work
doesn't get considered for large-scale adoption What results is
something that the schools won't use.

This is an irony because if we can simply find ways to play by the
framework rules to begin with, we will get books written, published,
and adopted, en masse. Once that's accomplished, it will provide an
opening into opportunities to impact curriculum with open source
curriculum materials. We don't want our passion for a better quality
of public education to be lost, or frittered away, simply because we
refuse to understand that there is a Trojan Horse strategy possible
in all of this - i.e. getting open source K-12 books written and
adopted in large numbers, and thereby earning credibility in the
system/network that forges the nature of curriculum, thus giving
ourselves the power to effectively impact that network in the long run.

A final note: Content is no longer the problem - we now understand
what the content rules are, and need only to have the will to execute
projects based on those rules. The forward challenges for open source
K-12 publishing are constraints in content filtering, actual print
publishing, and effective distribution. Thus, the California Open
Source Textbook Project will continue - as it has in the last year -
to alter its primary focus from one of proselytizing for content
construction in specific ways, to a focus on innovative means to
solving the latter group of problems just mentioned. Stay tuned.

Cheers,
Sanford

Sanford Forte, Director
California Open Source Textbook Project
Palo Alto, CA
http://www.opensourcetext.org

On Oct 23, 2006, at 7:32 PM, Jimmy Wales wrote:

> Brianna Laugher wrote:
>> On 11/09/06, Andrew Whitworth <wknight8111 at hotmail.com> wrote:
>>> Jimbo: If you want us to use a specific defintion of "textbook" and
>>> "accredited institution", then you are going to have to mandate such
>>> definitions to us. At the moment we are picking our way through such
>>> matters, with varying degrees of success.
>>
>> It is my observation that TPTB is very reluctant to offer such
>> definitions or mandates, even when requested. "Picking our way
>> through
>> such matters with varying degrees of success" -- it seems to be the
>> wiki way. Try just making your own definitions (as a project), and I
>> guess you'll find out if you've been too WP:BOLD if you notice some
>> personal interventions after that. :)
>>
>> It doesn't seem ideal, but I guess I can understand why they're
>> reluctant to define such things. Then the criticism of such things
>> also falls to them. The people who are actually running the project
>> should take control of its direction at some stage... although
>> mandates would make life so easy.
>
> Brianna has hit the nail on the head.  I believe firmly that the
> communities are smarter than I am, that I should not be involved to
> the
> level of detail that Andrew is asking for, except in an advisory
> capacity more or less like everyone else.
>
> I think that the charter of *what we are looking for* is pretty clear.
> Andrew hit the nail on the head when he talked about bogus
> "accredited"
> institutions teaching nonsense that we don't want, and about perfectly
> good community centers teaching perfectly sensible stuff without
> worrying about being accredited.
>
> That doesn't mean that the "accredited institution" test is useless in
> every respect, of course, and I am guessing that he would agree.
> But it
> does mean that we have to dig into more details.
>
> Some of the main points that I think are important...
>
> -- Wikibooks is something we can get very passionate about, but that
> passionate vision is marred if we allow it to become a dumping ground
> for stuff people don't want in Wikipedia, or a POV haven for
> nonsense, etc.
>
> -- Wikibooks has a serious possibility to get independent funding, so
> long as it remains focussed on its serious mission of textbooks.  Such
> funding can be used to customize and improve the software for
> wikibooks,
> as well as to *purchase and liberate* textbook works that already
> exist.
>
> Suffice to say: we can get funding for Wikibooks to radically
> change the
> education world if potential funders come to the project and see a
> serious project doing good work.  We can not get funding for Wikibooks
> if potential funders come to the project and look at it and see a
> bunch
> of nonsense that we did not have the pride to disallow (random crap
> that
> got pushed out of Wikipedia, for example).
>
> Funders are eager to find solutions to important questions facing
> education.  They are not eager to fund videogame manuals and pokeman
> trivia reference books.
>
> -- Wikibooks needs to focus on actual courses because we passionately
> care that our work *actually be used in education*.  In order to get
> textbooks adopted by real schools, they must meet curriculum
> standards.
>   It is as simple as that.
>
> -------------
>
> I could go on, but I think you begin to see... there are some basic
> standards and concepts, but really we need to work together
> carefully as
> a community to build detailed policies to implement these and other
> natural and sensible guidelines.
>
> A fair amount of that work is already done, of course, and it will
> be a
> long and ongoing process.
>
> --Jimbo
>
> _______________________________________________
> Textbook-l mailing list
> Textbook-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/textbook-l
>


from_name: Damian Finol

subject: [Foundation-l] Some question about Wikimedia Hong Kong

body:
Greetings,

I see it more like, if a group of people feel socially, culturally,
politically or for some other reason, different from other people in
their "country" they could create a chapter.

For example:
Hong Kong and Taiwan from the PRC (maybe Macau too).
Puerto Rico from the USA
French Guiana from France
And maybe (not wanting to start a war here :P) Quebec from Canada.

Just examples of my perception.

Regards,
Damian


from_name: Evan Prodromou

subject: [Wikitech-l] MicroID extension

body:
I whipped up a little extension for MediaWiki that implements the
MicroID standard (http://www.microid.org/ ).

        http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MicroID_extension

MicroID is a teeny-tiny standard that lets users with accounts on
multiple Web services assert that those accounts belong to the same
person. The standard consists of a single <meta> element with a hash of
the user's email address and the address of the current page. MicroIDs
are lightweight, relatively hard to spoof without control of the server,
and help assert identity without sharing private information.

The extension I wrote adds a MicroID <meta> tag for User: pages for
registered users with confirmed email addresses. The user can set
whether they want to show their MicroID or not in the "Misc" tab of the
Special:Preferences page. (Someone using MicroID to verify a user's
identity has to know their email address already first; however, some
users may not want to share their identity in any way.)

The extension has, as far as I can tell, little performance impact. It
loads the user record for the user page, but since that's loaded anyways
for user pages there's not much cost.

The feature is rolled out on Wikitravel and we've had some positive
feedback on it. It would probably be a useful extension to add for
Wikimedia projects.

~Evan

--
Evan Prodromou <evan at prodromou.name>


from_name: Travis Derouin

subject: [Wikitech-l] svn server down?

body:
I can't seem to connect today:

http://svn.wikimedia.org/


from_name: George Herbert

subject: [WikiEN-l] Deletionist graft

body:
On 10/24/06, Guy Chapman aka JzG <guy.chapman at spamcop.net> wrote:
>
> On Mon, 23 Oct 2006 21:56:47 -0500, ikiroid <ikiroid at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >Why does it seem like the wikipedia mailing list is used to make implicit
> >requests to delete or undelete articles in an under-the-table fashion?
>
> Foolish people.  As any fule kno, the way to get an under-the-table
> deletion is to email a rouge admin.
>
> Guy (JzG)
> --
> http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

Yes, the Red Menace strikes again.

--
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com


from_name: Mark Wagner

subject: [WikiEN-l] Deletionist graft

body:
On 10/23/06, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 10/24/06, ikiroid <ikiroid at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Why does it seem like the wikipedia mailing list is used to make implicit
> > requests to delete or undelete articles in an under-the-table fashion?
>
> It's a public mailing list there are far better ways to have things
> deleted under the table.

Yes, if you want something deleted "under the table", as it were, send
me a snail-mail note.  A note wrapped around a $100 bill works even
better.

--
Mark
[[User:Carnildo]]


from_name: Mark Williamson

subject: [Wikitech-l] Need a developer for a Kabyle wiki

body:
Curious if you're going to use Tifinagh or Latin or Arabic letters.

Mark

On 24/10/06, Toira <venomens at yahoo.fr> wrote:
> Hello everybody,
>
> Our request to have a wikipedia in the Kabyle Berber language have been aproved
> by an administrator :
>
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:TUF-KAT
>
> On this page:
>
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:Requests_for_new_languages/Kabyle
>
> The use/admin TUF-KAT said we need to ask a developer to do the rest, here we
> are ;-)
>
> Can anybody do it? thanks in advance.
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>

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


from_name: Jimmy Wales

body:
Parker Peters wrote:
> The first is Jimbo's rampant bad faith. He sent me a couple emails, and
> requested diffs for items I had question on. Since sending him the
> diffs, however, he has done precisely jack shit, and has not bothered to
> respond to my emails to him requesting a simple update on the matters at
> hand.

Hey, Parker, I apologize to you that it takes me a while to do such
things.  Rather than assuming bad faith on my part, I recommend assuming
good faith.  Remember, I respond to dozens of different kinds of things
from many different projects every day.  I wrote to you to ask for diffs
because I am interested in the problem you raised, and I will look into
it.  It's a shame that you have chosen to be hostile about it, but I am
very sorry that I can't do more. :(

> Jimbo, by your silence, you've proven that you don't really give a shit
> about making a good encyclopedia anymore.

Right.  Well, I am sorry you feel that way.

--Jimbo


from_name: Liz Kim

subject: [Wikitech-l] Javascript

body:
question overview:
Where/How could I add new javascript files into wiki?
I would like to add dynamic functions as a part of the header which will be
static on all pages.

details:
I have gone in and changed the content under skins/.
"Sidebar" now exist as a horizontal navigation bar.
What I would like to do is to include a set of javascript funcions and call
it from Monobook.php
(I have just edited the default Monobook.php file) when outputing the items.

I have tried it on a separte test php file where it echos: "<script
type='text/javascript' src='menu.js'>"
It works fine on this test run. When added to Monobook.php, it stops
working.

I have also tried to delete all content form Monobook.php to nothing but
just the javascript include and hard-code definition of the sidebar items &
its dropdown menu
(pretty much the same as the test run php file from above) but the
javascript capability is still
lost.  I have checked paths of these files and am sure that it works outside
of wiki...

Any inputs would be greatly appreciated!

Thank you