body:
On 6/7/06, Andrew Gray <shimgray at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 07/06/06, George Herbert <george.herbert at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On 6/7/06, Mark Gallagher <m.g.gallagher at student.canberra.edu.au> wrote:
> > >
> > > [...] and it all just leading to an attempt to recapture USENET's
> heyday.
> > >
> >
> > We had a heyday?
>
> August.

Which August?   The one before The September That Never Ended?

I was there, and a lot of people are falsely nostalgic about The Old Days.

--
-george william herbert
gherbert at retro.com / george.herbert at gmail.com


list: wikipedia-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Fred Bauder

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikia's new CEO

body:
What evidence do you have that any donated money is used to run Wikia?

Fred

On Jun 7, 2006, at 9:18 AM, Selina . wrote:

> It's disturbing to think how much money donated to the charity
> Wikimedia is
> used for running commercial organisation Wikia...
>
> --
> Selina -


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikia's new CEO

body:
A statement that there is no evidence is not evidence.

Fred

On Jun 7, 2006, at 9:55 AM, Selina . wrote:

> Read what stuff well? Wikipedia has
> http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Fundraising but I can't find
> anything
> about how Wikia gets it's money. http://wikia.com/wiki/About_Wikia for
> example has absolutely nothing
> Go to https://sos-res.state.de.us/tin/GINameSearch.jsp and search for
> "Wikia" and it says it's "NOT IN GOOD STANDING" - I don't know what
> that
> means, but it doesn't sound like a good thing.
>
> http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showtopic=192 has some stuff,
> apparently there is no paper trail which is bad compared to the
> openness
> with Wikimedia, especially when the two organisations are so closely
> related.
>
> I'm not saying anything bad is going on at all, but there's no way
> for the
> public to know if everything's kept secret.
>
> --
> Selina


list: wikien-l

from_name: Abigail Brady

subject: [WikiEN-l] Types of categories

body:
Hi.  I know it's been mentioned before, but can I strongly suggest everyone
speculating about what how this might work have a look at the Semantic
MediaWiki demo here ->

  http://wiki.ontoworld.org/index.php/Main_Page

It needs a lot of work (transitive relations in particular), but it's
an interesting
start.

--
Abi


from_name: Selina .

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikia's new CEO

body:
On 06/06/06, Tim Starling <t.starling at physics.unimelb.edu.au> wrote:
>
> Andrew Lih wrote:
> > FYI,
> >
> > Wikia taps eBay exec as CEO
> > San Francisco Business Times - 2:41 PM PDT Monday
> >
> > Wikia Inc., a for-profit company founded 18 months ago by Wikipedia
> > founder Jimmy Wales, hired Gil Penchina as its CEO on Monday.
> >
> > Penchina was vice president and general manager at eBay (NASDAQ: EBAY).
>
> Penchina was *a* vice president of eBay. eBay is one of these companies
> with
> lots of division presidents, senior vice presidents and vice presidents.
>
> http://pages.ebay.com/aboutebay/thecompany/executiveteam.html
>
> -- Tim Starling
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>

It's disturbing to think how much money donated to the charity Wikimedia is
used for running commercial organisation Wikia...

--
Selina -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Mistress_Selina_Kyle?oldid=55639088 /
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Mistress_Selina_Kyle?oldid=41845454
http://wikipediareview.com/?showuser=1
"I *do* think criticism is good for Wikipedia [...] Good quality criticism
is valuable, and Wikipedians should listen to it, and actually make changes
based on it. Are there corrupt administrators, then we should get rid of
them." --Jimmy Wales ( http://wikipediareview.com/?showtopic=1693 )


list: foundation-l

from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [Foundation-l] Instant Commons : INCORRECT

body:
On 6/5/06, Erik Moeller <eloquence at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 6/5/06, Anthere <Anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> > The problem now is to get the grant from Kennisnet.
>
> I very much doubt that given our discussions in February, but I'll be
> happy to call Jan-Bart to clarify things.

As was clarified by e-mail, the situation is exactly as I expected.
Kennisnet is working for the WMF to complete the transaction.

Erik


list: wikimedia-l


body:
On 6/7/06, Erik Moeller <eloquence at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 6/5/06, Erik Moeller <eloquence at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On 6/5/06, Anthere <Anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> > > The problem now is to get the grant from Kennisnet.
> >
> > I very much doubt that given our discussions in February, but I'll be
> > happy to call Jan-Bart to clarify things.
>
> As was clarified by e-mail, the situation is exactly as I expected.
> Kennisnet is working for the WMF to complete the transaction.

s/working/waiting


from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject: [WikiEN-l] Category translation

body:
Elisabeth Bauer wrote:
> Anthony DiPierro schrieb:
>
>> Jimbo and others have also made it clear that any cultural distinction
>> between different language Wikipedias is accidental and in fact goes
>> against the intention (this in the context of which languages should
>> have a Wikipedia, but the idea carries here as well).  We don't have a
>> British Encyclopedia and an American one, because we can both
>> understand each other well enough to communicate.  If it were
>> *possible* to automatically translate all articles into every language
>> while keeping the content the same, we'd do so.  It just isn't, at
>> least not with current technology.
>
> Yes, the original plan was to write all articles in Esperanto and then
> have them autotranslated to all the other languages of the world. But
> somehow, this didn't work out so well.
>
> The rest of your posting is sort of new to me (I wasn't aware that
> cultural distinctions between different language Wikipedias were to be
> regarded as accidental and against the intention of Wikipedia proper)

Of course it is new to you, since Anthony just made it up out of thin
air.  :)

For the record, and as I have said many times in the past, I do NOT
think that cultural distinctions between difference language Wikipedias
are accidental or to be regarded as accidental, and even if it were
possible to translate every article using machine translation, I cannot
imagine that we would want to do so.

Anyway, if we were going to use a constructed meta-language, obviously
it would be Klingon or Toki Pona. ;-)

--Jimbo


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Tim Starling

subject: [Wikitech-l] How often should exceptions be used?

body:
Steve Bennett wrote:
> On 6/7/06, Tim Starling <t.starling at physics.unimelb.edu.au> wrote:
>> which is better? Should the backend dictate the error format by
>> specifying an exception class with a fixed format? Of course, a caller
>> wishing to override the formatting could catch the exception, but is
>> that better than the old method of using a success/failure return value?
>>
>> Should error handling be completely exception-dominated? Is there any
>> role for success/failure return values in a language with exception support?
>
> Assuming this is a general question not specifically related to
> MediaWiki, the general answer is that exceptions should only be used
> for exceptional circumstances, and likely failures are better off
> handled with return codes. It's better to use exceptions for weird
> things like running out of memory, suddenly being unable to access the
> disk, or an assertion failing, rather than something as banal as a bad
> filename being supplied, for instance.

Do you have some sort of justification for this view?

> Also, it's not usually good practice to allow uncaught exceptions, as
> in your "pretty error" case, is it?

It's not practical to put a try block around every entry point. MediaWiki
has quite a lot of entry points. What's more, the exception framework is
only initialised part-way through Setup.php, not at compile time as it would
be in C++, so it makes sense to install an exception handler to catch
exceptions which are thrown between that point and the return to the
enclosing scope (e.g. index.php). PHP has a bug with exceptions thrown from
within catch blocks, and this means that standard exception handling
requires some 10 lines of boilerplate, making a try block on every entry
point less practical still. Although it might offend purists, the exception
handler works perfectly and transparently in all current cases. All the
benefits of using exceptions are still present.

-- Tim Starling


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikia's new CEO

body:
On 6/7/06, Selina . <wikipediareview at gmail.com> wrote:

> > On 06/06/06, Tim Starling < t.starling at physics.unimelb.edu.au> wrote:
> > >
> > > Andrew Lih wrote:
> > > > FYI,
> > > >
> > > > Wikia taps eBay exec as CEO
> > > > San Francisco Business Times - 2:41 PM PDT Monday
> > > >
> > > > Wikia Inc., a for-profit company founded 18 months ago by Wikipedia
> > > > founder Jimmy Wales, hired Gil Penchina as its CEO on Monday.
> > > >
> > > > Penchina was vice president and general manager at eBay (NASDAQ:
> EBAY).
> > >
> > > Penchina was *a* vice president of eBay. eBay is one of these
> companies
> > > with
> > > lots of division presidents, senior vice presidents and vice
> presidents.
> > >
> > > http://pages.ebay.com/aboutebay/thecompany/executiveteam.html
> > >
> > > -- Tim Starling
> > >
> > > _______________________________________________
> > > Wikipedia-l mailing list
> > > Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> > > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
> > >
> >
> > It's disturbing to think how much money donated to the charity Wikimedia
> is
> > used for running commercial organisation Wikia...
> >
> > --
> > Selina -
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Mistress_Selina_Kyle?oldid=55639088 /
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Mistress_Selina_Kyle?oldid=41845454
> > http://wikipediareview.com/?showuser=1
> > "I *do* think criticism is good for Wikipedia [...] Good quality
> criticism
> > is valuable, and Wikipedians should listen to it, and actually make
> changes
> > based on it. Are there corrupt administrators, then we should get rid of
> > them." --Jimmy Wales ( http://wikipediareview.com/?showtopic=1693 )
> > _______________________________________________
> > Wikipedia-l mailing list
> > Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
> >

On 07/06/06, GerardM <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote: Hoi,
What does make you say that?

When you read the stuff well, Wikia has been provided capital to
expand its operation. There is no money from the Wikimedia Foundation
> involved. People have a day job you know..
>
>Thanks,
>>   GerardM

Read what stuff well? Wikipedia has
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Fundraising but I can't find anything
about how Wikia gets it's money. http://wikia.com/wiki/About_Wikia for
example has absolutely nothing
Go to https://sos-res.state.de.us/tin/GINameSearch.jsp and search for
"Wikia" and it says it's "NOT IN GOOD STANDING" - I don't know what that
means, but it doesn't sound like a good thing.

http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showtopic=192 has some stuff,
apparently there is no paper trail which is bad compared to the openness
with Wikimedia, especially when the two organisations are so closely
related.

I'm not saying anything bad is going on at all, but there's no way for the
public to know if everything's kept secret.

--
Selina - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Mistress_Selina_Kyle?oldid=55639088
/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Mistress_Selina_Kyle?oldid=41845454
http://wikipediareview.com/?showuser=1
"I *do* think criticism is good for Wikipedia [...] Good quality criticism
is valuable, and Wikipedians should listen to it, and actually make changes
based on it. Are there corrupt administrators, then we should get rid of
them." --Jimmy Wales ( http://wikipediareview.com/?showtopic=1693 )


subject: [Foundation-l] Fundraising ideas - using what we've already got

body:
On 6/7/06, Brianna Laugher <brianna.laugher at gmail.com> wrote:

> I think there is a lot of untapped potential in selling existing WM
> items to try and increase the average donation.

Not to mention the branding benefits -- and my Wikipedia bag has been
a conversation starter a few times already.

> I am constantly amazed at the quality of Wikimedian photography at the
> Commons and we could easily bundle, say, 10 super high quality images
> together in a ZIP and offer "10 free computer wallpapers".

This has worked well for a few webcomics artists: make a donation, get
a wallpaper. Of course, given that all our content is out there
anyway, people may feel a bit cheated if they don't get something
exclusive.

Erik


from_name: GerardM

body:
Hoi,
What would be really cool if we can make a contest out of creating
these pictures. When we want to provide pictures in certain categories
for EVERY country, we can use it to stimulate interest in these
countries.. when the "enemy" has a face, it becomes more like a
"friend".

Even when a contest costs us money (a T-shirt a Certificate with the
name of the photographer and the picture on it) it also helps us raise
awareness of Commons. When we make this an anual event it will only be
bigger next year.

Yes, the photo's that are the price winners would be offered in all
the ways that are mentioned...

I am sure we can find a sponsor to pay for the prices as well ....

Thanks,
    GerardM

On 6/7/06, Brianna Laugher <brianna.laugher at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > I am constantly amazed at the quality of Wikimedian photography at the
> > > Commons and we could easily bundle, say, 10 super high quality images
> > > together in a ZIP and offer "10 free computer wallpapers".
> >
> > This has worked well for a few webcomics artists: make a donation, get
> > a wallpaper. Of course, given that all our content is out there
> > anyway, people may feel a bit cheated if they don't get something
> > exclusive.
>
> I don't think so, because (A) I don't think your average "Wikipedia
> rocks, man!"-appreciative donor probably even realises that the other
> projects exist. Let's face it, half the Wikipedians don't. ;) Also
> they are essentially paying for the convenience. Of course they could
> go and get them for free (that's rather the point), but they were
> going to donate anyway, right? And hey, we make it so easy for
> them...seems like warm fuzzies all round to me.
>
> Besides being able to offer lots of PDFs of featured material from a
> range of projects in a range of languages (particularly a few European
> ones), we could also offer country/region-specific items to encourage
> parochial donations. eg. I could probably dig up 10 wallpaper-worthy
> pictures from Australia, to encourage Australian donations.
> Definitely the same with the UK, possibly NZ.
>
> I'm not taking it so much from the angle of "let's sell these" as
> "let's encourage them to donate a tiny bit more with a feelgood
> 'freebie' and simultaneously display the breadth and quality of our
> coverage which they probably didn't realise existed".
>
> Brianna
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikia's new CEO

body:
Hoi,
What does make you say that?

When you read the stuff well, Wikia has been provided capital to
expand its operation. There is no money from the Wikimedia Foundation
involved. People have a day job you know..

Thanks,
   GerardM

On 6/7/06, Selina . <wikipediareview at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 06/06/06, Tim Starling <t.starling at physics.unimelb.edu.au> wrote:
> >
> > Andrew Lih wrote:
> > > FYI,
> > >
> > > Wikia taps eBay exec as CEO
> > > San Francisco Business Times - 2:41 PM PDT Monday
> > >
> > > Wikia Inc., a for-profit company founded 18 months ago by Wikipedia
> > > founder Jimmy Wales, hired Gil Penchina as its CEO on Monday.
> > >
> > > Penchina was vice president and general manager at eBay (NASDAQ: EBAY).
> >
> > Penchina was *a* vice president of eBay. eBay is one of these companies
> > with
> > lots of division presidents, senior vice presidents and vice presidents.
> >
> > http://pages.ebay.com/aboutebay/thecompany/executiveteam.html
> >
> > -- Tim Starling
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Wikipedia-l mailing list
> > Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
> >
>
> It's disturbing to think how much money donated to the charity Wikimedia is
> used for running commercial organisation Wikia...
>
> --
> Selina -
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Mistress_Selina_Kyle?oldid=55639088 /
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Mistress_Selina_Kyle?oldid=41845454
> http://wikipediareview.com/?showuser=1
> "I *do* think criticism is good for Wikipedia [...] Good quality criticism
> is valuable, and Wikipedians should listen to it, and actually make changes
> based on it. Are there corrupt administrators, then we should get rid of
> them." --Jimmy Wales ( http://wikipediareview.com/?showtopic=1693 )
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


from_name: Delirium

subject: [WikiEN-l] Template HTML fixups coming this week

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:
> Would you prefer to change the behavior? Note that this will require some
> restructuring to the parser to both be more correct and and not break things,
> and will leave us with inconsistent, unparseable code in the future. (That is,
> it'll be impossible to tell what the code after a template inclusion will parse
> as unless the template is available.)
>
> But if we're really, really sure, we can put some time into working on that and
> accept that our syntax will never be predictable. (This has consequences for
> future wysiwyg or markup-sensitive assisted editing plugins.)
>

Isn't it general practice with a macro-like facility like templates not
to parse until you've substituted in the preprocessing phase?  That is,
{{subst:foo}}, {{foo}}, and copying and pasting in the code from
Template:foo (and substituting the parameters manually) should all
produce equivalent output.  Sort of like C macros---it's madness to try
to parse C code without first running the preprocessor.

If they're to have some sort of different semantics, that's a different
paradigm of sorts---it would require no longer using templates as
macros, but as functions that return complete well-formed sub-parts of
the page.  I'm not really opposed to that change (I think it could be
made to work, and as you note, it makes some future editing tools easier
to write), but it should then be made obvious and well-understood that
templates aren't macros.

-Mark


body:
Delirium wrote:
> it should then be made obvious and well-understood that
> templates aren't macros.
>

I was going to add that we might want to do something about subst: then,
too.  IMO it's *very* counterintuitive that {{subst:foo}} and {{foo}}
would render differently, especially since most of the documentation
treats them as semantically equivalent.

-Mark


body:
On 6/7/06, Brianna Laugher <brianna.laugher at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 08/06/06, GerardM <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Hoi,
> > What would be really cool if we can make a contest out of creating
> > these pictures. When we want to provide pictures in certain categories
> > for EVERY country, we can use it to stimulate interest in these
> > countries.. when the "enemy" has a face, it becomes more like a
> > "friend".
>
> Hm... Featured Pictures is already quite a contest, and not such a
> friendly one. God forbid you nominate yet another sunset. :) I am not
> sure that encouraging generic-type images is such a great idea. It
> tends to be better if we have images created for a specific purpose,
> that happen to be beautiful and awesome and wallpapery.

Why are they such a fierce contest? Probably because there are only so
many days in a month. We have precious little material illustrating
many countries. And when we get great quality expressive pictures, not
necessarily beautiful and wallpapery but certainly awesome it will
stimulate the articles we are lacking. Yes, there is some notion of an
article on every locality in the USA but do we have the same for Iran
of the Ivory Coast?

> Or if you mean encourage it just for specific countries, that's
> probably a good idea (save half a dozen countries which are probably
> already overrepresented).

When we have a contest and we exclude the Netherlands, the USA or the
UK we will have many people call foul. The rules of the contest can be
such that the photos that we have are part in a category are part of
the quality demands for a winning picture. When we have many GREAT
pictures for the USA, the price winning pictures have to truly add
something that was not there before...

> > Even when a contest costs us money (a T-shirt a Certificate with the
> > name of the photographer and the picture on it) it also helps us raise
> > awareness of Commons. When we make this an anual event it will only be
> > bigger next year.
>
> CafePress also does prints. We have some amazing panoramas that would
> go perfectly on your corporate boardroom wall.... or your parents'
> hallway.
>
> Didn't Wikimania have several photo competitions last time, or was
> that something else? Is Wikimania doing that this year?
>
> Also I don't know if cash is even necessary - we're talking about
> wikicontributors, after all. Prestige and bragging rights tend to be a
> big drawcard.

Bragging rights, do you have a T-shirt saying that you are a winner of
the Wikimedia Photo challenge? A T-shirt does not cost much but it can
be a really attractive item. I would only talk prices as in money when
a sponsor takes up the tab.

Thanks,
    GerardM


from_name: Mark Gallagher

subject: [WikiEN-l] To: Jimmy Wales - Admin-driven death of Wikipedia

body:
G'day Dan,

> On 6 Jun 2006 at 15:38, Raphael Wegmann <raphael at psi.co.at> wrote:
>
>>The discussion is not about thoughtcrimes. It is about hate *speech*
>>which is a different matter. The U.S. is actually violating an UN
>>resoltion by not passing hate speech laws.
>
> Fuck the UN.
>
> (Is that hate speech?)

Not in the Land of the Brave, it isn't.

Can we kinda get back on-topic here, because I can just *see* an
avalanche of Americans posting all sorts of stuff we all already know
Americans think, and a couple of other posters (Raphael leading the
charge, undoubtedly) coming back with poorly-considered retorts, and it
all just leading to an attempt to recapture USENET's heyday.  No, thanks.

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


from_name: Sean Barrett

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikia's new CEO

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

Jimmy Wales stated for the record:

> Wow, that is just staggeringly dishonest.

That is, indeed, the very definition of Selina.

- --
 Sean Barrett     | A computer lets you make more mistakes
 sean at epoptic.com | faster than any invention in human
                  | history with the possible exceptions of
                  | handguns and tequila. --Mitch Ratcliffe
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.2 (MingW32)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

iD8DBQFEh3Z+MAt1wyd9d+URAmryAJ0V7OeRqMcQZFnUB9pyL1EZO+CojACfS4Kt
pcAJjQ8ewZ0OHFcJHRquTFs=
=/J5/
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----


from_name: George Herbert

subject: [WikiEN-l] Types of categories

body:
On 6/7/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 6/7/06, Roger Luethi <collector at hellgate.ch> wrote:
> > Because it does. Where it's different is that the category names make it
> > much clearer what does and what does not belong into the category, the
> > catch-all "thematic" categories are eliminated (or made explicit by
> saying
> > "is related to").
>
> Maybe the way to go is have only attributes, but then make certain
> attributes themselves belong to thematic categories. Something like:
>
> The Outsider
> +Novel
> +By Albert Camus
> +Existentialist

I was considering once in passing the structural and technical challenges of
formatting a WP-like project in which an underlying structure of "Facts" and
categorizations of those facts was set up underneath the articles.  Each
Fact would have attributes like references, links, etc.  Articles would have
prioritized lists of relevant facts, with a system to allow rating and
adding and tagging the facts at the meta level.

Articles could then be written based on a snapshot of the agreed-upon facts
base for the particular article.

One of the additional uses would be as an input database to various
inferrence engines.

At a technical and operational level, it's a completely different project
concept than Wikipedia, even though the end result might be similar from the
article standpoint.

It worries me that the startup effort required probably is impractical.

It seems to me that a lot of the categorization analysis I'm seeing here is
similar to a half-attempt to set up such a structure project.

It's interesting to me that conventional online references and encyclopedias
don't seem to have attempted this.  That's not a comment that it might not
be a good thing, but they may not have tried because it's too hard, not
because they didn't think of it.

Part of the hard part seems to be that getting the initial framing and
conceptual rules down close enough to right is a lot harder than the initial
energy required to start something like Wikipedia, and even borrowing WP
resources and making it part of WP to do it as a WP adjunct in this category
structure may be impractically hard.

Can you or others in this thread address your thoughts on how to move this
into the realm of the practical?  I would sort of like to be wrong on the
nearterm practicality of an approach like this, since it seems extremely
useful in the long term.

--
-george william herbert
gherbert at retro.com / george.herbert at gmail.com


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikia's new CEO

body:
Hoi,
Even when there are "secrets", they are none of our business. What I
objectto is the suggestion that money from the Wikimedia Foundation
ended up at Wikia. If you think this is the case to be careful because
you are close to getting yourself into hot water.
I do not know what the public needs to know more than:
*A venture capalist invested money in Wikia
*A person of the venture fund become a member of its board
*Wikia hired a CEO, someone with Industry credentials read Yahoo

Thanks,
    GerardM

On 6/7/06, Selina . <wikipediareview at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 6/7/06, Selina . <wikipediareview at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > > On 06/06/06, Tim Starling < t.starling at physics.unimelb.edu.au> wrote:
> > > >
> > > > Andrew Lih wrote:
> > > > > FYI,
> > > > >
> > > > > Wikia taps eBay exec as CEO
> > > > > San Francisco Business Times - 2:41 PM PDT Monday
> > > > >
> > > > > Wikia Inc., a for-profit company founded 18 months ago by Wikipedia
> > > > > founder Jimmy Wales, hired Gil Penchina as its CEO on Monday.
> > > > >
> > > > > Penchina was vice president and general manager at eBay (NASDAQ:
> > EBAY).
> > > >
> > > > Penchina was *a* vice president of eBay. eBay is one of these
> > companies
> > > > with
> > > > lots of division presidents, senior vice presidents and vice
> > presidents.
> > > >
> > > > http://pages.ebay.com/aboutebay/thecompany/executiveteam.html
> > > >
> > > > -- Tim Starling
> > > >
> > > > _______________________________________________
> > > > Wikipedia-l mailing list
> > > > Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> > > > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
> > > >
> > >
> > > It's disturbing to think how much money donated to the charity Wikimedia
> > is
> > > used for running commercial organisation Wikia...
> > >
> > > --
> > > Selina -
> > > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Mistress_Selina_Kyle?oldid=55639088 /
> > > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Mistress_Selina_Kyle?oldid=41845454
> > > http://wikipediareview.com/?showuser=1
> > > "I *do* think criticism is good for Wikipedia [...] Good quality
> > criticism
> > > is valuable, and Wikipedians should listen to it, and actually make
> > changes
> > > based on it. Are there corrupt administrators, then we should get rid of
> > > them." --Jimmy Wales ( http://wikipediareview.com/?showtopic=1693 )
> > > _______________________________________________
> > > Wikipedia-l mailing list
> > > Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> > > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
> > >
>
>
>
>
> On 07/06/06, GerardM <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote: Hoi,
> What does make you say that?
>
> When you read the stuff well, Wikia has been provided capital to
> expand its operation. There is no money from the Wikimedia Foundation
> > involved. People have a day job you know..
> >
> >Thanks,
> >>   GerardM
>
> Read what stuff well? Wikipedia has
> http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Fundraising but I can't find anything
> about how Wikia gets it's money. http://wikia.com/wiki/About_Wikia for
> example has absolutely nothing
> Go to https://sos-res.state.de.us/tin/GINameSearch.jsp and search for
> "Wikia" and it says it's "NOT IN GOOD STANDING" - I don't know what that
> means, but it doesn't sound like a good thing.
>
> http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showtopic=192 has some stuff,
> apparently there is no paper trail which is bad compared to the openness
> with Wikimedia, especially when the two organisations are so closely
> related.
>
> I'm not saying anything bad is going on at all, but there's no way for the
> public to know if everything's kept secret.
>
> --
> Selina - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Mistress_Selina_Kyle?oldid=55639088
> / http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Mistress_Selina_Kyle?oldid=41845454
> http://wikipediareview.com/?showuser=1
> "I *do* think criticism is good for Wikipedia [...] Good quality criticism
> is valuable, and Wikipedians should listen to it, and actually make changes
> based on it. Are there corrupt administrators, then we should get rid of
> them." --Jimmy Wales ( http://wikipediareview.com/?showtopic=1693 )
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikia's new CEO

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

Selina . stated for the record:

> (Argh it's so annoying that you can't link directly, I tried messing around
> with the form input but it says "Illegal attempt", lol, talk about Assuming
> Bad Faith ;))
> Sorry, I wasn't being "dishonest" (hey, AGF?) I didn't know the difference,

[WP:AGF] does not require that editors continue to assume good faith in
the presence of evidence to the contrary. ... Automatically accusing the
other side in a conflict of not assuming good faith regardless of their
motivation is failing to assume good faith in itself.

- --
 Sean Barrett     | Hunde, wollt ihr ewig leben?
 sean at epoptic.com | --Frederick the Great, Kolin, 18 June 1757
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.2 (MingW32)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

iD8DBQFEh3jGMAt1wyd9d+URAnuHAJwOBfBDnCgj/FxEWV8eyxqplJx1JQCfSATm
Tdmnt0iO75fA8j/7J+7H5xY=
=c6Di
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----


from_name: Conrad Dunkerson

body:
* Mark Gallagher wrote:

> While I agree with the general idea of what you've been saying since
> your RfA passed, I think you could do with being a little less smug
> while you're saying it.

Heh, 'since my RFA passed'... and well before it. As to 'smug', not my
intent, but someone once told me that I 'use sarcasm the way most people
use punctuation'. I'm not sure they meant it to be the great compliment
that I took it for. Accuse me of arrogance and I'll accuse >you< of
perceptiveness. :]

> You haven't dealt with the same sorts of issues that other admins have.
>   Now, it's not necessary to fight trolls, regularly clean up heavy
> vandalism, mediate bloody disputes, etc., to be an admin, so that's no
> slight on you.

You are mistaken. I have dealt with heavy vandalism and bloody disputes
and trolls in great degree for many years. Granted, much of that was off
Wikipedia or before I became an admin for the stuff ON Wikipedia, but this
image you project of me as someone unfamiliar with such conflict and
dispute would be shocking to those who know me better. As you noted, I've
been dealing more with article issues of late, but that isn't the sum of
my background nor my only area of involvement on Wikipedia.

> I think admins have a responsibility to be civil and polite *on
> Wikipedia* at all times; I think the better admins out there go one
> better and are actually *pleasant* to deal with.  This is what I aim
> for; I often fall short of that goal, but it's there nevertheless.  It
> can be very difficult to maintain one's temper when dealing with
> problematic users.  That's a Bad Thing, true, but it would be nice if
> those criticising had some understanding of the difficulty.

Again, you seem to think I DON'T have, "some understanding of the
difficulty"... at which point I'd invite you to review my interactions
with Pigsonthewing, Karmafist, Selina, Freestylefrappe, et cetera. As I
mentioned earlier in this thread, I've been kicking around on the 'net for
a couple of decades now. It is not >possible< to do that and NOT gain an
'understanding' of the difficulty of keeping your temper in check when
dealing with some netizens. I've been stalked around the net, received
threats and real life harassment, and have the special 'privilege' of
being despised above all others by an infamous 'net kook. Trust me... I
'get' it. We're all human and sometimes people get under our skin. I don't
exempt myself from that... if anything I'm 'by nature' of the same sort as
the admins I'm objecting to, I've just had alot (really really really
ALOT) of practice in phrasing, 'Die you farging bastage!' as, 'I see and
appreciate your point, but feel there may be other issues you might wish
to consider'.

> Often a polite, private message will
> work wonders.  Standing by and pointing the finger and saying "you see
> what bastards these people on Wikipedia are?" is *not* going to improve
> anyone's behaviour, administrator or not.  It is an oft-repeated tragedy
> that people who are absolutely correct can be ignored, simply because
> the way that they make their points gets people off-side immediately.
> Please consider this; if the point you're making is important to you, it
> will be worth your while to change your mode of delivery.

Entirely true. However, I am not (primarily) TRYING to nudge individual
admins towards greater civility. It is inevitable that admins will from
time to time be uncivil. The greater problem, in my opinion, is that the
admin COMMUNITY largely accepts and allows these incidents without comment
or repercussion... to the point that they have become somewhat
commonplace. I would like to see a collective rather than individual
change... and that requires public demonstration of the problem. It simply
isn't possible to make a case for a global shift through individual
appeals. I believe that a change in the culture and standards of adminship
would do more to reduce such incidents than I could possibly accomplish
through 'individual counseling'. Not that there is no merit in such... I
do that quite a bit also, but I think a different method is needed for
this issue.


from_name: Andrew Gray

subject: [WikiEN-l] Types of categories

body:
On 06/06/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 6/6/06, Roger Luethi <collector at hellgate.ch> wrote:
> > Significant? Salient? You don't want to go there.
> >
> > I'd argue the most significant thing about the Titanic is "major disaster"
> > ("Shipwrecks in the Atlantic Ocean", actually). It's not significant or
> > salient for being a ship, but for taking 1500 people down.
>
> But at the end of the day, it's a ship. Indisputably so. You would
> certainly want to put an attribute "shipwrecked" on it, and possible
> "shipwrecked in 1903" or whatever. Instead of "significant" and
> "salient" how about "concrete"? The fact that it's a ship is concrete
> and essential. The fact that it shipwrecked is ancillary.

But what's our *article* about? It's evenly split between an article
on the ship, and an article on the sinking of the ship - if the name
of the Titanic herself hadn't entered into common usage, there'd be a
good argument for calling the article [[1912 sinking of RMS Titanic]].

(Compare [[Exxon Valdez]] and [[Exxon Valdez oil spill]] - I'm
surprised they're not merged)

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


from_name: Anthony DiPierro

subject: [WikiEN-l] Types of categories

body:
On 6/7/06, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> Anthony DiPierro wrote:
> >On 6/4/06, Roger Luethi <collector at hellgate.ch> wrote:
> >>For instance, how do you connect the districts of Paris to the category
> >>Paris? What is a subset of the parent attribute "Paris": "Districts of
> >>Paris", or "Quartier Latin", or neither? Does it bother you if the article
> >>on a French district is now in a subcategory of "Capitals in Europe"?
> >>
> >>
> >[[Category:Paris]] is a theme, not an attribute, so [[Category:Paris]]
> >should not be a subcategory of [[Category:Capitals in Europe]].
> >
> Is it practical to have people debating whether something is a theme or
> an attribute?
>
There's nothing to debate.  Either the subjects of articles within a
category have an "is a" relationship, and are attributes, or they
don't, and are themes.

> >[[Category:Women]] could be a subcategory of [[Category:Woman]].
> >Making an attribute a subcategory of a theme is allowed, it is the
> >reverse that is not allowed.
> >
> Avoid distinctions that will have to be re-explained every time another
> newbie joins.
>
Why?  The MoS is filled with rules that have to be re-explained every
time another newbie joins.  Do you capitalize "External Links" or do
you write "External links"?  The MoS says it should be the latter, but
this is by no means obvious.

In order to lower the learning curve for newbies, should we abandon
all attempts at having a consistent style?

> >In any event, things wouldn't be perfect.  Ultimately the best
> >solution would involve fixing the category system itself, a process
> >which should be approached carefully so as to avoid making the same
> >mistakes all over again.  The advantage of my proposal to not allow
> >themes as subcategories of attributes is that it can be implemented
> >today, without much disruption, and without modifying any code.  Plus,
> >it allows for a relatively straightforward upgrade path when the
> >category system is fixed.  The proposal itself is not the fix, it's a
> >temporary workaround.
> >
> >As an alternative, it would probably be possible to do all of this
> >even without enforcing the subcategory rule.  But all purely attribute
> >categories would have to be identified as such.  I'll have to think
> >about that.
> >
> One can work towards this, but any enforcement is a bit like passing a
> law that requires everybody to think logically.
>
Not at all.  All that's required is that people who do think logically
are allowed to fix things up and have somewhere to point to if they
are challenged.

Anthony


subject:
[WikiEN-l] Cultural distinctions are accidental? Consensus among
	cultures is bad?

body:
On 6/7/06, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
> Jimmy Wales wrote:
> > For the record, and as I have said many times in the past, I do NOT
> > think that cultural distinctions between difference language Wikipedias
> > are accidental or to be regarded as accidental, and even if it were
> > possible to translate every article using machine translation, I cannot
> > imagine that we would want to do so.
> >
>
> This seems like a strange position to me.
>
It doesn't make any sense to me either, and it seems to directly
contradict this exchange:

Mark Williamson wrote:
> Is it considered acceptable to have spearate Wikipedias for different
> cultures and peoples rather than languages? Are any existing
> Wikipedias considered in this capacity?

Jimbo responded:
> In general, no, but there are many complications of course relating to
> ISO language codes, dialects, languages, etc.

Anthere responded:
> Imho, it is not acceptable at all.
> We try to reach people in their mother language or at least a language
> they handle very well, but we should not provide different content based
> on any other specificity such as nationality, religion, political view point
> and such. By definition, since we try to stick to neutrality, the content provided
> should fit all.

Angela responded:
> No it isn't. I agree with what Jimmy, Anthere, and others have already
> written in reply to this.

Jimbo claims he's said this many times in the past.  I couldn't find
any, but if anyone else can maybe I can better understand what he's
saying.  If Jimbo does "NOT think that cultural distinctions between
difference language Wikipedias are accidental", then he must think
they're intentional.  That raises the question as to who intended
these distinctions, and what distinctions were intended.  I always
thought the English Wikipedia at least was supposed to be neutral with
regard to culture.  Maybe English is the exception?

Jimbo also writes "Anyway, if we were going to use a constructed
meta-language, obviously it would be Klingon or Toki Pona. ;-)"  This
presumably was a response to "Yes, the original plan was to write all
articles in Esperanto and then have them autotranslated to all the
other languages of the world."  This might point to some of the
confusion, as my statement had NOTHING to do with constructed
languages.  I was thinking more along the lines of Wikipedia after the
invention of the [[babel fish]].

If everyone in the world could write to everyone else in the world and
be understood, would there still be a need for multiple language
Wikipedias?  Is Jimbo saying that yes, there would?  If so, I'd LOVE
to see some of the "many times in the past" he's talked about this,
because it makes absolutely no sense.

Anthony


from_name: Michael Bimmler

subject: [Wikitech-l] ch.wikimedia.org - close please

body:
On 6/6/06, Tim Starling <t.starling at physics.unimelb.edu.au> wrote:
> Michael Bimmler wrote:
> > we moved everything from ch.wikimedia.org to our own wikis/websites.
> > Could somebody close/lock/delete/make inaccessible/whatever the
> > ch.wikimedia.org wiki?
> > Thanks
>
> Wouldn't you rather make it a redirect to some external website?
>
Well, yes, a redirect to http://www.wikimedia.ch would be nice.
Michael
> -- Tim Starling
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>

--
Regards
Michael Bimmler

Wikimedia CH - Verein zur F?rderung Freien Wissens
Wikimedia CH - Association for the advancement of free knowledge
www.wikimedia.ch


from_name: Anders Wegge Jakobsen

subject: [Wikitech-l] Template HTML fixups coming this week

body:
Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> writes:

> Just a heads-up, folks:
>
> Later this week I'm going to be installing a fix for some
> longstanding bugs with HTML in wiki pages. One of the issues is a
> difference in rendering of templates that improperly nest HTML tags,
> which caused certain badly-written templates to render in one way on
> Wikipedia but wildly broken on most other wikis.

 Will the fixes also affect templates that spread wikitext table
markup across more than one template, or is this a fix for misnested
HTML only?

--
// Wegge
Min begrundelse for at betragte Arne Wilstrup som en paphat:
<http://wiki.wegge.dk/Usenet_personligheder>
Bruger du den gratis spamfighther ser jeg kun dine indl?g *EN* gang.


from_name: Daniel R. Tobias

subject: [WikiEN-l] Types of categories

body:
On 7 Jun 2006 at 11:29, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:

> One can work towards this, but any enforcement is a bit like passing a
> law that requires everybody to think logically.

...which they really ought to pass.  Summarily execute all illogical
people, for the general improvement of the world, I say!

--
== Dan ==
Dan's Mail Format Site: http://mailformat.dan.info/
Dan's Web Tips: http://webtips.dan.info/
Dan's Domain Site: http://domains.dan.info/


from_name: Gerard Meijssen

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Update van de MediaWiki boodschappen

body:
Hoi,
Nadat de MediaWiki boodschappen die door Galwaygirl zijn aangeboden aan
Gangleri op de Betawiki, zijn er veel boodschappen geupdate en zijn veel
(niet alle) boodschappen die nog niet vertaald waren vertaald.
Boodschappen die niet aangepast waren op een nl.project worden NIET
overschreven. Het is daarom ook beter om aanpassingen in MediaWiki niet
meer locaal te doen maar centraal en wel op de Betawiki.

Wanneer deze boodschappen in MediaWiki worden opgenomen, dan komen ze in
een aantal dagen beschikbaar in de projecten. De boodschappen die
aangepast moeten worden zijn te herkennen "Special:allmessages for
changed messages which needs to be updated".. Ik kan dat niet op de
Nederlandse Wikipedia herkennen .. maar ik neem aan dat er genoeg
moderatoren zijn die dit voor hun rekening kunnen nemen.

Groetjes,
    GerardM


from_name: HeinzJ

subject:
[Wikitech-l] changing usernames / changing all occurences of a
 username [[user:XYZ]] in all tables

body:
i would like to change all occurences and references of an username in
all tables

can someone give me a hint how this can be done. does there exist a
php-script or some sql-code-snipplet?

thx, heinz


subject:
[Wikitech-l] changing usernames / changing all occurences of a
	username [[user:XYZ]] in all tables

body:
HeinzJ <h-j.luecking at t-online.de> writes:

> i would like to change all occurences and references of an username in
> all tables
>
> can someone give me a hint how this can be done. does there exist a
> php-script or some sql-code-snipplet?

 Install the Renameuser extension from
<http://svn.wikimedia.org/viewvc/mediawiki/trunk/extensions/Renameuser/>

--
// Wegge
Min begrundelse for at betragte Arne Wilstrup som en paphat:
<http://wiki.wegge.dk/Usenet_personligheder>
Bruger du den gratis spamfighther ser jeg kun dine indl?g *EN* gang.


from_name: Philip Welch

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Aww, so cute,
	a banned user is trying to take us down with a
	DMCA	notice	(Forwarded email)

body:
On Jun 7, 2006, at 2:50 PM, Ray Saintonge wrote:

>> It's still against the rules to give legal advice for free, because
>> the rules are made by lawyers, and lawyers' business is giving legal
>> advice.
>>
> There's such a thing as taking this to extremes.  The way you put
> it if
> two beer buddies sit down and discuss their latest parking tickets
> they
> could be illegally driving lawyers into starvation.  In practical
> terms,
> even though lawyers write the rules they are not turned on unless they
> can smell money.

Yes but lawyers will look at them with disdain.

(I was half-joking, too.)

--
Philip L. Welch
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Philwelch


body:
thxs Anders, but that extension only renames users whithin table "users"
an perhaps soome more. But my problem are the references within the
"cur"-table where you have text / links to a user page "[[user:name]]".
these references dont get changed by that extension.

Heinz

Anders Wegge Jakobsen schrieb:
> HeinzJ <h-j.luecking at t-online.de> writes:
>
>> i would like to change all occurences and references of an username in
>> all tables
>>
>> can someone give me a hint how this can be done. does there exist a
>> php-script or some sql-code-snipplet?
>
>  Install the Renameuser extension from
> <http://svn.wikimedia.org/viewvc/mediawiki/trunk/extensions/Renameuser/>
>


from_name: Platonides

body:
How about a new Magic Word like __TAGS_COMPLETED_ON_PARENT__ to specifically
allow _some_ templates to have their tags opened/closed at their parent
level? It'd allow the current use for intentioned behaviour while correcting
human errors. Of course, use of such word would be discouraged... ;)

The other wikis would also need the table-problematic templates list

Platonides


references:
<e677su$lgg$1@sea.gmane.org> <m34pywwzaf.fsf@obelix.wegge.dk>
	<e67c3b$7r2$1@sea.gmane.org>

body:
"HeinzJ"
> thxs Anders, but that extension only renames users whithin table "users"
> an perhaps soome more. But my problem are the references within the
> "cur"-table where you have text / links to a user page "[[user:name]]".
> these references dont get changed by that extension.
>
> Heinz

Use the 'what links-here' data and then run a bot to fix the refered pages?


from_name: MacGyverMagic/Mgm

subject: [WikiEN-l] AFC needs your help!

body:
Where can I find out more about that extension?
To others: the whole point of AFC is to help out people who don't want to
create an account and still want to submit articles while at the same time
filtering out the crap.
Allowing anyone to create articles again, would indeed overwork admins who
work in deletion. Jimbo called it a temporary test, but he never reinstated
anon powers to create articles - probably for a very good reason.

Mgm

P.S. Thanks for adding AFC to your VandalFighter watchlist, Ryan.

On 6/7/06, Magnus Manske <magnus.manske at web.de> wrote:
>
> Anthony DiPierro schrieb:
> > On 5/22/06, MacGyverMagic/Mgm <macgyvermagic at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >> Dear RC patrollers and vandal hunters,
> >>
> >> This is a desperate plea for help!
> >>
> >> The few people who work at "Articles For Creation" are getting
> overworked.
> >> They almost can't keep up with the new requests and a lot of dubious
> >> submission are left
> >> with no idea how to handle them. Even worse, occasionally
> >> "Wikipedia:Articles for creation"
> >> and "Wikipedia:Articles for creation/Today" get blanked by a newbie who
> >> isn't reading the
> >> instructions. Unfortunately, those blankings aren't always discovered
> in
> >> time, and this way
> >> a lot of good submissions are missed. Once they get archived, they're
> almost
> >> never touched.
> >>
> >>
> > Why not set up a system where each article proposed for creation
> > exists as a separate page.  And there could be a special page set up
> > which points to each of them.  This special page could list the date
> > and time created, the name of the proposed page, the number of bytes
> > of the page, and the username or  IP address of the proposer.
> >
> My Tasks extension handles requests for creation, with the date the task
> was submitted, and the IP of the submitter. Tasks can be sorted by
> creation date, and assigned to people. Each task can have its own
> discussion page.
>
> Besides, it could handle requests for deletion, stub notes
> (automatically categorized), etc.
>
> Currently, however, it is sitting unmaintained in the extensions module,
> since noone gives a s**t. Business as usual.
>
> Magnus
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


body:
On 07/06/06, George Herbert <george.herbert at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 6/7/06, Mark Gallagher <m.g.gallagher at student.canberra.edu.au> wrote:
> >
> > [...] and it all just leading to an attempt to recapture USENET's heyday.
> >
>
> We had a heyday?

August.

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


from_name: Selina .

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikia's new CEO

body:
On 07/06/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
>
> Selina . wrote:
> > Go to https://sos-res.state.de.us/tin/GINameSearch.jsp and search for
> > "Wikia" and it says it's "NOT IN GOOD STANDING" - I don't know what that
>
> > means, but it doesn't sound like a good thing.
>
> Wow, that is just staggeringly dishonest.  You do know that people can
> click on the link and look for themselves, don't you?
>
> What it actually says is: "THIS IS NOT A STATEMENT OF GOOD STANDING"
>
> Wikia is in good standing, but the point this website is making is that
> this is not where you look that up.
>
> --Jimbo
>
>
(Argh it's so annoying that you can't link directly, I tried messing around
with the form input but it says "Illegal attempt", lol, talk about Assuming
Bad Faith ;))
Sorry, I wasn't being "dishonest" (hey, AGF?) I didn't know the difference,
without the explanation it sounds like the meaning's the same ~shrug~ i.e.
if the government statement about something is "bad standing" I thought it
must be talking about the organisation - my mistake -.-

Fred: Read my other post ("I'm not saying anything bad is going on at all,
but there's no way for the public to know if everything's kept secret."),
I'm not claiming anything, I misworded that - what I meant is how it COULD
be used for Wikia and no one would basically know

However I don't think it's that much of a risk I just was surprised it
wasn't as open as I thought it would be, and worried when I read stuff
posted on WR which sounded pretty dodgy (that topic I referred to -.-) -
I've basically satisfied my curiousity and won't bring it up again, it
sounds like the fears of others (I never posted in the topic, but read it..)
may just be that, worries :)

--
Selina - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Mistress_Selina_Kyle?oldid=55639088
/ <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Mistress_Selina_Kyle?oldid=55639088/>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Mistress_Selina_Kyle?oldid=41845454

http://wikipediareview.com/?showuser=1
"I *do* think criticism is good for Wikipedia [...] Good quality criticism
is valuable, and Wikipedians should listen to it, and actually make changes
based on it. Are there corrupt administrators, then we should get rid of
them." --Jimmy Wales ( http://wikipediareview.com/?showtopic=1693 )


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikia's new CEO

body:
On 07/06/06, Sabine Cretella <sabine_cretella at yahoo.it> wrote:
>
> >
> >> It's disturbing to think how much money donated to the charity
> >> Wikimedia is
> >> used for running commercial organisation Wikia...
> >>
> >> --
> >> Selina -
>
> Chiacchiera con i tuoi amici in tempo reale!
> http://it.yahoo.com/mail_it/foot/*http://it.messenger.yahoo.com
>

no, I've never been involved in accounting at all I'm an art student ;) I
guess it may seem obvious to you it's impossible but, well, I didn't know
never mind :)

--
Selina - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Mistress_Selina_Kyle?oldid=55639088
/ <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Mistress_Selina_Kyle?oldid=55639088/>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Mistress_Selina_Kyle?oldid=41845454
http://wikipediareview.com/?showuser=1
"I *do* think criticism is good for Wikipedia [...] Good quality criticism
is valuable, and Wikipedians should listen to it, and actually make changes
based on it. Are there corrupt administrators, then we should get rid of
them." --Jimmy Wales ( http://wikipediareview.com/?showtopic=1693 )


from_name: Walter van Kalken

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikia's new CEO

body:
GerardM wrote:

>Hoi,
>Even when there are "secrets", they are none of our business. What I
>objectto is the suggestion that money from the Wikimedia Foundation
>ended up at Wikia. If you think this is the case to be careful because
>you are close to getting yourself into hot water.
>I do not know what the public needs to know more than:
>*A venture capalist invested money in Wikia
>*A person of the venture fund become a member of its board
>*Wikia hired a CEO, someone with Industry credentials read Yahoo
>
>Thanks,
>    GerardM
>
>On 6/7/06, Selina . <wikipediareview at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>>On 6/7/06, Selina . <wikipediareview at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>>>>On 06/06/06, Tim S
>>>>
I have to agree with Gerard here.

Wikia is a private project by two prominent wikimedians using the wiki
system. Nothing to do with wikimedia really. So nothing for us to make
waves about really.

Waerth/Walter


from_name: Brianna Laugher

body:
Regarding fundraising. From the recent discussion I've come to the
conclusion that there isn't a fundraising committee, yet, so when
there is one, I'll forward such ideas to it. But in the meantime, here
you go.

I think there is a lot of untapped potential in selling existing WM
items to try and increase the average donation. 'sweeteners'. The
CafePress merch at the moment is a little bit crud. For example some
Wikibooks already offer PDF versions (well, Learning German in English
does, at least). So you could say, "Donate $X and receive a free
e-book to learn German!" Or a "best of" the cookbook. The only extra
cost to the Foundation is the bandwidth.

I am constantly amazed at the quality of Wikimedian photography at the
Commons and we could easily bundle, say, 10 super high quality images
together in a ZIP and offer "10 free computer wallpapers". Since we
have so many I think we could even offer a choice between a few of
these, by theme (eg landscapes, art, sunsets, science-y, insects
having sex). We could set the donation bar for this $5 higher than
whatever the average donation last time was.

I would also like to create some templates and put together some
themes to allow people to easily make their own calendars from Commons
material. And back to fundraising, CafePress does calendars. I don't
really know who controls all that but I assume there'd be no objection
if I/we put some together for that? I imagine they would sell really
well in Nov/Dec. They also do prints and mousepads, gift cards...

Of course the markup on CafePress stuff is not great, it would be
better if could be done inhouse somehow, but I haven't figured out a
good solution to that yet. The "computer wallpapers" and PDF books
stuff exists already though. I guess all you would need is to have the
files on the foundation wiki and when a donation is over the target,
they get some special 'download link'.

So, is what I'm proposing technically feasible, is it a good idea or
will it probably be a lot of fuss for negligible impact, and should I
start trying to find good candidates for such things?

cheers,
Brianna
en|commons:user:pfctdayelise

PS. I also think there is great potential in the Spoken Wikipedia
material, but I haven't figured out what the best format for it would
even be. How many could you reasonably ZIP?


from_name: Steve Bennett

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Another KIND of categories: (Was: Types of
	categories)

body:
On 6/7/06, Drini drini <wpdrini at gmail.com> wrote:
> Well, the discussion about the "kind of categories" missed a very important
> one:
>
> Categories used to group wikipedians by poitical/religious beliefs
> like
> [[Category:Muslim Wikipedians]]
> [[Category:Born-again Christian Wikipedians]]
> [[Category:Flying Spaghetti Monsterist Wikipedians]]
> [[Category:Roman Catholic Wikipedians]]

As far as the other thread goes, I'm happy to leave them out because
they only affect user pages, not article pages.

Btw, what's with [[Category:Flying Spaghetti Monsterist Wikipedians]]?
Surely everyone knows the correct category is [[Category:Pastafarian
Wikipedians]]?

Steve


from_name: Cormac Lawler

body:
On 6/7/06, Anthere <Anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Erik Moeller wrote:
> > On 6/5/06, Erik Moeller <eloquence at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >>On 6/5/06, Anthere <Anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> >>
> >>>The problem now is to get the grant from Kennisnet.
> >>
> >>I very much doubt that given our discussions in February, but I'll be
> >>happy to call Jan-Bart to clarify things.
> >
> >
> > As was clarified by e-mail, the situation is exactly as I expected.
> > Kennisnet is working for the WMF to complete the transaction.
> >
> > Erik
>
> As was also mentionned, the spc had not been informed whether the grant
> was okay or not, nor of how much it was planned to be (still unclear by
> the way).
>
> I'd like that you make the effort to recognise that we are acting in
> good faith and trying to make our best. I may also hint at the fact that
> we are volunteers and that volunteers can *choose* to take care of a
> proposal... or not. We are under no obligation to spend hours studying
> your proposals, and may prefer to focus on other issues of more interest
> to us or where people will appreciate a bit more the efforts of the
> team. The comments you made are not motivating in the least. You may
> criticize as much as you feel like, but one drawback may be that the
> next proposal Gerard or you make, finds nobody to take care of and is
> simply forwarded to the board for consideration.
>
> Anthere
>

Before this thread descends into chaos, I'd just like to point out
that we (the SPC)  *are* trying to get InstantCommons going, and are
doing it the best we can. Truth is, this is a complicated project that
many of us have been confused about the exact details of how it is to
be managed.

On the SPC, we generally take responsibility for specific projects (or
aspects of them) individually or as a group. Consequently, I was not
fully aware of InstantCommons' progress until this came up on the
mailing list. I would also appreciate some good faith as Anthere said
- an email to us would possibly work better than a public criticism,
though criticism, where appropriate and well-intentioned, is always a
good thing.

But I would like to nip a potential interpretation of Anthere's mail
in the bud here. We do *not* reject or accept proposed projects on the
SPC based on the proposer's personality. It does help if they are
willing to work with us, patiently, until we can get their projects
sufficiently worked out, but this has nothing to do with liking the
person - it's about liking the *proposal*. And we like InstantCommons
:-)

Cormac


from_name: Sabine Cretella

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikia's new CEO

body:
You are kidding, right??? How can you doubt?

Wikimedia has nothing to do with Wikia - these are two completely
different organisations. Did you ever have to deal with accounting? I
suppose not, otherwise you could not have made this assumption ...

Best, Sabine

>
>> It's disturbing to think how much money donated to the charity
>> Wikimedia is
>> used for running commercial organisation Wikia...
>>
>> --
>> Selina -

Chiacchiera con i tuoi amici in tempo reale!
 http://it.yahoo.com/mail_it/foot/*http://it.messenger.yahoo.com


from_name: Anthere

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:
> On 6/5/06, Erik Moeller <eloquence at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>On 6/5/06, Anthere <Anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>>
>>>The problem now is to get the grant from Kennisnet.
>>
>>I very much doubt that given our discussions in February, but I'll be
>>happy to call Jan-Bart to clarify things.
>
>
> As was clarified by e-mail, the situation is exactly as I expected.
> Kennisnet is working for the WMF to complete the transaction.
>
> Erik

As was also mentionned, the spc had not been informed whether the grant
was okay or not, nor of how much it was planned to be (still unclear by
the way).

I'd like that you make the effort to recognise that we are acting in
good faith and trying to make our best. I may also hint at the fact that
we are volunteers and that volunteers can *choose* to take care of a
proposal... or not. We are under no obligation to spend hours studying
your proposals, and may prefer to focus on other issues of more interest
to us or where people will appreciate a bit more the efforts of the
team. The comments you made are not motivating in the least. You may
criticize as much as you feel like, but one drawback may be that the
next proposal Gerard or you make, finds nobody to take care of and is
simply forwarded to the board for consideration.

Anthere


from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikia's new CEO

body:
Selina . wrote:
> Go to https://sos-res.state.de.us/tin/GINameSearch.jsp and search for
> "Wikia" and it says it's "NOT IN GOOD STANDING" - I don't know what that
> means, but it doesn't sound like a good thing.

Wow, that is just staggeringly dishonest.  You do know that people can
click on the link and look for themselves, don't you?

What it actually says is: "THIS IS NOT A STATEMENT OF GOOD STANDING"

Wikia is in good standing, but the point this website is making is that
this is not where you look that up.

--Jimbo


body:
Yes ! I like your ideas.

Good news : the board just approved the creation of the Fundraising
Committee. Get in touch with Mav to help on it.

Mav, there was a comment made by a board member about the scope of the
committee. Can you draft us a scope pretty quickly and let's agree on it.

Ant

Brianna Laugher wrote:
>>>I am constantly amazed at the quality of Wikimedian photography at the
>>>Commons and we could easily bundle, say, 10 super high quality images
>>>together in a ZIP and offer "10 free computer wallpapers".
>>
>>This has worked well for a few webcomics artists: make a donation, get
>>a wallpaper. Of course, given that all our content is out there
>>anyway, people may feel a bit cheated if they don't get something
>>exclusive.
>
>
> I don't think so, because (A) I don't think your average "Wikipedia
> rocks, man!"-appreciative donor probably even realises that the other
> projects exist. Let's face it, half the Wikipedians don't. ;) Also
> they are essentially paying for the convenience. Of course they could
> go and get them for free (that's rather the point), but they were
> going to donate anyway, right? And hey, we make it so easy for
> them...seems like warm fuzzies all round to me.
>
> Besides being able to offer lots of PDFs of featured material from a
> range of projects in a range of languages (particularly a few European
> ones), we could also offer country/region-specific items to encourage
> parochial donations. eg. I could probably dig up 10 wallpaper-worthy
> pictures from Australia, to encourage Australian donations.
> Definitely the same with the UK, possibly NZ.
>
> I'm not taking it so much from the angle of "let's sell these" as
> "let's encourage them to donate a tiny bit more with a feelgood
> 'freebie' and simultaneously display the breadth and quality of our
> coverage which they probably didn't realise existed".
>
> Brianna


from_name: Rob Church

body:
On 07/06/06, HeinzJ <h-j.luecking at t-online.de> wrote:
> thxs Anders, but that extension only renames users whithin table "users"
> an perhaps soome more. But my problem are the references within the
> "cur"-table where you have text / links to a user page "[[user:name]]".
> these references dont get changed by that extension.

The magic of redirects.

Rob Church


from_name: brion at pobox.com

subject: [Wikitech-l] MediaWiki automated test run failure 2006-06-08

body:
An automated run of parserTests.php showed the following failures:

Running test Table security: embedded pipes (http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2006-April/034637.html)... FAILED!
Running test Link containing double-single-quotes '' (bug 4598)... FAILED!
Running test BUG 1887, part 2: A <math> with a thumbnail- math enabled... FAILED!
Running test Language converter: output gets cut off unexpectedly (bug 5757)... FAILED!
Running test HTML bullet list, unclosed tags (bug 5497)... FAILED!
Running test HTML ordered list, unclosed tags (bug 5497)... FAILED!
Running test HTML nested bullet list, open tags (bug 5497)... FAILED!
Running test HTML nested ordered list, open tags (bug 5497)... FAILED!
Running test Parsing optional HTML elements (Bug 6171)... FAILED!
Running test Inline HTML vs wiki block nesting... FAILED!
Running test Mixing markup for italics and bold... FAILED!

Passed 385 of 396 tests (97.22%) FAILED!


body:
> > I am constantly amazed at the quality of Wikimedian photography at the
> > Commons and we could easily bundle, say, 10 super high quality images
> > together in a ZIP and offer "10 free computer wallpapers".
>
> This has worked well for a few webcomics artists: make a donation, get
> a wallpaper. Of course, given that all our content is out there
> anyway, people may feel a bit cheated if they don't get something
> exclusive.

I don't think so, because (A) I don't think your average "Wikipedia
rocks, man!"-appreciative donor probably even realises that the other
projects exist. Let's face it, half the Wikipedians don't. ;) Also
they are essentially paying for the convenience. Of course they could
go and get them for free (that's rather the point), but they were
going to donate anyway, right? And hey, we make it so easy for
them...seems like warm fuzzies all round to me.

Besides being able to offer lots of PDFs of featured material from a
range of projects in a range of languages (particularly a few European
ones), we could also offer country/region-specific items to encourage
parochial donations. eg. I could probably dig up 10 wallpaper-worthy
pictures from Australia, to encourage Australian donations.
Definitely the same with the UK, possibly NZ.

I'm not taking it so much from the angle of "let's sell these" as
"let's encourage them to donate a tiny bit more with a feelgood
'freebie' and simultaneously display the breadth and quality of our
coverage which they probably didn't realise existed".

Brianna


from_name: Bryan Derksen

subject: [WikiEN-l] AFC needs your help!

body:
MacGyverMagic/Mgm wrote:
> Jimbo called it a temporary test, but he never reinstated
> anon powers to create articles - probably for a very good reason.

Did any actual results ever come out of that test, BTW? I'm curious
whether there was a significant effect on the rate of article deletion,
and whether it resulted in a significant increase in throwaway accounts
being registered.

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 250 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
Url : http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/attachments/20060608/1a1edb05/attachment.pgp


from_name: Andrew Gray

subject: [WikiEN-l] Category translation

body:
On 06/06/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:

> > Looking a bit into this, I agree it'll be a hurdle.  How big of a
> > hurdle I still don't know.
>
> Just fwiw, one simple basic example I have dealt with.
>
> [[fr:Carnac]] discusses both the township of Carnac and the famous
> Carnac stones which are found within the town.
>
> I split [[en:Carnac]] into that article which only discusses the town,
> and [[en:Carnac stones]] which discusses the megalithic site.
>
> [[en:carnac]] and [[en:Carnac stones]] both interwikilink to
> [[fr:Carnac]]. However, nothing (anywhere) interwikilinks back to
> [[en:Carnac stones]]. There is no clean mechanism for doing so. The
> French article *could* link twice - once to each article - but then
> you'd just have two interwiki links labelled "English" and only the
> URL would tell you which was which.
>
> In other words, many -> one correspondances are ok. One -> many are
> unhandled atm. Occasionally you'll see "French Wikipedia article"
> given as a "further reading" link but I don't think the MoS sanctions
> that.

This is basically what I was talking about upthread, but Steve
explained the fundamental issue better than me... the scope of
articles in different languages isn't a 1:1 correspondence.

The problem with language and cultural issues isn't with neutrality,
or whether-or-not something gets written about, it's how it gets
written about. Indeed, the "cultures" aren't really differences
between Danish culture and Japanese culture - they're differences
between the internal culture of the Danish wikipedia and that of the
Japanese wikipedia.

In some projects, the use of broad-scope articles may be much more
popular than in others, so you have one article on X mapping to three
or four on Y. And different groups have different preferences as to
how to do these broad articles. In the case of [[Carnac stones]], it
could rationally be part of a broader article organised on a
geographic basis ([[Carnac]]), a thematic basis ([[Standing stones]]),
or a historic basis ([[Prehistoric monuments]]).

I honestly don't know if this is the case. But I'm betting that, to
some degree, it is... or it is enough to screw up any kind of
cross-project categorisation program.

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


body:
On 08/06/06, GerardM <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hoi,
> What would be really cool if we can make a contest out of creating
> these pictures. When we want to provide pictures in certain categories
> for EVERY country, we can use it to stimulate interest in these
> countries.. when the "enemy" has a face, it becomes more like a
> "friend".

Hm... Featured Pictures is already quite a contest, and not such a
friendly one. God forbid you nominate yet another sunset. :) I am not
sure that encouraging generic-type images is such a great idea. It
tends to be better if we have images created for a specific purpose,
that happen to be beautiful and awesome and wallpapery.

Or if you mean encourage it just for specific countries, that's
probably a good idea (save half a dozen countries which are probably
already overrepresented).

> Even when a contest costs us money (a T-shirt a Certificate with the
> name of the photographer and the picture on it) it also helps us raise
> awareness of Commons. When we make this an anual event it will only be
> bigger next year.

CafePress also does prints. We have some amazing panoramas that would
go perfectly on your corporate boardroom wall.... or your parents'
hallway.

Didn't Wikimania have several photo competitions last time, or was
that something else? Is Wikimania doing that this year?

Also I don't know if cash is even necessary - we're talking about
wikicontributors, after all. Prestige and bragging rights tend to be a
big drawcard.

Brianna


from_name: Angela

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikia's new CEO

body:
On 6/8/06, Selina . <wikipediareview at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 6/7/06, Selina . <wikipediareview at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > It's disturbing to think how much money donated to the charity Wikimedia
> > is
> > > used for running commercial organisation Wikia...

No money from Wikimedia is used for Wikia. The aim is actually for it
to happen the other way around, with Wikia providing money to
Wikimedia. For example, through sponsorship of Wikimania which Wikia
might do.

> Read what stuff well? Wikipedia has
> http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Fundraising but I can't find anything
> about how Wikia gets it's money. http://wikia.com/wiki/About_Wikia for
> example has absolutely nothing

So far, there are two ways Wikia has made money - advertising and
venture capital/angel investment:
http://www.wikia.com/wiki/Press_releases/Bessemer_Venture_Partners_Funds_Jimmy_Wales%27_Startup_Wikia
http://www.wikia.com/wiki/Advertising

Angela.


from_name: Mark Williamson

subject: [Wikitech-l] Simplified/traditional Chinese on Commons

body:
I'm not sure why it's such a big deal to have separate Traditional and
Simplified versions of pages on Commons. Unlike most other projects,
language is obviously not a main concern of the project, that's why it
combines so many languages in one site.

The automatic converter for zh.wp is not perfect, in fact it has many
problems. However, on zh.wp, there is a huge volume of material
written in Chinese, and to publish separate editions would be such a
divisive move that it is much less practical.

With Commons, on the other hand, the only sorts of material that need
to be translated are things like documentation, a relatively small
volume, so the effort to convert by hand is not misplaced -- why not
have a better-quality product when it takes only slightly more effort?

Mark

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


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [WikiEN-l] Category translation

body:
Andrew Gray wrote:

>The problem with language and cultural issues isn't with neutrality,
>or whether-or-not something gets written about, it's how it gets
>written about. Indeed, the "cultures" aren't really differences
>between Danish culture and Japanese culture - they're differences
>between the internal culture of the Danish wikipedia and that of the
>Japanese wikipedia.
>
The important differences are the deep one between cultures and
linguistic structures.  The concepts that are most significant in a
culture are taken for granted by the members of that culture.  It's "the
way things are done", and doing things differently is well outside the
box.  Other cultures will take an entirely different set of ideas for
granted.  Different pronoun sets, the selection of verb forms, the use
of inflections instead of prepositions can all be major factors in
cultural differences.  It's not so simple that it can be dismissed as a
difference between internal Wikipedia cultures.

Ec


subject: [WikiEN-l] Category translation

body:
Delirium wrote:

>Jimmy Wales wrote:
>
>
>>For the record, and as I have said many times in the past, I do NOT
>>think that cultural distinctions between difference language Wikipedias
>>are accidental or to be regarded as accidental, and even if it were
>>possible to translate every article using machine translation, I cannot
>>imagine that we would want to do so.
>>
>>
>This seems like a strange position to me.
>
>My view of a good encyclopedia article is that *any* reasonable person
>in the world would find it: 1) informative; and 2) neutral.  This should
>include non-native speakers of the language, people from outside the
>typical "culture" of the language, and even people who can't speak the
>language at all who have the article translated for them.  On en:, we
>make an explicit effort to have it *not* be biased towards Anglosphere
>culture, but instead to pull in people who speak English as a second
>language (whether well or not) and are generally outside of
>"English-speaking culture".  This isn't of course 100% successful, but
>the *goal* is definitely to make it a global encyclopedia, not an
>encyclopedia only for people who are culturally in the English-speaking
>world.
>
They are probably both right.  At a deep level all the differences are
accidental, but that's not a reason to be compulsive about harmonizing
them.  In one sense too Wikipedia can be seen as a lens that converges
all knowledge at the top of the Tower of Babel, but I doubt if that
approach has any practical value, except perhaps in the minds of
techno-geek Vulcans who believe that there is a logical computer
solution for every possible problem..  So I do believe that the
differences are accidental, but I see that as a good dynamic.  Viewed
separately the Wikipedias in different languages are bound to arrive at
different NPOVs that are each strongly rooted in distinct cultural
values.  A language with a small concentrated geographical territory is
more likely to achieve a satisfactory NPOV, without the complicated
arguments  that may be encountered with a widely dispersed language like
English.  This broad range of neutralities helps keep things dynamic.

Ec


subject:
[WikiEN-l] Cultural distinctions are accidental? Consensus
 among cultures is bad?

body:
Anthony DiPierro wrote:

>On 6/7/06, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
>
>
>>Jimmy Wales wrote:
>>
>>
>>>For the record, and as I have said many times in the past, I do NOT
>>>think that cultural distinctions between difference language Wikipedias
>>>are accidental or to be regarded as accidental, and even if it were
>>>possible to translate every article using machine translation, I cannot
>>>imagine that we would want to do so.
>>>
>>>
>>This seems like a strange position to me.
>>
>>
>It doesn't make any sense to me either, and it seems to directly
>contradict this exchange:
>
The similarities are just as accidental as the differences.

>If Jimbo does "NOT think that cultural distinctions between
>difference language Wikipedias are accidental", then he must think
>they're intentional.  That raises the question as to who intended
>these distinctions, and what distinctions were intended.  I always
>thought the English Wikipedia at least was supposed to be neutral with
>regard to culture.  Maybe English is the exception?
>
I reject the syllogism that absence of accidentality implies intention.
The English Wikipedia is as neutral as the converged thoughts of its
participants, but so are all the others.

>Jimbo also writes "Anyway, if we were going to use a constructed
>meta-language, obviously it would be Klingon or Toki Pona. ;-)"  This
>presumably was a response to "Yes, the original plan was to write all
>articles in Esperanto and then have them autotranslated to all the
>other languages of the world."  This might point to some of the
>confusion, as my statement had NOTHING to do with constructed
>languages.  I was thinking more along the lines of Wikipedia after the
>invention of the [[babel fish]].
>
I think that the native Esperanto speakers would have a hard time
keeping up. :-)
I have no background on this "original plan", though I suspect that the
idea would flatter the esperantists.

>If everyone in the world could write to everyone else in the world and
>be understood, would there still be a need for multiple language
>Wikipedias?  Is Jimbo saying that yes, there would?  If so, I'd LOVE
>to see some of the "many times in the past" he's talked about this,
>because it makes absolutely no sense.
>
Your hypothetical premise here is unrealistic

Ec


from_name: Birgitte SB

body:
--- Erik Moeller <eloquence at gmail.com> wrote:

> The notion that every contract has to be between the
> Wikimedia
> Foundation and another organization is also
> unnecessary -- contracts
> can be between volunteers and grant-giving
> organizations, if the
> grants are small and having the contracts managed by
> Wikimedia only
> adds unnecessary bureaucratic overhead. This way,
> Wikimedia adds
> organizational credibility for volunteers who
> deserve it.
>

I cannot agree with you on this point.  Contracts must
be with the Foundation if they want the WMF's name
attached to it.  If Kenniset was willing to give the
money to anyone willing to make it happen (Wikimedia
or otherwise), I imagine you would have already worked
it out.  Surely you understand why things must be done
in such a way.  It is just not acceptable for the
Board to not be a party to such a contract.  And this
is nothing against GeradM.  I would say the same thing
if the vonlunteer was Ahthere.  Bureaucracy is in
unfortunate when it slows things down, but it is
neccessaary to some degree to ensure oversight.

With regards to the rest of you email.  The Board is
going to hire an interim executive director.
Hopefully it will be soon.  This shows me that the
Board is addressing your corncerns about their
efficiency.  I imagine it will be a big and effective
change for WMF.  Please let us not talk of
re-organizing entire commitees when we have not even
given this new hire a chance.  The job hardly requires
solving global hunger!  I understand that you are
frustrated.  I would be too in your shoes.  But I see
that the concerns are being addressed, so now is an
even more appropriate time for patience than two
months ago.  It would be nice if this deal were
already finalized, but now we will have an executive
to help see these things through.  If we change to
many things at once we will not know what helped and
what hindered.

Birgitte SB

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


from_name: Erik Moeller

body:
On 6/7/06, Anthere <Anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> I'd like that you make the effort to recognise that we are acting in
> good faith

This is not about good or bad faith, Florence. Of course the SP
committee is acting in good faith - I never denied this. The point is
that a 5000 EUR project that was essentially OK'd by Kennisnet in
February is still not ready to go by June. The point is that at this
organizational efficiency, we need not even dream of realizing any
real grant proposals that are brought to us from the outside. I'd like
_you_ to make the effort to recognize that the organization needs to
fundamentally change in the way it does things if it does want to
fulfill its charitable mission.

I am very, very concerned that our promises about helping children in
Africa are going to sound rather cynical when actual African projects
(and InstantCommons is one) do not happen because the organization is
so ineffective. _Especially_ in an all-volunteer organization, the
approach which is currently taken -- a small group of people must make
all the critical decisions, and new members are only recruited if
there is consensus _within_ that group (_and_ ideally the Board) -- is
not scalable. And it's certainly not scalable for a top 16 website
with over a million registered users and hundreds, thousands of
potential "special projects". Not to mention other projects besides
Wikipedia which are badly in need of innovative thinking and creative
partnerships. Not to mention that we're supposed to be multilingual.

I have not seen a single announcement on this mailing list for an open
SP-related meeting. Most of the discussions you need to have can be
open without leaving a permanent record on the web -- publish edited
logs or summaries where confidential information is concerned. You can
accept advisors without even voting on them. And the core voting
members should be those who do the most work of actually planning,
coordinating and realizing projects as this becomes visible in a
larger group.

The notion that every contract has to be between the Wikimedia
Foundation and another organization is also unnecessary -- contracts
can be between volunteers and grant-giving organizations, if the
grants are small and having the contracts managed by Wikimedia only
adds unnecessary bureaucratic overhead. This way, Wikimedia adds
organizational credibility for volunteers who deserve it.

This could have been done with Kennisnet in February or March. Don't
be overly afraid of  outcomes -- just dissociate yourself from
projects which fail, and highlight those that succeed. And for
Christ's sake, don't worry all the time about legal risks. Legal risks
can be addressed as a project develops. Wikipedia is an insanely bad
idea from a legal point of view and would never have been started
through _any_ process which we are actually using in our organization
to start things.

Build _many_ relationships with people you can trust, instead of
building _few_ relationships with people you'd like to take out for
dinner.

> We are under no obligation to spend hours studying
> your proposals

How about you start _trusting_ me, Gerard and other volunteers when we
come to the Foundation and say: "This here is a moderately cool
project that these people over there are willing to pay for, but
they'd like to get an OK from the Foundation." Again, I ask: Why could
the SP committee not simply have sent the authorization to Kennisnet,
and let the contract side of things be handled between Gerard and
them? Again, not a single valid reason has been given for excluding a
person like Gerard from the committee. This is not about him
personally -- it's about the _process_.

You accuse me of assuming bad faith. Yet you are treating me as an
outsider after 5 years of working with and around Wikipedia which has
included more "special projects" than I care to mention (which pay my
salary, I might add). There are large grants I am associated with
which I wouldn't bring even anywhere _near_ the Foundation because of
its current state. Your point above seems to be accurately
summarizable as: "Erik, please be nice to us, because otherwise we'll
just ignore your ideas."

Not a single part of my e-mails was personal criticism, an assumption
of bad faith, or deliberately insulting. I have been very careful to
focus on the issues, using InstantCommons as an example of failure. I
am doing this publicly not to humiliate you but because I know from
experience that otherwise I will just be silently ignored. Instead of
actually trying to resolve the problems I pointed out, you posted a
new thread with the upper case title "INCORRECT", accusing me of
spreading false information. When the information turned out to be
correct, you accuse me of not being nice. How about, instead of
accusing me of something, you try to actually answer to my points
above? How is the Foundation going to scale to the size of problems it
faces?

I would be very happy to serve with you on SP and to work with you to
reorganize it in such a fashion that it can handle grants and projects
efficiently and effectively. The question is, do you acknowledge the
problems there are, and do you want my help to solve them? Or are you
hoping to pull a miracle CEO out of your hat who will solve global
hunger?

Kennisnet is just one random (if important) organization from the
Netherlands we happen to have a good working relationship with. There
are thousands of Kennisnets out there, thousands of organizations and
companies and institutions who would be happy to support us in a
myriad different ways. Heck, some of them have already sent the
Foundation product samples.

I have no doubt that the SP committee will initiate a dozen or half
dozen projects from within its own ranks in the coming months.
However, Wikimedia's ambition is not "to start a dozen or half dozen
interesting projects". Wikimedia's ambition is:

   "Imagine a world in which every single person is given free access
to the sum of
    all human knowledge. That's what we're doing."
   http://wikimediafoundation.org/

The first version of this statement was drafted by Jimmy and me at the
WOS 2004. I would say it's about time we get serious about it, or drop
the rhetoric. Wikimedia is turning into a "who likes who" club rather
than an organization centered around goals, objectives, and
qualifications. Jimmy says he doesn't want the organization to be run
like a college club. Then it's time to get rid of the bullshit
politics. Get Gerard and me on SP. Let us identify other people who
can help. Allow us to bring our existing collaborations into the WMF.
And let's broaden and open up the organization in ways which will
amaze us all.

This is not about "if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like
a nail" philosophy, about applying wiki ideology to areas where there
are "tried and tested" ways of doing things which are preferable. This
is about learning from great thinkers like Douglas Engelbart, Ted
Nelson, Howard Rheingold, Frederic Vester, and Tim Berners-Lee. This
is about running Wikimedia in accordance with the laws of
thermodynamics: only open systems are survivable. The last thing our
planet needs is more politics and more bureaucracy. What it does need
is smart people collaborating, building global networks, and
overlooking their personal differences, before our civilization
collapses under its own weight.

Erik


body:
On 6/8/06, Angela <beesley at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 6/8/06, Anthere <Anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> > Good news : the board just approved the creation of the Fundraising
> > Committee. Get in touch with Mav to help on it.
>
> Please see http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_committee for details.

I've taken the liberty to add a list where people can register their
interest in participating.

Erik


from_name: Jeremy Dunck

subject: [Wikitech-l] Researcher needs help

body:
On 6/8/06, Mark Bell <typewritermark at gmail.com> wrote:
> Sorry to clarify.
>
> "More history" means the complete history of more articles.
>
> I am using a tool called "historyflow" that can read html so let me try the
> HTML solution.

You might be interested in this:
http://tools.wikimedia.de/~magnus/wiki2xml/w2x.php

You can paste in a list of article and it gives you back various output formats.

The article data will be out of date, since that's pulling from the
toolserver which isn't in sync with production.  Sorry, I don't know
when the last import was.


list: textbook-l

subject: [Textbook-l] Game Guides

body:
Under full assumption of good faith of everyone involved, I would also
like to say that I find the fact that 3 out of 5 current Wikimedia
Board members (or 3 of 4 active ones) are founders of or working for
the for-profit Wikia.com, which hosts gameinfo.wikia.com (a wiki for
the kind of game guides that are being removed from Wikibooks),
somewhat problematic. Jimmy himself going into Wikibooks and
effectively making policy is even more worrying (I know he would argue
that it's been policy all along, but the fact is that these guides
would be sticking there without higher intervention).

There's another GFDL wiki out there, strategywiki.net, for these kinds
of guides. Given that StartegyWiki is more active than GameInfo
anyway, I would be more comfortable with the whole situation if Wikia
made a deliberate decision of its own to move guides from GameInfo to
StrategyWiki. It seems like a good free content thing to do (build
communities wherever there's the most activity), and would alleviate
concerns about outside appearance of the whole thing.

I also reiterate my suggestion to rename Wikibooks to WikiTextbooks.

Erik


from_name: Gerard Meijssen

subject: [Wikitech-l] New diff feature for MediaWiki

body:
Hoi,
This small Unicode issue is a show stopper. When software is suggested
that only works on Latin script, you do not appreciate the amount of
work that is done in other scripts using the MediaWiki software.

Apart from that why would it be boring.. this is a technical list.
Personally I am interested in two things as well, what other projects
are you referring to and how you want to see this attribution done.

Thanks,
    GerardM

Elliott F. Cable wrote:
> I'm forwarding this to MediaWiki-l also. I think it's more relevant
> there anyway.
>
> I like that a lot, and think it should be implemented in MediaWiki
> ASAP. I'm e-mailing him to ask why he only wants to contribute if
> it's used in 'teh wikipedia'<!-- wikicrapia more like it -->, there
> are lots of other wiki sites out there that need this and could
> definitely use it. I'm aallll for this, and willing to help in any
> way I can.
>
> On Jun 6, 2006, at 2:13 PM, Roman Nosov wrote:
>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I've been directed here by Brion, Robchurch and others on
>> #wikimedia-tech.
>> So I propose a new feature for Wikipedia which people on
>> #wikimedia-tech mostly refer as blame page or blame map. I would
>> prefer to call it something like "Track contributions mode" (because
>> of similarity with MS Word track changes mode) or "Hall of fame" but
>> whatever. I have live prototype written in PHP&MySQL at
>> http://217.147.83.36:9000/ Example of "blame map" can be seen at
>> http://217.147.83.36:9000/history::171 two blame maps compared
>> http://217.147.83.36:9000/history::171=169
>>
>> For some reason folks at #wikimedia-tech. were mainly concerned with
>> speed and almost nothing else so I'll try explaining performance
>> issues as best as I can.
>>
>> First of all, I DO NOT propose to recalculate diffs for all zillions
>> of edits Wikipedia already has. Diffs would only be calculated for a
>> new edits.
>> Next, I want to explain in detail how I see this working. So first I
>> propose to modify revision table and add a flag with following
>> possible values: "Revision is too old to be diffed", "Revision is
>> awaiting to be diffed", "Revision has been diffed". Also another table
>> should be added that will store blame maps for each revision. Blame
>> map for each subsequent revision will be calculated incrementally. So
>> it doesn't really matter whether article has 10 or 1000 revisions. We
>> would only need last blame map.
>>
>> I also propose to have separate dedicated diff server(s) with sole job
>> to calculate diffs in background. I.e. diff server grabs revision with
>> "Revision is awaiting to be diffed" flag and last blame map from
>> database, calculates diff and finally stores new blame map in the
>> database and also changes revision flag to "Revision has been diffed".
>> Repeat.
>>
>> In addition, article display logic should be altered. The module that
>> displays article should check diff flag. If diff flag is set to
>> "Revision is too old to be diffed" no further changes needed. If diff
>> flag is set to "Revision is awaiting to be diffed" then Credits
>> section should be created that only contains message "Calculation in
>> progress". If diff flag is set to "Revision has been diffed" then
>> Credits section should be created that contains list of contributors
>> ordered by contribution size. The list of contributors in correct
>> order can be generated with a single select to blame map table. In
>> addition this select can be cached. Direct link to blame map should be
>> displayed too. If user clicks on this blame map link corresponding
>> blame map should be presented. Every blame map can be generated with a
>> single select and can be placed in cache. Yawn
>>
>> If you are still awake by now more thoughts on fault tolerance here.
>> Should diff server die, crash, fail or whatever the only side effect
>> end user will see is "Calculation in progress" message right after
>> article body. That's it. No slowdown or anything. If user still wants
>> see some kind of diff he/she can still use old diff engine. Because
>> blame maps aren't calculated in real time this feature is impractical
>> target for DoS attacks. However I should point out that any real time
>> diff algorithm is one big fat target for DoS attacks on other wikis
>> which are run on single server without some sort of acceleration.
>>
>> There is also small Unicode issue. Due to crappy utf-8 support in PHP
>> all non-latin characters are currently ignored. I believe this could
>> be solved either by enabling proper Unicode support in PHP or writing
>> custom code to separate words. But before that I propose to test on
>> English Wikipedia first because if it will works for English it should
>> work for other languages.
>>
>> So I offer following practical steps. Dedicate one of servers to be
>> diff playground. I will need a shell account on this server. Install
>> mediawiki on it alongside with diff logic running in background.
>> Create read only mysql account on live database server. So as a result
>> this diff server can grab new revisions from live database, diff them
>> and store results locally. This way we can find out how many edits
>> single server can process and see how many servers this feature will
>> require in total (I don't think it will be more than 2-3 though).
>>
>> In conclusion, I'd like to say that in my opinion this feature will be
>> useful and practical if implemented. It also can be crucial building
>> block for other interesting features. However, I want to stress that
>> I'm not interested in doing this *unless* it is used in English
>> Wikipedia and I'm given appropriate credit. I can give a reason why I
>> want that in private e-mail.
>>
>> Thank you for reading this long and boring e-mail.
>>