from_name: slimvirgin at gmail.com

subject: [WikiEN-l] Improper sysop behavior

body:
On 6/13/05, Jane Halliwell <hundredpurses at hotmail.com> wrote:
> I am user:Eyeon. Sysop:SlimVirgin has wrongly suspended me, accusing me of
> using sockpuppets (user:niglet and user:fecologist) to get around 3rr.

[[User:Eyeon]] has been causing trouble around a number of articles
for some time, including [[Feces]], where she's trying to insert a
photograph of a human turd against the wishes of the editors on the
page. She's has already been blocked twice for 3RR on that page, once
by me, and several editors have said her behavior is troll-like.

Today, Eyeon and two new accounts, Niglet and Fecologist, started
reverting at [[Feces]] to the version with the photograph. Eyeon and
Fecologist reverted six times in 10 hours. I therefore blocked Eyeon
for a 3RR violation, and blocked the two new accounts indefinitely as
sockpuppets created to violate 3RR. I also protected the page in case
Eyeon turned up with more sockpuppets, and to give the other editors a
rest from having to revert. I've made it clear on the talk  page that
I'll unprotect if the other editors want to edit.

Eyeon has e-mailed me several times insisting the new accounts were
not controlled by her, and requesting an IP check. I wonder about the
value of that, as she may have asked friends to set up the accounts
for her, which would still make them sockpuppets. I've put a request
for advice as to how to proceed on [[WP:AN/I]].  If anyone here has
ideas, or feels I should assume good faith and unblock, please let me
know.

Sarah


list: wikien-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Anthere

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Re: Discussion on English Wikipedia in languages other
	than English

body:
Habj a ?crit:
 > Myself a non-native speaker of English, I fully agree that diskussions
 > on en WP should be held in English. However, IMO the policy should not
 > be that posting in other languages than English would be "not allowed
 > or sternly frowned upon". Rather, efforts to write in English should
 > be encouraged. I.e., don't say "don't write in foreign languages". Say
 > "explain what you mean in english, and if you quote sources in other
 > languages please translate.  If you find doing so difficult, please
 > try and find someone who can translate for you" and then gently point
 > them to the relevant Babel user category as a means to find people to
 > ask.

Nod. I think this is a very gentle approach. I like it :-)

ant


from_name: Jane Halliwell

subject: [WikiEN-l] Improper sysop behavior

body:
I am user:Eyeon. Sysop:SlimVirgin has wrongly suspended me, accusing me of
using sockpuppets (user:niglet and user:fecologist) to get around 3rr.
Furthermore, she has blocked editing of Feces article for content reasons,
and admits it on the talk:feces page - quote: "If any regular editor wants
to edit, drop me a note on my talk page, and I'll unprotect." I'm pretty
sure that the role of a sysop is NOT to pre-screen edits.

_________________________________________________________________
Don?t just search. Find. Check out the new MSN Search!
http://search.msn.click-url.com/go/onm00200636ave/direct/01/


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Lee Daniel Crocker

subject: [Wikitech-l] New syntax/Styles

body:
On Mon, 2005-06-13 at 20:12 -0700, Brion Vibber wrote:

> Well, to be consistent with other stuff consider:
> {{i|may be {{b|nested}}, as long}}

Yeah, that's another possibility, but it's not really
consistent with the extension syntaxes, which only uses
"|" to separate arguments from each other, not from the
keyword.  But I could do that as well, I suppose.

> However I'll chime in on not being too thrilled about using curly braces
> for this; co-opting our current syntax to do something totally different
> is troublesome in a way that replacing old things with different new
> things isn't.

That's true, and that's a better argument than mere custom or inertia.
I really don't want to use curlies for inclusions, because it makes
short equations a pain, but maybe we could use <<>> for inclusions and
something entirely different for styles.  I also /do/ want to make sure
there's a clean conceptual separation between inclusion-like things and
tag-like things.

There's another possibility I thought of that might be a reasonable
compromise--allow both class and id tags for block-level things, but
only numeric ids for running text.  If an article wants to use a style
class for many pieces of running text in an article, the author can
pre-declare (as part of the article's style metadata) a symbol to use
for marking those text spans (there's several left--@@, %%, etc.)

--
Lee Daniel Crocker <lee at piclab.com>
<http://creativecommons.org/licenses/publicdomain/>


from_name: Bryan Derksen

subject: [WikiEN-l] WikiProjects overriding global guidelines?

body:
Timwi wrote:

> I'm quite severely disturbed by the apparent habit of participants in
> some WikiProjects to completely disregard Wikipedia's Manual of Style
> and various guidelines, claiming that their pet WikiProject has their
> own pet style guidelines, as if Wikipedia's global guidelines have no
> say anyway.

I've recently come across a couple of examples of something like this
this too, on Wikiproject Cricket.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Cricket_subcategories> directly
contains all subcategories of Category:Cricket in it, for use by
wikiproject members who want a list of categories to search when
categorizing new aticles. My attempts to either replace this with a
plain old list page or to move the category tags into talk pages (in
accordance with the category guidelines suggesting that "meta"
categories should go on talk pages) were vigorously opposed by
Wikiproject members. I let the issue lie for a few months since it
didn't seem in any way urgent and monitoring the category's usage over
that time has been useful.

More recently, there's been a bunch of arguing over the usage of
transclusion in articles relating to
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:2005_English_cricket_season>, in
this case articles on individual cricket matches are being transcluded
into larger articles that group them on various different criteria. I've
been arguing that instead of transclusions they should be ordinary
links, since this is the practice with other similar groups of articles
on Wikipedia (and other reasons I won't go into here. I raised the issue
at
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_%28policy%29#Unusual_transclusion_issue_not_covered_by_policy>
and was told there was also previous discussion at
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Template_namespace#transcluding_prose>).
I'm more worried about this one because subst:ing the transcluded
article text could result in a very difficult situation to reverse if it
turns out to be a bad approach.

Wikiprojects are excellent for bringing standardized style and
organization to subject areas, but I find it trouble when this starts
going in a different direction from the style and organization of
Wikipedia as a whole. Wikipedia is supposed to be a general reference
work, people will be reading it for all manner of different subject
areas and if each subject area is organized differently it'll make it
harder to follow (as well as looking more like a hodgepodge). I'm not
sure that there needs to be a policy specifically about this, though; in
theory it should be enough that Wikipedia's general style guide applies
to all articles. In practice, it can be difficult to go against the
desires of organized voting blocks like this because by definition
they're more interested in these particular articles than other editors
are. Not sure how to balance these things out. Perhaps we could start
some sort of "WikiProject Wikipedia" dedicated to improving consistency
and organization throughout the project as a whole? Seems kind of
redundant, somehow.


from_name: Stacey Greenstein

subject: [WikiEN-l] Improper sysop behavior

body:
I think you have proceeded with the correct course of action. Good job!

UtherSRG

On 6/13/05, slimvirgin at gmail.com <slimvirgin at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 6/13/05, Jane Halliwell <hundredpurses at hotmail.com> wrote:
> > I am user:Eyeon. Sysop:SlimVirgin has wrongly suspended me, accusing me
> of
> > using sockpuppets (user:niglet and user:fecologist) to get around 3rr.
>
> [[User:Eyeon]] has been causing trouble around a number of articles
> for some time, including [[Feces]], where she's trying to insert a
> photograph of a human turd against the wishes of the editors on the
> page. She's has already been blocked twice for 3RR on that page, once
> by me, and several editors have said her behavior is troll-like.
>
> Today, Eyeon and two new accounts, Niglet and Fecologist, started
> reverting at [[Feces]] to the version with the photograph. Eyeon and
> Fecologist reverted six times in 10 hours. I therefore blocked Eyeon
> for a 3RR violation, and blocked the two new accounts indefinitely as
> sockpuppets created to violate 3RR. I also protected the page in case
> Eyeon turned up with more sockpuppets, and to give the other editors a
> rest from having to revert. I've made it clear on the talk page that
> I'll unprotect if the other editors want to edit.
>
> Eyeon has e-mailed me several times insisting the new accounts were
> not controlled by her, and requesting an IP check. I wonder about the
> value of that, as she may have asked friends to set up the accounts
> for her, which would still make them sockpuppets. I've put a request
> for advice as to how to proceed on [[WP:AN/I]]. If anyone here has
> ideas, or feels I should assume good faith and unblock, please let me
> know.
>
> Sarah
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] New syntax/Styles

body:
Lee Daniel Crocker wrote:
> I really don't want to use curlies for inclusions, because it makes
> short equations a pain,

I'm not sure I understand why that is. Can you give an example?

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Timwi

body:
Hi,

I'm quite severely disturbed by the apparent habit of participants in
some WikiProjects to completely disregard Wikipedia's Manual of Style
and various guidelines, claiming that their pet WikiProject has their
own pet style guidelines, as if Wikipedia's global guidelines have no
say anyway.

Is this really how things are going now? Articles on topic X follow a
certain style while articles on topic Y follow a completely different style?

Case in question: So far it seemed to me that Wikipedia uses brackets
after article titles *only* when they are required for disambiguating
between otherwise identical article titles. Hence, there is the title
[[Cher (d?partement)]] but not [[Haute-Corse (d?partement)]].

However, the Star Trek WikiProject has now randomly decided that this
rule needs to go, and all articles on Star Trek episodes must have an
extra parenthesis showing what series it's an episode of, even though
most of the titles are unique as they are. Hence, [[Hide and Q]] is a
redirect to [[Hide and Q (TNG episode)]], and all links to such pages
unnessarily look like this: [[Hide and Q (TNG episode)|Hide and Q]].

Add to this the fact that outside of Star Trek fandom, readers aren't
likely to know what TOS, TNG, DS9, VOY and ENT mean anyway.

What is everybody's opinion on this?

Timwi


from_name: MacGyverMagic/Mgm

body:
Yep, I agree. That's the best approach. Try it the friendly way,
before imposing policies.

--Mgm

On 6/13/05, Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>
> Habj a ?crit:
>  > Myself a non-native speaker of English, I fully agree that diskussions
>  > on en WP should be held in English. However, IMO the policy should not
>  > be that posting in other languages than English would be "not allowed
>  > or sternly frowned upon". Rather, efforts to write in English should
>  > be encouraged. I.e., don't say "don't write in foreign languages". Say
>  > "explain what you mean in english, and if you quote sources in other
>  > languages please translate.  If you find doing so difficult, please
>  > try and find someone who can translate for you" and then gently point
>  > them to the relevant Babel user category as a means to find people to
>  > ask.
>
>
> Nod. I think this is a very gentle approach. I like it :-)
>
> ant
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


subject: [Wikitech-l] New syntax/Styles

body:
On Mon, 2005-06-13 at 22:48 -0700, Brion Vibber wrote:

> > I really don't want to use curlies for inclusions, because it makes
> > short equations a pain,
>
> I'm not sure I understand why that is. Can you give an example?

TeX uses curlies, so something like a continued fraction will
have two close-braces, confusing the parser:

 x = a_0 + \cfrac{1}{a_1 + \cfrac{1}{a_2 + \cfrac{1}{a_3+\,\cdots}}}

(This is the first equation in the article "continued fraction".

--
Lee Daniel Crocker <lee at piclab.com>
<http://creativecommons.org/licenses/publicdomain/>


from_name: Gdr

body:
Timwi wrote:
> I'm quite severely disturbed by the apparent habit of participants in
> some WikiProjects to completely disregard Wikipedia's Manual of Style
> and various guidelines, claiming that their pet WikiProject has their
> own pet style guidelines, as if Wikipedia's global guidelines have no
> say anyway.

This has always been the case. Specialities need their own naming
schemes because the problems of naming and disambiguation are
different. For example, European monarchs, European nobility, popes,
cardinals and patriarchs all have their own naming schemes that differ
from the Wikipedia standard; see [[Wikipedia:Naming conventions (names
and titles)]]. Military ships have their own naming scheme, because so
many ships share names; see [[Wikipedia:Naming conventions (ships)]].

So I think it's reasonable for Star Trek articles to have their own
specialized naming conventions. However, if you're concerned that they
are departing too much from standard conventions, you need to "bring
them into the fold" by integrating the Star Trek conventions into the
Manual of Style in the way that other specialized conventions have been
integrated.

> Case in question: So far it seemed to me that Wikipedia uses brackets
> after article titles *only* when they are required for disambiguating
> between otherwise identical article titles. Hence, there is the title
> [[Cher (d?partement)]] but not [[Haute-Corse (d?partement)]].

> Add to this the fact that outside of Star Trek fandom, readers aren't
> likely to know what TOS, TNG, DS9, VOY and ENT mean anyway.

I agree that the abbreviations are not likely to be understood by many
readers. But  compare this case with an article like [[USS Nassau
(CVE-16)]]. Who except a naval enthusiast understands what "CVE-16"
means? But "CVE-16" is universally used by naval historians, the
experts in the field, to identify this ship.

So if the experts in the field of Star Trek universally use "TOS" to
refer to the original series, then we should at least consider
deferring to them. (But if they don't, then you certainly have a case
for changing the convention.)


from_name: Angela

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Discussion on English Wikipedia in languages other
	than English

body:
On 13/06/05, David Friedland <david at nohat.net> wrote:
> I have noted an increase of discussion on English Wikipedia in languages
> other than English lately. For now, I'll forgo naming languages and
> listing particular offenders here.
>
> Do we have a policy on this? Should we?

I don't see a need for a policy. It's a wiki, so anyone is free to add
translations, or even replace the original text with English.

I regularly leave messages on talk pages and user talk pages in
English on the non-English wikis
(<http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discussion_MediaWiki:Extlink_sample> or
<http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:PiaCarrot#Administrator> for
example). Should I be banned from communicated in those places? Or
should people assume good faith rather than assuming distrust and
simply ask me to find someone to translate it if they feel a need to
read those messages?

Angela.


from_name: Andrew Gray

body:
On 13/06/05, Timwi <timwi at gmx.net> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> I'm quite severely disturbed by the apparent habit of participants in
> some WikiProjects to completely disregard Wikipedia's Manual of Style
> and various guidelines, claiming that their pet WikiProject has their
> own pet style guidelines, as if Wikipedia's global guidelines have no
> say anyway.
>
> Is this really how things are going now? Articles on topic X follow a
> certain style while articles on topic Y follow a completely different style?
>
> Case in question: So far it seemed to me that Wikipedia uses brackets
> after article titles *only* when they are required for disambiguating
> between otherwise identical article titles. Hence, there is the title
> [[Cher (d?partement)]] but not [[Haute-Corse (d?partement)]].
>
> However, the Star Trek WikiProject has now randomly decided that this
> rule needs to go, and all articles on Star Trek episodes must have an
> extra parenthesis showing what series it's an episode of, even though
> most of the titles are unique as they are. Hence, [[Hide and Q]] is a
> redirect to [[Hide and Q (TNG episode)]], and all links to such pages
> unnessarily look like this: [[Hide and Q (TNG episode)|Hide and Q]].
>
> Add to this the fact that outside of Star Trek fandom, readers aren't
> likely to know what TOS, TNG, DS9, VOY and ENT mean anyway.
>
> What is everybody's opinion on this?

[[Wikipedia talk:WikiProject UK Parliament constituencies]] has a lot
of discussion on this; the project was a crash project to create a
standard useful stub article for every UK constituency in about three
weeks (which succeeded), and (mostly) went with a policy of naming
every page [[Constituency (UK Parliament constituency)]] (or Scottish
Parliament, as the case may be). There was a bit of heated debate at
the time, which was mostly dealt with by the reasonable enough "look,
can we come back to this after the election?"

The current debate is down at the bottom of that page; one point which
may be of use in your context is the idea of standard redirects.

ie - whatever page "Hide and Q" ends up at, have a redirect page at
Hide and Q (TNG episode). This means that if you're writing an article
and want to link to it you don't have to go and check if it's listed
as "Hide and Q", or "Hide and Q (episode)", or "Hide and Q (Star Trek
episode)"... which is often one of the reasons to use standard page
titles, for linking simplicity.

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


from_name: David Friedland

body:
Angela,

I thought about precisely the situation you describe when I composed my
original message. Obviously someone who is trying to communicate with
users on a wiki that's in a language they don't command should be
welcomed in trying to communicate in whatever way they can.

My concern is with users who have demonstrated elsewhere that they have
a perfectly adequate command of written English but who deliberately
choose to not use English on certain article talk and Wikipedia project
pages.

Clearly, legislating against it is not popular here. But I think we
should discourage such behavior because it's clearly intentionally
exclusionary. There is a point at which good faith can longer be assumed.

For example, let's say a pair of editors repeatedly revert a change I
make to an article, then post some messages in a foreign language to the
article talk pages as well as to their own user talk pages and the "Xyz
Wikipedians' notice board". Some of these messages clearly contain my
user name.

How should one respond to something like that? By politely asking that
they translate their messages to English?

I'll start by posting machine translations and requesting that they be
cleaned up enough to be intelligible. I doubt I'll get very far, though,
because these editors are already on a campaign to defame me elsewhere
on Wikipedia.

Here's to assuming good faith! :-)

- David

Angela wrote:
> On 13/06/05, David Friedland <david at nohat.net> wrote:
>
>>I have noted an increase of discussion on English Wikipedia in languages
>>other than English lately. For now, I'll forgo naming languages and
>>listing particular offenders here.
>>
>>Do we have a policy on this? Should we?
>
>
> I don't see a need for a policy. It's a wiki, so anyone is free to add
> translations, or even replace the original text with English.
>
> I regularly leave messages on talk pages and user talk pages in
> English on the non-English wikis
> (<http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discussion_MediaWiki:Extlink_sample> or
> <http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:PiaCarrot#Administrator> for
> example). Should I be banned from communicated in those places? Or
> should people assume good faith rather than assuming distrust and
> simply ask me to find someone to translate it if they feel a need to
> read those messages?
>
> Angela.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Improper sysop behavior

body:
Stacey Greenstein wrote:
> I think you have proceeded with the correct course of action. Good job!
>
> UtherSRG
>

Hear, hear! User:Eyeon is an archetypal troll, making edits in bad faith
  to test Wikipedians' patience under the guise of superficially
reasonable argument.

I would have blocked him myself long ago for being a vandal, but I had
already become deeply involved in the [[feces]]-storm. I must say,
though, that unwatching that page has dramatically improved my quality
of life over the past couple days.

- David [[User:Nohat]]


from_name: Fastfission

subject: [WikiEN-l] Improper sysop behavior

body:
Well whatever the case, 24 hours of not editing a page on feces isn't
going to be the end of the world, is it? "Pre-screening" -- also known
as coming to some sort of agreement before getting into or continuing
a revert war -- is often an essential way of keeping articles from
getting, um, crapped up in the process of disagreement. If a user
can't be bothered to discuss changes beforehand with other editors
before insisting on re-inserting and reverting contentious
information, I think that's a good sign of a problem.

FF

On 6/13/05, Jane Halliwell <hundredpurses at hotmail.com> wrote:
> I am user:Eyeon. Sysop:SlimVirgin has wrongly suspended me, accusing me of
> using sockpuppets (user:niglet and user:fecologist) to get around 3rr.
> Furthermore, she has blocked editing of Feces article for content reasons,
> and admits it on the talk:feces page - quote: "If any regular editor wants
> to edit, drop me a note on my talk page, and I'll unprotect." I'm pretty
> sure that the role of a sysop is NOT to pre-screen edits.
>
> _________________________________________________________________
> Don't just search. Find. Check out the new MSN Search!
> http://search.msn.click-url.com/go/onm00200636ave/direct/01/
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


body:
This is a rather specific comment, but I heavily support this sort of
thing for works of fiction in general. I think making it VERY explicit
-- i.e. in the title of an article -- that a given description of
events is a work of imagination rather than some sort of factual
account is always a good idea. It would be easy enough to have the
link [[Hide and Q]] be a redirect to [[Hide and Q (TNG episode)]],
which it probably is, if there is no need for a disambig. But I
understand that might be the pet peeve of a historian!

One of the most humorous things I ever came across in Wikipedia edit
histories and talk pages -- I think in the article on [[Atomic
bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki]] -- was somebody who had, quite
earnestly and accidentally, used an image from "The Onion" as an
illustration (it was from their fake "old newspaper" style bits they
run, with a picture of the Nagasaki mushroom cloud and the headline
"U.S. BOMBS THE LIVING CRAP OUT OF JAPAN" or something like that).
Some discussion ensued over it being a good illustration when finally,
a week or so later, realized that "The Onion" is a humor magazine and
not actually a historical news source, and removed it. Embarassment
and apologies all around! Good reading for me, a year or two in the
future.

I don't present this as representative, but it is, in a sense, akin to
the confusion I'd hope to dispel. I realize, however, that my desire
to "mark" all cartoon characters with little badges of (cartoon
character) might be seen as some sort of horrible realist segregation
scheme... which it might be, honestly. Hmm.

FF

On 6/13/05, Timwi <timwi at gmx.net> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> I'm quite severely disturbed by the apparent habit of participants in
> some WikiProjects to completely disregard Wikipedia's Manual of Style
> and various guidelines, claiming that their pet WikiProject has their
> own pet style guidelines, as if Wikipedia's global guidelines have no
> say anyway.
>
> Is this really how things are going now? Articles on topic X follow a
> certain style while articles on topic Y follow a completely different style?
>
> Case in question: So far it seemed to me that Wikipedia uses brackets
> after article titles *only* when they are required for disambiguating
> between otherwise identical article titles. Hence, there is the title
> [[Cher (d?partement)]] but not [[Haute-Corse (d?partement)]].
>
> However, the Star Trek WikiProject has now randomly decided that this
> rule needs to go, and all articles on Star Trek episodes must have an
> extra parenthesis showing what series it's an episode of, even though
> most of the titles are unique as they are. Hence, [[Hide and Q]] is a
> redirect to [[Hide and Q (TNG episode)]], and all links to such pages
> unnessarily look like this: [[Hide and Q (TNG episode)|Hide and Q]].
>
> Add to this the fact that outside of Star Trek fandom, readers aren't
> likely to know what TOS, TNG, DS9, VOY and ENT mean anyway.
>
> What is everybody's opinion on this?
>
> Timwi
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


from_name: Tim Starling

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: bugzilla votes

body:
Ed W wrote:
> If many people feel as strongly as you, then perhaps there is scope for
> a wiki "bounties" page where people can offer to pay for development?
> Seems that hard physical "beer tokens" are a better form of vote than
> electronic ones anyway...

So if Wikipedians aren't interested in working on the various other
projects of the foundation, you think we should just use money donated
by Wikipedia readers to pay for them instead?

-- Tim Starling


from_name: geni

subject: [WikiEN-l] Improper sysop behavior

body:
> Furthermore, she has blocked editing of Feces article for content reasons,
> and admits it on the talk:feces page - quote: "If any regular editor wants
> to edit, drop me a note on my talk page, and I'll unprotect." I'm pretty
> sure that the role of a sysop is NOT to pre-screen edits.

A fairly standard way of dealing with socks without haveing to use
range blocks and the like
--
geni


subject: [Wikitech-l] Wikimedia (was Re: bugzilla votes)

references:
<42AAAFC0.4010601@yahoo.com>	<51dd1af8050611071232cc5374@mail.gmail.com>	<d8esel$psb$1@sea.gmane.org>	<d2f92e8b05061108006b0fecd6@mail.gmail.com>	<42AB0320.6040909@gmail.com>	<d8f4lt$de3$1@sea.gmane.org>	<42AD436D.5080508@wildgooses.com>	<d8kdht$lcp$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<42ADC8FC.4040808@gmail.com>

body:
This comes from a thread on wikitech-l, I'm cross-posting it to
wikipedia-l. Please reply on one list only.

Gerard Meijssen wrote:
> Hoi,
> When developers aren't interested in working on functionality for the
> various projects of the foundation, we should find developers that are.

Who is "we"? I joined Wikipedia well before the Foundation was formed,
I've watched it develop. I can't help but feel that myself and those who
share my views are underrepresented. I've argued for focus but I've been
ignored. Wikipedia has grown but has barely matured, the date for
"Wikipedia 1.0" keeps being pushed back with virtually no progress made.
Instead, any enthusiastic newcomer with an idea for a word we can
prepend "wiki" to is greeted with open arms, especially if they come
bearing money.

It would be all very well if Wikipedia could manage itself, but I don't
think it can, I think it lacks strong leadership. I don't think it's any
surprise that the German Wikipedia, with enthusiastic leadership largely
independent of the Foundation, has had more success with distribution
and quality control than the English Wikipedia.

-- Tim Starling


from_name: Poor, Edmund W

subject: [WikiEN-l] Policy on shocking images (was: Improper sysop behavior)

body:
I've changed the "subject line" on purpose. This is *not* really about
the propriety of sysop behavior.

I have seen the same thing several times (innumerable times!) since
joining Wikipedia almost 4 years ago. It's called "gaming the system".
You want a certain thing (for some selfish reason), so you accuse the
responsible folks of impropriety. Whereupon they "assume good faith" and
take your claim at face value, while you're laughing up your sleeve as
you tie everyone in knots.

The real issue is POLICY about images. How much do we want to shock our
readers? Are we trying to re-educate them, change their attitude,
enlighten them, cleanse their brains of impurities wrought by a
misguided culture?

I thought we were just supposed to be a reference book. When the facts
are clear, we lay them out for you. What you do with the info is up to
you. When the facts are not clear, we describe the controversy over
"what's what". Again, what conclusions you draw after that is up to you.
We're not supposed to try and change your mind.

The responsible ones among us *know* we're not supposed to use the
Wikipedia for advocacy. (If we ever slip into it, we always appreciate
the "good catch".) But there are POV pushers still.

/A chorus of shocked gasps fills the room/

*You shouldn't make such a big deal out of poo. Here's some in your
face, get used to it, it's real, it's here; nothing to make a fuss over.

That is prescriptive. It's an attempt to change attitudes.

If we need images of human feces or dog turds or horse manure, why not
create a sidebare article called [[Images of feces]]? A link or two in
the article won't offend too many people.

Uncle Ed


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: WikiProjects overriding global guidelines?

body:
I thought categories were for rational organization? In any event, I
don't consider categories very explicit -- at least in the Monobook
skin, they are at the BOTTOM of the page, the LAST thing available to
the reader. I like my nonsense to be labeled in a bright neon sign, if
possible. But I understand this to be a somewhat undefendable bias of
sorts.

FF

On 6/14/05, Timwi <timwi at gmx.net> wrote:
> Fastfission wrote:
> > I think making it VERY explicit -- i.e. in the title of an article --
> > that a given description of events is a work of imagination rather
> > than some sort of factual account is always a good idea.
>
> But that's what categories are for.
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


from_name: dpbsmith at verizon.net

body:
People can and do have "private" discussions about articles via email. Is
there any rule prohibiting this?

Is there rule against discussing articles on this mailing list (knowing full
well that not all Wikipedians subscribe to this list?)

Is there any rule that forbids any discussion of an article anywhere except
on that article's Talk page?

If the answer to the above is "no," then what possible objection can there be
to non-English discussions on a talk page? These discussions are _more_
public and accessible than _any_ of the above.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Policy on shocking images (was: Improper sysopbehavior)

body:
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Gregory Maxwell [mailto:gmaxwell at gmail.com]
>
> Hogwash.
>
> When you systematically remove informative content that your
> personal system of values deems as offensive or unethical you
> force the encyclopedia to adopt your bias: By removing
> content that is considered by some to be 'wrong' because it
> is considered to be 'wrong' we make the statement that the
> encyclopedia considers the content is wrong and therefor
> present a non neutral point of view.

Who's talking about systematic removal of information? It's going to be
one click away, in [[Images of poo]] or whatever you want to call it.
Don't give me shit about hiding content.

Oops, I mean don't accuse me of hiding shit.

Hmm. I seem to be running a bit of a potty mouth today. Sorry.

Ed Poor


body:
Fastfission wrote:

>Well, I disagree with this, for informational as well as aesthetic
>purposes, and think it in any event it is a separate discussion from
>the point I am trying to make. I think labeling something as fiction
>is of a higher level of importance than labeling all of the other
>various sets it could fall into, and the purpose of doing so would be
>quite different from the purpose of categories.
>
>
>
I disagree, but this whole subthread is a digression from the main
point. You're suggesting that Wikipedia have a global guideline or
policy of putting a parenthetical comment in the titles of articles
about fictional things (In addition to Timwi's objection, the presence
of a parenthetical phrase in a title would then have two completely
different possible meanings which is IMO a bad idea) but the original
subject was Wikiprojects that decide to disregard global Wikipedia
policies in favor of their own "local" ones. If this suggestion were to
be adopted as policy, what would we do about WikiProject Wormhole
X-treme when it decides that _their_ policy is never to use parentheses
in the titles of articles relating to that show?


body:
Fastfission wrote:
> I think making it VERY explicit -- i.e. in the title of an article --
> that a given description of events is a work of imagination rather
> than some sort of factual account is always a good idea.

But that's what categories are for.


from_name: Rebecca

body:
> Case in question: So far it seemed to me that Wikipedia uses brackets
> after article titles *only* when they are required for disambiguating
> between otherwise identical article titles. Hence, there is the title
> [[Cher (d?partement)]] but not [[Haute-Corse (d?partement)]].

I think you've picked a pretty bad example here. It's hardly a hard
and fast rule, and there's many circumstances when it's been seen as
*much* easier for the parties involved to auto-disambiguate, as with
US and Australian towns.

> However, the Star Trek WikiProject has now randomly decided that this
> rule needs to go, and all articles on Star Trek episodes must have an
> extra parenthesis showing what series it's an episode of, even though
> most of the titles are unique as they are. Hence, [[Hide and Q]] is a
> redirect to [[Hide and Q (TNG episode)]], and all links to such pages
> unnessarily look like this: [[Hide and Q (TNG episode)|Hide and Q]].

This could, indeed, be a problem, if there were any "rule" in the
first place that they "randomly decided" needed to go. I can't see any
problem with it, if that's the consensus of the editors involved -
they're the ones who generally have to link to the articles.

> Add to this the fact that outside of Star Trek fandom, readers aren't
> likely to know what TOS, TNG, DS9, VOY and ENT mean anyway.

As long as they're covered by an appropriate redirect, I really don't
see the issue at all.

-- ambi


body:
Phil Boswell wrote:

>For me, this goes to the "principle of least astonishment".
>
>The titles of many episodes are common phrases. It is not unlikely that
>someone might link to that phrase. It is a good thing that the default
>target for such a link is **not** a TV episode which happens to use it.
>
>
But in those cases wouldn't it be more appropriate to actually have an
article about the common phrase? That way the normal disambiguation
state kicks in and a parenthetical is warranted. Other episodes with
titles that aren't common phrases wouldn't be disambiguated, but they
also wouldn't be astonishing so they wouldn't need a special rule like this.


list: foundation-l

from_name: Jakob Voss

subject: [Foundation-l] Wikimania Program

body:
Hi,

Wikimania's call for papers has concluded, and the Program Committee has
finished reviewing the submissions. Almost 90 proposals for
presentations, workshops, papers, and posters were submitted and almost
60 were accepted as part of the official program. We are currently
notifying all authors - this may take a while because the organising
team is rather small and we are not using a special software for
conference planning (for instance Pentabarf) but a wiki.

We are currently soliciting volunteers to help edit the official
conference proceedings, hosted by Wikibooks[1].  In true Wiki form, the
proceedings will be open to editing by anyone, but we're looking for a
few reliable people to oversee the process.  We also need a few
volunteers to liaise with the authors of accepted papers and assist with
program coordination.  If either of these tasks interests you, please
add yourself at wikibooks and contact cfp at wikimedia.org or find us in
#wikimania on Freenode.

Greetings,
Jakob

[1] http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikimania05


list: wikimedia-l

subject: [Foundation-l] Wikimania Program


list: wikipedia-l

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikimania Program


from_name: Gregory Maxwell

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Policy on shocking images (was: Improper sysop
	behavior)

body:
On 6/14/05, Poor, Edmund W <Edmund.W.Poor at abc.com> wrote:
> *You shouldn't make such a big deal out of poo. Here's some in your
> face, get used to it, it's real, it's here; nothing to make a fuss over.
>
> That is prescriptive. It's an attempt to change attitudes.
>
> If we need images of human feces or dog turds or horse manure, why not
> create a sidebare article called [[Images of feces]]? A link or two in
> the article won't offend too many people.

Hogwash.

When you systematically remove informative content that your personal
system of values deems as offensive or unethical you force the
encyclopedia to adopt your bias: By removing content that is
considered by some to be 'wrong' because it is considered to be
'wrong' we make the statement that the encyclopedia considers the
content is wrong and therefor present a non neutral point of view.

There are plenty of people who would be sufficently shocked by our
mentioning of matters sexual or outside a single religion, so when we
are done removing useful images because some people are offended do we
then begin to delete articles about 'wrong' subjects?

The question for exclusion should be based on the images ability to
inform. We should exclude content that has no value to teach.  This
does not mean we should include every potentially informative image,
but rather we should select the most informative subset and of the
remaining equally most informative results we should select the ones
which best satisfy secondary artistic and editorial criteria.

So for example, perhaps a particular image of feces is considered
especially disgusting but someone has found an image of equal
informative ability that most consider less disgusting. Thus decision
between the two images is an editorial judgement and does not interact
with NPOV.  I do not advocate that 'majority shock' should be
encouraged or the risk of which intentionally ignored,  but rather
that because of NPOV all decisions of taste should take a secondary
role by only being used to decide among multiple choices of
substantially equally informative value.

I'm pretty clueless when it comes to feces, and would like to stay
that way :), so I can't fairly gauge what the informative ability of a
given image is... But I strongly object to how you've framed the
argument.


from_name: Tomasz Wegrzanowski

subject: [Wikitech-l] New syntax/Styles

body:
On Mon, Jun 13, 2005 at 11:38:48PM -0700, Lee Daniel Crocker wrote:
> On Mon, 2005-06-13 at 22:48 -0700, Brion Vibber wrote:
> > > I really don't want to use curlies for inclusions, because it makes
> > > short equations a pain,
> >
> > I'm not sure I understand why that is. Can you give an example?
>
> TeX uses curlies, so something like a continued fraction will
> have two close-braces, confusing the parser:
>
>  x = a_0 + \cfrac{1}{a_1 + \cfrac{1}{a_2 + \cfrac{1}{a_3+\,\cdots}}}
>
> (This is the first equation in the article "continued fraction".

We could put TeX in <math> </math> tags or something ...


body:
> But that is exactly what you're trying to use the article title for. Or
> what else do you mean by rational organisation?

Taxonomy. Titles are for the "species" or even "sub-species" level of
information, to use a biological metaphor, whereas categories can be
used for a wide variety of classification -- from the very broad to
the very specific. Additionally, categories are a much fuzzier type of
classification -- they can include information from widely different
types of domains. What I'm arguing for is using some sort of way to
clearly and instantly designate fictional content from non-fictional
(one could imagine a less intrusive "fiction" template that would do
the same thing, if designed well). I see these as being separate
functions with separate effects. (Again, I'm not really making a major
point of this; I think it would probably be an unpleasant precedent to
actually start labeling all titles in a very literal fashion, and
would loathe to clutter up non-fiction works with (non-fiction) in
their title.)

> Right, so of course we must move them into the article titles, rather
> than just simply modifying the Monobook skin so that they're at the top,
> like I've always advocated (and indeed achieved with my user CSS/JS).

Well, I disagree with this, for informational as well as aesthetic
purposes, and think it in any event it is a separate discussion from
the point I am trying to make. I think labeling something as fiction
is of a higher level of importance than labeling all of the other
various sets it could fall into, and the purpose of doing so would be
quite different from the purpose of categories.

FF


from_name: Dovi Jacobs

subject: [Foundation-l] Censorship discussion: Thanks to all

body:
Sorry, I don't know how I missed this. Thanks for the reply.

Overall, "pausing to evaluate the situation" is a good idea, and it is important to choose battles wisely. What worries me is that this might be more than just a pause, and put the issue on a back-burner indefinitely. And also how we evaluate which battles we choose to fight.

A couple of points I think should be re-emphasized:

1. I hope Wikinews people won't throw rotten tomatoes at me for saying this, but Wikinews is just a hobby and not a value-product, and not likely to be much more than a hobby for a long time in English and most other languages. I think it will eventually provide great value as it grows, but it doesn't now, because there are much better news sources out there on the net. But this is *not* true of Chinese: Providing an outlet like this for Chinese news would be a thing of tremendous, immediate value to a huge number of people. And it is precisely this language that we are blocking! That is terrible.

2. When it comes to choosing our battles, we should remember that our choices *now* have implications for our *future* choices. Will we also deny Wikinews in Arabic if people in some countries are worried about that being blocked? Or certain other countries in Asia and Africa, or even a few left in Eastern Europe? A firm policy decision now will might prevent damage in the future if people (and governments and corporations) simply know, in advance, that censorship is not on the agenda at Wikimedia.

3. When you decide which battles to fight, you first have to evaluate how strong you are! Wikimedia is not weak; Wikipedia (plus its sisters) have become invaluable resources provided by a well-known, well-respected organization. This is only becoming more and more so, month by month, and the trend is not going to be reversed. In other words, we have the *strength* to stand up to this in the long term. It is not all or nothing: We should assume that even the *worst-case* scenario is a ban that will be eventually be revoked, because no govenment will be able to justify banning it in the long term.

4. Jimbo wrote: "We would be lauded as heros in the western media. I'd have my face on
the cover of Time Magazine and Der Spiegel and so on. "Wikipedia shut
down by the Chinese government" -- an exciting story! We feel great
about ourselves for fighting against censorship!" ....
I really think that the whole point has been missed here. Of course we are not looking for glory and amazing press releases (though they are nice... :-). The point is that those press releases are not important for making us feel good, but for the good that they can do for our Chinese contributors. If the worst-case scenario happens, and we get press releases like that, their purpose in our eyes will *not* be to *report* on the problem, but to help *solve* the problem. The Chinese government is not impervious to criticism, and such press will make sure that blocking, if it happens, will not stand in the long run.

5. We should also consider negative press, like this story that came out today: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4088702.stm. Do we want to be the same as that? Because we are non-profit, we have the opportunity to provide an alternative that other corporations cannot provide. Let's do it!

6. I wonder if the Chinese censors are reading this right now? If so, let's send them the right message. :-)

Dovi

---------------------------------
Discover Yahoo!
 Find restaurants, movies, travel & more fun for the weekend. Check it out!


from_name: MHart

subject: [Wikitech-l] Cascading extensions

body:
Extensions within extensions don't seem to be parsing.

<ext1>Do something
<ext2>And something else</ext2></ext1>

Is there a way to get the inner extension to parse correctly?

Thanks

- MHart


body:
On 6/14/05, Poor, Edmund W <Edmund.W.Poor at abc.com> wrote:
> Who's talking about systematic removal of information? It's going to be
> one click away, in [[Images of poo]] or whatever you want to call it.
> Don't give me shit about hiding content.
> Oops, I mean don't accuse me of hiding shit.
> Hmm. I seem to be running a bit of a potty mouth today. Sorry.

:)
Well certainly it's silly to make the image huge, but out standard
should be to match the style of wikipedia... and it's not normal to
put basic images of a subject on their own page...

It is useful for some subjects to have a gallery page on the commons,
because sometimes people want to see many images... but this doesn't
mean we don't include pictures in the article as well.

Now, which pictures go in the gallery vs the article should be decided
based on ability to inform, and only if they are equal do we decide on
risk of offense. The existance of a gallery page doesn't give us the
ability to violate NPOV by deciding based on our point of view over
the more objective criteria of informativeness and encyclopedic merit.


from_name: Andrew Venier

body:
Consider it Wikiquette then.

Compare with a social situation where all those present share a
language.  For a few of the participants to suddenly switch to a
language understood by only some to make private comments is quite
simply rude.  Of course, these same people could excuse themselves and
have a private conversation or contact each other later to discuss
matters in private ... socially this is more acceptable.  Likewise,
brash whispering in such a situation is more likely to offend than a
discreet word in private later.

It may indeed be objectionable, but is probably a matter of manners, not
policy.

dpbsmith at verizon.net wrote:

>People can and do have "private" discussions about articles via email. Is
>there any rule prohibiting this?
>
>Is there rule against discussing articles on this mailing list (knowing full
>well that not all Wikipedians subscribe to this list?)
>
>Is there any rule that forbids any discussion of an article anywhere except
>on that article's Talk page?
>
>If the answer to the above is "no," then what possible objection can there be
>to non-English discussions on a talk page? These discussions are _more_
>public and accessible than _any_ of the above.
>_______________________________________________
>WikiEN-l mailing list
>WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>
>
>


subject: [WikiEN-l] My views on policies and debates over content

body:
Ray Saintonge wrote:

> Jack Lynch wrote:
>
>> Additionally, I, and assumably many others, read encyclopedias, and
>> esp. the wikipedia, as a source of extremely obscure and bizarre info
>> not to be found elsewhere.
>>
> Absolutely!  And I hope we can add much more.  If it's verified as
> having been proposed by somebody (which does not mean verifying that
> the guy's theories make any sense),  and properly sourced what more
> can we ask for.

What ever happened to
[[WP:WIN#Wikipedia_is_not_an_indiscriminate_collection_of_information]]?
I thought that was official policy.


from_name: Stephen Bain

body:
On 6/14/05, Timwi <timwi at gmx.net> wrote:
>
> I'm quite severely disturbed by the apparent habit of participants in
> some WikiProjects to completely disregard Wikipedia's Manual of Style
> and various guidelines, claiming that their pet WikiProject has their
> own pet style guidelines, as if Wikipedia's global guidelines have no
> say anyway.
>
> Is this really how things are going now? Articles on topic X follow a
> certain style while articles on topic Y follow a completely different style?
>

I would congratulate the WikiProjects for doing the sensible thing and
avoiding any possible ambiguity before it can occur.

Taking your example, it might be "easier" to put Hide and Q at [[Hide
and Q]]. But someone looking for that episode will either follow a
link there or type it into the search box, either way they'll find it.
And people who come across it randomly will know from the title
exactly what it is. An episode of TNG, even though they don't know
what TNG is.

I agree with Gdr, specialities have their own naming conventions, for
very good reasons.

--
Stephen Bain
stephen.bain at gmail.com


subject: [WikiEN-l] ArbCom and content in real life

body:
Here's an interesting RFAr I came across:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_arbitration/Climate_change_dispute

ArbCom are still working on a decision, but the proposed decision so
far is quite interesting, as it relates strongly to the ongoing RfC
over the Arbitration process. Although the decision is not yet final,
I think the principles so far proposed are very good ones (and well
supported by precedent). The findings of fact section is very
interesting also.

Without wanting to interfere with the judicial process, I thought I'd
pose the question - how does the community percieve this response to a
content related dispute by the ArbCom? Personally I believe that the
proposed decisions are very good, but I would be interested to see
what other people think.

--
Stephen Bain
stephen.bain at gmail.com


subject: [Wikitech-l] Cascading extensions

body:
Rendering wikitext is not a problem:

 function renderHideShow( $input ) {
     global $wgParser, $wgUser, $wgTitle;
     $parserOptions = ParserOptions::newFromUser( $wgUser );
     $parser = & new Parser();
     $output = & $parser->parse($input, $wgTitle, $parserOptions);

Now $output->getText(); has properly rendered wikitext.

So if I have: <hideshow>Here's some [[wikitext]]</hideshow>

the [[wikitext]] will be properly rendered as a link.

However, even though I sent the $input through the parser, AND the first
parsing function called in that routine is:

  $text = $this->strip( $text, $this->mStripState );

which contains the foreach to render extensions, there's something that
isn't quite setup properly in the parser - because the foreach never
executes when extension tags are included in $input.

So if $input is "Here's some [[wikitext]] and another <ext>extension</ext>",
then [[wikitext]] gets rendered, but <ext> does not.

Maybe its a bug...

- MHart

----- Original Message -----
From: "Rowan Collins" <rowan.collins at gmail.com>
To: "Wikimedia developers" <wikitech-l at wikimedia.org>
Sent: Tuesday, June 14, 2005 12:45 PM
Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] Cascading extensions

On 14/06/05, MHart <wiki at matthart.com> wrote:
> Extensions within extensions don't seem to be parsing.

Extensions return HTML, not wikitext; that is, nothing returned by
your extension function will be touched by the parser. In the case of
"<e1><e2>foo</e2></e1>" only the extension for "e1" will be called,
the rest is just its input, and its output is just HTML.

For how to manually parse some text inside the extension, see
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_extensions_FAQ#How_do_I_render_wikitext_in_my_extension.3F

For something more specific, you'll have to improvise.

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]
_______________________________________________
Wikitech-l mailing list
Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l


from_name: Anthere

references:
<d8jbel$eoc$1@sea.gmane.org>	<8b722b80050613150332431deb@mail.gmail.com>
	<d8m15p$o8c$1@sea.gmane.org>

body:
David Friedland a ?crit:
 > Angela,
 >
 > I thought about precisely the situation you describe when I composed my
 > original message. Obviously someone who is trying to communicate with
 > users on a wiki that's in a language they don't command should be
 > welcomed in trying to communicate in whatever way they can.
 >
 > My concern is with users who have demonstrated elsewhere that they have
 > a perfectly adequate command of written English but who deliberately
 > choose to not use English on certain article talk and Wikipedia project
 > pages.
 >
 > Clearly, legislating against it is not popular here. But I think we
 > should discourage such behavior because it's clearly intentionally
 > exclusionary. There is a point at which good faith can longer be assumed.
 >
 > For example, let's say a pair of editors repeatedly revert a change I
 > make to an article, then post some messages in a foreign language to the
 > article talk pages as well as to their own user talk pages and the "Xyz
 > Wikipedians' notice board". Some of these messages clearly contain my
 > user name.
 >
 > How should one respond to something like that? By politely asking that
 > they translate their messages to English?
 >
 > I'll start by posting machine translations and requesting that they be
 > cleaned up enough to be intelligible. I doubt I'll get very far, though,
 > because these editors are already on a campaign to defame me elsewhere
 > on Wikipedia.
 >
 > Here's to assuming good faith! :-)
 >
 > - David

Hi David

But reading your answer to Angela, I feel that you are not so much
talking of a general trend, but rather of a couple of very specific
situations, which involves yourself. Am I wrong ?

If so, perhaps the issue can be solved by a *rule* but rather by finding
someone (in particular of their language) to talk to him/them and see
where the problem relies ?

ant


from_name: Stefan Mahler

subject: [Wikitech-l] Creating own skin

body:
Hi,

I want to create my own skin, e.g. to add a logo bar at the bottom at
the side.
For this I've overwritten the MySkin-Skin with a class extends
MonoBook-Skin.
But its equal that I do (e.g. I add some stupid text like 'AAAAAAAA' in
the divs of the stream in MySkinTemplate::execute() method), it has no
effect. What did I wrong?

thanks,
Stefan


subject: [Wikitech-l] Security Questions

body:
Hi,

Can I create special areas in MediaWiki version 1.4.5, which are
viewable / editable by special user groups?

Thanks,
Stefan


from_name: Dan Grey

subject: [WikiEN-l] Improper sysop behavior

body:
--- slimvirgin at gmail.com wrote:
including [[Feces]], where she's
> trying to insert a
> photograph of a human turd against the wishes of the
> editors on the
> page.

To be fair, that's not strictly true. The Talk page
has gone to a rather lame vote, but even discounting
any possible sock-puppets, editors seem fairly evenly
split on the issue.

Dan

___________________________________________________________
Does your mail provider give you FREE antivirus protection?
Get Yahoo! Mail http://uk.mail.yahoo.com


from_name: Delirium

subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Copyright and local liability

body:
Robert Scott Horning wrote:

> The problems seem to be particularly rough with photographic images
> and audio recordings, as most textual information on the Wikimedia
> projects is original material where fair-use questions are not even a
> problem.

In terms of word count that's certainly true, but we use a *lot* of
fair-use textual material as well.  Many articles about copyright books,
for example, contain short quotations from them.

-Mark


from_name: Rick

body:
--- dpbsmith at verizon.net wrote:

> People can and do have "private" discussions about
> articles via email. Is
> there any rule prohibiting this?
>
> Is there rule against discussing articles on this
> mailing list (knowing full
> well that not all Wikipedians subscribe to this
> list?)
>
> Is there any rule that forbids any discussion of an
> article anywhere except
> on that article's Talk page?
>
> If the answer to the above is "no," then what
> possible objection can there be
> to non-English discussions on a talk page? These
> discussions are _more_
> public and accessible than _any_ of the above.

Well, for one thing, it's rude.  And it's especially
troublesome when one of the people involved is a
sysop.

RickK

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body:
--- "Poor, Edmund W" <Edmund.W.Poor at abc.com> wrote:
> If we need images of human feces or dog turds or
> horse manure, why not
> create a sidebare article called [[Images of
> feces]]? A link or two in
> the article won't offend too many people.
>
> Uncle Ed

[[Images of feces]] is currently on VfD.

RickK

__________________________________
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Stay connected, organized, and protected. Take the tour:
http://tour.mail.yahoo.com/mailtour.html


from_name: Ray Saintonge

body:
Habj wrote:

>Myself a non-native speaker of English, I fully agree that diskussions
>on en WP should be held in English. However, IMO the policy should not
>be that posting in other languages than English would be "not allowed
>or sternly frowned upon". Rather, efforts to write in English should
>be encouraged. I.e., don't say "don't write in foreign languages". Say
>"explain what you mean in english, and if you quote sources in other
>languages please translate.  If you find doing so difficult, please
>try and find someone who can translate for you" and then gently point
>them to the relevant Babel user category as a means to find people to
>ask.
>
>I have myself recently translated a quotation in Swedish, used to
>support a point of view, on an article talk page. I can happily do so
>again, if someone thinks (s)he has a good source to support his/her
>opinion but is not brave or confident enough to translate it to
>English - and finds the matter important enough to take the trouble to
>go ahead and ask me. If it was not important enough to take the
>trouble, then (s)he needn't post it.
>
While it is very helpful to translate sources, one cannot escape the
fact that the source was in another language, and if someone is to
verify that source it will be in that original language.  Translated
book or article titles are very unsatisfactory because reversing the
translation may not lead to the correct source.

Ec


from_name: Jane Halliwell

subject: [WikiEN-l] Anyone there?

body:
I have received no response to my inquiry, so I am repeating it here.

I have been wrongly accused of using sockpuppets to circumvent the 3rr. I
have been suspended, as have two others who share my views. Furthermore, the
sysop has blocked edits to the page in violation of the adminship rules -
for CONTENT REASONS, and she admits it at the bottom of talk:feces.

I demand due process. I want an investigation. Do an IP check. Give me a
call, 918-313-7160. Call the others who are blocked. This is an abuse of
adminship.

Me: Eyeon. Purported sockpuppets: Niglet and Fecologist. Admin: SlimVirgin.

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subject: [WikiEN-l] Arbitration Committee Seeking Comment

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:

>Sean Barrett wrote:
>
>
>>Jimmy Wales stated for the record:
>>
>>
>>>steven l. rubenstein wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>>Moreover, no one has mentioned "unpopular" content and Sean is just
>>>>waving a red herring to distract us from a serious problem.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>I fully and totally agree with every bit of this.
>>>
>>>--Jimbo
>>>
>>>
>>Wow.  I am such scum.  Let this be a lesson to me.
>>
>>
>Someone finding Sean's post here might assume (if they didn't check the
>history) that I was agreeing with the assessment of Sean's part in this
>discussion as "waving a red herring".  I don't, and I apologize to Sean
>for inadvertantly also quoting this bit.
>
It's the mixed metaphor that does it.  When people switch from waving
red flags to waving red herrings the world has indeed become a more
dangerous place. :-)

Ec


from_name: Timwi

body:
Fastfission wrote:
> I thought categories were for rational organization?

But that is exactly what you're trying to use the article title for. Or
what else do you mean by rational organisation?

> at least in the Monobook skin, they are at the BOTTOM of the page

Right, so of course we must move them into the article titles, rather
than just simply modifying the Monobook skin so that they're at the top,
like I've always advocated (and indeed achieved with my user CSS/JS).

Timwi


subject: [WikiEN-l] talk:feces

body:
Please check the talk:feces page before deciding if SlimVirgin has behaved
properly. She has misrepresented the situation.

At Talk:Feces, we have THOROUGHLY discussed the issue, and public opinion is
in FAVOR of including the image. 16 to 10.

Furthermore, if you read her 'pre-screening' message, it is not intended to
let consensus emerge. It is intended to exclude me from contributing. Read
her words at talk:feces.

The 24 hours is not the end of the world for me. But SlimVirgin has
PERMANENTLY blocked two newbies. As far as Wiki editing goes, it IS the end
of the world for them.

>Well whatever the case, 24 hours of not editing a page on feces isn't
>going to be the end of the world, is it? "Pre-screening" -- also known
>as coming to some sort of agreement before getting into or continuing
>a revert war -- is often an essential way of keeping articles from
>getting, um, crapped up in the process of disagreement. If a user
>can't be bothered to discuss changes beforehand with other editors
>before insisting on re-inserting and reverting contentious
>information, I think that's a good sign of a problem.

>FF

On 6/13/05, Jane Halliwell <hundredpurses at hotmail.com> wrote:
>>I am user:Eyeon. Sysop:SlimVirgin has wrongly suspended me, accusing me of
>>using sockpuppets (user:niglet and user:fecologist) to get around 3rr.>
>>Furthermore, she has blocked editing of Feces article for content reasons,
> >and admits it on the talk:feces page - quote: "If any regular editor
>wants
> >to edit, drop me a note on my talk page, and I'll unprotect." I'm pretty
> >sure that the role of a sysop is NOT to pre-screen edits.>

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body:
On 6/14/05, Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen at shaw.ca> wrote:
> Timwi wrote:
>
> > I'm quite severely disturbed by the apparent habit of participants in
> > some WikiProjects to completely disregard Wikipedia's Manual of Style
> > and various guidelines, claiming that their pet WikiProject has their
> > own pet style guidelines, as if Wikipedia's global guidelines have no
> > say anyway.
>
> I've recently come across a couple of examples of something like this
> this too, on Wikiproject Cricket.
> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Cricket_subcategories> directly
> contains all subcategories of Category:Cricket in it, for use by
> wikiproject members who want a list of categories to search when
> categorizing new aticles. My attempts to either replace this with a
> plain old list page or to move the category tags into talk pages (in
> accordance with the category guidelines suggesting that "meta"
> categories should go on talk pages) were vigorously opposed by
> Wikiproject members. I let the issue lie for a few months since it
> didn't seem in any way urgent and monitoring the category's usage over
> that time has been useful.
>
> More recently, there's been a bunch of arguing over the usage of
> transclusion in articles relating to
> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:2005_English_cricket_season>, in
> this case articles on individual cricket matches are being transcluded
> into larger articles that group them on various different criteria. I've
> been arguing that instead of transclusions they should be ordinary
> links, since this is the practice with other similar groups of articles
> on Wikipedia (and other reasons I won't go into here. I raised the issue
> at
> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_%28policy%29#Unusual_transclusion_issue_not_covered_by_policy>
> and was told there was also previous discussion at
> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Template_namespace#transcluding_prose>).
> I'm more worried about this one because subst:ing the transcluded
> article text could result in a very difficult situation to reverse if it
> turns out to be a bad approach.
>
> Wikiprojects are excellent for bringing standardized style and
> organization to subject areas, but I find it trouble when this starts
> going in a different direction from the style and organization of
> Wikipedia as a whole. Wikipedia is supposed to be a general reference
> work, people will be reading it for all manner of different subject
> areas and if each subject area is organized differently it'll make it
> harder to follow (as well as looking more like a hodgepodge). I'm not
> sure that there needs to be a policy specifically about this, though; in
> theory it should be enough that Wikipedia's general style guide applies
> to all articles. In practice, it can be difficult to go against the
> desires of organized voting blocks like this because by definition
> they're more interested in these particular articles than other editors
> are. Not sure how to balance these things out. Perhaps we could start
> some sort of "WikiProject Wikipedia" dedicated to improving consistency
> and organization throughout the project as a whole? Seems kind of
> redundant, somehow.
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

I agree with your concerns with these cricket articles. It's fair
enough for specialist WikiProjects to override global *guidelines*,
things like naming conventions are the best example, but overriding
global *policy*, like Wikipedia:Subpages, etc, is a Bad Thing.

--
Stephen Bain
stephen.bain at gmail.com


subject:
[WikiEN-l] Due process ignored, two newbies banned permanently,
	admin blocks for content

body:
>[[User:Eyeon]] has been causing trouble around a number of articles
>for some time, including [[Feces]], where she's trying to insert a
>photograph of a human turd against the wishes of the editors on the
>page.

This is NOT TRUE. If you check the Talk:Feces page, it is clear that public
opinion is AGAINST censoring the image. Even the poll has 16 in favor of
inlining, 10 in favor of linking, and ONE in favor complete censorship.
Unfortunately, this ONE is one of SlimVirgin's fellow admins.

>She's has already been blocked twice for 3RR on that page, once
>by me, and several editors have said her behavior is troll-like.

The first time, I learned of the rule. The second time, I included a
DIFFERENT, more acceptable image, but SlimVirgin ignored that distinction.

>Today, Eyeon and two new accounts, Niglet and Fecologist, started
>reverting at [[Feces]] to the version with the photograph. Eyeon and
>>Fecologist reverted six times in 10 hours. I therefore blocked Eyeon
>for a 3RR violation, and blocked the two new accounts indefinitely as
>sockpuppets created to violate 3RR.

They are not my sockpuppets, and one has been around longer than I have.

>I also protected the page in case
>Eyeon turned up with more sockpuppets, and to give the other editors a
>rest from having to revert. I've made it clear on the talk  page that
>I'll unprotect if the other editors want to edit.

She is abusing her position to control the content of the page, in violation
of her terms of adminship, and against the prevailing opinion of the editors
on the page.

>Eyeon has e-mailed me several times insisting the new accounts were
>not controlled by her, and requesting an IP check. I wonder about the
>value of that, as she may have asked friends to set up the accounts
>for her, which would still make them sockpuppets.

That's absurd. Why would I lobby friends on this issue? Public opinion was
already in my court. And is there no due process? Call me. 918-313-7160. I
have nothing to hide. Call the others, if you haven't completely discouraged
them.

>I've put a request
>for advice as to how to proceed on [[WP:AN/I]].  If anyone here has
>ideas, or feels I should assume good faith and unblock, please let me
>know.

The request you put up is biased to get the response you want. You have
misrepresented my behavior, you have blocked me from responding. Of course
you will get support for your actions.

Admins, CHECK the talk:feces page. When my name is slurred, CHECK the
footnotes. If something looks wrong, ASK ME to explain.

It's awful when an admin can ban people's contributions without due process,
permanently block two newbies, and block edits on a page in violation of the
prevailing opinion.

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from_name: Richard Rabinowitz

subject: [WikiEN-l] Fwd: fyi (fwd)

body:
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sun, 12 Jun 2005 23:23:12 EDT
From: SR51 at aol.com
To: rickyrab at eden.rutgers.edu
Subject: Fwd: fyi


from_name: Stan Shebs

body:
Ray Saintonge wrote:

>>
> It's the mixed metaphor that does it.  When people switch from waving
> red flags to waving red herrings the world has indeed become a more
> dangerous place. :-)

"And now - you must cut down the mightiest metaphor in the forest -
wiiiiiith

A RED HERRING!!!"

<dramatic crescendo>

:-)

Stan


from_name: Phil Boswell

body:
"Timwi" <timwi at gmx.net> wrote in message
news:d8l02r$h92$1 at sea.gmane.org...
[heavy snippage...this paragraph should be representative I hope]
> However, the Star Trek WikiProject has now randomly decided that this rule
> needs to go, and all articles on Star Trek episodes must have an extra
> parenthesis showing what series it's an episode of, even though most of
> the titles are unique as they are. Hence, [[Hide and Q]] is a redirect to
> [[Hide and Q (TNG episode)]], and all links to such pages unnessarily look
> like this: [[Hide and Q (TNG episode)|Hide and Q]].
> What is everybody's opinion on this?

For me, this goes to the "principle of least astonishment".

The titles of many episodes are common phrases. It is not unlikely that
someone might link to that phrase. It is a good thing that the default
target for such a link is **not** a TV episode which happens to use it.
--
Phil
[[en:User:Phil Boswell]]


from_name: Maru Dubshinki

subject: [Wikipedia-l] WikiProxy

body:
Wow! That's pretty cool; I just have one question.
Is it possible to have the script differentiate the wiki-links, from
regular links, by modifying the font or something? As it stands with
my setup, I have problems readily seeing the little blue arrow box.

~Maru

On 6/13/05, Matthew Gertner <matthew at allpeers.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
>
>
> Thought this might be of interest to those of you who are
> Firefox/Greasemonkey users. With the help of Stefan Magdalinski, who wrote
> the original WikiProxy for the BBC News site (www.wikiproxy.org
> <http://www.wikiproxy.org/> ), I wrote a Greasemonkey script that adds links
> to Wikipedia to every page that you visit. It uses a simple algorithm to
> guess which terms on the page might be in Wikipedia and confirms these using
> a web service. The effect is quite cool. it's as if every page on the web
> linked carefully to all the relevant Wikipedia articles.
>
>
>
> You can download the script here if you want to try it out:
> http://wikiproxy.whitelabel.org/greasemonkey.html. There is some more
> discussion on my blog: http://www.allpeers.com/blog/?p=165 and
> http://www.allpeers.com/blog/?p=167.
>
>
>
> Note that you need the latest version of Greasemonkey
> (http://greasemonkey.mozdev.org/) for this to work.
>
>
>
> Enjoy!
>
> Matt
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


subject: [Wikitech-l] Alpha lists

body:
Small hack I did today is very useful when converting help text to wiki
format - I added ~ to the list elements. Is ~ used elsewhere.. looks like
maybe a timezone thing so that ~~~ would fail? Is there another char that
would work better?

# something
#~ step 1
#~ step 2
# else

shows

1. something
    a. step 1
    b. step 2
2. else

in Parser.php, function openList()
  else if ( '~' == $char ) { $result .= '

'; }
in nextItem()
  else if ( '~' == $char ) { return '

'; }
in closeList()
  else if ( '~' == $char ) { $text = '

'; }
and in doBlockLevels()
    $prefixLength = strspn( $oLine, '*#~:;' );

- MHart


body:
Angela wrote:

>On 13/06/05, David Friedland <david at nohat.net> wrote:
>
>
>>I have noted an increase of discussion on English Wikipedia in languages
>>other than English lately. For now, I'll forgo naming languages and
>>listing particular offenders here.
>>
>>Do we have a policy on this? Should we?
>>
>>
>I don't see a need for a policy. It's a wiki, so anyone is free to add
>translations, or even replace the original text with English.
>
>I regularly leave messages on talk pages and user talk pages in
>English on the non-English wikis
>(<http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discussion_MediaWiki:Extlink_sample> or
><http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:PiaCarrot#Administrator> for
>example). Should I be banned from communicated in those places? Or
>should people assume good faith rather than assuming distrust and
>simply ask me to find someone to translate it if they feel a need to
>read those messages?
>
Comments in a language that I do not understand absolve me from making
responses that I do not understand. :-)

Ec


subject: [WikiEN-l] Photo size and tangential plastering

body:
SlimVirgin has misrepresented the situation. The photo was never larger than
250px - the same size as the other two photos. If you note on the talk:feces
page, nobody ever objected to the size of photo. However, I REDUCED the size
of the photos from 250px to 200px. Me. I did. Just for better layout. And
the image was not 'plastered all over tangential' articles. It was added to
defecation and one other. In those cases, other editors simply removed the
picture, and I deferred to their judgement and did not re-post it. Is this
vandalism?

Jane

>I don't feel that including an image of human feces is inappropriate.
>Having it huge and then  plastered all over tangentially-related
>articles is vandalism, and Eyeon should note that _that_ is a
>perfectly valid reason for being blocked.
>
>Sam

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from_name: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason

subject: [Wikitech-l] Cascading extensions

body:
On 6/14/05, MHart <wiki at matthart.com> wrote:
> Rendering wikitext is not a problem:
>
>  function renderHideShow( $input ) {
>      global $wgParser, $wgUser, $wgTitle;
>      $parserOptions = ParserOptions::newFromUser( $wgUser );
>      $parser = & new Parser();
>      $output = & $parser->parse($input, $wgTitle, $parserOptions);
>

Using Parser::parse() is simper and usually enough for most
situations, unless you want to manually manipulate the title object or
something like that before parsing.


body:
Andrew Venier wrote:

> Ray Saintonge wrote:
>
>> Jack Lynch wrote:
>>
>>> Additionally, I, and assumably many others, read encyclopedias, and
>>> esp. the wikipedia, as a source of extremely obscure and bizarre info
>>> not to be found elsewhere.
>>
>> Absolutely!  And I hope we can add much more.  If it's verified as
>> having been proposed by somebody (which does not mean verifying that
>> the guy's theories make any sense),  and properly sourced what more
>> can we ask for.
>
> What ever happened to
> [[WP:WIN#Wikipedia_is_not_an_indiscriminate_collection_of_information]]?
> I thought that was official policy.

I said nothing about being indiscriminate with the various available
nutcases.

Ec


from_name: Guaka

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Fulfulde Wikipedia [was:Request for a Wikipedia
	in Cebuano]

body:
> Does Aliu Mamadu Jallo have regular internet access? And if so, can he
> type the special characters nessecary for writing Fulfulde?

I managed to find 3 of the 5 used phonetic characters (like on the
Bambara Wikipedia), and put them in the add-character-box that's
included in the edit page. I still need the "rounded" Y if you know what
I mean? (I don't, really :) And the 'ng', a rounded n, the one that is
also missing on the Bambara Wikipedia. This could probably be due to a
problem with the phonetic fonts on Debian, since I did found the
obviously correct place in the unicode IPA table on Wikipedia, but it's
only like a normal "n" on my screen.

Unfortunately he doesn't use a computer. It's also pretty hard for him
to use it, since he's having troubles with his eyes. I have some video
footage of us doing the work, which I'll try to upload one of these
days. It's difficult to have a nice, usable layout _and_ big characters.
This should probably be tackled by the MediaWiki devs. There should be
an easy way to access a special Mediawiki mode for people with trouble
seeing.

Also, I've just returned to the Netherlands. Fortunately I know Aliu
thanks to Bamako's free software guru, and I'll contact him to find out
a way to add more of Aliu's writing.

> And how will Fulfulde be handled in terms of dialects, namely that
> some will tell you Fulfulde is a dialect of Pulaar?

Good question. I haven't figured out this one. It's probably good to
start a page in the Wikipedia namespace on ff.wp.

> But yes, it's a wonderful achievement. :)

I'm especially happy that the interface is partially translated. Maybe
it's good to have a list of 20 terms to be translated in order to create
a useable Wikipedia for people who don't understand English (or French
in case a language is for the largest part spoken in francophone
countries). African languages don't really observe state borders. And
hence the borders between francophone, anglophone, lusuphone and
otherphone area's, which can make it difficult to choose the appropriate
"starting language".


from_name: MacGyverMagic/Mgm

body:
I saw someone adding a whole buch of inclusions of a feces image a while back.

What bothered me about it was mostly the size of the image. In some
articles the images was larger than the text itself.

That, and I really don't think such an image has added value in case
of the article on South Park's Mr. Hankey (in which he's depicted
himself).

--Mgm

On 6/14/05, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 6/14/05, Poor, Edmund W <Edmund.W.Poor at abc.com> wrote:
> > *You shouldn't make such a big deal out of poo. Here's some in your
> > face, get used to it, it's real, it's here; nothing to make a fuss over.
> >
> > That is prescriptive. It's an attempt to change attitudes.
> >
> > If we need images of human feces or dog turds or horse manure, why not
> > create a sidebare article called [[Images of feces]]? A link or two in
> > the article won't offend too many people.
>
> Hogwash.
>
> When you systematically remove informative content that your personal
> system of values deems as offensive or unethical you force the
> encyclopedia to adopt your bias: By removing content that is
> considered by some to be 'wrong' because it is considered to be
> 'wrong' we make the statement that the encyclopedia considers the
> content is wrong and therefor present a non neutral point of view.
>
> There are plenty of people who would be sufficently shocked by our
> mentioning of matters sexual or outside a single religion, so when we
> are done removing useful images because some people are offended do we
> then begin to delete articles about 'wrong' subjects?
>
> The question for exclusion should be based on the images ability to
> inform. We should exclude content that has no value to teach.  This
> does not mean we should include every potentially informative image,
> but rather we should select the most informative subset and of the
> remaining equally most informative results we should select the ones
> which best satisfy secondary artistic and editorial criteria.
>
> So for example, perhaps a particular image of feces is considered
> especially disgusting but someone has found an image of equal
> informative ability that most consider less disgusting. Thus decision
> between the two images is an editorial judgement and does not interact
> with NPOV.  I do not advocate that 'majority shock' should be
> encouraged or the risk of which intentionally ignored,  but rather
> that because of NPOV all decisions of taste should take a secondary
> role by only being used to decide among multiple choices of
> substantially equally informative value.
>
> I'm pretty clueless when it comes to feces, and would like to stay
> that way :), so I can't fairly gauge what the informative ability of a
> given image is... But I strongly object to how you've framed the
> argument.
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


from_name: Rowan Collins

subject: [Wikitech-l] Cascading extensions

body:
On 14/06/05, MHart <wiki at matthart.com> wrote:
> Extensions within extensions don't seem to be parsing.

Extensions return HTML, not wikitext; that is, nothing returned by
your extension function will be touched by the parser. In the case of
"<e1><e2>foo</e2></e1>" only the extension for "e1" will be called,
the rest is just its input, and its output is just HTML.

For how to manually parse some text inside the extension, see
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_extensions_FAQ#How_do_I_render_wikitext_in_my_extension.3F

For something more specific, you'll have to improvise.

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


from_name: Stacey Greenstein

subject: [WikiEN-l] talk:feces

body:
Hardly. No ban by an admin is truely permanent. Any other admin can revert
the ban at any time.

UtherSRG

On 6/14/05, Jane Halliwell <hundredpurses at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> Please check the talk:feces page before deciding if SlimVirgin has behaved
> properly. She has misrepresented the situation.
>
> At Talk:Feces, we have THOROUGHLY discussed the issue, and public opinion
> is
> in FAVOR of including the image. 16 to 10.
>
> Furthermore, if you read her 'pre-screening' message, it is not intended
> to
> let consensus emerge. It is intended to exclude me from contributing. Read
> her words at talk:feces.
>
> The 24 hours is not the end of the world for me. But SlimVirgin has
> PERMANENTLY blocked two newbies. As far as Wiki editing goes, it IS the
> end
> of the world for them.
>
>
> >Well whatever the case, 24 hours of not editing a page on feces isn't
> >going to be the end of the world, is it? "Pre-screening" -- also known
> >as coming to some sort of agreement before getting into or continuing
> >a revert war -- is often an essential way of keeping articles from
> >getting, um, crapped up in the process of disagreement. If a user
> >can't be bothered to discuss changes beforehand with other editors
> >before insisting on re-inserting and reverting contentious
> >information, I think that's a good sign of a problem.
>
> >FF
>
> On 6/13/05, Jane Halliwell <hundredpurses at hotmail.com<http://hotmail.com>>
> wrote:
> >>I am user:Eyeon. Sysop:SlimVirgin has wrongly suspended me, accusing me
> of
> >>using sockpuppets (user:niglet and user:fecologist) to get around 3rr.>
> >>Furthermore, she has blocked editing of Feces article for content
> reasons,
> > >and admits it on the talk:feces page - quote: "If any regular editor
> >wants
> > >to edit, drop me a note on my talk page, and I'll unprotect." I'm
> pretty
> > >sure that the role of a sysop is NOT to pre-screen edits.>
>
> _________________________________________________________________
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from_name: Bryan Derksen

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Re: WikiProjects overriding global guidelines?

references:
<d8l02r$h92$1@sea.gmane.org> <d8mt2n$m1m$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<42AF0E66.2080500@shaw.ca> <d8n35n$ch4$1@sea.gmane.org>

body:
Phil Boswell wrote:

>Yes, I absolutely agree. The point being that if the link to such a common
>phrase comes up "blue", editors will assume that such an article already
>exists, whereas if it comes up "red" they might be inclined to go and write
>it.
>
>
Ah, I see - I'd thought you were arguing that _all_ episode titles
should be disambiguated because some of them might be ambiguous. I
certainly have no problem with disambiguating episode titles where an
actual ambiguity exists, even preemptively disambiguating them before
the other article exists isn't a bad idea. It was the idea of putting
disambiguation parentheticals on all episode articles without exception
that I had a problem with.


from_name: Lars Aronsson

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Enciclopedia Libre

body:
Mark Williamson wrote:
> An example might be, speaking in front of a crowd, saying
> "Almost all of you did a terrific job. However, there are some
> people here in whom I am disappointed. You know who you are" is
> better than saying "Everybody did well except John Doe, Jane
> Smith, and Tom Buck, in all of whom I am extremely
> disappointed".

No, Mark, I don't agree.  What you did was more like saying
"someone in this room smells bad", which has the effect of several
innocent people feeling hit, but the one guilty most likely
doesn't at all understand that he is accused.  Specifically, I had
no way of knowing if I was accused by your criticism, so I felt
forced to present a preemptive defense, to avoid false rumors from
spreading.  In the situation you describe above, the good leader
would first have talked to the individuals in private, who would
then "know who they are" without guessing.

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


subject: [WikiEN-l] New evidence of abuse by SlimVirgin

body:
This is SlimVirgin's block of me from yesterday:

>23:45, 13 Jun 2005, SlimVirgin blocked Eyeon (expires 23:45, 14 Jun 2005)
>(contribs) (3RR violation at Feces using sockpuppets)

Now today, 96 minutes before the block is to expire, she has blocked my IP
address:

>22:09, 14 Jun 2005, SlimVirgin blocked #24943 (expires 22:09, 15 Jun 2005)
>(Autoblocked because your IP address has been recently used by "Eyeon". The
>reason given for Eyeon's block is: "'''3RR violation at Feces using
>sockpuppets'''".)

If you look at her user contributions, this is her ONLY contribution since:

>10:58, 14 Jun 2005

The timing is unmistakeable. She actually made a special effort to get
online shortly before my suspension would be lifted - for the sole purpose
of extending my suspension.

She knew yesterday that #24943 was me, having suspended me (in error) in the
past. (#24943 is not a sock puppet; it is my IP address, which I edited
under before I got an account, and I still use occasionally when I just
forget to log in.)

Here, she is abusing her adminship to extend my suspension another day,
which she still refuses to admit was a mistake to begin with. In the
meantime, my name continues to be smeared on the discussion boards, and I am
unable to respond.

My suspension should be lifted and SlimVirgin should recuse herself. Is
there no admin around who can see what's going on? SlimVirgin is abusing her
position to control content.

Jane

_________________________________________________________________
Express yourself instantly with MSN Messenger! Download today - it's FREE!
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references:
<d8l02r$h92$1@sea.gmane.org> <d8mt2n$m1m$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<42AF0E66.2080500@shaw.ca>

body:
"Bryan Derksen" <bryan.derksen at shaw.ca> wrote in
message news:42AF0E66.2080500 at shaw.ca...
> Phil Boswell wrote:
>>For me, this goes to the "principle of least astonishment".
>>The titles of many episodes are common phrases. It is not unlikely that
>>someone might link to that phrase. It is a good thing that the default
>>target for such a link is **not** a TV episode which happens to use it.
> But in those cases wouldn't it be more appropriate to actually have an
> article about the common phrase? That way the normal disambiguation state
> kicks in and a parenthetical is warranted. Other episodes with titles that
> aren't common phrases wouldn't be disambiguated, but they also wouldn't be
> astonishing so they wouldn't need a special rule like this.

Bryan he speak good sense :-)

Yes, I absolutely agree. The point being that if the link to such a common
phrase comes up "blue", editors will assume that such an article already
exists, whereas if it comes up "red" they might be inclined to go and write
it.
--
Phil
[[en:User:Phil Boswell]]


subject: [Wikitech-l] New syntax proposal

body:
On 13/06/05, Brian <reflection at gmail.com> wrote:
> Regarding image syntax, would it be possible to allow an image to be a link
> elsewhere, but if not specified defaults to its image description page?

See http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=539
This seems best placed as a new option, along with all the existing
"width=foo" etc, so doesn't really require anything particularly
radical as such. It's just that the code is pretty messy and I gave up
modifying it and started trying to rewrite it completely.

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


from_name: slimvirgin at gmail.com

subject: [WikiEN-l] I'm unblocked, but SlimVirgin STILL WON'T LET ME EDIT!

body:
On 6/14/05, Jane Halliwell <hundredpurses at hotmail.com> wrote:
> These are her words, at the bottom of talk:feces:
>
> 'As for page protection, I won't unprotect it at your request, but I'll do
> so if any other regular editor wants to edit.'
>
I have no intention of feeding User:Eyeon (Jane Halliwell) over her
accusations of censorship at [[Feces]], or her conspiracy theory about
me being in control of the autoblocker.

I'll say only this for the benefit of other editors who don't know the
situation. Apart from the provocative editing at Feces, Eyeon has
created nonsense articles e.g. [[Dieter Manisprechensie]], now
deleted, about a non-existent philosopher, and a quick check through
the contribs shows efforts to be provocative in several articles and
talk pages, including [[Penis removal]] by inserting another image
intended to shock.

Feces is protected only against further attempts by Eyeon to cause
trouble. If the regular editors on the page want to edit it, whether
to include the image or not, I'll unprotect it. I'm not censoring the
image. I'm stopping the trolling.

Sarah


body:
These are her words, at the bottom of talk:feces:

'As for page protection, I won't unprotect it at your request, but I'll do
so if any other regular editor wants to edit.'

This is an abuse of power. She is attempting to control the content of the
article, pretending not to take a side in an content dispute, while
everything she does favors the pro-censorship minority.

Her behavior is a hell of a lot more offensive than any photo.

_________________________________________________________________
Don?t just search. Find. Check out the new MSN Search!
http://search.msn.click-url.com/go/onm00200636ave/direct/01/


from_name: Tomer Chachamu

subject: [Wikitech-l] Security Questions

body:
On 14/06/05, Stefan Mahler <mahler at espresto.com> wrote:
> Can I create special areas in MediaWiki version 1.4.5, which are
> viewable / editable by special user groups?

No. You will not be able to do this in 1.5 either.


from_name: Andrew Venier

body:
Ray Saintonge wrote:

> Andrew Venier wrote:
>
>> Ray Saintonge wrote:
>>
>>> Jack Lynch wrote:
>>>
>>>> Additionally, I, and assumably many others, read encyclopedias, and
>>>> esp. the wikipedia, as a source of extremely obscure and bizarre info
>>>> not to be found elsewhere.
>>>
>>>
>>> Absolutely!  And I hope we can add much more.  If it's verified as
>>> having been proposed by somebody (which does not mean verifying that
>>> the guy's theories make any sense),  and properly sourced what more
>>> can we ask for.
>>
>>
>> What ever happened to
>> [[WP:WIN#Wikipedia_is_not_an_indiscriminate_collection_of_information]]?
>> I thought that was official policy.
>
>
> I said nothing about being indiscriminate with the various available
> nutcases.
>
> Ec

"If it's verified as having been proposed by somebody... and properly
sourced" is a standard that many, many nutjobs can meet.  Worthiness to
be included in an encyclopedia is "what more we can ask for."


subject: [WikiEN-l] Anyone there?

body:
On 14/06/05, Jane Halliwell <hundredpurses at hotmail.com> wrote:
> I have received no response to my inquiry, so I am repeating it here.

You sent a post to a mailing list without subscribing to that list;
replies *were* sent, but to the list, without explicitly sending a
copy to your address, as I am now doing. This is normal on a list of
this kind, since it is assumed that everyone is subscribed, and it
thus acts as a kind of "forum" collecting and redistributing
everyone's messages.

To see the replies you missed, see the mailing list's archive at
http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2005-June/thread.html#24644

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


from_name: Sam Korn

body:
I don't feel that including an image of human feces is inappropriate.
Having it huge and then  plastered all over tangentially-related
articles is vandalism, and Eyeon should note that _that_ is a
perfectly valid reason for being blocked.

Sam

On 6/14/05, Rick <giantsrick13 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> --- "Poor, Edmund W" <Edmund.W.Poor at abc.com> wrote:
> > If we need images of human feces or dog turds or
> > horse manure, why not
> > create a sidebare article called [[Images of
> > feces]]? A link or two in
> > the article won't offend too many people.
> >
> > Uncle Ed
>
> [[Images of feces]] is currently on VfD.
>
> RickK
>
>
>
>
> __________________________________
> Yahoo! Mail
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> http://tour.mail.yahoo.com/mailtour.html
>
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> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


from_name: Habj

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Re: Discussion on English Wikipedia in languages other
	than English

body:
On 6/14/05, Rick <giantsrick13 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Well, for one thing, it's rude.  And it's especially
> troublesome when one of the people involved is a
> sysop.

This sounds more and more like a specific case. Have you tried to talk
to him or her about it?

/Habj


from_name: Dori

subject: [Wikitech-l] Alpha lists

body:
On 6/14/05, MHart <wiki at matthart.com> wrote:
> Small hack I did today is very useful when converting help text to wiki
> format - I added ~ to the list elements. Is ~ used elsewhere.. looks like
> maybe a timezone thing so that ~~~ would fail? Is there another char that
> would work better?

Maybe '@', what happens with deeper levels?


from_name: Gregory Maxwell

body:
On 6/14/05, slimvirgin at gmail.com <slimvirgin at gmail.com> wrote:
> Feces is protected only against further attempts by Eyeon to cause
> trouble. If the regular editors on the page want to edit it, whether
> to include the image or not, I'll unprotect it. I'm not censoring the
> image. I'm stopping the trolling.

Shouldn't you be taking this to arbcom rather than unilaterally taking
complex measures to control what a user is permitted to edit?


from_name: Brent 'Dax' Royal-Gordon

subject: [Wikitech-l] Edit conflict

body:
On 6/14/05, Philipp <wikilist-1 at e-something.de> wrote:
> in the past few days the following problem occurred in a local mediawiki
> installation: When opening an article for edit, everything seems in order.
> Showing the preview also works and the change applied to the article is shown.
> But when trying to submit, one gets the other-user-edits-conflict-warning and
> in the preview field there is the old unchanged version.

The first step in troubleshooting this sort of problem is to take a
good, long look at the server's clock.  Is it correct (within a few
minutes, at least)?  Was it recently changed?  Does the database have
absurd timestamps in it?  If the web and database servers are
separate, do their clocks pretty much agree?

The clock isn't the only possibility, but in my experience it's a
pretty common cause of phantom edit conflicts.

--
Brent 'Dax' Royal-Gordon <brent at brentdax.com>
Perl and Parrot hacker