subject:
[Foundation-l] Fwd: Your message to Wikilegal-l awaits moderator
	approval

body:
Here is typically one of the message I receive after I
send a mail from gname to the main.

Walter, I just sent you an answer to your mail posted
on foundation-l

My mail was send to foundation-l via gname

In case you wonder, the gname also indicates *you* are
one of those posting to the legal list

just as alterego

and just as michael snow

and a few others

The mail I sent to foundation-l via gname is now lost.
It is waiting for approval from a list that does not
exist any more.
It will never appear on foundation-l.

This is what I have been experiencing for about 2
months now. I lost several mails like this. I already
entirely reinstalled netscape (and actually the whole
computer entirely), after the list became extinct, so
I see not why how my computer would be responsible for
this. I suppose it is more a config issues on your
side. Or from gname ?

But the fact it, *you* are apparently posting to
legal, and I can't answer these mails.

Find below my only feedback from my answer. Check the
date. This mail was what I received after I answered
to you about an hour ago.

Where are the lost messages ?

Fire, the person responsible of the mailing lists, has
not been able to answer me. Do you have an idea ?

But since foundation-l is now the main ml I use, I
find it problematic I can't quietly post to it without
fearing to lose dozen of messages :-( I lost dozens
:-(

HELP !

--- wikilegal-l-bounces at Wikimedia.org wrote:
> Subject: Your message to Wikilegal-l awaits
> moderator approval
> From: wikilegal-l-bounces at Wikimedia.org
> To: anthere9 at yahoo.com
> Date: Tue, 13 Jul 2004 19:20:25 +0200
>
> Your mail to 'Wikilegal-l' with the subject
>
>     Re: [Foundation-l] The list wikilegal-l does not
> exist - Yes, but
>  some users still send mails to it
>
> Is being held until the list moderator can review it
> for approval.
>
> The reason it is being held:
>
>     Post by non-member to a members-only list
>
> Either the message will get posted to the list, or
> you will receive
> notification of the moderator's decision.  If you
> would like to cancel
> this posting, please visit the following URL:
>
>
>
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/confirm/wikilegal-l/f4fa14181f938acbc6caf03efdc048a4f2b3e22a
>
>

__________________________________
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list: wikimedia-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Anthere


list: wikien-l

from_name: Charles Matthews

subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia in the news

body:
Hemanshu Desai wrote

> In a way it is Wikipedia's strength that we don't *depend* on scholars
> and experts.

I think, in the longer term, the dependence will be seen to be greater.  An
interesting comparison is Murray's New English Dictionary, for which the
basic material seems mostly to have come in over the first five years,
submitted by many readers.  Then bringing the entries to a polished state
took much longer. That is, we do see a great enthusiasm for getting material
onto WP.

Charles


from_name: Sean Barrett

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Wikipedia in the news

body:
Timwi wrote:

> Sean Barrett wrote:
>
>> Timwi wrote:
>>
>>> Sheldon Rampton wrote:
>>>
>>>> Just out of curiosity, I clicked the "Random page" link a few times.
>>>> Out of ten articles, I found five stubs, two of which had frequent
>>>> grammatical errors. [...]
>>>> My little experiment isn't sufficient to serve as the basis for any
>>>> conclusions, but if two out of ten articles are grammatically-flawed
>>>> stubs, [...]
>>>
>>>
>>> Concluding factual inaccuracy or unreliability from mere grammatical
>>> imperfection is fallacious and prejudicial.
>>
>>
>> On the contrary, it is a safe assumption that someone who is careless
>> about grammar and spelling is also careless about factual accuracy.
>
>
> The others already mentioned that this assumption breaks down for
> non-native speakers, but I think even for native speakers this is *far*
> from a "safe assumption".

Not only is it a safe assumption, it is an assumption that has remained
safe for many people for a long time.  In the evolution of memes, this
one is one of the winners.

--
  Sean Barrett     | Guns cause crime like garbage causes flies.
  sean at epoptic.com |


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Magnus Manske

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Showing causation among articles

body:
IMHO such automated meta-data would be a fun project, but not within
wikipedia. These things could be done via an SQL dump or the XML interface.

The results could be displayed online in a separate project and link to
the wikipedia article(s). If it proves useful, wikipedia could then link
to that project. "hyperWikipedi", anyone? :-)

Magnus

Abe wrote:

>Wikipedia has proven itself as an effective process for creating
>encyclopedia articles.  But, there's an easy way to give Wikipedia the
>ability to to show causal relations among articles.
>
>For example, all articles could have a tab called "influences".  In the
>case of the article on Copernicus, users would be free to list hyperlinks
>to other articles that complete the sentence
>
>   "Copernicus influenced_____."
>
>and articles that complete the sentence
>
>     "______influenced Copernicus".
>
>If users did this for many articles, then a network of causation would
>emerge, where the nodes of the network are articles and the links are
>"influences".  This network could be exploited through a search tool that
>finds paths of articles between article A and B.
>
>Such a tool would allow for a fascinating study of history.  For instance,
>Wikipedia currently has an article on the Cold War and an article on the
>Attacks on Sept. 11.  But, what if you want to see if there's a causal
>relationship between the two events?  Neither article mentions the other,
>and rightly so, since any causal relation between them is too indirect for
>the scope of an encyclopedia article.  Also, you won't find one article
>titled "How the Cold War Influenced 9/11" because encyclopedias typically
>provide information that fills the middle space of the spectrum between
>history books on one end, and the daily newspaper on the other.  This
>question would usually be a question for history, because normal methods
>of tackling such questions require: analysis and time.
>
>But the system I describe above can compress the analysis. Each
>influence-link between articles would be one tiny piece of
>analysis between events that happpened close together in time.  By drawing
>a path through these small links of analysis and time, you can connect
>events that happen farther apart in time, thereby automating the analysis.
>
>There are a lot of other uses of this kind of "influence
>mapping".  And, you could get a lot of fun data to play with, as
>well.  But, that's the main idea I wanted to throw out.  Any thoughts?
>
>Abe
>_______________________________________________
>Wikipedia-l mailing list
>Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>
>


from_name: Stan Shebs

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Wikipedia in the news

body:
Sheldon Rampton wrote:

> Stan Shebs wrote:
>
>> Jimbo is being a little too modest when he says that scholars haven't
>> picked articles for fact-checking - we have a number of scholars and
>> other authorities who are WPers, the articles in their areas get pretty
>> thoroughly fact-checked, and they watch those articles closely to see
>> that new errors don't get in. The only thing that hasn't happened yet
>> is a large-scale systematic review.
>
>
> But that wasn't the question. The article asked if Wikipedia had
> tested its reliability by taking a number of RANDOMLY-SELECTED
> articles and submitting them to scholars for fact-checking, to which
> Jimbo admitted that they hadn't.

That's true, the WPing scholars are self-selected.

It occurs to me that an amusing future use of donations would be to
give $1-5k grants to various notables, for the purpose of reviewing
a small number of articles in their areas. Most would just do the work
(or assign to a grad student) and move on, but if 1 in 10 got hooked,
they could add a lot of valuable content.

Stan


from_name: Ray Saintonge

body:
Hemanshu Desai wrote:

>On Tue, 13 Jul 2004 08:47:06 -0700, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
>
>
>>>Interesting but how do we resolve the POV problem? do we want endless
>>>arguments over whether America influenced the Taliban; George Bush
>>>influenced oil markets; oil influenced Gulf war.... to name a few?
>>>
>>>
>>YES!
>>
>>That's the small enough price of  neutrality.  No article is sacred, and
>>that's healthy. People on both sides of these issues are enraged  when
>>they see the blatant POVism of their opponents destroying their own very
>>neutral views.  The control freaks worry me a lot more than the trolls,
>>because they use a patina of legitimacy to impose their POV.
>>
>>Resolving  "POV problem"s will be an incremental process that may take
>>years.
>>
>The question is what do all these questions  have to do with making an
>encyclopedia? This is clearly a distinct project
>
Absolutely everything.  How can we possibly separate the articles from
their objectivity?  Being on paper made Britannica a static
encyclopedia.  By being an  editable  on-line Wikipedia it becomes more
dynamically linked with the processes that create it.

Ec


list: foundation-l

from_name: Walter Vermeir

subject: [Foundation-l] The list wikilegal-l does not exist

body:
Anthere <anthere9 at ...> writes:

>
> I do not answer to any mails sent to wikilegal-l.

The list wikilegal-l does not exist. It is closed some time ago.

http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikilegal-l
http://mail.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikilegal-l/2004-April/000296.html

[[nl:gebruiker:walter]]


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Tim Starling

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: [Solution ?] [ 983680 ] username starting with :

body:
Emmanuel Engelhart wrote:
> hi
>
> bug:
> https://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=983680&group_id=34373&atid=411192
>
> The Problem comes from this lines in Title.php
>
> <<
> # Initial colon indicating main namespace
> if ( ":" == $t{0} ) {
> 			$r = substr( $t, 1 );
> 			$this->mNamespace = NS_MAIN;
> }
> else {
> (...)
> }
>
>
> I removed all this code portion (not (...)), and it seems to work.  I
> don't understand why an initial colon should indicate the
> mainspace... and why an article can't start with ":" ? But I'm a newcomer :)
>
> So I hope that's an acceptable solution, otherwise a message on the
> loginform with login rules could be appropriate ?

That's been there since time immemorial, and is used (no doubt among
other things) to allow template inclusion from the main namespace, e.g.
{{:Main page}}. Note that this is not a security problem, it's just
slightly confusing. A better solution would be to compare the text form
of the generated title object against the entered user name, and to
issue an error if they differ in anything other than case. That way
you'll catch not only initial colons, but all manner of other implicit
conversions, for example the removal of leading underscores.

-- Tim Starling


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Wikipedia in the news

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:

>Stan-
>
>>It occurs to me that an amusing future use of donations would be to
>>give $1-5k grants to various notables, for the purpose of reviewing
>>a small number of articles in their areas. Most would just do the work
>>(or assign to a grad student) and move on, but if 1 in 10 got hooked,
>>they could add a lot of valuable content.
>>
>
>The kind of people who charge $1-5k for a review usually don't have the
>time to "get hooked", or they already would be. It would be a total waste
>of money until we have a systematic internal peer review process. Many
>errors are so blatant that you don't need a Ph.D. to spot them. You just
>have to look for them. Typically, once a Wikipedia article gets above a
>certain length, only a minority of people working on the article has
>actually read the complete piece.
>
I think I didn't make my point well - the purpose is not really to
get scholars to copyedit random articles, in fact you'd want to
choose areas that are relatively clean, so they aren't spending time
on obvious errors. The end goal is a sort of "targeted advertising";
getting some eyeball time from people that might tend to dismiss WP
without ever having looked at it. They might not want to volunteer
their own time, but having looked, they can then tell other people
about WP (good and bad).

A related idea, which I've done a couple times with middling results,
is simply to email the authors of references I've used in articles,
and ask them to look at those articles to see if they fairly represent
the work being cited. But having once been an academic, I know it can
be tough to get cycles without some kind of carrot.

Stan


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] work to do

body:
Robert Fries wrote:
> I'm also interested in helping ... it seems that from what I've read
> so far, people are "creating their own work" ?  Ie: People are posting
> a problem, along with a patch for it.
>
> A todo, or other method of identifying issues that need help would be useful.

See the bug tracker:
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=34373&atid=411192

There are a lot of open bug reports; some are duplicates, some are fixed
and forgotten, some we can't even tell what they're asking about. The
problems need to be verified, identified, and fixed.

Even just verifying problems and producing a minimal test case can be a
big help in tracking down the source of the problem and how to fix it.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Hemanshu Desai

subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia in the news

body:
On Mon, 12 Jul 2004 14:11:29 -0700, Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales
<jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> The actual question was about a systematic review; I did emphasize
> exactly what you did -- it's false to assume that Wikipedians aren't
> scholars and authorities, many of us are, and lots of quality review
> and comparisons to other reference works goes on all the time.
>

In a way it is Wikipedia's strength that we don't *depend* on scholars
and experts. Everything is open to review including something that is
added by an "expert". Articles written by experts only are more
susceptible to lack of neutrality. Ofcourse we need expertise but we
also need ordinary people who make articles written by experts still
better. This is the only place where you can clean up an article
written by an expert (assuming you are bettering it in ever so tiny a
way).

Hemanshu


body:
On Mon, 12 Jul 2004 19:59:55 -0400 (EDT), Abe <arafi at umich.edu> wrote:
> If users did this for many articles, then a network of causation would
> emerge, where the nodes of the network are articles and the links are
> "influences".  This network could be exploited through a search tool that
> finds paths of articles between article A and B.

Interesting but how do we resolve the POV problem? do we want endless
arguments over whether America influenced the Taliban; George Bush
influenced oil markets; oil influenced Gulf war.... to name a few?

Hemanshu


subject: [Wikitech-l] FCKeditor

body:
Kurt Jansson wrote:
> Erik's toolbar is realy nice, but some time ago I discovered FCKeditor:
> http://www.fckeditor.net/Demo/index.html
> And I think it's just - WOW!

Looks like a plain <textarea> in IE and Safari with JavaScript on, and
*no editor at all* with JavaScript off or no JavaScript.

In Mozilla with JavaScript on it's one of those hideous wysiwig HTML
editors. Seems to function (although it's very slow), but since wikicode
is not HTML, and transformation back and forth between them is lossy, I
doubt it would be useful.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Christopher Mahan

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Elevating ip blocking

body:
After reading the thing about AOL proxies:

How possible would it be to go into a very temporary "elevated risk"
level, where new anon IPs are not accepted for edit to foil the
ip-proxied troll?
Any ip anon with a valid cookie and a non-changing session ip that
was instantiated prior to the "elevated threat" would be able to
continue to edit.

I suggest that such elevated levels might last 10-15 minutes,
renewable as long as the threat remains.

IP blocking would still work.

Thoughts?

=====
Chris Mahan
818.943.1850 cell
chris_mahan at yahoo.com
chris.mahan at gmail.com
http://www.christophermahan.com/

__________________________________
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subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Wikipedia in the news

body:
--- Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:

> Another technique might be to sent randomly selected articles to
> sympathetic professors who do not for themselves write for
> Wikipedia,
> and ask them to rate the articles as they would term papers.

I would just rather they came and edited them themselves.

People in academia are afraid of things they don't know. When they
use, edit, and come to trust wikipedia, they'll recommend it for
their students.

Also, just as we have wikipedians administrators, and wikipedians by
fields of interest, why don't we have wikipedians by fields of
expertise, with credentials (not necessarily academics) to beef it
up.

=====
Chris Mahan
818.943.1850 cell
chris_mahan at yahoo.com
chris.mahan at gmail.com
http://www.christophermahan.com/

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from_name: Jack Lynch

subject: [WikiEN-l] Google ads

body:
Have a look

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump#Opt-in_Google-ads.3F

it would seem we have concensus?

Jack / [[User:Sam Spade]]

_______________________________________________
Join Excite! - http://www.excite.com
The most personalized portal on the Web!


from_name: Ribamar Santarosa de Sousa

subject: [Wikitech-l] work to do

body:
On Fri, Jul 09, 2004 at 09:49:14AM +0200, David Link wrote:
> Hi everybody,
>
> I read on slashdot that you are looking for php / mysql coders. I would
> be willing to help because I admire your project. I am  programming
> java, php, c, html, mysql etc since 97, so I think I could be able to
> contribute. Please write to david at khm dot de directly to give me
> hints what to do.
>
> Thanks,
>
> David
>

Isn't there a TODO page?

-- Riba


subject: [Wikitech-l] Slight problem with mediawiki-cvs list

body:
Timwi wrote:
> The problem is that it sets a Reply-To header to
> wikitech-l at wikimedia.org (wikiMedia with M), but Gmane has the tech
> mailing list registered as wikitech-l at wikipedia.org (wikiPedia with P).

There, I've fixed wikitech-l to use the wikimedia.org (with M) as
'preferred host name'; apparently this was mistakenly not done back
during The Great WikiMedification.

Please fix gmane if necessary.

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

subject: [WikiEN-l] Google ads

body:
I think trying opt-in Google Ads (and perhaps having a little campaign among
site regulars to encourage turning them on) would be a  fun experiment .   We
could have a little link on the donations page that takes people from there to
the appropriate section of their preferences, for people considering donating
but not willing to go through the hassle of paypal etc (which is probably 10x
the number who visit the donations page and actually donate).

To answer a few lingering Google-ad Q's -- if Google thinks it's being gamed
by clickthroughs from your site, it can shut off your account.  It also retains
the ability to freeze your Google-ad account balance if it thinks you
or your site visitors have been gaming it, iirc.  So, um, don't do it.  ^ ^  On
the other hand, non-automated clicking on ad links, for fun, is ok; you don't
have to intend to buy a product when you follow a link (it's their job
to convince
you anyway).

+sj+

> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump#Opt-in_Google-ads.3F


from_name: Rowan Collins

subject: [Wikitech-l] [Fwd: Re: Wikipedia - cookie error]

body:
On Sun, 11 Jul 2004 20:04:21 +0100, J. Grant <jg at jguk.org> wrote:

> In Mozilla 1.4 I have a huge list of thousands of "blocked" sites, for
> which I have to hunt for wikipedia to remove the domain which is there.

I'm not quite sure how you've got into that situation, but I guess I
haven't played with all the different configurations of Mozilla's
cookie system - I gather it's one of the things that's been rewritten
in FireFox, but whether a new system will ever "land on the trunk" I'm
not sure.

> There is no way to remove all ".wikipedia.org" domains without
> manually reading all domain names which are not sorted by their org,
> domain, host order.

Yes, that's a pain.

> If what ever the server wikipedia uses for storing cookies could be
> listed that would be helpful. I was browsing  from en.wikipedia.org but
> the cookie server as not en.wikipedia.org...

Well, I just checked, and it was 'en.wikipedia.org' that was storing
cookies for me (I turned on "ask me before storing a cookie" and it
came up with messages of the form "The site en.wikipedia.org wants to
store another cookie..."; the details included
"Host:en.wikipedia.org"). I can only think that whatever
auto-blacklisting system you've got active made multiple blocks - one
for 'en.wikipedia.org' *and* one for '.wikipedia.org', perhaps - so
that removing one simply allowed the other to be triggered, and seemed
to have no effect. If so, us telling you what cookies were trying to
be set wouldn't have helped much anyway.

> If you could specify the servers you use for serving/reading cookies
> that would just make things a lot simpler than placing the burden on
> users to find whatever the present name of the cookie server happens to
> be.. :)

I'm surprised that it can ever be as complicated as needing that - the
way I understood it, the cookie can only possibly be stored for
'en.wikipedia.org', '.wikipedia.org', or 'wikipedia.org'. That's not
really many options to try, and, as I say, as far as I can make out
it's the very first one.

Don't get me wrong, I agree that *something* failed to give you the
information you needed, but in this case I think it was Mozilla's
cookie system doing too much automatically, and not giving you a
decent UI to undo it.

--
Rowan Collins, BSc
[IMSoP]


from_name: Robert Fries

subject: [Wikitech-l] work to do

body:
On Fri, 09 Jul 2004 09:49:14 +0200, David Link <david at khm.de> wrote:
> I read on slashdot that you are looking for php / mysql coders.

I'm also interested in helping ... it seems that from what I've read
so far, people are "creating their own work" ?  Ie: People are posting
a problem, along with a patch for it.

A todo, or other method of identifying issues that need help would be useful.

- Robert


from_name: Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales

body:
It's a neat idea, but...

First, it is already possible to explore relationships among concepts
in interesting ways by just browsing the site.  I'm sure that the vast
majority of contributors are like me -- I start reading about one
thing for fun, and end up an hour later reading about stuff that is
completely unrelated, just by following links which implicitly
describe relationships.

Those existing relationships include causality, influence, proximity,
temporality, and much more.  Why single out "influence" as a
privileged kind of relationship?

Second, your example in your original post was of finding out if there
was a causal relationship between the Cold War and 9/11. Wqell, I
think this example actually points out the artificiality and
arbitrariness of how this would end up being used if it existed as a
separate feature.

Nearly everything influences everything else, if you want to be
philosophical about it.  Introducing a feature which tempts people to
link "Marie Antoinette" with "Michael Jordan", well, I don't think it
makes sense.

---

What *would* be cool, and might just be a different implementation of
exactly what you have in mind, would be a tool to find all the
(reasonably short) click-paths between any two concepts.  I mean, now
that I selected the article titles randomly, I actually wonder how
many clicks it takes to get from Marie Antionette to Michael Jordan.
And what's intervening?

Basically, this doesn't need a special type of "influence map", but
rather just an analysis of existing links.

--Jimbo


body:
On Tue, 13 Jul 2004 21:16:41 +0200, Emmanuel Engelhart
<emmanuel at engelhart.org> wrote:
> So it forbids the creation of new accounts with a login starting with ":"
> But the problem stays with created accounts, an idea ?

How many existing accounts are affected by this?  The answer may help
determine the best solution ...

- Robert


from_name: Timwi

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Wikipedia in the news

body:
Sheldon Rampton wrote:

> Just out of curiosity, I clicked the "Random page" link a few times. Out
> of ten articles, I found five stubs, two of which had frequent
> grammatical errors. [...]
> My little experiment isn't sufficient to serve as the basis for any
> conclusions, but if two out of ten articles are grammatically-flawed
> stubs, [...]

Concluding factual inaccuracy or unreliability from mere grammatical
imperfection is fallacious and prejudicial.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Categories for images?

body:
Matthew Trump wrote:

> I'm not sure if this has been discussed in the past, but I have been
> wondering about categories for images.

I want categories for images too :)

> There is no "Category:Maps" right now. I thought of making one, with
> subcategories such as "Category:Historical maps" etc. Then it occured
> to me that those categories might be best used for *articles* about
> well-known maps (such articles exist), like the [[Zeno map]] article
> for exaple.

Yeah, or the [[Tube map]] :)

> So what do people think about this situation. I think images are
> worth categorization. Should there be a separate namespaces, or
> should this done within the current system of categorization (I would
> prefer the latter personally). A bit of policy would be helpful here.

Personally, I would have preferred if there had been extra Category
namespaces for most of the namespaces we already have. I think there
should have been:
* Category:
* Category talk:
* Wikipedia category:
* Wikipedia category talk:
* User category:
* User category talk:
* Image category:
* Image category talk:

I admit that "User categories" would merely be a fun thing and wouldn't
serve much purpose, but "Wikipedia category" and "Image category" would
be pretty useful, so while we would have been at it, we could as well
have had "User categories".

HOWEVER, since we don't have these extra namespaces, and because I'm
pretty sure there would be too much opposition to introducing them, I
would suggest that we use [[Category:Images:Maps]] etc.

Timwi


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Fundraising

body:
On Tue, 13 Jul 2004 21:25:05 +0200, Dietrich von Hase <hase at akademie.de> wrote:
> Hi,
>>  and it is also very good that readers are then offered the page
>>  http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/What_we_use_the_money_for
>
> It would be perfect if the reader of this page would also be informed that
>
> -  many small donations have always added to the larger amounts needed. I am
>    afraid that a normal person reading how much money is needed for hardware
>    could think that his contributions will be too small anyhow to make sense.
>
> - and after this is said the reader should find a link directly to the
>   donation page where he then finds practical information how to make
>   a donation.

These sounded like good ideas, so I made relevant changes; also
a few copyedits (we're in the top 750 sites in the world, not just in English,
according to Alexa =).   >sj<


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Fundraising


from_name: Bill Clark

subject: [Wikitech-l] FCKeditor

body:
On Tue, 13 Jul 2004 23:19:33 +0200, Kurt Jansson <jansson at gmx.net> wrote:
> Erik's toolbar is realy nice, but some time ago I discovered FCKeditor:
> http://www.fckeditor.net/Demo/index.html

That's really cool.  I was also looking at the Epoz editor.  I've
configured and installed a working copy here:

http://edit.xoom.org/

It looks like both of them only work in MSIE or Gecko-based browsers, though.

-Bill Clark


from_name: Matthew Allen

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Problem with running convert as wwwrun with the
	Thumbnail generator

body:
	We have begun to explore using Mediawiki as our main web
interface. One of the selling points for us was the automatic thumbnail
creation on user uploaded images. We were able to get past a number of
the new user gotchas (installing, changing the skin, editing the
navigation menu, etc.) However we have run into a problem with the
thumbnail stuff in includes/Image.php. This problem may not be Mediawiki
specific, but I have to assume someone else has run into this.

	Specifically it appears that createThumb is calling convert as
the user wwwrun. This should work. However it doesn't do anything. No
error messages, no segfaults nothing. We tested this by changing the app
to convert (in LocalSettings.php) to point to a script that captures all
of the data coming from the php command, spits this out to convert and
then capturing the info from that. We can use the user wwwrun to copy
and move files around the directory structure, however any time we try
to use wwwrun to call convert it just dies.

	A couple of things (just in case the questions are asked).

1. Yes we have enabled ImageMagick in the LocalSettings.php.
2. Yes convert works just fine as a normal user.
3. Yes we tried the fallback thumbnail creator, and our entire wiki went
away (all white pages, possibly a php/apache error, we are not admins on
the system where this will be located, so we can not set php/apache to
show us the errors)
4. The large images do exist.
5. Latest out of CVS as of last week Thursday

	I have done a search of the archives and no one has ever
mentioned this as an issue (unless of course my search skills are
failing, which is totally possible).

	Anyone have any ideas or pointers? Are we just doing something
silly? We currently have a hack where the Thumbnail command creates a
list of files people have uploaded, and a cron job runs convert under
one of our user names every couple of hours, but this is ugly and the
feedback is less than stellar.

Thanks for what is turning out to be a very awesome and powerful tool!
That we are trying to get our heads around.

m.

_________________________________________________
Scanned on 14 Jul 2004 00:49:52
Scanning by http://erado.com


from_name: Dan Drake

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Wikipedia in the news

body:
On Mon, 12 Jul 2004 19:56:02 UTC, Rick
<giantsrick13 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> An accusation of failing to explain "Islamic terrorism" - http://usa.mediamonitors.net/content/view/full/8148/
>

Yes, but so what?  The article is nonsense from its first unattributed
quote to its assertion that other groups' terror activities are never
described with adjectives for their orgins, to whatever is said at the end
of this worthless rant. Wikipedia has too many real problems to waste time
on this stuff.

--
Dan Drake
dd at dandrake.com
http://www.dandrake.com


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Wikipedia in the news

body:
Sean Barrett wrote:

> Timwi wrote:
>
>> Sheldon Rampton wrote:
>>
>>> Just out of curiosity, I clicked the "Random page" link a few times.
>>> Out of ten articles, I found five stubs, two of which had frequent
>>> grammatical errors. [...]
>>> My little experiment isn't sufficient to serve as the basis for any
>>> conclusions, but if two out of ten articles are grammatically-flawed
>>> stubs, [...]
>>
>> Concluding factual inaccuracy or unreliability from mere grammatical
>> imperfection is fallacious and prejudicial.
>
> On the contrary, it is a safe assumption that someone who is careless
> about grammar and spelling is also careless about factual accuracy.

The others already mentioned that this assumption breaks down for
non-native speakers, but I think even for native speakers this is *far*
from a "safe assumption".


from_name: Michael Snow

subject: [Foundation-l] Why are some replies being directed to wikilegal-l?

body:
Anthere wrote:

>Walter, I just sent you an answer to your mail posted
>on foundation-l
>
>My mail was send to foundation-l via gname
>
>In case you wonder, the gname also indicates *you* are
>one of those posting to the legal list
>
>just as alterego
>
>and just as michael snow
>
Sorry, I wasn't aware until now that I was considered part of the
problem. To be honest, I couldn't see what the problem was, as all
messages I saw came from foundation-l, appeared to be sent to
foundation-l, and whenever I send something myself I just click reply,
and that goes to foundation-l too. There was no sign of wikilegal-l
anywhere for me.

 From checking the subscriber list, what all of us have in common is
that we receive the mailing list in digest mode. I'm not sure why this
would cause such a glitch, but from what I know I'm pretty sure it's not
on my end - I'm not sending anything to wikilegal-l, and if I tried I
assume it would get rejected the same as for Anthere. I notice that
Alterego, one of the other people mentioned, wasn't even around for the
existence of wikilegal-l, so there's no reason he would be sending stuff
there. This makes me think the problem is with gmane.

--Michael Snow


from_name: leonard.vertighel at web.de

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Wikipedia in the news

body:
> On the contrary, it is a safe assumption that someone who is careless
> about grammar and spelling is also careless about factual accuracy.

Nope, I don't agree with that. I know several persons at the university who write excellent papers with a spelling and grammar (in their native tounge even!) that makes me wonder how they got through elementary school. But I do dislike carelessness about grammar and spelling nonetheless.

[[User:Leonard Vertighel]]
____________________________________________________
Aufnehmen, abschicken, nah sein - So einfach ist
WEB.DE Video-Mail: http://freemail.web.de/?mc=021200


from_name: David Gerard

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Please let [[special:blockip]] flag AOL proxies

body:
I understand that, when blocking vandals, blocking addresses
that are actually AOL proxies is worse-than-useless: the
vandal isn't blocked, and legit users will be. I have fallen
afoul of this myself (and emailed apologies to aggrieved
AOL users after unblocking).

So, here is a request: something on special:blockip that
will warn you that you are about to block an AOL proxy (by
IP number), and possibly even not let you do so.

Are all the AOL address ranges easily obtainable? (A simple
query to ARIN, or perhaps emailing and asking AOL?)

- d.


from_name: Anthere

subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Fundraising

body:
Timwi wrote:
> Anthere wrote:
>
>> Thank you to the person who added the fundraising link at the top of
>> the main page :-)
>
>
> We really really seriously need to make these messages wiki-editable.
> For some reason, I *always* find something wrong with them ;-)

yes, YES, <big>YES</big>

You can do it perhaps ??? :-)


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Fundraising


from_name: Abe

body:
Here are some responses to the issues raised so far about using "influence
links" to find information in Wikipedia. (original post here
http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2004-July/015988.html)

First, Hemanshu brings up a potential POV problem: "do we want endless
arguments over whether America influenced the Taliban; George Bush
influenced oil markets; oil influenced Gulf war.... to name a few?"

To avoid this, there is one rule: an influence must already be present in
the article to be made an "influence link".  This way, only assertions
that have already passed the wiki test are admissible.  The key idea is
that influence links don't add new information to the article.  Rather,
they make explicit the influences that are already present in the article.
Then, they can be used to analyze relationships among articles (more on
possible uses for this system, below).

On another issue, Austin pointed out: "...for it to be useful for any kind
of analysis we would have to work out a system to show the extent and type
of relationships involved."

The way around this, is to give users the burden of describing the type of
each influence link.  Users would include a small description next to each
influence link.  For example, the article on Copernicus reads:

"His theory about the Sun as the center of the solar system, turning over
the traditional [[geocentric theory]] (that placed Earth at the center of
the Universe), is considered one of the most important discoveries
ever...."

On Copernicus' "influences" page, one influence link would look like this:

Copernicus influenced:
  - [[geocentric theory]], Copernicus turned over the traditional
geocentric theory.

If a user searches for a path of influences between Article "A" and
Article "C", the result would look like:

    - [[A]] influenced [[B]]. Short description of how A influenced B.
    - [[B]] influenced [[C]]. Short description of how B influenced C.

In the results, each influence link would have a checkbox next to it,
allowing the user to easily glance through and un-check any influence
links that aren't of the type he/she is looking for.  Then the user could
re-run the search, with the un-checked influence links filtered out.

Austin also rightly notes that if there aren't enough influence links,
they can't be strung together to show complex paths of influence.  But,
since the influences are already in the articles, I don't think it would
bee too much trouble for users to make them explicit by simply listing
them under the influence tab.

Hemanshu brings the discussion back to the mission of Wikipedia by asking
what all of this has to do with making an encyclopedia.  In response, I
say that an encyclopedia needs two things:  good content, and a structure
for finding the content.  With conventional encyclopedias, readers found
articles in only one way: paging through, alphabetically.  Today,
Wikipedia uses a search engine.  Or, if you'd rather browse by topic, you
can navigate your way through Wikipedia's categories.  The more ways you
can find information in an encyclopedia, the more useful it is, which is
why cross-referencing with hyperlinks in articles is so powerful.  None of
these tools affect the way articles are written--just how they are found.
An "influence map" would be one more tool for finding information that
allows you to browse through artiles by tracing their influences, and
searching for influence paths between articles.  Also, by skimming an
article's influence page, to see its outgoing/ingoing influence links, you
can quickly put the article in context.

Moreover, influence links will create an incentive for users to contribute
more to the Wikipedia as a whole.  For example, if you are a contributor
to the Copernicus article, not only do you want to make sure that the
Copernicus article is high-quality and NPOV, but you'll want to make sure
that articles on subjects which claim to have influenced Copernicus do so
accurately with a NPOV.  An influence map for each article would allow you
to quickly see who is claimed to be an influence on Copernicus, allowing
you to correct mistakes or POVs in articles that you might not otherwise
edit.  With more people editing more articles, the whole Wikipedia becomes
richer.

Does that fill the gaps?  Any more thoughts?

Abe


subject:
[Foundation-l] The list wikilegal-l does not exist - Yes, but
	some users still send mails to it

body:
yes, I KNOW Walter

but GNAME still refers to it from time to time
The newsgroup indicate two mailing lists instead of one only

For example, ALL MAILS SEND BY MICHAEL ARE SEND TO WIKILEGAL AND FOUNDATION

when I reply to them via gname, the mail is entirely rejected, and I
LOSE it.

Walter Vermeir wrote:
> Anthere <anthere9 at ...> writes:
>
>
>>I do not answer to any mails sent to wikilegal-l.
>
>
> The list wikilegal-l does not exist. It is closed some time ago.
>
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikilegal-l
> http://mail.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikilegal-l/2004-April/000296.html
>
> [[nl:gebruiker:walter]]


from_name: daniwo59 at aol.com

subject: [WikiEN-l] the Childlover article

body:
I would like to draw everyone's attention to the [[Childlover]] page. I am
not taking a position on the issue, but I do believe that this is one topic we
must be very careful of. Our reputation as a reliable source can be severely
impeded if we are perceived (whether right or wrong) as promoting pedophilia.
While I am not saying that we should censor the page, I do think that everyone
should take a very careful look at it to see that we do not cross any
boundaries that can be potentially harmful to us.

Danny
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subject: [Wikipedia-l] [Wikide-l] Neues Uploadformular

body:
Andre Darmochwal (de:Benutzer:Sansculotte) wrote:

>Hallo Ihr,
>
>nachdem schon seit l?ngerem ?ber die Defizite unseres Bild-Uploades
>gemeckert wird, insbesondere die Faulheit vieler Benutzer, eine Lizenz
>und weitere Bildinfos einzutragen und dsa Hinterherr?umen ziemlich
>aufwendig ist, habe ich mal den Versuch gewagt und ein neues
>Upload-Formular entworfen.
>
>Schaut es Euch mal an unter http://www.ru-info.de/upload_neu.htm und
>gebt mir Euer Feedback.
>
>In den Feldern 4 (Urheber), 5 (Lizenz) und 6 (Best?tigung) mu? etwas
>eingetragen sein, sonst kann der Upload nicht gestartet werden. Gibt
>der Benutzer bei "Lizenz" "unbekannt/wei? nicht" an, erh?lt er
>folgende Meldung:
>
>http://www.ru-info.de/upload_lizenz.htm
>
>Bleibt der Uploader dann bei "unbekannt/wei? nicht", wird das
>hochgeladene Bild automatisch in die [[Kategorie:Bilder ohne
>Lizenzangabe]] einsortiert.
>
>Die gemachten Angaben werden dann zu den Bildinformationen erg?nzt:
>
>http://www.ru-info.de/upload_ergebnis.htm
>
>Nach Auskunft von gwicke sollte die Implementation des Uploadformulars
>mit zwei bis drei Stunden Arbeitsaufwand machbar sein. Die Frage ist,
>ob diese Formular nur f?r die deutschsprachige Wikipedia eingerichtet
>werden soll/kann oder f?r alle Wikipedias. Im letzteren Fall m?sste
>das Form erst ?ber wikipedia-l abgestimmt werden.
>
>Lieber Gru?, Andre
>
Translation follows:

Hello all,

After a lengthy discussion about the weaknesses of the image upload
form, particularly in light of the effort required to clean up after
users who are too lazy to provide licensing and other information, I
have tried my hand at creating a new upload form.

Take a look at http://www.ru-info.de/upload_neu.htm and give me your
feedback.

Fields 4 (originator), 5 (license) and 6 (confirmation) must be filled
in for the upload to work. If the user enters "unknown" in the license
field, he gets the following message first:

http://www.ru-info.de/upload_lizenz.htm

If the uploader sticks with "unknown" as the license, the uploaded image
is automatically added to [[Category:Images without license information]].

The information in these fields is added to the image description page
as shown here:

http://www.ru-info.de/upload_ergebnis.htm

According to gwicke, it should only take about two or three hours of
work to implement the new upload form. The question is whether this form
can/should be implemented only for the German Wikipedia, or for all
Wikipedias. In the latter case, the form would need to be approved on
wikipedia-l first.

Greetings, Andre


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: [Wikide-l] Neues Uploadformular

body:
I thought I should act on Andre's suggestion at wikide-l that this
proposal be discussed globally, so I forwarded and translated his post
in my previous message. If you take a look at the test upload form, it's
in German, but if any non-German-speakers have questions about it, feel
free to ask. Now for my comments.

Field 6, as with the current form, asks the user to confirm that the
copyrightholder agrees to the licensed use. Field 4 asks who created the
image and/or what is the source. Field 5 asks you to choose a license;
the options provided are GFDL, CC-by, CC-by-sa, and unknown. As
indicated, if you choose unknown, you get a message first about our
policy for using licensed images. All of these fields are required.

I think Andre has done excellent work, and this upload form should be
implemented on all Wikipedias as quickly as possible. I actually care
less about making users input licensing information, but as I've said
repeatedly, we absolutely need an upload form that *requires* source
information. This matters even more for Wikipedias that, unlike the
German Wikipedia, allow fair use images. According to international law,
we *must* provide source information in order to have copyrighted images
under fair use (or as the Berne Convention calls it, fair practice).

--Michael Snow


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Showing causation among articles

body:
Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote:

>What *would* be cool, and might just be a different implementation of
>exactly what you have in mind, would be a tool to find all the
>(reasonably short) click-paths between any two concepts.  I mean, now
>that I selected the article titles randomly, I actually wonder how
>many clicks it takes to get from Marie Antionette to Michael Jordan.
>And what's intervening?
>
>Basically, this doesn't need a special type of "influence map", but
>rather just an analysis of existing links.
>
Check out [[Wikipedia:Six degrees of Wikipedia]]. It's just for fun, and
we'd have to create a specific search function to do it automatically,
but that's basically what you're talking about.

--Michael Snow


from_name: J. Grant

body:
Hi Rowan,

Thank you for your e-mail.

> I'm surprised that it can ever be as complicated as needing that - the
> way I understood it, the cookie can only possibly be stored for
> 'en.wikipedia.org', '.wikipedia.org', or 'wikipedia.org'. That's not
> really many options to try, and, as I say, as far as I can make out
> it's the very first one.

Perhaps these domains can be listed on the page with the cookie error
please.  At least as suggestions for starting point to try and resolve
the situation...

> Don't get me wrong, I agree that *something* failed to give you the
> information you needed, but in this case I think it was Mozilla's
> cookie system doing too much automatically, and not giving you a
> decent UI to undo it.

I think Mozilla did now me it, but I did not click "Details" to see the
hostname.  I get cookie requests all the time, I wish to avoid being
someones advertisement profile, so I deny all for which I do not think I
need.  Very few sites have errors this way.  Although in this instance
Wikipedia website did complain.  So then I had the problem of trying to
find which host the cookie came from, www.wikipedia.org no.. etc etc..

I have removed the block now, and the wikipedia.org site works ok with
the cookie.

Thank you for your help.

Kind regards

JG


from_name: Ray Saintonge

body:
Timwi wrote:

> Abe wrote:
>
>> First, Hemanshu brings up a potential POV problem: "do we want endless
>> arguments over whether America influenced the Taliban; George Bush
>> influenced oil markets; oil influenced Gulf war.... to name a few?"
>>
>> To avoid this, there is one rule: an influence must already be
>> present in
>> the article to be made an "influence link".  This way, only assertions
>> that have already passed the wiki test are admissible.
>
>
> That doesn't work. If people disagree on whether X influenced Y, our
> NPOV policy dictates that the article should state, "People in group
> ABC tend to believe that X influenced Y, but other people tend to
> disagree". Your "influence links" can't do that: They are either there
> (asserting a definite influence) or not (asserting a definite lack of
> influence).

We've said nothing yes of negative influences like "I saw the damage
that the company was doing to the land, and that influenced me to become
an environmentalist."

Ec


subject:
[WikiEN-l] The Church of Scientology is discovered to have
	discovered Wikipedia!

body:
On Wed, 14 Jul 2004 00:56:48 +0000, David Gerard
<fun at thingy.apana.org.au> wrote:
> [[User:I'M4aNPOV]], who also edited as [[User:205.227.165.11]]
> but signed with the user name. Without mentioning that
> 205.227.165.11 is in a CoS-allocated netblock. I expect this
> was completely inadvertent, of course.
>
> See
> http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Talk:Scientology&diff=4616961&oldid=4616317
>
> The answer there appears to my jaundiced eye to be looking for
> procedural loopholes. ("No, no, I'm editing Scientology articles
> from a CoS IP, but I'm strictly NPOV myself. Of course.") I may
> have had a bit much experience of dealing with CoS representatives
> in the past. What do you think?

I don't see any reason for our Scientology articles not to be informed by
criticisms, suggestions, and edits from Sc. practitioners.  Anything
unverifiable will have to stay on Talk pages... (and maybe this user can
help us flesh out the article on [[Mission Earth]] so that it passes FAC
next time.  ^ ^ )  + sj +


body:
Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote:

>Those existing relationships include causality, influence, proximity,
>temporality, and much more.  Why single out "influence" as a
>privileged kind of relationship?
>
See [[Butterfly effect]]

>Second, your example in your original post was of finding out if there
>was a causal relationship between the Cold War and 9/11. Wqell, I
>think this example actually points out the artificiality and
>arbitrariness of how this would end up being used if it existed as a
>separate feature.
>
Correlation does not imply causality.

>What *would* be cool, and might just be a different implementation of
>exactly what you have in mind, would be a tool to find all the
>(reasonably short) click-paths between any two concepts.  I mean, now
>that I selected the article titles randomly, I actually wonder how
>many clicks it takes to get from Marie Antionette to Michael Jordan.
>And what's intervening?
>
Over a year ago I raised the possibility of tracing every article back
to the Main Page.  None in my random sample was more than five links
away.  Thus if you trace Marie Antoinette and Michael Jordan back to the
Main Page, the sum of their links will be a maximum distance. :-)

Ec


from_name: The Cunctator

subject: [WikiEN-l] Passing through

body:
Did I miss you passing through NYC/Boston?

--tc


from_name: Emmanuel Engelhart

body:
On Tue, 13 Jul 2004 11:26:14 +1000
Tim Starling <ts4294967296 at hotmail.com> wrote:

> Emmanuel Engelhart wrote:
> > hi
> >
> > bug:
> > https://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=983680&group_id=34373&atid=411192
> >
> > The Problem comes from this lines in Title.php
> >
> > <<
> > # Initial colon indicating main namespace
> > if ( ":" == $t{0} ) {
> > 			$r = substr( $t, 1 );
> > 			$this->mNamespace = NS_MAIN;
> > }
> > else {
> > (...)
> > }
> >
> >
> > I removed all this code portion (not (...)), and it seems to work.  I
> > don't understand why an initial colon should indicate the
> > mainspace... and why an article can't start with ":" ? But I'm a newcomer :)
> >
> > So I hope that's an acceptable solution, otherwise a message on the
> > loginform with login rules could be appropriate ?
>
> That's been there since time immemorial, and is used (no doubt among
> other things) to allow template inclusion from the main namespace, e.g.
> {{:Main page}}. Note that this is not a security problem, it's just
> slightly confusing. A better solution would be to compare the text form
> of the generated title object against the entered user name, and to
> issue an error if they differ in anything other than case. That way
> you'll catch not only initial colons, but all manner of other implicit
> conversions, for example the removal of leading underscores.
>
> -- Tim Starling
>

I made a patch in this way.
The patch is based on your idea : "ucFirst($name) != $u->getName()".
So it forbids the creation of new accounts with a login starting with ":"
But the problem stays with created accounts, an idea ?

Emmanuel Engelhart

--
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Il faut que l'homme libre ne suive aucun enseignement dans un climat
d'esclavage                         Platon, la R?publique, VII, 536e.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Emmanuel Engelhart      ICQ UIN : 53388731    TEL (+49) 06.22.15.88.03.31
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from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Wikipedia in the news

body:
Stan-
> It occurs to me that an amusing future use of donations would be to
> give $1-5k grants to various notables, for the purpose of reviewing
> a small number of articles in their areas. Most would just do the work
> (or assign to a grad student) and move on, but if 1 in 10 got hooked,
> they could add a lot of valuable content.

The kind of people who charge $1-5k for a review usually don't have the
time to "get hooked", or they already would be. It would be a total waste
of money until we have a systematic internal peer review process. Many
errors are so blatant that you don't need a Ph.D. to spot them. You just
have to look for them. Typically, once a Wikipedia article gets above a
certain length, only a minority of people working on the article has
actually read the complete piece.

Regards,

Erik


from_name: Dietrich von Hase

subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Fundraising

body:
Hi,

>> Thank you to the person who added the fundraising link at the top of
>> the main page :-)
>
and it is also very good that readers are then offered the page
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/What_we_use_the_money_for

It would be perfect if the reader of this page would also be informed that

-  many small donations have always added to the larger amounts needed. I am
   afraid that a normal person reading how much money is needed for hardware
   could think that his contributions will be too small anyhow to make
sense.

- and after this is said the reader should find a link directly to the
  donation page where he then finds practical information how to make
  a donation.

Just make it easy for the readers to give their money by offering them
a link here at the seconds they are really motivated to donate :-).

best regards
Dietrich von Hase
hase at akademie.de


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Fundraising


from_name: Slow Poke

subject: [Wikitech-l] work to do

body:
On Tue, 13 Jul 2004 13:28:26 -0700, Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:
> Robert Fries wrote:
> > I'm also interested in helping ... it seems that from what I've read
> > so far, people are "creating their own work" ?  Ie: People are posting
> > a problem, along with a patch for it.
> >
> > A todo, or other method of identifying issues that need help would be useful.
>
> See the bug tracker:
> http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=34373&atid=411192
>
> There are a lot of open bug reports; some are duplicates, some are fixed
> and forgotten, some we can't even tell what they're asking about. The
> problems need to be verified, identified, and fixed.
>
> Even just verifying problems and producing a minimal test case can be a
> big help in tracking down the source of the problem and how to fix it.

There are also a couple of big meta pages:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_feature_request_and_bug_report_discussion
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.3_comments_and_bug_reports

--
[[en:User:Dori]]


from_name: Dori

subject: [Wikitech-l] FCKeditor

body:
On Tue, 13 Jul 2004 23:19:33 +0200, Kurt Jansson <jansson at gmx.net> wrote:
> Erik's toolbar is realy nice, but some time ago I discovered FCKeditor:
> http://www.fckeditor.net/Demo/index.html
> And I think it's just - WOW!
>
> Maybe someone wants to take it as a source of inspiration.
>
> Kurt

Looks good, but it's pretty slow

--
[[en:User:Dori]]


subject: [WikiEN-l] Google ads

body:
On Wed, 14 Jul 2004 03:10:26 +0200, Kurt Jansson <jansson at gmx.net> wrote:
> Jack Lynch schrieb:
>
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump#Opt-in_Google-ads.3F
> >
> > it would seem we have concensus?
>
> The ability to tell journalists "Wikipedia is completly free of advertising" is
> worth more than a few cents from Google ads, IMHO. With ads, even if opt-in, we
> are much less of a bird of paradise in the web's top 1000. And there might also
> be a negative psychological effect on the donors.

I also agree with that

> If we once *really* need the money we should use opt-out, but I hope this will
> never happen.

Opt-out is even worse.

If people want to support Wikipedia by looking at ads, I would propose
a Wikimedia-sponsored mirror with ads, while the main Wikipedia is
left pristine. Don't know how effective this would be though.

--
[[en:User:Dori]]


from_name: Keith Maxwell

subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia in the news

body:
It depends. In my opinion, Wikipedia compares well with traditional encyclopedias for several reasons:

   it is far more up-to-date than encyclopedias on CD-ROM for example CD-ROMs would still show that Ronald Reagan was alive;

   many of the articles are edited extensively and the reasons for inclusion of material is available on discussion pages - it is probable that articles are reviewed by several people with expertise in an area not just one;

   there are topics covered extensively in WIkipedia ie computer science in far more depth than traditional encyclopedias;

   we are far quicker to add encyclopedic topics as even the gentleman from the Encyclopedia Britannica acknowledged - I have a a 1970 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica that doesn't even contain an article on the Beatles - in contrast, we have extensive articles on most aspects of popular culture; and

   as an Australian, Wikipedia has a far more extensive coverage of Australian topics than other encyclopedias - for example, I looked up retiring Australian Environment Minister Dr David Kemp and cricketer Shane Warne who tied the world record for number of test wickets taken and both had good articles while other encyclopedias lack coverage.

If I was a high-school student, I wouldn't use the Wikipedia as the sole source of material for an assignment but I wouldn't use the Encyclopedia Britannica or Encarta as the sole source of material for an assignment either. Students should learn to use a wide variety of sources for assignments and, in general, I feel confident that they would find useful material in the Wikipedia for school projects or assignments. Also, a person in the public seeking useful reference material can generally find it in the Wikipedia although the same proviso about using a variety of sources should apply.

This isn't to say there aren't areas in the Wikipedia that need more comprehensive coverage or articles on Wikipedia that don't need a lot of care and attention. However, every day the Wikipedia is being improved both in quantity and quality of articles. For a project that is three and a half years old, it has come a long way

Charles Matthews <charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:
Hemanshu Desai wrote

> In a way it is Wikipedia's strength that we don't *depend* on scholars
> and experts.

I think, in the longer term, the dependence will be seen to be greater. An
interesting comparison is Murray's New English Dictionary, for which the
basic material seems mostly to have come in over the first five years,
submitted by many readers. Then bringing the entries to a polished state
took much longer. That is, we do see a great enthusiasm for getting material
onto WP.

Charles

_______________________________________________
WikiEN-l mailing list
WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

---------------------------------
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body:
Ray Saintonge wrote:

>>What *would* be cool, and might just be a different implementation of
>>exactly what you have in mind, would be a tool to find all the
>>(reasonably short) click-paths between any two concepts.  I mean, now
>>that I selected the article titles randomly, I actually wonder how
>>many clicks it takes to get from Marie Antionette to Michael Jordan.
>>And what's intervening?
>>
>Over a year ago I raised the possibility of tracing every article back
>to the Main Page.  None in my random sample was more than five links
>away.  Thus if you trace Marie Antoinette and Michael Jordan back to the
>Main Page, the sum of their links will be a maximum distance. :-)
>
Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but I don't think that last statement is
correct. The number of links required to travel in one direction is not
necessarily the same as the number required in the opposite direction.
In this case, the paths from A to B and from A to C do not necessarily
tell us anything about the path from B to C. Although if A is the Main
Page, you can always cheat and use any of the navigation links that go
there.

--Michael Snow
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subject:
[Wikitech-l] [PATCH] [ 986736 ] Special:ImageList form doesn't
	retain sort type

body:
Hi

bug:
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=986736&group_id=34373&atid=411192

As attachment a patch, which makes this search engine a little bit more
usefull.

Emmanuel Engelhart

--
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Tout contentement est bon ; le contentement dans l'?tude est mauvais.
                                                 	       "Talmud"
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Emmanuel Engelhart      ICQ UIN : 53388731    TEL (+49) 06.22.15.88.03.31
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body:
On Tue, 13 Jul 2004 22:30:58 +0200
Emmanuel Engelhart <emmanuel at engelhart.org> wrote:

> Hi
>
> bug:
> http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=986736&group_id=34373&atid=411192
>
> As attachment a patch, which makes this search engine a little bit more
> usefull.
>

More infos about the patch:
- Adds a feature for sorting by name (size and date were existing)
- Remembers the type of sort after a new search (new string pattern)
- Remembers the string pattern if the user changes the limit

:)

Emmanuel Engelhart

--
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ceux qui abandonnent un peu de leurs libert?s essentielles en echange
d'un peu plus de securit? ne meritent ni la libert?, ni la securit?,
et vont perdre les deux.                            Benjamin Franklin
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Emmanuel Engelhart      ICQ UIN : 53388731   TEL (+49)(0)6.22.15.88.03.31


subject:
[Wikitech-l] [Solution ?] [ 967833 ] Only first five template
	inclusions work

body:
On  wikipedia  the  MAX_INCLUDE_REPEAT  limit (=5)  in  Parser.php  is
problematic.  I  propose to  change the sens  of this  constraint from
"max template inclusions" to "max different template inclusions".

To  solve the  memory  usage problem,  we  could use  a tempory  table
containing the previously loaded templates  in the article ?  So, each
template replicated x  time in an article would  generate only one SQL
request.

An opinion ?

Emmanuel Engelhart

--
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Il y a 10 cat?gories de gens. Ceux qui savent compter en binaire et
ceux qui ne savent pas.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Emmanuel Engelhart      ICQ UIN : 53388731   TEL (+49)(0)6.22.15.88.03.31


subject: [Wikitech-l] Memcached article

body:
Interesting article on Linux Journal on caching (mentions Wikipedia as
a Memcached user):

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=7451
--
[[en:User:Dori]]


from_name: Kurt Jansson

subject: [Wikitech-l] FCKeditor

body:
Erik's toolbar is realy nice, but some time ago I discovered FCKeditor:
http://www.fckeditor.net/Demo/index.html
And I think it's just - WOW!

Maybe someone wants to take it as a source of inspiration.

Kurt

--
  http://leihnetzwerk.de -- Teile B?cher, Videos und CDs mit anderen!
  http://wikipedia.de    -- Arbeite mit bei der freien Enzyklop?die!
  Kurt Jansson, Wiener Str. 7, 10999 Berlin, http://jansson.de


from_name: Timwi

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Wikipedia in the news

body:
Sean Barrett wrote:

>> The others already mentioned that this assumption breaks down for
>> non-native speakers, but I think even for native speakers this is
>> *far* from a "safe assumption".
>
> Not only is it a safe assumption, it is an assumption that has remained
> safe for many people for a long time.  In the evolution of memes, this
> one is one of the winners.

It being a meme and it having survived as a meme don't make it any more
true, either.


from_name: Gabriel Wicke

subject: [Wikitech-l] FCKeditor

body:
On Tue, 2004-07-13 at 17:31 -0400, Bill Clark wrote:
> That's really cool.  I was also looking at the Epoz editor.  I've
> configured and installed a working copy here:
>
> http://edit.xoom.org/
>
> It looks like both of them only work in MSIE or Gecko-based browsers, though.

There has been some discussion about Epoz and similar things at
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WYSIWYG_editor.
--
Gabriel Wicke


body:
Michael Snow wrote:

> Ray Saintonge wrote:
>
>>> What *would* be cool, and might just be a different implementation of
>>> exactly what you have in mind, would be a tool to find all the
>>> (reasonably short) click-paths between any two concepts.  I mean, now
>>> that I selected the article titles randomly, I actually wonder how
>>> many clicks it takes to get from Marie Antionette to Michael Jordan.
>>> And what's intervening?
>>
>> Over a year ago I raised the possibility of tracing every article
>> back to the Main Page.  None in my random sample was more than five
>> links away.  Thus if you trace Marie Antoinette and Michael Jordan
>> back to the Main Page, the sum of their links will be a maximum
>> distance. :-)
>
> Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but I don't think that last statement
> is correct. The number of links required to travel in one direction is
> not necessarily the same as the number required in the opposite
> direction. In this case, the paths from A to B and from A to C do not
> necessarily tell us anything about the path from B to C. Although if A
> is the Main Page, you can always cheat and use any of the navigation
> links that go there.

Theoretically the links in one direction should be the same if all the
proper up and down links have been made.  When I did my little
experiment, I made use of the "What links here" function.  Using A as
the Main Page, if B is four clicks away from the Main Page, and C is
five clicks away, then their maximum distance is 9.  The fact that it's
a maximum doesn't mean that it can't be less..

In my cruder moments I would say that the thing that these two had in
common was baskets.  He put his balls in a basket, while she put her
head in one. :-\

Ec


body:
Anthere wrote:

> but GNAME [...] when I reply to them via gname [...]

Psst. Gmane. Not gname. ;-)

P.S. you sent that mail to wikilegal-l too...


body:
Hi.

Who administrates the mediawiki-cvs list? Who can make configuration
changes?

The problem is that it sets a Reply-To header to
wikitech-l at wikimedia.org (wikiMedia with M), but Gmane has the tech
mailing list registered as wikitech-l at wikipedia.org (wikiPedia with P).

Can the Reply-To header be set to wikitech-l at wikipedia.org instead?

Thanks,
Timwi


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Slight problem with mediawiki-cvs list

body:
Timwi wrote:

> Who administrates the mediawiki-cvs list?

Oh, sorry, I forgot to mention that gmane.org.wikimedia.mediawiki.cvs
now exists as a mirror to the mediawiki-cvs list. :)


from_name: Jens Frank

body:
On Tue, Jul 13, 2004 at 10:45:49PM +0200, Emmanuel Engelhart wrote:
> On Tue, 13 Jul 2004 22:30:58 +0200
> Emmanuel Engelhart <emmanuel at engelhart.org> wrote:
>
> > Hi
> >
> > bug:
> > http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=986736&group_id=34373&atid=411192
> >
> > As attachment a patch, which makes this search engine a little bit more
> > usefull.
> >
>
> More infos about the patch:
> - Adds a feature for sorting by name (size and date were existing)
> - Remembers the type of sort after a new search (new string pattern)
> - Remembers the string pattern if the user changes the limit
>

Your patch has been applied as revision 1.14.

Regards,

	JeLuF


body:
Brion Vibber wrote:

> Timwi wrote:
>
>> The problem is that it sets a Reply-To header to
>> wikitech-l at wikimedia.org (wikiMedia with M), but Gmane has the tech
>> mailing list registered as wikitech-l at wikipedia.org (wikiPedia with P).
>
> There, I've fixed wikitech-l to use the wikimedia.org (with M) as
> 'preferred host name'; apparently this was mistakenly not done back
> during The Great WikiMedification.
>
> Please fix gmane if necessary.

I don't think I can do that, but I'll contact them about it. Thanks.


body:
Abe wrote:

> First, Hemanshu brings up a potential POV problem: "do we want endless
> arguments over whether America influenced the Taliban; George Bush
> influenced oil markets; oil influenced Gulf war.... to name a few?"
>
> To avoid this, there is one rule: an influence must already be present in
> the article to be made an "influence link".  This way, only assertions
> that have already passed the wiki test are admissible.

That doesn't work. If people disagree on whether X influenced Y, our
NPOV policy dictates that the article should state, "People in group ABC
tend to believe that X influenced Y, but other people tend to disagree".
Your "influence links" can't do that: They are either there (asserting a
definite influence) or not (asserting a definite lack of influence).

Timwi


from_name: Hemanshu Desai

body:
On Tue, 13 Jul 2004 08:47:06 -0700, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> >>
> >>
> >Interesting but how do we resolve the POV problem? do we want endless
> >arguments over whether America influenced the Taliban; George Bush
> >influenced oil markets; oil influenced Gulf war.... to name a few?
> >
> YES!
>
> That's the small enough price of  neutrality.  No article is sacred, and
> that's healthy. People on both sides of these issues are enraged  when
> they see the blatant POVism of their opponents destroying their own very
> neutral views.  The control freaks worry me a lot more than the trolls,
> because they use a patina of legitimacy to impose their POV.
>
> Resolving  "POV problem"s will be an incremental process that may take
> years.
>
The question is what do all these questions  have to do with making an
encyclopedia? This is clearly a distinct project

Hemanshu


from_name: Till Westermayer

body:
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . till we *) . . .

>How can you tell who was influencing whom?  Most of the time these
>influences are tenuous and speculative.

One way to find reliable influences is in another field: how scientists
(and their works) are influenced by other scientists. At least in
theory, the references section of a scientific work should list all
influences. Here is reliable data for possible "influences"-tags, but
way to much of it, so even here a representation of influences would be
near-useless. But it's a fascinating idea, to be sure.

BTW: Going back to the history-influences-idea: of course there are
cyclic influences: Bush influences the Taliban, the Taliban influence
Bush. Most interesting things go in these transaction cycles ...

 __ .
 / / / /                            ... Till Westermayer - till we *)
. .
  . mailto:till at tillwe.de . www.westermayer.de/till/ . icq 320393072
  . Habsburgerstr. 82 . 79104 Freiburg . 0761 55697152 . 0160 96619179
  . . . . .


from_name: David Gerard

body:
[[User:I'M4aNPOV]], who also edited as [[User:205.227.165.11]]
but signed with the user name. Without mentioning that
205.227.165.11 is in a CoS-allocated netblock. I expect this
was completely inadvertent, of course.

See
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Talk:Scientology&diff=4616961&oldid=4616317

The answer there appears to my jaundiced eye to be looking for
procedural loopholes. ("No, no, I'm editing Scientology articles
from a CoS IP, but I'm strictly NPOV myself. Of course.") I may
have had a bit much experience of dealing with CoS representatives
in the past. What do you think?

- d.


from_name: Sj

body:
On Wed, 14 Jul 2004 01:32:25 +0000, David Gerard
<fun at thingy.apana.org.au> wrote:
> On 07/14/04 00:26, Sj wrote:
>
> > I don't see any reason for our Scientology articles not to be informed by
> > criticisms, suggestions, and edits from Sc. practitioners.  Anything
> > unverifiable will have to stay on Talk pages... (and maybe this user can
> > help us flesh out the article on [[Mission Earth]] so that it passes FAC
> > next time.  ^ ^ )  + sj +
>
> Not 'practitioners', but the organisation itself. That's different.

Hmm.  How does one distinguish?  I'm going to suggest this person look at
the mission earth article, in any case; let me know if this also seems
objectionable
to you.   ++sj


subject:
[WikiEN-l] The Church of Scientology is discovered to
	have	discovered Wikipedia!

body:
On 07/14/04 00:26, Sj wrote:

> I don't see any reason for our Scientology articles not to be informed by
> criticisms, suggestions, and edits from Sc. practitioners.  Anything
> unverifiable will have to stay on Talk pages... (and maybe this user can
> help us flesh out the article on [[Mission Earth]] so that it passes FAC
> next time.  ^ ^ )  + sj +

Not 'practitioners', but the organisation itself. That's different.

- d.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Google ads

body:
Jack Lynch schrieb:

> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump#Opt-in_Google-ads.3F
>
> it would seem we have concensus?

The ability to tell journalists "Wikipedia is completly free of advertising" is
worth more than a few cents from Google ads, IMHO. With ads, even if opt-in, we
are much less of a bird of paradise in the web's top 1000. And there might also
be a negative psychological effect on the donors.

If we once *really* need the money we should use opt-out, but I hope this will
never happen.

Kurt


subject: [Foundation-l] Wikicommons take 5

body:
Andre-
> I'm sending this message to once again ask for Wikicommons (or Wikimagery or
> whatever) to be created. Just so everyone knows that there are still people
> who want this.

Apologies, I'm a bit behind on my book due to various circumstances (such
as a friend moving in downstairs), and really need to commit myself to it
to get it finished. I promise I'll rally the troops for the Wikicommons as
soon as I'm ready. In the meantime, I'll state here that I will not stand
in the way of any temporary wiki being set up.

Regards,

Erik


subject: [Foundation-l] Wikicommons take 5


from_name: Nathaniel Krause

subject:
[WikiEN-l] The Church of Scientology is discovered tohave
	discovered Wikipedia!

body:
>From: David Gerard <fun at thingy.apana.org.au>
>Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
>To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
>Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] The Church of Scientology is discovered
>tohave	discovered Wikipedia!
>Date: Wed, 14 Jul 2004 01:32:25 +0000
>
>On 07/14/04 00:26, Sj wrote:
>
>>I don't see any reason for our Scientology articles not to be informed by
>>criticisms, suggestions, and edits from Sc. practitioners.  Anything
>>unverifiable will have to stay on Talk pages... (and maybe this user can
>>help us flesh out the article on [[Mission Earth]] so that it passes FAC
>>next time.  ^ ^ )  + sj +
>
>Not 'practitioners', but the organisation itself. That's different.
>
>- d.

Is there a policy that organizations are not supposed to edit articles,
provided they meet the standards of behavior that apply to anyone else?

-Nat Krause (the eponymous user)

_________________________________________________________________
FREE pop-up blocking with the new MSN Toolbar ? get it now!
http://toolbar.msn.click-url.com/go/onm00200415ave/direct/01/


from_name: Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales

subject: [WikiEN-l] Google ads

body:
Kurt Jansson wrote:
> If we once *really* need the money we should use opt-out, but I hope this
> will never happen.

I am of the opinion that we will never "need" the money.  I think the
challenge to the community is going to be from a different direction:
how much good could we do to further our goals as a charitable
institution, and does that good outweigh our distaste for advertising.

As a thought experiment, consider a day 2 years in the future when
Wikipedia is serving 1 billion pageviews per month, and we are
continuing to easily fund the site's growth through donations, grants,
etc.

A conservative estimate (in my experience, which is valid I think) of
how much revenue we could generate with Google Adwords or similar,
i.e. no banners, no flashing lights, no popups, would be around $1 per
thousand.  So a billion pageviews a month generates at least $1
million per month.  Even with the ability for people who hate ads to
opt-out with a single click, the revenue would be substantial.

For $12 million a year, how many millions of CDs could we make
available to charities building media centers in the slums of New
Delhi?  If we work wisely with for-profit or non-profit organizations
in developing countries, we can subsidize their production to leverage
their ability to profitably and sustainably make our work widely
available everywhere.

My dream is to create a comprehensive free encyclopedia to be
distributed at extremely low cost to them to every single person on
the planet.  Is our distaste for ads so high that we are willing to
deny the people who don't even have access to clean drinking water a
copy of a work that could help empower them to change their lives?

To sum up, I don't think we will ever "need" the money to keep doing
what we are doing.  But I think the day may come when we have to make
a very tough decision about what kind of good we could do with the
money.

I have my own opinion about what we should do when that day comes,
which you might or might not be able to glean from the above, but for
now I remain firmly opposed to advertising on Wikipedia, for all the
reasons that many people have already mentioned: credibility, good
taste, the feeling that we are doing something extra-ordinary, etc.

--Jimbo

p.s. Lest any trolls wants to make up some claims about this, let me
be perfectly clear.  If the day ever comes when we decide that we can
do so much good with advertising money that we should not turn it
down, that decision is not going to come top-down from me, but from
the community as a whole.


from_name: Robert

subject: [WikiEN-l] Child lover article

body:
Viajero writes:
> The term "childlover" appears, presumably for tactical
> reasons, to be essentially a synonym for pedophilia,
> so shouldn't the contents of the page simply be
> merged with [[Pedophilia]], which already has a
> one-line paragraph on the term?

I agree absolutely. This should be done immediately.

> Also, I am not in favor of moralizing, even indirectly,
> but if there is clinical evidence that sex with children
> is not healthy, that surely it should be reported.

Agreed. And there is a huge amount of such research. Our
article should pick a dozen separate studies on this
subject, and summarize each study separately. Build up this
article with scientific evidence.

> The text as it now stands reads like a defense against a
> charge which is not explicitly made evident.

In other words, it is pro-pediphillia propaganda.

There's a good South Park episode on this issue, btw.

Robert (RK)

__________________________________
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New and Improved Yahoo! Mail - Send 10MB messages!
http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail


subject: [WikiEN-l] NPOV discussion on historical context

body:
As I understand it, writing in accord with NPOV policy
means that we treat our issues in light of their historical
development.

For instance, in our articles on Christianity and on Haredi
(Ultra-Orthodox) Judaism, we do not merely describe the way
that these religions exist now. Rather, we describe the
historical origins of these groups, as known from the best
evidence, archaeological, scientific, and from traditional
religious sources. These articles then describe changing
social, religious and political conditions, and describe
how people's beliefs and practices changed over time.

On a number of occasions, religious fundamentalist Jews,
Christians and Muslims have strenuously objected to these
treatments, claiming that they discriminate against their
religious beliefs. They prefer that the articles describe
their faith as they see it, which is from an ahistorical
perspective (e.g. the way things are is the way things have
always been; any differences are from heretical sects that
don't represent the real religion.) Fortunately, we have
reverted any such changes to the previously described
historical descriptions.

I am familiar with the NPOV article, but it doesn't really
mention historical development, even though we all
apparently understand it this way. Is there a formal
article on how and why Wikipedia NPOV polic means that
articles must be written in such a way as to show
historical context?  If so, where?  If not, can we edit and
add to the current NPOV article to mention this.

Robert (RK)

__________________________________
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subject: [Foundation-l] Fundraising notice (on de)

body:
There was an unintentional miscommunication.  The notice was only
supposed to be on en, due to an expected slashdotting.  I expect my
interview results to be posted there tomorrow or the next day, and we
expect therefore to be slashdotted again then.

But since that doesn't directly affect non-en wikipedia, the notice
should only go on en.  The fact that it went elsewhere was just a
mistake.

--Jimbo

Arne Klempert wrote:

> The fundraising notice for the German Wikipedia has been temprarily
> disabled. We think that since the German Verein will need a few more
> days to be able to receive donations ...
>
> It would be counterproductive to direct people to a page prompting them
> to make donations to a US account. Knowing Germans, that will result in
> relatively few donations. (Many Germans, for example, don't have a
> credit card.) If on the other hand we wait for a few days, until the
> bank account for the Verein has been set up, we estimate that we will
> recieve much more donations.
>
> It would be nice if such actions were discussed beforehand.
>
> -Arne (akl)
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Galileo and others

body:
Just out of curiosity, how will the GPS co-ordinates differ in the
Galileo system from the existing system?  I assume that the two can be
easily converted back and forth, or that the numbers are the same for
both?

If the numbers differ, we should accept both, so the markup should
have the ability to distinguish.  It'd be a shame if I took my GPS
receiver (which uses the existing system) to get a location, but could
not enter it.  It would be equally a shame if someone took a Galileo
system out in a few years and could not easily enter that as well.

--Jimbo

Magnus Manske wrote:

> Europe will over the next years install a GPS-like positioning system
> called Galileo. The German list got a suggestion to include coordinates
> in the form of
>    [[Geo:-13?23'+45?2'23'']]
> or similar for locations. A future GPS/Galileo PDA/smartphone could then
> reverse-lookup what wikipedia has about the current location. (This is
> kind of a PR gag, but still...)
>
> IMHO that brings us back to the map system we already discussed to death
> ;-)
>
> Seriously, such markup could link to a special page with multiple
> functions:
> * Show it on a map
> * List wikipedia locations nearby
> and others I can't think of right now.
>
> Should we
> a) include such a syntax?
> b) wait for a "real" map system to emerge, or just do this now and
> convert later?
>
> Magnus
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


body:
David Gerard wrote:
> Not 'practitioners', but the organisation itself. That's different.

I recently told a reporter that representatives of the Chinese
government are welcome to edit zh.wikipedia.org if they like.  I think
we can extend the same courtesy to representatives of the Church of
Scientology.

Of course, as with any highly ideological and controversial topic, a
careful approach to NPOV is warranted.  Particularly given the fact
that many Scientologists feel that they have been portrayed unfairly
in the media, I think they will welcome the chance to participate in a
truely neutral forum.

Of course, just as with Democrats, Republicans, Greens, Catholics,
Jews, Athiests, whatever, there is the chance that overly partisan
people may have a rough emotional time of it.  But we can proceed with
professionalism and love in all cases, towards a solid outcome.

--Jimbo


subject: [WikiEN-l] Passing through

body:
The Cunctator wrote:
> Did I miss you passing through NYC/Boston?

Possibly you meant this as a private note to me?

Anyhow, this is a good excuse for me to hype the Boston meeting:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Jimbo_Wales/Boston

This will be the first large-scale meeting of Wikipedians in the
United States.  We had sizeable meetings in London, Berlin, Munich,
and Genoa, and smaller but still important meetings in Frankfort and
Vienna.

I'm a little disappointed at the number of people signed up so far to
the Boston meetup, so I hope my encouraging people to come will help.

Also, as an added bonus, Danny will be presenting the Golden Nica
statue (which is nice and shiny, oooh!) to us at the meeting.  So we
can all pose with it!

--Jimbo


from_name: Ribamar Santarosa de Sousa

subject: Fwd: [Wikitech-l] Multiple categories

body:
>
> Category:Female/Catholic,Protestant/Saint
>

Why not Category:Female,Catholic,Protestant,Saints ??? This way, we could
order Categories by several ways:
Category:Saints lists all category of Saints
Category:Female lists all category of Females
Category:Female/Saints is the same as Category:Saints/Female

if i wasn't clear, i can try to explain better....

-- Riba


subject:
[Foundation-l] [wikipedia@earthlink.net: [Wikipedia-l] Re:
	[Wikide-l] Neues Uploadformular]

body:
I think this is something that should be reviewed and implemented
right away.  It is long overdue.  Perhaps after some discussion, the
board should even vote on it to make it clearly official.

--Jimbo

----- Forwarded message from Michael Snow <wikipedia at earthlink.net> -----

From: Michael Snow <wikipedia at earthlink.net>
Date: Tue, 13 Jul 2004 20:01:11 -0700
To: wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
Subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: [Wikide-l] Neues Uploadformular

I thought I should act on Andre's suggestion at wikide-l that this
proposal be discussed globally, so I forwarded and translated his post
in my previous message. If you take a look at the test upload form, it's
in German, but if any non-German-speakers have questions about it, feel
free to ask. Now for my comments.

Field 6, as with the current form, asks the user to confirm that the
copyrightholder agrees to the licensed use. Field 4 asks who created the
image and/or what is the source. Field 5 asks you to choose a license;
the options provided are GFDL, CC-by, CC-by-sa, and unknown. As
indicated, if you choose unknown, you get a message first about our
policy for using licensed images. All of these fields are required.

I think Andre has done excellent work, and this upload form should be
implemented on all Wikipedias as quickly as possible. I actually care
less about making users input licensing information, but as I've said
repeatedly, we absolutely need an upload form that *requires* source
information. This matters even more for Wikipedias that, unlike the
German Wikipedia, allow fair use images. According to international law,
we *must* provide source information in order to have copyrighted images
under fair use (or as the Berne Convention calls it, fair practice).

--Michael Snow

_______________________________________________
Wikipedia-l mailing list
Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l

----- End forwarded message -----


from_name: Magnus Manske

subject: [Wikitech-l] PHP 5...

body:
...was released. ZendII, supposedly better object orientation.

Just FYI ;-)

Magnus


from_name: Christopher Mahan

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Galileo and others

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

> Do it now, convert later.

I agree.

> There are serious obstacles to developing real map system, most
> important
> being limited free geographical data of decent quality.

I say forget mapping. Just put in coordinates into physical location
pages, and let the mapping software companies do their magic.

=====
Chris Mahan
818.943.1850 cell
chris_mahan at yahoo.com
chris.mahan at gmail.com
http://www.christophermahan.com/

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subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Wikipedia in the news

body:
Sheldon Rampton wrote:
> The bottom line, though, is that an encyclopedia article shouldn't
> have errors of grammar *or* fact. I know some respected university
> scholars who have problems with spelling and grammar, but before
> their writings get published, someone fixes those problems. An
> article in the Wikipedia that has problems with spelling and grammar
> clearly hasn't been through the level of review that goes into a
> student's term paper, let alone an article for the Encyclopedia
> Britannica.

Absolutely right.

I think right now we have a situation of very high average quality
(esp. for articles over a certain length), but with some very
important weaknesses.  That's going to be the goal of a review
process: to address those weaknesses while at the same time respecting
and working with our community model.

I'm generally in agreement with what Erik Moeller says about this.
That is, I think that it is best if one way or another our review
process grows organically from our existing traditions of review for
featured articles.

--Jimbo


subject: [WikiEN-l] Google ads and other ramblings by Chris

body:
--- "Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales" <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:

> A conservative estimate (in my experience, which is valid I think)
> of
> how much revenue we could generate with Google Adwords or similar,
> i.e. no banners, no flashing lights, no popups, would be around $1
> per
> thousand.  So a billion pageviews a month generates at least $1
> million per month.  Even with the ability for people who hate ads
> to
> opt-out with a single click, the revenue would be substantial.

That, or if 120,000 people donate $100 per year.

I suggest the latter would be easier to achieve.

By the way, has anyone done any car/window stickers for wikipedia?
Donate $10, get a sticker. Put it on your car or bathroom window,
give it to a friend, whatever.

in the same vein, would it be possible to have publishing on demand?
The way I see it is this: I want to make a booklet with anything in
the airline/airplane category. Can I pay $12.95 and have a TeX
formatted PDF report mailed to my house with the 60-90+articles
related to that? (I just know the technical know-how to do that is to
be found here. But it could be outsourced)

I think that would be cool and would allow for a greated
dissemination of the Wikipedia brand. And perhaps the National
Georgraphic-type ads could go in that. After reading a re-reading, I
could leave it in a strategic place for passerbys to see/pickup.

Just putting the idea out there.

=====
Chris Mahan
818.943.1850 cell
chris_mahan at yahoo.com
chris.mahan at gmail.com
http://www.christophermahan.com/

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from_name: Poor, Edmund W

body:
I think we should incorporate Robert (RK)'s ideas about historical
context into the [[Wikipedia:Neutral point of view]] article.

(God, it's good to hear from RK when he's in a good mood!! Let's try to
avoid riling him up in the future, okay, people? He's a very thoughtful
and mellow guy when he's not under attack :-)

Ed Poor, aka Uncle Ed


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Google ads

body:
Sheldon Rampton wrote:
> I think we're talking about more than "a few cents from Google ads."

Indeed.  Just to set the context, it seems that we are currently
publishing around 360 million pageviews per month.  At a conservative
estimate of $1 per thousand (that's about half what I think is
actually likely), we are currently implicitly turning down $360,000
per month.

See:
http://www.wikipedia.org/wikistats/EN/TablesUsagePageRequest.htm
(12.0M * 30 = 360M)

>From October 2003 through June 2004, our traffic grew by a factor of
10.  By my rough calculation, if we continue to grow at that rate, we
will be pushing 1 billion pageviews per month in just over 100 days
from now.

We are not actually likely to keep growing at that rate for a few
reasons.

First, our growth has to level off at some point.  Has to, dammit! :-)
Maybe we're already maxed out; there's not really any way to know.

Second, our ability with a volunteer staff and donations for hardware
to *quickly* increase capacity is limited.  We will likely remain
hardware-bound for some time to come.

Nonetheless, at the present time, I remain opposed to having
advertisements on Wikipedia.

--Jimbo


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Wikipedia in the news

body:
--- Sheldon Rampton <sheldon.rampton at verizon.net> wrote:

> ... That degree of
> confidence doesn't exist across the board for the Wikipedia.

Granted. But Britannica has been at it a lot longer than three years.

The other thing to remember is that a lot of our articles are very
modern and refer to completely current events. They are very relevant
to people on the cutting edge. Someone mentioned a type of armor in
Gundam anime. This would be important for anime film translators,
artists, and for afficionados. The Britannica cannot help them there.

It's a matter of the usefulness of the encyclopedia that is
important.

=====
Chris Mahan
818.943.1850 cell
chris_mahan at yahoo.com
chris.mahan at gmail.com
http://www.christophermahan.com/

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from_name: Mark Richards

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Wikipedia in the news

body:
I agree - is there any way that we could use markers
or categories (maybe on the talk page) to 'certify'
that articles have been checked by someone for g and
s? It would limit the amount of duplication of effort,
of course, it would only be much use for relatively
stable articles.
Mark

--- "Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales" <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> Sheldon Rampton wrote:
> > The bottom line, though, is that an encyclopedia
> article shouldn't
> > have errors of grammar *or* fact. I know some
> respected university
> > scholars who have problems with spelling and
> grammar, but before
> > their writings get published, someone fixes those
> problems. An
> > article in the Wikipedia that has problems with
> spelling and grammar
> > clearly hasn't been through the level of review
> that goes into a
> > student's term paper, let alone an article for the
> Encyclopedia
> > Britannica.
>
> Absolutely right.
>
> I think right now we have a situation of very high
> average quality
> (esp. for articles over a certain length), but with
> some very
> important weaknesses.  That's going to be the goal
> of a review
> process: to address those weaknesses while at the
> same time respecting
> and working with our community model.
>
> I'm generally in agreement with what Erik Moeller
> says about this.
> That is, I think that it is best if one way or
> another our review
> process grows organically from our existing
> traditions of review for
> featured articles.
>
> --Jimbo
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

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