from_name: Daniel Ehrenberg

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Deletion policy needed

body:
--- Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> Matthew J. Brown wrote:
>
> >On Tue, 21 Oct 2003, Alex Rosen wrote:
> >
> >>I wasn't aware that there was any "official"
> policy as to whether
> >>something had to be important, or if it just had
> to be true and
> >>verifiable.
> >>
> >Official or not, many people seem to use an
> 'important' standard when it
> >comes to biographical articles.  'Wiki Is Not a
> Biographical Dictionary'
> >(wherever that is) describes teh policy a lot seem
> to follow.
> >
> The rule is that Wikipedia is not a dictionary,
> biographical or
> otherwise.  That is no bar to biographical articles
> which are an
> important part of the 'pedia.
>
> Ec

Well, that doesn't explain much. What makes it an
important part of the 'pedia?
LDan

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list: wikien-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Tim Starling

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Could we swap list names please ?

body:
Rick wrote:
> What the heck is the "general" list?

Wikipedia-l


from_name: Delirium

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: [Wikipedia-l] Saints

body:
(replying on wikiEN-l)

Matt M. wrote:

>>I partially agree, and partially disagree.  "Saint Bernard of Clairvaux"
>>is perfectly fine, as people who have been beatified are often referred
>>to as such, both by those who recognize the sainthood and those who do
>>not (there are plenty of atheists who debate the viewpoints of Saint
>>Peter, for example).  I do think "Blessed ..." is inappropriate though,
>>and frankly a little ridiculous.
>>
>>
>
>I don't see why. "Blessed" is analogous to "Saint." "Saint" is the title of
>a person who has been canonized; "Blessed" is the title of a person who has
>been beatified.
>
>
In retrospect I agree partially, and would move towards using neither
Blessed or Saint.  In fact, I would prefer not using titles at all.  See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulysses_S._Grant for an example of this in
practice (note that it does not start off "General Ulysses S. Grant..."
-- even though in this case "General Grant" was in fact a common way to
refer to him before, during, and after his Presidency.

There are a few exceptions, of course.  "Saint Peter" should be referred
to as such, because that's the most common way to refer to him (though I
wouldn't object to "Peter the Apostle" either).  Popes should probably
be referred to as "Pope John Paul II", because "John Paul II" is not
actually a personal name, but one adopted with the office.  But I don't
think this should extend to all people who have titles.

So, basically, I'd propose we remove titles from both article names and
the beginning of the first sentence of the article, unless they are
absolutely integral.  This includes both official titles (President,
Prime Minister, etc.) and honorific titles (Blessed, Sir, etc.).  Then
if having the title is important, it can be mentioned later (perhaps
later in the first sentence).  Thoughts?

-Mark


from_name: Poor, Edmund W

subject: [WikiEN-l] William is safe!

body:
Charles,

I'm not banning William:
* I have no authority to do so.
* I have no reason to do so.
* I have no desire to do so.
* I have promised NOT to do so.

What more can I do to reassure you?

Ed Poor


from_name: Stevertigo

subject: [WikiEN-l] Resolution of conflicts .

body:
--- "Poor, Edmund W" <Edmund.W.Poor at abc.com> wrote:

> If I thought asking one or both of the parties in
> the "case in point" to stop editing the "page in
question" would help, I would do so. They
> MIGHT listen to me, but they might tell me to bugger
> off, too :-(

Thats precisely the point. But instead of giving the
power to User:Ed --we give the power to the community
to enforce a vote decision to ban a pair of polarizers
from an article.  We do this already with protected
pages -- but as we saw, the PP rules get run over by
sysops all the time.

> Getting back to the point: I have just now started
> editing "the article", so by the customs of our
strange little
> tribe, I have just forfeited certain rights...

Well if we block the two typical polarized views
--(from editing the page for a week) then whatever
edits you make could then more clearly come under
scrutiny.  ;-)

~S~

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from_name: Matthew J. Brown

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Deletion policy needed

body:
On Wed, 22 Oct 2003, Alex Rosen wrote:

> If so, then how will we ever get *done*?

Begging the question as to whether Wikipedia is something that should ever
be 'done', and whether the ability to be 'done' is a desirable one.

-Matt


subject: [WikiEN-l] Resolution of conflicts (Erik)

body:
--- Erik Moeller <erik_moeller at gmx.de> wrote:

> That is a completely nonsensical explanation of my
> motives. It had nothing
> to do with "developer access". Please stop pouring
> fuel into the fire.

Well, OK  :)

But in my defense, I qualified the above statement
with not just one "part of", but two "part of" -- so,
Although *half of my post was about a theory that your
motives "may have been 'in part of a part' responsible
for your statement.  I at least qualified it...
somewhat.

So let the lesson not be lost: My admitted bad example
should maybe... perhaps... have resonance with other
matters, eh?

~S~
;-)  <==Extra gratuitious smiley, for sarcastic (not
cynical) effect.

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list: wikitech-l

from_name: Magnus Manske

subject: [Wikitech-l] C++ parser : executable

body:
All you need to set up your local wikipedia copy (given windows, a web
server, such as apache, and PHP are already running) should be under

	http://magnusmanske.de/stuff/Waikiki.zip

Just follow the README.txt for setup. The process is quite simple,
considering I didn't waste much time on an easy installation ;-)

Magnus

P.S.: You'll need to generate an sqlite database from the sqldump. The
program will do it for you, but it is very slow, and the size of the
resulting database file will be about two times that of the (unzipped!)
SQL dump!


from_name: Toby Bartels

subject: [WikiEN-l] ESP and e-mail

body:
Ed Poor wrote:

>I wish people would stop putting words in my mouth.

Since I was one of those people, let me say this up front:

If I ever claim that somebody meant something,
or said something (other than with a direct quotation),
what I mean is that this is what I believe that they meant,
on the basis of what they literally said.
And furthermore, the person in question is invited
to correct me if I am wrong.

In this particular case, I apologise to Ed that I was wrong.

-- Toby


subject: [WikiEN-l] [OT grammar] Re: EdSP and e-mail

body:
Stevertigo wrote in very small part:

>who's (/?/personal posessive for a machine process?/?/)

"whose"
Despite the fact that you wouldn't call it "who",
you still call its possessions "whose".

-- Toby


from_name: Alex Rosen

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Deletion policy needed

body:
>Wheteher someone is "notable" is more often than not a determination
>based on somebody's POV.

Well it's frequently based on someone's opinion, which to me is
different than POV. I'd say that *sometimes* it's based on somebody's
POV, but then so are lots of other things on Wikipedia - e.g. whether a
particular article is POV or not is sometimes based on somebody's POV.
We live with that.

So if something doesn't have to notable to be in Wikipedia, then would
an article on every single elementary school in the world be OK? How
about every single person in the world? If so, then how will we ever get
*done*?

>>Official or not, many people seem to use an 'important' standard when
it
>>comes to biographical articles.  'Wiki Is Not a Biographical
Dictionary'
>>(wherever that is) describes teh policy a lot seem to follow.
>>
>The rule is that Wikipedia is not a dictionary, biographical or
>otherwise.  That is no bar to biographical articles which are an
>important part of the 'pedia.

The actual page he's referring to is
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Criteria_for_Inclusion_of_Biographies,
it has nothing do with dictionaries.

Alex


from_name: Louis Kyu Won Ryu

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Resolution of conflicts

body:
> I suggested the idea that people (even devrs) can be
> banned from editing a particular page.  Even if its
> only a soft-security ban -- allowing sysops to revert
> the page if either one of the banned polarist
> prevaricators edits the page.
>
> ~S~

A brief respite certainly has merit, but is not a solution
by itself.

The greater problem is the absence of a dispute-resolution
culture and process.  Most Wikipedians are more interested
in being right than being facilitative, and those who visit
a disputed article are often more interested in making some
of their own edits to get the article "right," or in making
a clever comment on the talk page, than in helping others
get along and ensuring fairness.

Louis


from_name: Joachim Kerschbaumer

subject: [Wikitech-l] Email-Problem on the German Wikipedia

body:
Hi,

When I send a Wikipedia-Userpage-Email on the German Wikipedia, instead of
"???" i get something like  "=E4 =D6"  and the "Sender" is empty or has
strange content.

On the english Wikipedia it works.
I guess, it is just on option to be set on the server.

Thanks for Help, Fantasy :-)


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Deletion policy needed

body:
Alex Rosen wrote:

>>Wheteher someone is "notable" is more often than not a determination
>>based on somebody's POV.
>>
>
>Well it's frequently based on someone's opinion, which to me is
>different than POV. I'd say that *sometimes* it's based on somebody's
>POV, but then so are lots of other things on Wikipedia - e.g. whether a
>particular article is POV or not is sometimes based on somebody's POV.
>We live with that.
>
The distinction between POV and opinion can be a bit of a hairspltter.

>So if something doesn't have to notable to be in Wikipedia, then would
>an article on every single elementary school in the world be OK?
>
That wouldn't bother me.

>How
>about every single person in the world? If so, then how will we ever get
>*done*?
>
Exactly!  It's self-limiting, so why bother with a rule? :-)

>>>Official or not, many people seem to use an 'important' standard when it
>>>
>>>comes to biographical articles.  'Wiki Is Not a Biographical Dictionary'
>>>
>>>(wherever that is) describes teh policy a lot seem to follow.
>>>
>>The rule is that Wikipedia is not a dictionary, biographical or
>>otherwise.  That is no bar to biographical articles which are an
>>important part of the 'pedia.
>>
>
>The actual page he's referring to is
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Criteria_for_Inclusion_of_Biographies,
>it has nothing do with dictionaries.
>
The first line there says "Feel free to ignore it."  I'll be glad to.
If it has nothing to do with dictionaries why was the term "biographical
dictionary" used? :-)

Ec


list: textbook-l

subject: [Textbook-l] high textbook prices article

body:
--- Sanford Forte <siforte at ix.netcom.com> wrote:
> Thanks for posting this Karl.
>
> It's been a little-known fact that overseas MSRP for
> American-produced
> university textbooks are far lower. The article is
> simply one more example
> of the gravy train that textbook publishers have
> been on for the last four
> decades, since the baby boomers started their formal
> years of schooling.
>
> Every few years commercial textbook publishers
> obsolete their university
> textbooks with "new editions". These "new edition"
> updates are often little
> more than minor updates that compel students to buy
> new textbooks, in order
> to kill the used book market. I heard that college
> textbook publishers have
> a "lease" arrangement with at least one state (I
> think it might be Texas).
> In this state, university books are leased. When
> they reach the end of their
> life cycle they are trucked off to landfills (dozens
> of truckloads) to keep
> them from the used book market. This is wasteful in
> the extreme,  shameful
> (in terms of environmental impact), and yet another
> example of a content
> sector that's unable to creatively leverage IP.
>
> Some years ago, while employed with one of the
> companies mentioned in the
> NYT article, I discovered quite by accident that a
> very popular mathematics
> textbook selling for roughly $80.00 in America could
> be had as a paperback
> edition in India for just over $6.00. I was taken
> back by that; in fact,
> it's what started me thinking about how distributed,
> open content
> environments could easily replace the inefficient
> textbook creation system
> that was in place at the time (about 1995).
>
> Let's make this textbook project happen, and save
> the world's K-12 and
> university students billions in the process, while
> providing content that is
> second to none in quality, and variety.
>
> Sanford

I think I'm a bit unclear about Wikibooks' goals. Are
we going to eventually send this to a publisher, or
will this always be online? If we do send it to a
publisher, how will that all work? Will we
self-publish? How will distribution work? Will we just
let someone else print Wikibooks?
LDan

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subject:
[WikiEN-l] Process for suggesting a ban (was Re:
	Resolution	ofconflicts)

body:
The Cunctator wrote:

>>From: Louis Kyu Won Ryu
>>
>>I believe that the procedure is supposed to be to contact Jimbo
>>privately.  I will admit that I myself did not do this with the matter
>>of User:Mediator, but that seemed a special case for a number of
>>
>reasons.
>
>The requests should be made publicly. Transparency in procedure is
>necessary to a healthy Wikipedia community.
>
Of course.  The community needs to find ways to solve its own problems
without running to daddy crying like a little kid about every little
complaint.

Ec


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Matt M.

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Saints

body:
> I partially agree, and partially disagree.  "Saint Bernard of Clairvaux"
> is perfectly fine, as people who have been beatified are often referred
> to as such, both by those who recognize the sainthood and those who do
> not (there are plenty of atheists who debate the viewpoints of Saint
> Peter, for example).  I do think "Blessed ..." is inappropriate though,
> and frankly a little ridiculous.

I don't see why. "Blessed" is analogous to "Saint." "Saint" is the title of
a person who has been canonized; "Blessed" is the title of a person who has
been beatified.

Matt


subject: [WikiEN-l] Resolution of conflicts

body:
Steve,

If I thought asking one or both of the parties in the "case in point" to
stop editing the "page in question" would help, I would do so. They
MIGHT listen to me, but they might tell me to bugger off, too :-(

Of course if I had the Authority as Sheriff to handcuff users...

Which reminds me: according to my church's theology, God is Almighty and
also has the "right" to intervene in human affairs. I wonder why He
doesn't swoop down and settle the Middle East crisis, abolish poverty
and disease, and (while he's at it) fix the goldarn WikiLag problem?
(*^*)

Getting back to the point: I have just now started editing "the
article", so by the customs of our strange little tribe, I have just
forfeited certain rights...

Mysteriously,

Ed Poor


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Resolution of conflicts

body:
Louis:

> Most Wikipedians are more interested in being right
> than being facilitative, and [snip]

That's not true! I would never ...

Oops (blush) I think I just proved your point. Oh, you
are subtle, grandfather :-)

Uncle Ed


from_name: The Cunctator

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Mailing lists (Was: Dammit! Post to the right list
	ordon't post at all.)

body:
> From: Toby Bartels
>
> The Cunctator wrote for the most part:
>
> >Don't blame the participants--blame the flawed interface of using
> >multiple mailing lists for discussing Wikipedia issues.
>
> Do you mean that it would be better for the French speakers
> to look through all posts now on wikiEN-L /and/ wikipedia-L
> to search for matters relevant to all Wikipedias?
> Having general material appear on wikiEN-L from time to time,
> and [[en:]]-specific material appear on wikipedia-L occasionally,
> seems easier to deal with than always having to check everything.
>
Not really; I mean primarily that mailing lists are a flawed interface
(a point I've made since the beginning).

Since matters discussed on Wiki-EN are not always exclusive to wiki-en,
to effectively keep up with the tendencies and mores of Wikipedia one
*does* have to troll through wikien-l to really know what's going on.
For example, right now on wiki-en we're hashing out deletion policies,
policies for banning people, policies for nomenclature for Catholic
saints, etc., all of which are relevant to all the Wikipedias.

Unless our goal is to have completely culturally distinct projects with
minimal commonality of methods and purpose.

In which case we're doing the right thing.


subject: [Textbook-l] history texts

body:
> Absolutely 100% correct.
>
> Essentially, in taking this thread to its
> reductionist (or logical) extreme,
> one would have to concede that *all* points of view,
> including NPOV, *are
> points of view*.

I'd say NPOV is more like a meta-POV. Unlike the
meta-POV of choosing one specific POV and teaching it,
NPOV treats all different POVs equally. It is on a
whole different level that bias.
>
> We should note that going too far in the direction
> of NPOV - which is where
> this thread is heading - is *exactly* the process
> engaged by commercial
> textbook publishers in an attempt to please
> everyone. We need only look an
> 90% of the K-12 textbooks out there to see the kind
> of pedagogical
> medoicrity that this approach has led to.
>
What the textbook companies make is far from NPOV.
What they have is a series of sometimes dubious facts
all purporting to be correct. They also have unrelated
facts in places to satisfy certain people. I don't
think anyone wants Wikibooks to be like this.

I think DPOV (except where there is legitimate
contraversy *within* the field), combined with a blurb
about how this reflects one specific POV, would be the
best. This blurb doesn't have to be long, and it can
acknowledge that almost everyone agrees with it, but I
still think it would be beneficial. Maybe it would
just be online, not printed.

It seems like most people are advocating for NPOV for
Wikibooks but really mean DPOV without the blurbs
mentioned above.

> Thus, following this line of argument, obsessive
> NPOV (ultimately, within
> the contect of the Wikipedia project) = *NO* point
> of view = no text or
> texts worse than what we see from the commercial
> sector. That's where this
> argument - accurately characterized as "misguided",
> is headed.

NPOV just means that the reader decides. This may not
be what we need for Wikibooks, as I already said, but
it is not that there is no POV. I have no idea where
you came up with that NPOV means no text.
>
> Further thoughts:
>
> There is *no* way to escape the subjective bias of
> *any* author(s).

There is no way to create a wiki that covers all
encyclopedic topics, yet we still aim for it.
Similarly, we can escape *some* subjective bias, and
we should do as much as we can.

> However,
> some authors, and books, work hard to present
> material in a way that
> presents all sides *without* burdening the *purpose*
> of the book with side
> issues that divert it from it's primary goal. I
> think that's the point that
> Jimmy was making when he says "The point is, if
> there is legitimate
> controversy, then the text itself need take no
> particular stand, but rather
> present the conflict in a way that all parties can
> agree." With respect, I
> would slightly alter Jimmy's end statement to read
> as follows: "....but
> rather present the conflict in a way that all
> parties can *agree to
> disagree*."
>
I think that's about what he meant, but personally, I
like his version better.

> The goal of the Wikipedia textbook project is to
> take the best state
> framework structures, and build content around those
> structures. The
> curriculum specifics of those frameworks are *very*
> specific. They're meant
> to be. One can be NPOV within the context of
> curriculum frameworks, but be
> assured that working within any framework is POV.
> It's simply unavoidable.
> Pick your poison.
>
> In the case of textbooks built around state-approved
> frameworks, there *is*
> an *implicit purpose* built in. That purpose is to
> create a tool (the
> textbook) that will help a teacher present material
> in a way that the
> groups - those approving the textbook frameworks in
> the first place -
> 'approve' of. Those groups have - to the best of
> their ability (with
> respect, these efforts vary in quality from
> state-to-state) - *already* gone
> through their own NPOV process!
>
> In California's case, for example, the curriuculum
> frameworks committees
> have sought the input of hundreds of teachers,
> topical experts, the general
> public, educational researchers, cognitive
> development experts, private and
> home schoolers, and many other groups to try to find
> ways to create a
> comprehensive 'general' frameworks that 'work'.
> These frameworks are
> comprehensive, and very thorough, but are they
> *perfectly* NPOV? Of course
> not. They're general guides set up to help those
> creating textbooks to build
> content that is thought-provoking, informative, and
> hopefully
> well-presented.

OK, you've convinced me on that point.
>
> [note: one of the great opportunities present to any
> teacher who doesn't
> agree with what's stated in a textbook is to use
> that same textbook as a
> foil in presenting alternative arguments. This is
> called "teaching against
> the text". It's a technique that's widely used, at
> all academic levels]
>
...and Wikibooks should be very capable of that being
done. (I love it when my teachers do that)
LDan

> Thus, per Jimmy's argument, I suggest we forge ahead
> with the best
> frameworks out there, build good open source
> textbooks, and trust that as a
> part of that process, those who want to add modules
> to counterbalance what
> they see as bias in the frameworks can do so. This
> gives everyone the best
> of open source. On the one hand we end up with
> *better* books that are based
> on curriculum frameworks, as well as alternate
> materials to be used in
> addition to, instead of, or in tandem with the
> approved curriculum framework
> materials for those that want to point their
> educational efforts in a
> different direction that those proposed by one or
> another state framework.
>
> Sanford

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subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Saints

body:
Karl Eichwalder wrote:

>>In case of "saints" it's just wrong to call them with such names.
>>
>>
>
>Yes.  Arabs and Jews wil not rate Bernhard of Clairvaux as a "saint".
>
>
What's more, neither will Orthodox Christians, who have their own only
partially-overlapping list of saints (which does not include Bernard, as
he was not an Orthodox Christian).  And obviously strains of Protestant
Christianity that do not recognize sainthood at all won't either.

In light of that, I've rewritten the intro to
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_of_Clairvaux as a proposed example
of how we should handle these things: basically, say he's Bernard of
Clairvaux, an abbot and theologian, and then say he is considered a
saint by the Roman Catholic and Anglican churches, with a link on
[[saint]] to the explanation of various issues.  A very good reference
table for which saints are recognized by which sects of Christianity is
already on Wikipedia here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_saints

-Mark


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Deletion policy needed

body:
> Well, that doesn't explain much. What makes it an
> important part of the 'pedia?
> LDan

If we are to have some sort of standard of importance, notability, or
relevance, then the best way to define it is through examples applicable
to the various fields of study.

To some extent this has been done, with an effort under way to merge
articles on places with fewer than 10 people, and with the "Criteria for
inclusion of biographies" page.

Some Wikipedians claim that any such standard is pointless and that the
only thing that matters is verifiability.  I do not necessarily adhere
to that view, though I think there are more pressing matters at hand
that can be more readily solved.

One alternative would be to take a slashdottish approach and assign
"relevance levels" of 0-5 to each page.  Pages below a particular user's
"relevance threshold" would not be shown.  Just a surface thought.

Louis


from_name: Sanford Forte

subject: [Textbook-l] history texts

body:
----- Original Message -----
From: "Daniel Ehrenberg"
> There is no way to create a wiki that covers all
> encyclopedic topics, yet we still aim for it.
> Similarly, we can escape *some* subjective bias, and
> we should do as much as we can.
-------
That was my point. So, moving forward from that, let's do it. Otherwise, we
will end up contemplating our respective NPOV navels.  :)

Sanford

> > Absolutely 100% correct.
> >
> > Essentially, in taking this thread to its
> > reductionist (or logical) extreme,
> > one would have to concede that *all* points of view,
> > including NPOV, *are
> > points of view*.
>
> I'd say NPOV is more like a meta-POV. Unlike the
> meta-POV of choosing one specific POV and teaching it,
> NPOV treats all different POVs equally. It is on a
> whole different level that bias.
> >
> > We should note that going too far in the direction
> > of NPOV - which is where
> > this thread is heading - is *exactly* the process
> > engaged by commercial
> > textbook publishers in an attempt to please
> > everyone. We need only look an
> > 90% of the K-12 textbooks out there to see the kind
> > of pedagogical
> > medoicrity that this approach has led to.
> >
> What the textbook companies make is far from NPOV.
> What they have is a series of sometimes dubious facts
> all purporting to be correct. They also have unrelated
> facts in places to satisfy certain people. I don't
> think anyone wants Wikibooks to be like this.
>
> I think DPOV (except where there is legitimate
> contraversy *within* the field), combined with a blurb
> about how this reflects one specific POV, would be the
> best. This blurb doesn't have to be long, and it can
> acknowledge that almost everyone agrees with it, but I
> still think it would be beneficial. Maybe it would
> just be online, not printed.
>
> It seems like most people are advocating for NPOV for
> Wikibooks but really mean DPOV without the blurbs
> mentioned above.
>
> > Thus, following this line of argument, obsessive
> > NPOV (ultimately, within
> > the contect of the Wikipedia project) = *NO* point
> > of view = no text or
> > texts worse than what we see from the commercial
> > sector. That's where this
> > argument - accurately characterized as "misguided",
> > is headed.
>
> NPOV just means that the reader decides. This may not
> be what we need for Wikibooks, as I already said, but
> it is not that there is no POV. I have no idea where
> you came up with that NPOV means no text.
> >
> > Further thoughts:
> >
> > There is *no* way to escape the subjective bias of
> > *any* author(s).
>
> There is no way to create a wiki that covers all
> encyclopedic topics, yet we still aim for it.
> Similarly, we can escape *some* subjective bias, and
> we should do as much as we can.
>
> > However,
> > some authors, and books, work hard to present
> > material in a way that
> > presents all sides *without* burdening the *purpose*
> > of the book with side
> > issues that divert it from it's primary goal. I
> > think that's the point that
> > Jimmy was making when he says "The point is, if
> > there is legitimate
> > controversy, then the text itself need take no
> > particular stand, but rather
> > present the conflict in a way that all parties can
> > agree." With respect, I
> > would slightly alter Jimmy's end statement to read
> > as follows: "....but
> > rather present the conflict in a way that all
> > parties can *agree to
> > disagree*."
> >
> I think that's about what he meant, but personally, I
> like his version better.
>
> > The goal of the Wikipedia textbook project is to
> > take the best state
> > framework structures, and build content around those
> > structures. The
> > curriculum specifics of those frameworks are *very*
> > specific. They're meant
> > to be. One can be NPOV within the context of
> > curriculum frameworks, but be
> > assured that working within any framework is POV.
> > It's simply unavoidable.
> > Pick your poison.
> >
> > In the case of textbooks built around state-approved
> > frameworks, there *is*
> > an *implicit purpose* built in. That purpose is to
> > create a tool (the
> > textbook) that will help a teacher present material
> > in a way that the
> > groups - those approving the textbook frameworks in
> > the first place -
> > 'approve' of. Those groups have - to the best of
> > their ability (with
> > respect, these efforts vary in quality from
> > state-to-state) - *already* gone
> > through their own NPOV process!
> >
> > In California's case, for example, the curriuculum
> > frameworks committees
> > have sought the input of hundreds of teachers,
> > topical experts, the general
> > public, educational researchers, cognitive
> > development experts, private and
> > home schoolers, and many other groups to try to find
> > ways to create a
> > comprehensive 'general' frameworks that 'work'.
> > These frameworks are
> > comprehensive, and very thorough, but are they
> > *perfectly* NPOV? Of course
> > not. They're general guides set up to help those
> > creating textbooks to build
> > content that is thought-provoking, informative, and
> > hopefully
> > well-presented.
>
> OK, you've convinced me on that point.
> >
> > [note: one of the great opportunities present to any
> > teacher who doesn't
> > agree with what's stated in a textbook is to use
> > that same textbook as a
> > foil in presenting alternative arguments. This is
> > called "teaching against
> > the text". It's a technique that's widely used, at
> > all academic levels]
> >
> ...and Wikibooks should be very capable of that being
> done. (I love it when my teachers do that)
> LDan
>
> > Thus, per Jimmy's argument, I suggest we forge ahead
> > with the best
> > frameworks out there, build good open source
> > textbooks, and trust that as a
> > part of that process, those who want to add modules
> > to counterbalance what
> > they see as bias in the frameworks can do so. This
> > gives everyone the best
> > of open source. On the one hand we end up with
> > *better* books that are based
> > on curriculum frameworks, as well as alternate
> > materials to be used in
> > addition to, instead of, or in tandem with the
> > approved curriculum framework
> > materials for those that want to point their
> > educational efforts in a
> > different direction that those proposed by one or
> > another state framework.
> >
> > Sanford
>
>
>
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> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/textbook-l


body:
Daniel Ehrenberg:
> I think I'm a bit unclear about Wikibooks' goals. Are
> we going to eventually send this to a publisher, or
> will this always be online? If we do send it to a
> publisher, how will that all work? Will we
> self-publish? How will distribution work? Will we just
> let someone else print Wikibooks?
-----------------
It's my understanding that once a project is at a place where we can say
it's "finished" (even though it may be addended, as an open source
document), a publisher could take it forward. Distribution logistics would
be up to the publisher. Self-publishing is another possibility; in addition
to other combinations and permutations.

Sanford


subject: [Textbook-l] history texts

body:
> NPOV is not impossible for textbooks.  Why should it
> be?  It's the
> easiest thing in the world.  I don't agree with
> Alex's comments on
> history being necessarily POV at all -- I think that
> his comment
> misunderstands the social evolution of consensus
> embodied in an NPOV
> policy.
>
OK, I guess NPOV is possible for *some* textbooks,
namely the ones that couldn't have a POV (like
programming languages) or ones with minimal
disagreement (such as physics or literature), but for
things like Israeli history (I'm not sure if Alex was
reffering to page history or actual history, I haven't
read his message yet), there is widespread
disagreement about basic underlying facts, not to
mention people's motives, both of which are essential
to creating a good textbook. To represent both of
these views in a single textbook could be confusing to
many kids below the college level (not all of them,
but a significant amount). At the elementary school
level, simplification to a DPOV is absolutely
necessary so that all of the kids in the class can
follow it.

> Suppose it is true that at any point in time, a
> history text will be
> imperfect, biased in some way.  Does that mean we
> have good reason to
> celebrate this flaw?  And to enshrine it?  I think
> not.  If someone
> comes along to improve the text by making it
> neutral, that's great,
> and that's what NPOV is all about.
>
> Consider, what is the alternative?  Suppose someone
> comes along and
> finds a biased or inaccurate statement in a
> textbook, a statement
> which puts forward a particular point of view.  Now,
> someone clicks
> on "edit this page" and changes the statement to
> make it neutral,
> i.e. to make it so that both sides of a dispute
> could agree to it.
>
> Are you suggesting that such behavior should be
> frowned upon?  Perhaps
> subject to banning?  Can you imagine the result?
> "Jimbo, I think you
> should ban Mr. Reasonable because he keeps coming in
> and making our
> biased text less biased.  We don't disagree with
> what he's writing,
> it's actually NPOV, but we are opposed to
> neutrality."

If we have a policy to write clear, non-wishy-washy,
age-appropriate textbooks, then in some cases NPOV
could be used. But in most cases in the K-12 level,
we'd have to minimise NPOV and use more of a DPOV. We
wouldn't ban people because they make the textbooks
unclear, we'd just tell them that we prefer textbooks
that can be easily understood at that age level and
ask them to change it to be more clear. If not, we can
change the textbook ourselves to make it clearer. We'd
never ban, or even consistantly revert, the work of
people using NPOV. I think that if people are using an
NPOV, they wouldn't have edit wars and would probably
respond to our request of DPOV.
>
> NPOV is the answer.  The point is, if there is
> legitimate controversy,
> then the text itself need take no particular stand,
> but rather present
> the conflict in a way that all parties can agree.

Creationists wouldn't want half of their textbook
filled up with the Christ-hating, secular humanist
arguments of Darwinists. Similarly, Darwinists
wouldn't like half of their textbook filled with the
pseudoscientific views of creationists. In the end,
NPOV could be a big waste of time. I think that,
possibly, the textbooks could have footnotes or (I
hope this is implimented) annotation, but these notes
would have only short arguments and not go into too
much depth.
>
> Ack!  This is a total misunderstanding of NPOV.
> There is no
> requirement that we make "every sentence NPOV", as
> if we have to treat
> the text as a series of statements rather than a
> flow of discussion.
> It's perfectly appropriate to set a context, and
> then talk within that
> context.

Sorry, I guess I understand you now.
>
> I think this is all a very misguided conversation,
> an attempt to solve
> non-existent problems with NPOV.
>
> --Jimbo

There are problems. Textbooks are fundimentally
different than encyclopedias. That's no argument *for*
DPOV, but NPOV is different in a textbook context.
Textbooks for young children need to be clear and
simple, something which NPOV has a deficiency in. NPOV
can also take up a lot of space with stuff many
teachers won't use, making the textbook either have
twice as many pages or half the content. What if we
used the context idea like you're talking about, but
instead of the paragraphs as the context, what if we
use most of the textbook. Then we'd write a disclaimer
that says that this is only one of the several
possible POVs on the topic. We could also write a
little about other POVs, but within actual textbooks,
we can't give them equal time. Individual textbooks
can choose a POV to focus on most of the time.
LDan

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subject: [Textbook-l] Re: history texts

body:
> I'm not convinced that this requires POV either.
> We should be able to write an NPOV text about
> creation science theories,
> limited in scope to the views of mainstream creation
> scientists --
> not evolutionary biologists, whose views like
> outside this book's focus
> (but well inside that /other/ biology textbook!).
>
>
> -- Toby

Oops. I hadn't heard this idea yet when I wrote my
other posts just now. I retract part of my arguments.
LDan

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subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Deletion policy needed

body:
Lee Pilich wrote:

> Alex Rosen wrote:
> >So if something doesn't have to notable to be in Wikipedia, then would
> >an article on every single elementary school in the world be OK? How
> >about every single person in the world?
>
> As far as I'm concerned, articles on any person and on any school are
> fine *if* we can verify the information in those articles. We can
> probably argue about exactly what is meant by "verifiable" for a
> looong time (see [[Wikipedia:Verifiabilty]] for some thoughts), but I
> think that by most standards, it would mean that we wouldn't have
> articles on most of the people in the world. Requiring things to be
> verifiable cuts a heck of a lot of stuff out.

I don't think it would cut nearly enough out.  For example, a short
article listing my place of birth, high school attended, and university
attended is easily verifiable through publically available records.
However, it doesn't belong in Wikipedia.

-Mark


subject: [Textbook-l] history texts

body:
LittleDan wrote:

>I'd say NPOV is more like a meta-POV. Unlike the
>meta-POV of choosing one specific POV and teaching it,
>NPOV treats all different POVs equally. It is on a
>whole different level that bias.

Yes.
I think that it's been widely acknowledged since early on
(certainly since before I arrived on the scene in 2002)
that "neutral point of view" is a bit of a misnomer.
That phrase implies that there is some point of view
that is neutral, and we are choosing that point of view.
It's not true that there is such a point of view, of course;
more to the point, that's not what "NPOV" is intended to mean.
[[wp:fr:]]'s "Neutralit? de point de vue" is (a bit) better.

>There is no way to create a wiki that covers all
>encyclopedic topics, yet we still aim for it.
>Similarly, we can escape *some* subjective bias, and
>we should do as much as we can.

Right.
We should recognise that nothing that we write is purely NPOV.
Always, we must strive to make things better and better --
in every way, including that one.

-- Toby


subject: [WikiEN-l] Criteria for inclusion (Was: Deletion policy needed)

body:
Alex Rosen wrote:

>So if something doesn't have to notable to be in Wikipedia, then would
>an article on every single elementary school in the world be OK? How
>about every single person in the world? If so, then how will we ever get
>*done*?

Get *done*???

Even if we limit ourselves to covering
the heads of government of sovereign states,
we will never get done.  There is always more info.

Keeping that in mind, I won't be spending /my/ precious time
on creating articles for every single elementary school in the world.
But I have no objection to somebody else's doing that.

-- Toby


subject: [WikiEN-l] ESP and e-mail

body:
Toby, I'm returning your apology unused. I was "thinking" of someone
else! (rhymes with potato, kind of) ;-)

But thanks for thinking of me...

On second thought, I accept you apology and will apply it to any
*future* misunderstandings!!

Uncle Ed


from_name: Charles Matthews

subject: [WikiEN-l] Process for suggesting a ban

body:
 "Poor, Edmund W"  wrote

<snip>

>The only case I'm going head-to-head on, is the field of climate change:
global warming and ozone depletion. That's because I think I know enough
about science and statistics to detect a flimflam campaign going on, and
I see no reason to roll over and play dead here. I'm trying to maintain
cordial relations with the chief proponent of the "wrong" POV, Dr.
William Connolley. Because he's a practicing scientist and I'm just an
amateur. In some ways, I feel we're making progress toward neutrality --
without sacrificing geniality.

>Oh, one more thing: just in case anyone imagines I might suddenly block
a user who disagrees with me on global warming; rest assured, I won't be
doing this.

<snip>

As my first posting to this list: can I say that I'm reassured, as someone
who knows William?  Anything else would be foot-shooting.

Charles


subject: [Textbook-l] history texts

body:
> I believe the consensus was that textbooks should be
> written from the
> "POV" of experts on the subject in question. So, for
> example, a textbook
> about evolution would not include a Kansas-style
> disclaimer because the
> creationism POV is largely irrelevant among experts
> on evolution. It might
> include a short segment about the controversy, but
> would probably tend to
> end with something like "There is virtually
> universal agreement among
> biologists that .."
>
> Wikibooks could, in my opinion, be somewhat more
> expert-centric than pure
> NPOV would allow. In case of controversies, we
> should try to decide
> whether this is a legitimate controversy among
> experts on the subject, or
> whether we are dealing with "crackpot" theories
> which have no place in
> serious textbooks. On Wikipedia, we would always try
> to include the
> opposite POV, if only as a link to a separate page.
> On Wikibooks, we may
> sometimes have to decide to remove it entirely.
>
> Regards,
>
> Erik

Wikibooks is in no position to judge who is an expert
on the issues. As long as they've been published,
they're an expert. But that sounds somewhat
impractical. The solution is to have different
textbooks for different groups of experts emphasized,
and have more of a focus that group. This can be a
little bit POV towards that group (as I think) or
completely NPOV, just focused (as most other people
think), but this seems to be the general consensus of
most people here.
LDan

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from_name: Nikola Smolenski

subject: [Wikitech-l] inter-language link insanity

body:
On Wednesday 22 October 2003 09:36, Andre Engels wrote:
> However, probably it is necessary to also give an option to specify that
> certain pages, while members of the same id, are not linked to eachother.
> nl: has a page "Adam" and a page "Eva" (Eve), en: has a single page "Adam
> and Eve". It is logical to link both nl:Adam and nl:Eva to en:Adam_and_Eve,
> and en:Adam_and_Eve could be linked to either or both Dutch pages, but I
> would not want nl:Adam to link to nl:Eva (or to Eve in any other language
> that has the two split). Whether in such a case it would be better to have
> one id ("Adam and Eve", with extra specification that some links do not
> exist), two ids ("Adam" and "Eve", with some pages having two ids) or three
> ids ("Adam", "Eve", "Adam and Eve", with additional information that the
> first two link to the latter and the latter to the first two, but the first
> two not to each other), I do not know yet, but I somewhat lean towards the
> last solution.

I think that the only right solution for this is the last one. It needs two
separate tables: one with unique ID for each possible concept and one that
would say which concepts encompass two or more sub-concepts:

table t1
ID|Names
1|nl:Adam
2|nl:Eva
3|en:Adam_and_Eve

table t2
ID1|ID2
1|1
2|2
3|1
3|2
3|3

Then, upon each page loading,

SELECT Names FROM t1
WHERE ID=(SELECT ID1 FROM t2
	WHERE ID2=(SELECT UNIQUE ID FROM t1
		WHERE Names REGEXP "[[:<:]](lang:page_name)[[:>:]]"))

(I've forgotten SQL a bit, but I guess everyone understand what I wanted to
say.) Then, join Names into one line and process as now.

Upon saving a page, nothing happens unless it has an interlanguage link (to
any language), then it is checked does it exists in t1. If it does, and the
page itself is not in Names of that row, the page is added to Names. If it
doesn't, and an interlanguage link to itself is encountered, a new concept is
added to t1 and t2. If there are several interlanguage links (not neccesarily
to the same language), t2 is expanded with IDs of those that exist in t1. I
think that this covers all possibilities.

Of course, it is possible that duplications of concepts would occur and that
someone mistakenly attributes a concept to another etc. This database would
have to be maintained.


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Robot code: open source or lock away in safe?

body:
--- Tim Starling <ts4294967296 at hotmail.com> wrote:

> I don't see what the problem is. A vandalbot and a
> well-behaved bot are
> two different things. The common code is only a
> small proportion. As
> long as sysops are not shy about blocking clueless,
> unapproved bots, I
> have no problem with making the code public.

"As long as" does'nt work, because its not a simple
rule --and generally, people are under the impression
(as they should be) that bots run only under the
watchful eye of devers -who might actually know what
the thing is doing.

Might there be a way to compile the bot into a
configurable (non-disassemble-able, like C, etc )
executable?

~S~

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subject: [WikiEN-l] William is safe!

body:
 "Poor, Edmund W" wrote

>Charles,

>I'm not banning William:
* I have no authority to do so.
* I have no reason to do so.
* I have no desire to do so.
* I have promised NOT to do so.

>What more can I do to reassure you?

But I said I was reassured ...

Perhaps (and I may be mistaken, but things seem to be a little fevered round
here) the phrase 'flimflam' could be retired from active service; in
relation anyway to what I take to be a perfectly honest disagreement.  Like
they say, 'assume good faith'.

Charles


from_name: Karl Eichwalder

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Saints

body:
Tomasz Wegrzanowski <taw at users.sf.net> writes:

> On Wed, Oct 22, 2003 at 12:49:05AM -0400, Matt M. wrote:

>> That's absurd. We don't start articles "Elizabeth Windsor, whom some
>> monarchists consider Queen Elizabeth II...", no matter how much this might
>> irritate republicans. The article on Quebec begins, "Quebec is a province of
>> Canada," no matter how much that irritates sovereignists. We don't hide
>> facts just because they irritate some people.

It isn't absurd, it's just following the tradition of enlightment;
lookup Meyers Konv.-Lex. and you will see how the article on Bernhard
von Clairvaux starts:

[http://susi.e-technik.uni-ulm.de:8080/meyers/servlet/showSeite?SeiteNr=0778&BandNr=2&textmode=true Bernhard von Clairvaux], in: ''Meyers Konversationslexikon'', 4.Aufl. 1888, Bd.2, S.778.

> because it could easily become:
>
> King of X and Y, duke of Z, prince of A, B, and C, [list of 40 titles]
> Foo Barski (1234-1278) ...
>
> And in some cases whether he was a king or not is controversial matter.

Yes, you are right.  First just the name, then the dates, and then the
occupation/job/title(s)

> In case of "saints" it's just wrong to call them with such names.

Yes.  Arabs and Jews wil not rate Bernhard of Clairvaux as a "saint".

--
                                                         |      ,__o
                                                         |    _-\_<,
http://www.gnu.franken.de/ke/                            |   (*)/'(*)


from_name: ray at ganymede.org

body:
It occurs to me that we could require bots to use a protocol to
guarantee their accountability. If one wants to use a bot, that person
would be given one-half of a private key. The other half would be kept
by the wiki servers.

We need to be able to detect bots. There are ways, in general, to do
this, but none are 100% reliable, but that might not be too much of a
problem. Any unauthorized bot would be denied access.

A bot wanting to be authorized would check in with their key and get
handed back a temporary key (a shorter, easier to confirm key) set to
last for some time. They can then use that to make their edits.

This is going to have to be done at some point. Why not get started
now? If we want bots to be allowed and to be well behaved, we need to
make them identifiable and accountable.

- ray

On Oct 22, 2003, at 6:30 PM, Tim Starling wrote:

> Stevertigo wrote:
>> --- Tim Starling <ts4294967296 at hotmail.com> wrote:
>>> I don't see what the problem is. A vandalbot and a
>>> well-behaved bot are two different things. The common code is only a
>>> small proportion. As long as sysops are not shy about blocking
>>> clueless,
>>> unapproved bots, I have no problem with making the code public.
>> <snip>


body:
On Tuesday 21 October 2003 12:29, Rob Hooft wrote:
> Nikola Smolenski wrote:
> > I propose that critical part of source (one that reads and writes data on
> > Wikipedia), with the enhancements that Louis proposed, should be stored
> > in a library which would be freely distributable but closed source. Then
> > the rest of the bot code could be released open source.
>
> Unfortunately that will not work, as the 'bot is written in python,
> which is source code or VM code which can be easily disassembled. And
> even without disassembly it is easy to "modify" the library in a running
> program.

Then perhaps it could be non-free open source. If someone wants to make a bot,
he would ask Wikimedia for the source, if Wikimedia agrees it wold give the
source with legal obligation that it is not spread further.


from_name: wiki pedista

subject: [Wikipedia-l] when will www.wikipedia.com be the new portal?

body:
Hello,
I've noticed that references to english wikipedia
most of the time bring you to en.wikipedia.org, and
the wikipedia link from the wikimediafoundation page
brings to the "provisional portal of wikipedia", a
multilingual attempt in meta.wikipedia.
When will a multilingual portal be installed in
www.wikipedia.org?, so as to avoid a link to a
"provisional portal" ?

AstroNomer

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subject: [Wikipedia-l] when will www.wikipedia.org be the new portal?

body:
I just noticed that I used .com instead of .org in the
subject of previous e-mail. I hope whoever answers
does
it using the .org subject.

AstroNomer

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from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [WikiEN-l] Resolution of conflicts

body:
Stevertigo-
> Erik's threatening a ban on JT comes in part due to
> his belief (mistaken) that his position with Wikipedia
> is more secure than JT's --in part due to his
> developer access.

That is a completely nonsensical explanation of my motives. It had nothing
to do with "developer access". Please stop pouring fuel into the fire.

Regards,

Erik


from_name: Eric Demolli

body:
What's the problem ? I send several time linux distribution to Ivory Coast
they know very well how to use a CD-burner.
Eric Demolli
(Ericd)

----- Original Message -----
From: "Daniel Mayer" <maveric149 at yahoo.com>
To: <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
Sent: Wednesday, August 27, 2003 4:10 AM
Subject: distributing 1.0 (was: Re: [WikiEN-l] copyright on old paintings)

> Richard Grevers wrote:
> >And in some countries High-speed internet is charged
> >for by data volume transferred. There is no way I'd be
> >downloading any ISO images on an account with 1GB/month
> >"free" and the rest at $0.2 ber MB.
>
> Eh gads! 1 GB/month? That is so draconian. I do that easily in a week and
> periodically in a single day when I'm updating my system. And that is just
> /my/ computer; my partner and our roomate use even more bandwidth with
online
> games and downloading media files (and they are both Windows users so they
> also have to update /way/ more often). We are only limited by speed; at
any
> one moment we are only able to share a single 1.5 MB/s DSL connection.
> America is grand!
>
> But the beauty of even having such a restricted pipeline as you do, is
that
> only one person in your community needs to download the ISO; then many,
many
> copies can be made of that single file. Then the updates can trickle-in
> easily under your 1 GB limit.
>
> -- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l


from_name: Anthere

body:
From: Toby Bartels <toby+wikipedia at math.ucr.edu>
> Subject: [Wikipedia-l] Mailing lists (Was: Dammit!
> Post to the right
> 	list or	don't post at all.)

> The Cunctator wrote for the most part:
>
> >Don't blame the participants--blame the flawed
> interface of using
> >multiple mailing lists for discussing Wikipedia
> issues.
>
> Do you mean that it would be better for the French
> speakers
> to look through all posts now on wikiEN-L /and/
> wikipedia-L
> to search for matters relevant to all Wikipedias?
> Having general material appear on wikiEN-L from time
> to time,
> and [[en:]]-specific material appear on wikipedia-L
> occasionally,
> seems easier to deal with than always having to
> check everything.
>
> Of course, I read both lists anyway, so I'll defer
> to Anth?re if I'm wrong.
>
>
> -- Toby

:-)
I am registered to fr, en, main, international,
textbook, and tech lists.
Because you guys are commonly spilling things at the
wrong place and that is the *only way* to know what is
going on. Ideally, I should also follow the village
pump as well, because more than once I fell upon
something all decided there. But I rarely do.
And of course, discussions also go on at meta, so that
is another place to watch.

For an english-only participant, that makes rather few
places to follow. Not so for someone working on
several wikipedias. Plus, we do not read so quickly as
you all do. And sometimes misinderstand entirely
things done, such as I did 2 days ago with Mav.

I think ultimately, one give up trying to follow.

I could not assume more than 100 messages a day in my
mail box, so I switched to digests. Now, I am breaking
threads, because I can't answer to a comment, just
copy the title of the thread. Further impairing the
information flow.

I know few internationals have the courage to follow
everything.

-------

Need proof ?

Some time ago, the english wikipedia decided to change
the software to make it suit better her own needs;
that is to make it possible to any sysop to block
someone.
I followed the discussion. It was a general soft
change, intended for the needs of ONE wikipedia only
(granted, we could use it as well one day, and that
can really help in case of vandalism). It was
discussed by english wikipedians only. It was decided
by english wikipedians only.
When I said that I did not want that on the french
wiki (sorry that no one else speak up, but I am not
gonna stop giving my opinion just because I am alone
talking), the soothing answer was "then we won't make
it available on the french wiki".

It was not even officially announced to
internationals, though imho, it is a *major* change,
and could have *very* bad consequences on those
wikipedias, where there are few sysops and no Jimbo.

Of course, the feature is available on the french
wiki. Just as politicians, promises last the time they
are written.

Similarly, a year ago, I remember fighting against the
red links for non articles, saying I would prefer ? to
be default. Again, I was finally told that the french
wikipedia would have ? as default then. Do I need to
say which one is default between ? and red links ?

Last week, one french, one that is supposingly
following the ML discovered by chance the ability to
block user name with one discussion here. He is
typically one that should have known, that should have
followed the discussion. But clearly did not. Probably
because the decision in software change was lost in
the discussion threads.

When the change over blocking decision was done,
french were discussing over a problematic user. I did
not want him to be banned, because I thought the issue
could be solved through discussion. Unless I am wrong,
it was.
If the french had known the feature, I foresee he
would have been blocked. So, I did not say anything
:-)
I suppose most french users are still not aware sysops
can block them. And it is not written anywhere :-)

------

I know damn well everyone is making efforts, and that
in the heat of a war, it is easy to make a mistake and
post things at a wrong place.

I know also that some people do disperse discussions
on purpose.

Wikipedia is supposed to be a global project.

Language can make whatever policies they see fit.

But software is commun asset. As such, any change made
to it should be discussed in common. Not at the
village pump and not on the english list. And ideally,
not in english only.
And when english people decide of a software change,
please do stop saying the change will be local only if
international do not agree with it. The truth is that
it is a good way to shut someone else opinion to say
so, and force someone to accept something, when they
discover that whatever their opinion, the change is
there, so better do with it.

I hardly dare to remind this, but the internationals
are slowly growing up. They may not be underage
wikipedias any more. They also have concerns on their
own, that are perhaps not those on the english
wikipedias.

There are also the small ones, not to forget. They
should perhaps have a specific mailing list, or a
specific place on meta, on their own, because their
concerns are differents from the biggest ones.

Any change in softwaree should NOT be discussed in
english and on english list and pump only. And it
should be officially announced somewhere. Perhaps a
"technical news" page should be set somewhere, where
we would put the upgrades announcements, the software
updates, the server status, the purchase
announcements, the classical bugs (ugly red missing
and visited links).  Having all this centralized could
help have the information follow.

Meta is becoming messy, because we can't distinguish
was is one wikipedia relevant, from what is wikipedia
wide relevant. English use meta as a repository of all
what they like on their main space. It is hard to
distinguish what we should read from what is not
necessary. Making it even more likely that we miss
something.
I would like very much to see something like
"categories" on meta, with boxes to tick when creating
or saving a page "english specific matters only",
"general matters". So at least an indicator on the
recent change could highlight what we are little
likely to be interested in. Or...do I dare say
again...even better, separate recent changes ?

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from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Mailing lists (Was: Dammit!

body:
On Wednesday, Oct 22, 2003, at 22:12 US/Pacific, Anthere wrote:
> Similarly, a year ago, I remember fighting against the
> red links for non articles, saying I would prefer ? to
> be default. Again, I was finally told that the french
> wikipedia would have ? as default then. Do I need to
> say which one is default between ? and red links ?

This can be set in the language file, as for instance the default on nl
is to use ? links. I just install the files you guys give me, if you
want a different default somebody's got to make the decision to do so.

I can't speak to the banning stuff, as I've not been closely involved
with setting it up.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikitech-l] PHP parser made twice as fast

body:
Tim-
> I just doubled the speed of the PHP parser.

> In my test page ([[Anime]], ~60 links with half broken), I cut the time
> for replaceInternalLinks from 800ms to 350ms, and the time for
> Article::view from 1310 to 610ms.

> This was acheived by eliminating redundant calls to secureAndSplit,
> using static variables for constants, and catering to PHP oddities such
> as the fact that === is slower than ==.

> Okay, you may shower me with praise now.

Very nice. Can we get this into stable ASAP?

Regards,

Erik


from_name: Jake Nelson

subject: [Wikitech-l] C++ parser : executable

body:
Magnus Manske wrote:
> P.S.: You'll need to generate an sqlite database from the sqldump. The
> program will do it for you, but it is very slow, and the size of the
> resulting database file will be about two times that of the (unzipped!)
> SQL dump!
>
You weren't kidding about the slowness. I started it 13 hours ago. It looks
like it'll be done in the next 3-6 hours, however, I'm going to bed now. If
a few people're using this, it'd probably be a good idea for someone to do
it once, then host the sqlite file for download.
Another thing to note is that it loads the whole sqldump... it's a little
weird seeing VM usage spike by half a gig... looking forward to the results,
however, thanks for doing this.

-- Jake


from_name: Lee Pilich

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Deletion policy needed

body:
Alex Rosen wrote:
 >So if something doesn't have to notable to be in Wikipedia, then would
 >an article on every single elementary school in the world be OK? How
 >about every single person in the world?

As far as I'm concerned, articles on any person and on any school are fine
*if* we can verify the information in those articles. We can probably argue
about exactly what is meant by "verifiable" for a looong time (see
[[Wikipedia:Verifiabilty]] for some thoughts), but I think that by most
standards, it would mean that we wouldn't have articles on most of the
people in the world. Requiring things to be verifiable cuts a heck of a lot
of stuff out.

 >If so, then how will we ever get *done*?

We won't. That's part of the fun :)

Lee (Camembert)


from_name: Walter Vermeir

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] [INFO] management of the many Wikipedia/Media-lists -
	gmane update

body:
There are two different manners to read the Wikimedia list;
- As an ordinary e-mail discussion list
- As a newsgroup

To read the lists like a usenet newsgroup...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newsgroup

...you need a "newsreader".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newsreader

You /can/ use Outlook Express for this.

All posting are also send to gmane.org, a mail-to-usenet gateway.

To use it;

You must specify the NNTP-server news.gmane.org at your newsreader.
Sarch for the "wikipedia" and "wikimedia" groups.

See;
http://news.gmane.org/?match=wikipedia
http://news.gmane.org/?match=wikimedia

All Wikipedia/Media lists are listed (so far I know)

New lists!
nntp://news.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.mediawiki
nntp://news.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.legal
nntp://news.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.mediawiki.bugs

For posting to a newsgroup you must be a list member of that list. The
first time you post to the newsgroup you will receive an email for
verification of your email address, which is normal.

If you work by means of the newsgroup you probably no longer wants to
receive the messages by email. To disable email delivery go to "Edit
Options" of the mailing list.
htt://mail.wikipedia.org

Now whit the new Mailman version you can disabel delivery for all
subribed Wikimedia lists.

Gmane options;
- A email address that is posted on gmane will be "encrypted".
It looks like this
wikipedia-l=T31ubCBy5U6GglJvpFV4uA @ public.gmane.org

This is a anti-spam function. When you send a email to a encrypted email
address you will recieve a auto request for confirmation the first time
you use that address befor delivery of the email.

- Gmane respects the X-No-Archive, Archive and X-Archive headers. These
headers allow users to say how long Gmane should store messages. A
expired message will still exist in the normal list archive. This works
only when you include those headers in the posting.

- cancel; if you post a message to a list by use of gmane you can
"cancel" it like on usenet. This is not a good idea to do this. When
canceled it is gone from the gmane newsserver and archive but you *can
not* un-send a email. All normal list users will have recieved you posting.

Please do not email gmane to ask to remove your posting from there
archive, the do not like it (i noticed, Ed, it is removed)

Notice to the list admins; please put a notice about gmane on your list
infopage and/or the "welcome email"

Walter


from_name: Neil Harris

body:
Tim Starling wrote:

> I just doubled the speed of the PHP parser.
>
> In my test page ([[Anime]], ~60 links with half broken), I cut the
> time for replaceInternalLinks from 800ms to 350ms, and the time for
> Article::view from 1310 to 610ms.
>
> This was acheived by eliminating redundant calls to secureAndSplit,
> using static variables for constants, and catering to PHP oddities
> such as the fact that === is slower than ==.
>
> Okay, you may shower me with praise now.
>
> -- Tim Starling.
>
Fantastic!

-- Neil


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: [Wikipedia-l] Saints

body:
Charles Matthews wrote:

>"Delirium" wrote
>
>>... I'd propose we remove titles from both article names and
>>the beginning of the first sentence of the article, unless they are
>>absolutely integral.  This includes both official titles (President,
>>Prime Minister, etc.) and honorific titles (Blessed, Sir, etc.).
>>
>
>I'd agree with the general sentiment.  Had a ''Sir'' imposed on an article I
>wrote, and felt this made too much of a non-hereditry title.  Isaac Newton
>doesn't need the "Sir", for example.
>
If you don't want titles in the articles that you write that's just
fine.  Others may prefer to include them in the articles that they
write; that's fine too..  Going around and removing these titles just
because they don't please you is a disrespectful act.

Ec


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikimedia, MediaWiki logos uploaded

body:
On Thursday, Oct 23, 2003, at 02:19 US/Pacific, tarquin wrote:
> Were IS the wikimedia logo? I can't see it anywhere :( , eg
> http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki

http://wikimediafoundation.org/

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


body:
> On Thursday, Oct 23, 2003, at 02:19 US/Pacific, tarquin wrote:
>> Were IS the wikimedia logo? I can't see it anywhere :( , eg
>> http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki
>
> http://wikimediafoundation.org/

Or if you meant the mediawiki logo, http://wikipedia.sourceforge.net/

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


body:
On Wednesday, Oct 22, 2003, at 20:20 US/Pacific, wiki pedista wrote:
> I've noticed that references to english wikipedia
> most of the time bring you to en.wikipedia.org, and
> the wikipedia link from the wikimediafoundation page
> brings to the "provisional portal of wikipedia", a
> multilingual attempt in meta.wikipedia.
> When will a multilingual portal be installed in
> www.wikipedia.org?, so as to avoid a link to a
> "provisional portal" ?

When somebody gets a chance to set up a final portal...

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Dante Alighieri

subject: [WikiEN-l] potential VfD abuse?

body:
Just a heads-up. A user "Wartortle" (a Pokemon reference, apparently) has
been voting "keep" /en masse/ on the VfD page with no explanations for
awhile now. He has been questioned (politely) numerous times as to his
intentions via his talk page.... there has been no response. I think the
time may come for Jimbo to give him a talking too... or else we all could
decide together if this is vandalism of a sort.

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Contributions&target=Wartortle

The above link is to his contributions page.

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

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


body:
On Wednesday, Oct 22, 2003, at 16:57 US/Pacific, Tim Starling wrote:
> This was acheived by eliminating redundant calls to secureAndSplit,
> using static variables for constants, and catering to PHP oddities
> such as the fact that === is slower than ==.
>
> Okay, you may shower me with praise now.

*sprinkle sprinkle sprinkle* Three cheers for Tim!

I've backported at least part of the changes to stable; it does make a
difference. On a copy of [[List of China-related topics]], with 1994
broken links and 1 live one, the new code gives about a 15% increase in
total page load speed -- which is a big difference considering that the
page takes about 3.5 seconds to render on my 2GHz Athlon with a single
request as the sole load! 16 of those page views in 60 seconds vs 70
seconds is a definite improvement. I'm sure there's more tweaking to be
done...

(A note: when you're into this many links, the time it takes to load
the info out of the link tables can actually be a significant chunk of
the render time. More aggressive caching will hopefully render all this
moot soon, though...)

Since I'm insane, I've also rewritten the replaceInternalLinks loop,
which has been pissing me off for a long time. It now lets
secureAndSplit do the link parsing rather than trying to do some of it
itself, so the code should be easier to maintain. The rewrite doesn't
seem to have made a significant impact on speed either way compared
with my initial backport of Tim's bits, but the code's IMHO cleaner and
I fixed some bugs while I was in there:

* initial spaces in the title of a link with a namespace are now
trimmed, so [[Wikipedia:_Oops]] now maps correctly to
[[Wikipedia:Oops]] instead of generating a technically illegal title
with initial whitespace in cur_title.
* 'media' is treated as a localizable pseudo-namespace like 'special',
and can be adjusted in the language files
* media links should now go into the imagelinks table and show up in
the image backlinks
* on the off chance someone makes a link in the form
[[:media:foo.jpg]], the link won't turn into a misguided attempt to
link to an article called "Media:foo.jpg".
* inline language links in the form [[:fr:lien interwiki]] finally work
* certain illegal links that were vanishing from the output completely
are now rendered as plaintext (such as "[[ ]]")

Another behavior change that could be changed back if people don't
think it's a good idea:
* on links with the initial colon, the colon now isn't displayed in the
default link text
* 'class="internal"' removed from normal inline links, it just wastes
bandwidth without doing anything useful

This is all "bug fixes" in stable... I've committed to cvs but haven't
installed it just yet, but unless someone turns up problems in testing
I'll install it tomorrow or so when I've got time to look it over and
babysit the server for a while after it's online.

The new fixes will need merging into the dev branch along with all the
other fixes...

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: WatchedItem.php

body:
On Wednesday, Oct 22, 2003, at 17:20 US/Pacific, Tim Starling wrote:
> Brion Vibber wrote:
>> I've consolidated some of the watchlist access code into
>> WatchedItem.php and added memcached support for it. This should
>> reduce db hits on logged-in page views; it had been checking the
>> watchlist table (twice!) per logged-in page render.
>
> Good stuff. Watchlist queries were common features in the slow query
> log.

A clarification: what I've got it going for is the 'is this page
watched?' check on every wiki page render. It's a simple enough query,
but even simple queries put load on the database and can hang if the db
doesn't want to respond. Right now it's storing each user<->page
relationship as a separate key. This probably isn't the most efficient
thing; it only wins you in db terms when you come back to a page you've
already visited. Every single _new_ page you visit still needs to be
checked against the db before the watched/not watched state can be
stored.

An alternate way might be to slurp the entire list of watched pages for
a user into a list and store it as one key. It then only needs to hit
the database the first time you come in and whenever you alter your
watchlist, and won't need to store a hojillion non-matches for all the
pages you visit that you're not watching. The whole watchlist can be in
the tens of kilobytes for a few really active users, but for most
people it'll be quite small, so this would probably be an efficiency
win. However it's 3am so I'll do this tomorrow. :)

>  BTW as I discovered with wfMsg(), querying memcached on a local
> machine takes on the order of a millisecond (on my poor old 66 MHz FSB
> Celeron). So if you need to access thousands of entries in the course
> of a request, it's probably better to consolidate the entries into
> larger chunks.

A note about memcached is that it's suboptimal on a stock 2.4.x Linux
kernel. A 2.6 or patched 2.4 kernel with epoll notification support, or
the similar kqueue on BSD, is recommended. Until we either get a new
kernel (successfully) installed or the LiveJournal guys finish tracking
down the bugs with rtsig notification, which stock 2.4 does support, we
won't get the best possible response times on memcached.

Should still be better than a database that doesn't feel like
responding for 90 seconds while it ponders statistics, though. ;)

>> (Also a note: main development is currently going on in the stable
>> branch and is focused on speed, security, and bug fixes, not
>> features. A lot of fixes will need to be forward-ported to the dev
>> branch at some point.)
>
> I've been working on the dev branch. When do you next want to merge
> the two branches? I'm not going to port my parser optimisation to
> stable, so if we want that, we'll have to do a proper merge.

Well, I've already ported some of that over. I think we should probably
do some more merging both ways; there are bug fixes in stable that
should go into dev, but not all of the new features in dev are ready
for stable yet.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


body:
From: "Guillaume Blanchard" <gblanchard at arcsy.co.jp>

>Effectively it's really pitty your are the alone to
>speak for french people.
>(your are often not representative of other french
>opinion)

Yeah. But it is not exactly as if I was not calling
for you all to participate more hein ?
And as I said, I am not gonna just shut up because you
guys don't speak up, right ?

Ce n'est pas faute de vous interpeller souvent :-)
Je ne vais pas me taire uniquement parce que d'autres
ne peuvent pas parler.

This said, apart from blocking undesired ones, I think
we agree on most things Aoi. Just check last
decisions.
Hum...and CD release of raw french version perhaps as
well.

Je pense Aoi, qu'? part le CD et la pratique de
bloquer toute personne qui semble avoir une vision
autre que le politiquement correct, nous sommes
d'accord dans la majorit? des cas. La plupart des
d?cisions "en rade" sur fr, ne le sont pas du fait
d'un blocage de ma part.

>I can't help... I can't read all the mails (too long
>to translate for me).

Yup. And I suppose you also have troubles finding the
relevant ones :-)

et peut ?tre sont ils un peu trop nombreux ?galement

>Just hope the french Wikipedia growing will attract
>more people fluent in english.

See to which extremities we are resolved ? We need to
attract people fluent in english to have a say. How
democratic is that ?

Et donc, pour participer, nous devons n?cessairement
parler anglais.

>How about other no-english Wikipedia ?

Not very much here either. At best one or two people
for each language participate actively to mailing
lists. No real representation can be fair this way.

Guillaume

Ben, pas mieux que nous.

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from_name: Delirium

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: [Wikipedia-l] Saints

body:
Ray Saintonge wrote:

> Charles Matthews wrote:
>
>> "Delirium" wrote
>>
>>> ... I'd propose we remove titles from both article names and
>>> the beginning of the first sentence of the article, unless they are
>>> absolutely integral.  This includes both official titles (President,
>>> Prime Minister, etc.) and honorific titles (Blessed, Sir, etc.).
>>>
>>
>> I'd agree with the general sentiment.  Had a ''Sir'' imposed on an
>> article I
>> wrote, and felt this made too much of a non-hereditry title.  Isaac
>> Newton
>> doesn't need the "Sir", for example.
>>
> If you don't want titles in the articles that you write that's just
> fine.  Others may prefer to include them in the articles that they
> write; that's fine too..  Going around and removing these titles just
> because they don't please you is a disrespectful act.

I don't see consistency as disrespectful.  Using some titles and not
others is highly POV, and so removing them all is an attempt to NPOV
things.  Saying that we like the Catholic Church and the British Crown
and so will respect Saint, Blessed, Sir, and so on, but dislike the
President for Life of Turkmenistan so won't respect his self-proclaimed
title "His Excellency Turkmenibashi" is a POV distinction.  Maintaining
such a distinction between "titles we accept and use" and "titles we
don't use" is untenable.  I don't really see a problem with simply not
using titles at all in the initial entry, and mentioning them later.
See [[John F. Kennedy]] on the English Wikipedia for a good example of
this: it starts off "John F. Kennedy...", *not*, "President John F.
Kennedy", but nonetheless conveys the important information that he was
president within the first sentence.  IMO all articles should be like
this, with the exception of a very few people who are known primarily by
their title (like Mother Theresa or Cardinal Richelieu).

-Mark


subject: [Wikipedia-l] missing links (Brion)

body:
This can be set in the language file, as for instance
the default on nl is to use ? links. I just install
the files you guys give me, if you want a different
default somebody's got to make the decision to do so.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com

thanks Brion. I will ask what they think.

I care little now, except that it is bad that on
Cologne skin, by default red is both the color for
missing and visited links :-) (are you sure this can't
be set on the language file as well ?)

ant

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subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re : banning (Tim)

body:
I thank you for this Tim :-)
I do not question the utility of the loggued in ban
option to fight worst cases of vandals. Thank you for
doing it and saving people time.

I note what Jimbo said. I think, just to take a bit of
perspective, it is interesting to read it again, with
awareness of the recent cases discussed.

>I think we need to revisit having the ability for
sysops to ban logged
>in users.  Maybe the wiki way of doing this is to put
the ability into
>the software, but all sysops must agree to use it
*only* to ban
>*certain* variants on a known banned troll.
>
>In the current case, it seems clear to me that
banning Zog, Anti-Zog,
>Baboon Mouth, JamesERay, and so on, should be done
virtually
>instantly, so as to discourage the behavior.

*only* to ban *certain* variants on a known banned
troll.

>This has to be an emergency situation to ban someone
>who is doing something really egregious right now, or
>to ban someone who you are *certain* is one of our
>usual suspects.

Emergency.
Usual suspects.

Egregious is unfortunaly not in my dictionnary, but I
can guess.

And your wise answer :

>I agree. But how do we implement it? We could create
>the concept of a
>"trusted user", perhaps defined in terms of number of
>edits and joining
>date. If a user is not "trusted", a sysop can ban >him/her.

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from_name: Tomasz Wegrzanowski

body:
On Wed, Oct 22, 2003 at 06:20:29PM -0700, Stevertigo wrote:
> --- Tim Starling <ts4294967296 at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> > I don't see what the problem is. A vandalbot and a
> > well-behaved bot are
> > two different things. The common code is only a
> > small proportion. As
> > long as sysops are not shy about blocking clueless,
> > unapproved bots, I
> > have no problem with making the code public.
>
> "As long as" does'nt work, because its not a simple
> rule --and generally, people are under the impression
> (as they should be) that bots run only under the
> watchful eye of devers -who might actually know what
> the thing is doing.
>
> Might there be a way to compile the bot into a
> configurable (non-disassemble-able, like C, etc )
> executable?

Security through obscurity again ?


subject: [Textbook-l] history texts

body:
On Wed, Oct 22, 2003 at 04:59:59PM -0700, Daniel Ehrenberg wrote:
> > NPOV is not impossible for textbooks.  Why should it
> > be?  It's the
> > easiest thing in the world.  I don't agree with
> > Alex's comments on
> > history being necessarily POV at all -- I think that
> > his comment
> > misunderstands the social evolution of consensus
> > embodied in an NPOV
> > policy.
> >
> OK, I guess NPOV is possible for *some* textbooks,
> namely the ones that couldn't have a POV (like
> programming languages) or ones with minimal
> disagreement (such as physics or literature), but for
> things like Israeli history (I'm not sure if Alex was
> reffering to page history or actual history, I haven't
> read his message yet), there is widespread
> disagreement about basic underlying facts, not to
> mention people's motives, both of which are essential
> to creating a good textbook. To represent both of
> these views in a single textbook could be confusing to
> many kids below the college level (not all of them,
> but a significant amount). At the elementary school
> level, simplification to a DPOV is absolutely
> necessary so that all of the kids in the class can
> follow it.

History is exactly where good NPOV textbooks are needed most.
In most countries history textbooks are little more than propaganda,
by both choice of material (ever noticed that they are mostly about history of
the government of the country, with relatively little information about other
areas like economy, culture etc. ?) and very strong bias in describing it.

In particular, if people in Israel had good NPOV information instead of being
fed by propaganda by both sides all the time, it would be much easier for them
to solve their problems.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] banning

body:
I use the word banning and note blocking, because that
is the one french users use. One must be aware that
blocking and banning on international wikipedias, will
have very similar significance.

I do not think it is necessary that you switch off the
procedure Tim, as I know what french people will vote.

I would really would like that
* the log feature is done, so tracking of who ban is
available for public consideration
* a system is made possible to warn people that a
loggued in user has been banned (could it be a message
at the top, or an automatic email, or automatic update
of a visible banning log ?)
* that on the message displayed to the banned user,
the adress of the mailing list appears, and that the
message sent be automatically approved by the emailer
(perhaps could it be a wikimail to the mailing list)
and this whether the user has a valid email address or
not
* that any first blocking be initially programmed to
expire after a certain number of hours
* perhaps that a specific page on wikipedia is made
editable even by a loggued in user, for wikipedia
communication. The banned user could not edit any page
but this one.

These are propositions.
I think english people can handle blocking better than
we can, with less risk of abuse.
But since we have not your safeguard, I think we need
other tools to avoid slipping.

Thanks

__________________________________
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from_name: Fred Bauder

subject: [WikiEN-l] Compare Mother Teresa article to Pokeman article

body:
Take a look at how criticisms are handled in the Pokeman article. I think
this is a reasonable way if all material is to be put into one article.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pok%e9mon

Fred


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Saints

body:
"Matt M." <matt_mcl at sympatico.ca> writes:

> I don't see why. "Blessed" is analogous to "Saint." "Saint" is the title of
> a person who has been canonized; "Blessed" is the title of a person who has
> been beatified.

Even if it's a title, it is not part of the name.

--
                                                         |      ,__o
                                                         |    _-\_<,
http://www.gnu.franken.de/ke/                            |   (*)/'(*)


from_name: Charles Matthews

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: [Wikipedia-l] Saints

body:
"Delirium" wrote

> ... I'd propose we remove titles from both article names and
> the beginning of the first sentence of the article, unless they are
> absolutely integral.  This includes both official titles (President,
> Prime Minister, etc.) and honorific titles (Blessed, Sir, etc.).

I'd agree with the general sentiment.  Had a ''Sir'' imposed on an article I
wrote, and felt this made too much of a non-hereditry title.  Isaac Newton
doesn't need the "Sir", for example.

Charles


from_name: Rick

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: [Wikipedia-l] Saints

body:
Blessed, not Saint.  And beatified, not canonized.

RickK

Vicki Rosenzweig <vr at redbird.org> wrote:
So Mother Theresa gets listed as that ("Saint Theresa" needs to be
a disambiguation
anyway), and the article should note her birth name as well as the fact
that she was
canonized by the Roman Catholic church in 2003 (other churches also have
saints,
but not the same list--so we need to be specific).

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from_name: Vicki Rosenzweig

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: [Wikipedia-l] Saints

body:
At 01:08 PM 10/22/03 -0700, Delirium wrote:

>In retrospect I agree partially, and would move towards using neither
>Blessed or Saint.  In fact, I would prefer not using titles at all.  See
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulysses_S._Grant for an example of this in
>practice (note that it does not start off "General Ulysses S. Grant..." --
>even though in this case "General Grant" was in fact a common way to refer
>to him before, during, and after his Presidency.
>
>There are a few exceptions, of course.  "Saint Peter" should be referred
>to as such, because that's the most common way to refer to him (though I
>wouldn't object to "Peter the Apostle" either).  Popes should probably be
>referred to as "Pope John Paul II", because "John Paul II" is not actually
>a personal name, but one adopted with the office.  But I don't think this
>should extend to all people who have titles.

This is basically the--sensible, I think--approach recommended by Fowler,
decades
ago: start by calling people by the name they're best known by, and
optionally add
others. So Mother Theresa gets listed as that ("Saint Theresa" needs to be
a disambiguation
anyway), and the article should note her birth name as well as the fact
that she was
canonized by the Roman Catholic church in 2003 (other churches also have
saints,
but not the same list--so we need to be specific). Ringo Starr isn't a
redirect to
Richard Starkey, and Gerald Ford is listed as that, not primarily as
"President Ford" or
by his birth name.
--
Vicki Rosenzweig
vr at redbird.org
http://www.redbird.org


from_name: Magnus Manske

body:
Tim Starling wrote:
> I just doubled the speed of the PHP parser.
>
> In my test page ([[Anime]], ~60 links with half broken), I cut the time
> for replaceInternalLinks from 800ms to 350ms, and the time for
> Article::view from 1310 to 610ms.
>
> This was acheived by eliminating redundant calls to secureAndSplit,
> using static variables for constants, and catering to PHP oddities such
> as the fact that === is slower than ==.
>
> Okay, you may shower me with praise now.

Cool! Keep going like this, and I'll throw my C++-parser away ;-)

Magnus


subject: [Wikitech-l] C++ parser : executable

body:
I might have to work on that part some more ;-)

But, I noticed that the zipped sqlite DB is only ~20% larger than the
zipped MySQL dump, so this could be offered for download as well, so one
can skip the "translation".

Magnus

Jake Nelson wrote:

> Magnus Manske wrote:
>
>>P.S.: You'll need to generate an sqlite database from the sqldump. The
>>program will do it for you, but it is very slow, and the size of the
>>resulting database file will be about two times that of the (unzipped!)
>>SQL dump!
>>
>
> You weren't kidding about the slowness. I started it 13 hours ago. It looks
> like it'll be done in the next 3-6 hours, however, I'm going to bed now. If
> a few people're using this, it'd probably be a good idea for someone to do
> it once, then host the sqlite file for download.
> Another thing to note is that it loads the whole sqldump... it's a little
> weird seeing VM usage spike by half a gig... looking forward to the results,
> however, thanks for doing this.
>
> -- Jake
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: [Wikipedia-l] Saints

body:
Charles Matthews wrote:

>"Ray Saintonge"  wrote
>
>>If you don't want titles in the articles that you write that's just
>>fine.  Others may prefer to include them in the articles that they
>>write; that's fine too..  Going around and removing these titles just
>>because they don't please you is a disrespectful act.
>>
>Puzzled by this comment.  I wouldn't so remove anything, in the absence of a
>convention.  Presumably there can be conventions? My wish not to have
>William Nicholson (artist) not called Sir wasn't respected.
>
I looked at the article and respect your view about it.  It has had only
one edit besides yours.  The last four were by you and more than a week
ago, so I have no reason to touch it myself because I know nothing aboui
Nicholson.  There is nothing on the discussion page.  In these
circumstances I would be the last one to object to your dealing with the
"Sir" in the manner that you stateed.  I would, however, recommend that
you discuss the matter with [[User:Angela]] who is the person who made
the change.

Ec


from_name: Poor, Edmund W

subject: [WikiEN-l] Please post to the right list

body:
As the administrator of English Wikipedia mailing list (Wikien-l), I
would like to *request* that contributors avoid cross-posting to the
International Wikipedia mailing list (wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org).

The international list should only be used for issues which affect all
languages, or the project as a whole.

I believe that all discussions relating to the [[Mother Theresa]]
article should be confined to Wikien-l and kept off the international
list.

The difference of opinion between Erik & James is purely an English
Wikipedia issue, so let's keep it there.

NOTE: If you reply to this post, please CHOOSE either Wikien-l or
Wikipedia-l (one or the other, NOT BOTH :-)

Ed Poor
Mailing List Administrator
English-language Wikipedia (Wikien-l)


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Please post to the right list


subject: [WikiEN-l] potential VfD abuse?

body:
Dante Alighieri wrote:

> Just a heads-up. A user "Wartortle" (a Pokemon reference, apparently)
> has been voting "keep" /en masse/ on the VfD page with no explanations
> for awhile now. He has been questioned (politely) numerous times as to
> his intentions via his talk page.... there has been no response. I
> think the time may come for Jimbo to give him a talking too... or else
> we all could decide together if this is vandalism of a sort.
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Contributions&target=Wartortle
>
>
> The above link is to his contributions page.

A better solution would be to accept his votes at face value, worth
neither more nor less than anyone else's.  Obviously he has a strong
attitude against deletions in general.  There should be no obligation
for him to justify his votes.

You forget that many of these people just fade away even without the fuss.

Ec


subject: [Wikipedia-l] English Wikipedia and the other languages

body:
Anthere has raised an important issue about the relationship between the
English Wikipedia and the other languages. I hope we address this issue
properly, with kindness and respect.

I recall that there was a fork, early in the history of this project,
due to a disagreement (or misunderstanding?). It is possible that a
shortage of Spanish-speaking speakers within the English Wikipedia
community contributed to this problem.

Anthere has been keeping all the communication alive, between French and
English wikipedias. (Peut-etre je donne un peu de 'help', de temps en
temps, but I can't really speak French well and babelfish is no
substitute.)

Somehow, the default language for decision-making in Wikipedia (the
whole project) seems to be English. I hope we can find a way that
non-English speakers aren't excluded; a way to include French, German,
Spanish and so on.

Ed Poor (aka Edmond LePauvre)


subject: [WikiEN-l] No policy needed for titles

body:
I don't think we need any special policy for personal titles like:
* Mr.
* President-for-life
* The Honorable
* Blessed
* His Holiness
* Father

If anyone objects to a *particular* use of a title, they can add an NPOV
qualifier, like:

* Sun Myung Moon - called "Father Moon" by friends of the movement
* Pope John Paul - called "His Holiness" by Catholics
* George Bush - called "Dumbo" by critics - he, he, just kidding
* Isaac Newton - known as "Sir Issac Newton" during his lifetime
* Mary - known by Catholics and most Protestants as the Blessed Virgin
Mary

Etc.

Ed Poor -- known as "Uncle Ed" by one or two Wikipedians of note


subject: [WikiEN-l] Personal titles (was: Saints)

body:
Vicki wisely wrote:

> Start by calling people by the name they're best known by, and
> optionally add others. So Mother Theresa gets listed as that
> ("Saint Theresa" needs to be  a disambiguation anyway), and
> the article should note her birth name as well as the fact
> that she was [beatified] by the Roman Catholic church in 2003
> (other churches also have saints, but not the same list-- so
> we need to be specific). Ringo Starr isn't a redirect to
> Richard Starkey, and Gerald Ford is listed as that, not
> primarily as  "President Ford" or by his birth name.

Looks like a common sense approach like Vicki (a professional
Proofreader) suggests, is better than creating more rules.

Ed Poor


from_name: Tim Starling

body:
I just doubled the speed of the PHP parser.

In my test page ([[Anime]], ~60 links with half broken), I cut the time
for replaceInternalLinks from 800ms to 350ms, and the time for
Article::view from 1310 to 610ms.

This was acheived by eliminating redundant calls to secureAndSplit,
using static variables for constants, and catering to PHP oddities such
as the fact that === is slower than ==.

Okay, you may shower me with praise now.

-- Tim Starling.