from_name: Gerard Meijssen

body:
Jim Breen wrote:

>Greetings,
>
>[Gerard Meijssen (Re: [Wiktionary-l] English orthographies) writes:]
>
>
>>>Jim Breen wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>>[Gerard Meijssen ([Wiktionary-l] English orthographies) writes:]
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>>>1) English, American English and other orthographies are treated as
>>>>>>seperate entities.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>I think this will be a disaster.
>>>>
>>>>Can you explain why "jewellery" and "jewelry" cannot be alternatives
>>>>within the one entry?
>>>>
>>>>
>
>
>
>>>In the database design,
>>>http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_Wiktionary_data_design , an
>>>Expression is a number of characters that make up a valid occurrence in
>>>a language. Therefore every spelling IS a different Expression.
>>>
>>>
>
>OK, so the short answer is that the UW database was designed that way.
>
>I predict it will be a mess. It is also at variance with all the
>lexicographical databases I have seen.
>
>
Yes, but there is as far as I know no database that wants to have ALL
languages and ALL words in one database. This is what Wiktionary does
and that is what the Ultimate Wiktionary makes markedly different from
what went before.

>
>
>>>The English used in Britain, the United States, Australia etc is
>>>significantly different.
>>>
>>>
>
>Nonsense.
>
>
That is a matter of opinion. I agree that to some extend the English is
the same. My English I learned at school and I lived in Great Britain
for a few years. I can tell you that I fall foul on misunderstanding
Americans sufficiently. The meaning is different and I have suffered the
consequences of not understanding well what was meant.

>
>
>>>This can be found in the difference in
>>>vocabulary and the difference in orthography.
>>>
>>>
>
>Both the spelling and vocabulary differ only to a very small extent.
>
>
When you however want the meanings described in that particular
orthography you need to have it specified as something specific.

>
>
>>>Typically when considering
>>>spelling, the way the English, American, Australian spell differently
>>>makes it a different orthography. This is reflected in there being
>>>English, American etc dead wood dictionaries. In a project like UW where
>>>we collect all words of all languages, it makes sense to reflect this.
>>>
>>>
>
>By all means collect them and reflect them, but don't foster the
>impression that they are a major issue, because they aren't. Also don't
>fall into the trap of thinking that you can neatly compartmentalize
>English spellings into strict country groups. Different mixes of spellings
>are used right across the English-speaking world.
>
>BTW, spelling and orthography are different things. Orthography refers
>to the writing system, i.e. "a method of representing the sounds of a
>language by written or printed symbols" (to quote Wordnet.) English
>is written with one orthographical system.
>
>
To be more "politically correct" Wiktionary gives as a definition: "The
study of correct spelling according to established usage". The
established usage in Britain is different from the United States and
therefore it could be considered a different orthography.

>To a large extent I don't really care that much about "jewellery" and
>"jewelry" being in their own entries in English, because they are only a
>few percent of words. Where this approach will be a total disaster is
>with Japanese, where most words can be and are written in two or
>more scripts, and where spelling variations are rife. The idea that the
>meaning, POS, etc. etc. for a word will be replicated again and again
>and again for each writing variant is too awful to contemplate.
>
>
With Japanese all these different ways of writing are ALL accepted
Japanese. They are ALL used intermixed and there is no reason why they
should not be. There is nothing that disallows Japanese expressions in
multiple charactersets. When a Word is included, it only needs to be
connected to the same Meaning through SynTrans to share the same meaning.

I am happy to explain how this works out from within the database
design. So consider asking questions instead of making pronouncements
about how "bad" it will be.

What is a POS?? part of speech ??

>To be blunt, it sounds like the UW database design was done with one
>or a few languages in mind, and the others are being told to fall into
>line.
>
I like you to be plainspoken, but consider; we consider sign languages,
we allow for these great bits of software that show strokes for Chinese
/ Japanese characters. We allow for many relations and labels for Words
/ Expressions / Meanings. Tell me what your issue is and I will see how
it fits in the database design and explain this to you.

I will not be too suprised when we find things that need improvement.
But improvements can only be made when the issues are identified that
are not catered for in the current database design. So give me your
issues and let us work toward solutions.

Thanks,
GerardM


list: wiktionary-l

source: pipermail-mbox

subject: [Wiktionary-l] English orthographies


list: wikien-l

from_name: Tony Sidaway

subject: [WikiEN-l] AfD Threshold being Revised Downward Again?

body:
On 9/20/05, Philip Sandifer <snowspinner at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> Thus it will always be the case that AfD becomes unmanageable, and
> that the unmanageability affects the exclusionists noticably less
> than the inclusionists.

Actually my conclusion is the opposite, from more or less the same set of
observations.

Firstly, as Wikipedia grows larger at an accelerating rate, the likelihood
of a given article ever being listed for deletion diminishes. AfD is not
growing in size, it seems to have stabilized, while I presume that the
article growth rate rises.

Secondly, while it is true that it's harder to make the case against
deletion, a consensus is not required to avoid deletion.

Thirdly, an article that is salvageable can be improved with a small amount
of effort during the discussion, and this has an immense effect on the
result of the debate.

Exclusionism may become more popular, because it appeals as a quick fix to
feelings that the project is growing beyond control.

However the same accelerating growth ensures that exclusionism confined to
AfD can only have a diminishing influence on the overall end product, as a
smaller proportion of both incoming new articles and of existing,
established articles, falls within the limited reach of AfD.


list: wikipedia-l

subject: [Wikipedia-l] OurMedia for ASL-English video

body:
Pawe? Dembowski wrote:

>>OurMedia.org may serve as a nice home for the video for an ASL-English
>>wikipedia. It seems to have no restrictions on video size. Wikipedia can
>>house the English text and link to the video file at OurMedia.
>>Also for the wiki in wikipedia. Consider a video file the same as an image
>>file in wikipedia.In Wikipedia, an image file cannot be edited other than
>>by replacement. A video could be "edited via replacement" the same way.
>>Words and sentences in Wikipedia are also done this way. If I change "lion"
>>to "king of the beasts" I have essentially edited via replacement.
>>Hhamilton
>>
>>
>
>So you actually want us to create a second Wikipedia in English, the
>only difference from the original Enlish one being links to external
>ASL videos, and you wonder why people oppose this idea?
>
Hoi,
I think that Mark said it well when he mentioned that we should have an
ASL wiki and not an English/ASL wiki. I wholeheartedly agree with him.
Thanks,
    GerardM


from_name: Daniel P. B. Smith

subject: [WikiEN-l] Potential Wikipedian growing pains

body:
> From: Geoff Burling <llywrch at agora.rdrop.com>

>  is there a point in Wikipedia's size where it's current growth
> will taper off or stop? I don't mean to repeat the old chestnut that
> knowledge is somehow finite: put in different words, is there a
> certain
> point where contributors will find it far easier to work on existing
> articles than to contribute new ones?

Oddly enough, I wonder about the exact opposite. I fear that people
enjoy creating new articles far more than they enjoy editing existing
articles, and that people look desperately for topics that do not
exist yet so that they can be the first to create them. The
Wikipedian equivalent of the Slashdot FIRST POST!!!!

This means that over time a greater proportion of newly created
articles will reflect an artificial attempt to find a topic that
hasn't been "taken," and a smaller proportion will be reflect a
genuine attempt to serve potential readers.

I do not think its growth will stop. The problem is, will the quality
of the articles hold up? There's no obvious reason why it shouldn't,
and no obvious reason why it should.

One reason why it _might_ not hold up is that when Wikipedia was less
famous, contributing to it required a greater interest in the project
and a greater commitment to the project's ideals. As it becomes more
and more familiar, it is possible that we will see an increasing
proportion of new "articles" that are really paragraph-long newbie
tests.

To tell the truth, I think many of the "articles" that land on AfD
are best not regarded as articles at all, but as elaborate newbie
tests OR as badly executed article requests. I'm thinking of substubs
that convey no information at all except the fact that someone either
a) genuinely wanted an article on that topic, or b) simply wanted to
experience the pleasure of creating an article.

I've been casting "votes" recently in AfD that say "delete, and enter
a request for the article." So far, nobody but me seems to think this
is a good idea.

--
Daniel P. B. Smith, dpbsmith at verizon.net
"Elinor Goulding Smith's Great Big Messy Book" is now back in print!
Sample chapter at http://world.std.com/~dpbsmith/messy.html
Buy it at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1403314063/


body:
Kelly Martin wrote:

>On 9/20/05, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>>I think that Mark said it well when he mentioned that we should have an
>>ASL wiki and not an English/ASL wiki. I wholeheartedly agree with him.
>>
>>
>
>Yeah, but to do that you're going to need an orthography for ASL.
>
>Kelly
>
Hoi,
This is something the the people that want this wiki need to consider.
It is not necessary for us to solve this.

I am happy with any orthography and any mediafiles in the Ultimate
Wiktionary.
Thanks,
    GerardM


from_name: ABCD

subject: [Wikipedia-l] English stats

body:
On 9/20/05, Marco Chiesa wrote:
> By the way, does en.wiki have / has en.wiki got its own mailing list?

Yes it does - WikiEN-l at wikimedia.org

ABCD


from_name: Taco Deposit

subject: [WikiEN-l] Esquire article on Wikipedia

body:
On 9/20/05, Mark Pellegrini <mapellegrini at comcast.net> wrote:
>
> I was asked to let everyone know about a little experiment that a
> reporter for Esquire magazine
> and Jimbo agreed to:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Improve_this_article_about_Wikipedia
>
> The page is pretty self explanatory. A journalist for Esquire magazine,
> A.J. Jacobs, did a story about Wikipedia,
> and then posted it on Wikipedia so that Wikipedians can edit it. He
> wants to see how his draft is changed
> (preferably for the better).
>
> -Mark

Is it supposed to be a secret that the magazine is Esquire? The the page
doesn't mention it and user "notafish" is being coy about it on the talk
page.

TD


from_name: Pawe³ Dembowski

body:
> Yeah, but to do that you're going to need an orthography for ASL.
> Kelly

We could always allow all of the existing ortographies and convert
between them like we do between traditional and simplified Chinese.

--
Ausir
Wikipedia, wolna encyklopedia
http://pl.wikipedia.org


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Ashar Voultoiz

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: How to be careful

body:
Tim Starling wrote:
<snip>
> Finally, remember to consider your mental state. Avoid logging in when
> fatigued. Take regular rest breaks. *Never* log in when drunk.

I fail to understand why we should not log in when drunk :) I personally
develop things much faster and act more carefully.

Thanks for the tips :o)

--
Ashar Voultoiz - WP++++
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Hashar
http://www.livejournal.com/community/wikitech/
IM: hashar at jabber.org  ICQ: 15325080


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Reboots of doom

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:
> The one thing that came to my mind is: why does anyone log into zwinger
> in the first place?  Since it's this horribly frightening SPOF, ought we
> to not avoid even _looking_ at it funny?

Cause nobody care about implementing a secured bastion host and setting
up proper groups. The easiest is probably move the NFS service on
another couple of redundant servers.

--
Ashar Voultoiz - WP++++
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Hashar
http://www.livejournal.com/community/wikitech/
IM: hashar at jabber.org  ICQ: 15325080


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: SPOF notes

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:
> However we are reading a few bits off of zwinger's NFS (some block lists
> etc, some lock files) and sometimes writing (logs). Insofar as those are
> currently used they should be either migrated to a more survivable
> situation or should be able to fail gracefully. NFS should be set up if
> it's not in a way that will fail cleanly after a short timeout.

Hello,

All logs should be sent on a dedicated logging server, I kept ranting
about it for the last 2 years. A cool big syslog could host all squids
logs, mail logs, apache error logs, various daemon logs etc.. That will
let dev find what's wrong at one place (you want redundant servers).

For file update you can push files using scp / ftp instead of a local cp
over a NFS mount.

For lock files, I dont know why there is any using the mount anyway.
Can't they be on the local file system under /var/lock/ or something?

Mail services (email from wikipedia.org and mailing lists), should
probably be moved off of apaches and zwinger to a new dedicated email
server).

Ganglia could be moved to Larousse wich already host noc.wikimedia.org
website and is(was) used for Nagios.  Larousse could become the
monitoring device.

> Some other configuration files, such as php.ini, and various programs
> and utilities (one of the perlbals?) are also pulled off of NFS
> currently. These need to generally be fixed up so that things can
> continue running while home dirs are down; pushing the files out on
> update as we do with the PHP scripts is probably in order.

Stop pulling ! Push with scp / sftp :o)

Ideally, someone should list every service provided by zwinger and plan
a migration of each services on dedicated servers. Once all services are
migrated, zwinger can be reinstalled from scratch using whatever
standard distribution in use at that time (FC3?) and then reused for
something else (like a dev machine maybe for testing stuff).

cheers,

--
Ashar Voultoiz - WP++++
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Hashar
http://www.livejournal.com/community/wikitech/
IM: hashar at jabber.org  ICQ: 15325080


from_name: Delphine Ménard

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia English English

body:
On 9/20/05, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:

> The French spelligs do tend to be closer to the British for reasons that
> go back to the Norman conquest, but if the context requires full
> translation this is not likely to be noticed.  The bulk of the
> translation is from English to French so that becomes an exercise in
> protecting French from the corruption of anglicisms of which ever type.
> The politically correct tendency in Quebec French is sometimes toward
> having a language that is more correct than what you might find in France.

Catching the thread just now. This is fun. ;)

Get your facts straight my friends.

*If anything, it's  'Lee-Bray-Ree', Librairie, not exactly Lie-bree,
which sounds rather like wine and cheese (French enough, I might add)
. But I may have lost the punch line, I am but a foreign-speaker. :)

France is hard to govern, as De Gaulle did put it, because it has "as
many kinds of cheese as days in the year". Way more than 246, that is.

As for quatre-vingt-dix and the rest, here is the deal:
The French say soixante-dix, quatre-vingt and quatre-vingt-dix
The Belgians say septante, quatre-vingt and nonante
The Swiss say septante, huitante and nonante, some even say octante.
They are the only ones who got it straight. (And I am French)

And also:
>The politically correct tendency in Quebec French is sometimes toward
>having a language that is more correct than what you might find in France.

I love Qu?bec, but when they throw me an evil look about "week-end", I
cannot help but smile at their "joke", or "chum". So I'd say that all
in all, we're even. ;-)

And to add to the fun, I learned English in the US, with a British
teacher freshly landed. That left me somewhere in between honor and
the centre. I am still puzzled to this day.

Delphine
--
~notafish


from_name: Frederic

subject: [WikiEN-l] Better tools to fight Wiki vandalism

body:
Hi Wikipedians,

just a question regarding Wiki Vandalism on Wikipedia.

On this page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Recentchanges, would it be possible to display a symbol in front of the line (let's say "V" for Vandalism)
if some facts are met about the changes on an article ?
E.g. : if size has decreased of more than 20%
Another way would be to compute a level of probability of vandalism based on some criteria, a bit like SpamAssasin is working on killing spams.

Another tool that would usefull to fight spam would be to create a page like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Recentchanges
but with differences directly displayed, without the full articles. I mean you would have all the differences on the latests articles amended displayed on one page.
Ok ok It would cost maybe too much CPU to do this, but this could be a tool reserved for "significant Wikipedia contributors"

Fred

(Sorry if this topic has already been discussed/solved but I didn't find a way to query the ML's history)


from_name: Gerrit Holl

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia English English

body:
Delphine M?nard wrote:
> *If anything, it's  'Lee-Bray-Ree', Librairie, not exactly Lie-bree,
> which sounds rather like wine and cheese (French enough, I might add)
> . But I may have lost the punch line, I am but a foreign-speaker. :)

I think what was being discussed was the way Londoners pronounce
"library" - that is, biblioth?que/Bibliothek/biblithoeek/bibliotek

> France is hard to govern, as De Gaulle did put it, because it has "as
> many kinds of cheese as days in the year". Way more than 246, that is.
>
> The French say soixante-dix, quatre-vingt and quatre-vingt-dix
> The Belgians say septante, quatre-vingt and nonante
> The Swiss say septante, huitante and nonante, some even say octante.
> They are the only ones who got it straight. (And I am French)

What do the Qu?becois say?

The Dutch and Germans haven't got it very straight either - we say
twee?nveertig (zweiundvierzig), whereas other languages just say
fortytwo/fyrtiotv?/quarante-deux/quarantadue

regards,
Gerrit.

P.S.
I am currently doing a Swedish course in a group of 21 different
nationalities. The English speaking people have by far the worst
pronunciation, where the Americans are worse than the Scottish,
Canadians or Australians (we don't have any English people). The worst
way to write down a pronunciation is by trying to write it phonetically in
English - you end up with pronunciations that are totally different from the
way it is actually pronounced. My name is NOT pronounced "Gair-Rid Hole" -
not even near (see [[en:User:Gerritholl]] for how it is), but I can't think
of a closer approximation using this "phonetic transcription".

--
Temperature in Lule?, Norrbotten, Sweden:
| Current temperature   05-09-20 20:09:50   10.5 degrees Celsius ( 51.0F) |
--
Det finns inte d?ligt v?der, bara d?liga kl?der.


body:
HHamilto at doe.k12.ga.us wrote:
> OurMedia.org may serve as a nice home for the video for an ASL-English
> wikipedia. It seems to have no restrictions on video size. Wikipedia can
> house the English text and link to the video file at OurMedia.
> Also for the wiki in wikipedia. Consider a video file the same as an image
> file in wikipedia.In Wikipedia, an image file cannot be edited other than
> by replacement. A video could be "edited via replacement" the same way.
> Words and sentences in Wikipedia are also done this way. If I change "lion"
> to "king of the beasts" I have essentially edited via replacement.
> Hhamilton

Like [[Wikipedia:WikiProject Spoken Wikipedia]], but with video's?

Gerrit.

--
Temperature in Lule?, Norrbotten, Sweden:
| Current temperature   05-09-20 20:19:54   10.8 degrees Celsius ( 51.4F) |
--
Det finns inte d?ligt v?der, bara d?liga kl?der.


body:
On 9/20/05, Philip Sandifer <snowspinner at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> The problem is that this leads to an inclusionist position with a
> substantial and non-trivial exclusionist force that goes and mucks
> things up. The result is, I think, bad, and bad in a way that is
> still exclusionist. The result is that, instead of a consistent
> exclusionism, we have an inconsistent one - some number of articles
> will get deleted, those articles will stay deleted regardless of the
> arguments to the contrary, and those articles will be selected more
> or less at random.
>
>

Well there is a substantial exclusionist faction on Wikipedia. While they
obviously don't enjoy consensus support (viz: Deletion policy, history of
organised attempts to exclude articles about schools, pikachu, cartoons,
etc) they're entitled to express their views.

Wikipedia isn't supposed to have a consistent policy. It's just supposed to
make decisions we can live with, even if we need to grit out teeth.

I suspect that the more exclusionist a position one takes about wikipedia
content, the more likely one is to have resource to gritting one's teeth.
Wikipedia is filling up with articles about animators, books, radio DJs,
episodes of old TV shows, drinking games, jokes, and all manner of subjects
that would probably not make it into a paper encyclopedia.

This process is inexorable. In the absence of widespread uproar at this
massive influx of articles on obscure subjects, the exclusionist position is
unsalvageable. By default, we have created an aggressively inclusionist
encyclopedia.

There are no effective policy tools by which this situation could be
reversed.


from_name: David Anderson (Phoenix)

subject: [Wikitech-l] Wiki Developers available for contract development

body:
HI,

I was referred to this list by April King regarding contract work for
setting up and configuring our internal corporate wiki.  If anyone is
interested, would you please contact me at:

David Anderson

Toll Free1-800-859-7249 or 623-445-9500 (AZ Residents)

davidanderson at uticorp.com

Thank you,

David

Confidential

This e-mail and any files transmitted with it are the property of the Universal Technical Institute, Inc. and/or its affiliates, are confidential, and are intended solely for the use of the individual or entity to whom this e-mail is addressed. If you are not one of the named recipients or otherwise have reason to believe that you have received this e-mail in error, please notify the sender and delete this message immediately from your computer. Any other use, retention, dissemination, forwarding, printing or copying of this e-mail is strictly prohibited.


from_name: Mark Pellegrini

subject: [WikiEN-l] Esquire article on Wikipedia

body:
"Is it supposed to be a secret that the magazine is Esquire? The the page
doesn't mention it and user "notafish" is being coy about it on the talk
page."

Um, oops. I must have missed that memo.
-Mark


from_name: Jtkiefer

subject: [WikiEN-l] Esquire article on Wikipedia

body:
damnit, not again.  When Jimbo decided to do this last time
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attack of the show it ended up being absolute
chaos complete with several vandalism sprees.  I wish that the community
would be consulted in the future when these types of things were decided.

-Jtkiefer


subject: [WikiEN-l] Esquire article on Wikipedia

body:
>Jtkiefer, no harm no foul. This artice is in "Wikipedia:" namespace
>and is not a true encyclopedia entry.
>
>The only thing it will do is show how badly Wikipedians are at writing
>magazine feature articles. :)
>
>-Andrew (User:Fuzheado)
>_______________________________________________
>WikiEN-l mailing list
>WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
>To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>
>
could have gone to Wikipedia Signpost if they wanted proof of that,
since that's the closest thing that we have to a magazine.

-Jtkiefer


from_name: Rowan Collins

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Re: Wikipedia English English

body:
On 20/09/05, Jack & Naree <jack.macdaddy at gmail.com> wrote:
>  Thus, if an American types a search for "color", they get the article in
> their orthography with the headword "color"; and if a
> non-American-English-speaker types in "colour", they get the article in
> their orthography with the headword "colour".

And what if they search for "red", which version does it link to?

>  ...for words with different meanings but identical orthographies you get a
> disambiguation page;

Fine, logical, and what I would presume we'd do already.

> for articles about the same subject that have a
> different word for the thing - like Aubergine (Am-En "Eggplant") for
> example: you get a page for each; in each respective orthography.

Why? Just because the headword is different, you suggest we manually
copy all changes to one onto the other? Or perhaps the entry on that
plant in a US encyclopedia and in a UK one would be fundamentally
different in some way? And what, as I say, of other articles which
happen to mention, and probably link to, the term in one form or the
other? Should they link both?

Somebody has mentionned that something similar is done on Wiktionary,
but that is a very different situation: in a dictionary, the entire
article is discussing the headword, as a word; in an encyclopedia, on
the other hand, the article is discussing the entity denoted by the
headword. That is, a dictionary entry for "aubergine" is discussing
the meaning, etymology, etc of that string of letters; an encyclopedia
entry for "aubergine" is discussing the plant itself, using the string
of letters merely as a label. It follows that whereas the dictionary
entries for the words "aubergine" and "eggplant" are distinct (because
they are two different words), the encyclopedia entries under those
two words will always be *exactly the same* - you might even put the
article under its scientific classification, but you'd still be
discussing the same plant (and you wouldn't suddenly be discussing it
in Latin, either).

I'm sorry to labour the point, but this is the major problem with
splitting up articles by dialect, whether in separate wikis or not -
it means that all those articles have to be written twice, or
constantly kept in synch, *even though they are for almost entirely
identical*. This seems to me a complete and blatant waste of effort.

Now, a few months back, when the orthography converter for Chinese was
being written (and please bear in mind that Chinese really does have
multiple different orthographies - they're related, but they're more
like different alphabets than the odd spelling difference), it was
suggested that something similar might be used in English (and
Scandinavian, and various other situations). I was opposed to that,
too, but less so - if implemented well, it would require very little
additional effort (discounting the effort of those implementing it),
because it would be automatic.

Indeed, the main problem would be defining the various variants (it
would be as arrogant to claim there are only two "proper" forms of
English as to claim there is only one) and making sure the right
things were "corrected" in the right way. And, as people pointed out,
there'd still be arguments over what the "correct" version was within
a particular variety, and there'd still be compromises needed on
grammar and punctuation issues, etc etc

>  Can we try and reach some consensus on this?

As others have pointed out, you seem to me to be very much in the
minority on this; everyone else seems to subscribe more-or-less to the
current consensus that it's really not that big a problem, and
certainly not worth multiplying our workload to avoid.

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


body:
On 9/20/05, Geoff Burling <llywrch at agora.rdrop.com> wrote:
>
> is there a certain point where contributors will find it far easier to
> work on existing articles than to contribute new ones? (This is a problem
> that I doubt we'll encounter until Wikipedia reaches somewhere between 5 &
> 10 million articles, but I think it is a potential problem.) If there is
> such a tipping point, we may find that AfD (in whatever form it has at the
> time) not only will be able to keep up with the flow, but may actually
> reduce the size of Wikipedia!
>

If this should ever become a serious problem, the GFDL ensures that the
information removed can be copied and retained indefinitely.


list: commons-l

from_name: Alphax

subject: [Commons-l] Local laws, trademarks and such

body:
Is Wikimedia bound by local laws regarding images? Eg. if the place
where the photo was taken says I'm not allowed to take a photo, or that
the thing I'm taking a photo of is copyrighted, is the photo allowed to
go on Commons?

Oh, and on a related note: If something vaguely looks like something
which someone else has claimed is trademarked, is it? Does that make the
image "unfree"?

--
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subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: [Wiktionary-l] English orthographies

body:
On 20/09/05, Jack & Naree <jack.macdaddy at gmail.com> wrote:
>  The debate is "huge" in terms of it's implications, because up until now
> no-one appears to have challenged the idea that American-English has the
> right to be considered the standard form of English.

Just a quick reply to this, but in a phrase I think I've picked up
from the American media:
I call bullshit on this.

I have never, ever, heard anyone claim that US English "has the right
to be considered the standard form of English". I've heard, and
shared, the opinion that US English is a recognisable, valid, and
hugely influential form of English, but that is a very different
point.

I have also heard, from you, the equally bogus claim that what you
call "English English", but might more commonly be called "UK",
"Commonwealth", "Queen's", or "BBC" English has the right to be
considered the standard form. I have never heard a convincing argument
as to why it has that right.

> It's patently obvious
> it's a dialect, with it's own orthography and it's simply wrong for the
> headword in English to be written in a dialect of English in a dialectal
> orthography and presented as the standard form, when it's not.

As for this bit, I think I and others have already refuted this at
some length on the other thread, but:
1) there is no such thing as "the standard form"
2) US English is a dialect of English
3) UK English is another dialect of English
4) neither of those labels is all that accurate, since those 2
dialects most definitely do not cover all usage in those 2 countries

So, yes, it's simply wrong to present US English as "the standard
form"; but it's just as wrong to present any other dialect, including
your precious "Queen's English", as "the standard form", because *both
are equally valid*.

Here's a thought experiment for you, to avoid reading too much into
the term "English": picture an imaginary language, we'll call it
"Blibbish". Now, to simplify, let's pretend there is a single version
of Blibbish spoken in Fooland, and a single one in Bargia. They are
both Blibbish, both from the same historical roots, but due to the
unfortunate location of a large body of sea-water between Fooland and
Bargia, they have evolved somewhat separately over the last couple of
centuries. Older versions of Blibbish were only spoken in Fooland,
because Bargia hadn't been discovered yet, but those old versions are
all extinct now - replaced by the two "competing" versions. Now, come
up with a good reason why either version of Blibbish should be
considered "superior" or "more standard" than the other.

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


from_name: Zephram Stark

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: AfD Threshold being Revised Downward Again?

body:
>AfD has two deeply seated problems.
>1) It is unmanageably big, and will only get bigger.
>2) The case for deletion can usually be made with a cursory look at
>the article. The case for inclusion often requires mildly substantive
>research using non-Wikipedia sources. Thus deletion is always going
>to be a fundamentally easier case to argue.
>Thus it will always be the case that AfD becomes unmanageable, and
>that the unmanageability affects the exclusionists noticably less
>than the inclusionists.
>-Snowspinner

Wasn't the above basically the same argument for the last government iteration of the Soviet Union?  I have an alternate suggestion on how a society should be governed that I'm sure you can extrapolate from the following quotes:
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron?s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their consciences.
? C. S. Lewis

Rightful liberty is unobstructed action, according to our will, within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others.
? Thomas Jefferson to Isaac H. Tiffany, 1819

Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then, be trusted with the government of others?
? Thomas Jefferson, in his 1801 inaugural address

Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government?s purposes are beneficient... The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding.
? Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis

Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. Tolerance in the face of tyranny is no virtue.
? Barry Goldwater

The state calls its own violence ?law?, but that of the individual ?crime?.
? Max Stirner

Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect every one who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force. Whenever you give up that force, you are inevitably ruined.
? Patrick Henry, speech of June 5 1788

The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it always to be kept alive. It will often be exercised when wrong, but better so than not to be exercised at all. I like a little rebellion now and then. It is like a storm in the Atmosphere.
? Thomas Jefferson, letter to Abigail Adams, 1787

& what country can preserve its liberties, if its rulers are not warned from time to time that his people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms...The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants.
? Thomas Jefferson, letter to Col. William S. Smith, 1787

Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.
? John F. Kennedy

Good intentions will always be pleaded for every assumption of authority. It is hardly too strong to say that the Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions. There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters.
? Daniel Webster

What, then is law? It is the collective organization of the individual right to lawful defense.
? Frederic Bastiat, The Law

The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant.
? John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, 1859

You [should] not examine legislation in the light of the benefits it will convey if properly administered, but in the light of the wrongs it would do and the harm it would cause if improperly administered.
? Lyndon Johnson, former President of the U.S.

It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is to-day, can guess what it will be to-morrow. Law is defined to be a rule of action; but how can that be a rule, which is little known, and less fixed?
? James Madison, Federalist Papers 62

The people cannot delegate to government the power to do anything which would be unlawful for them to do themselves.
? John Locke, A Treatise Concerning Civil Government

Don?t ever think you know what?s right for the other person. He might start thinking he knows what?s right for you.
? Paul Williams, ?Das Energi?

Anarchism is founded on the observation that since few men are wise enough to rule themselves, even fewer are wise enough to rule others.
? Edward Abbey

What luck for rulers, that men do not think.
? Adolf Hitler

He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.
? Friedrich Nietzsche

For what is liberty but the unhampered translation of will into act?
? Dante Alighieri

If you make people think they?re thinking, they?ll love you; but if you really make them think they?ll hate you.
? Anonymous

The more corrupt the republic, the more numerous the laws.
? Tacitus

The ideal government of all reflective men, from Aristotle onward, is one which lets the individual alone ? one which barely escapes being no government at all.
? H. L. Mencken

Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end.
? Lord Acton

The best government is that in which the law speaks instead of the lawyer.
? M.L. Byrn

Every man, and every body of men on earth, possesses the right of self-government.
? Thomas Jefferson: Opinion on Residence Bill

Man [is] a rational animal, endowed by nature with rights, and with an innate sense of justice; and... he [can] be restrained from wrong and protected in right, by moderate powers, confided to persons of his own choice, and held to their duties by dependence on his own will.
? Thomas Jefferson to William Johnson

The qualifications for self-government in society are not innate. They are the result of habit and long training.
? Thomas Jefferson to Edward Everett

[Without becoming] familiarized with the habits and practice of self-government,... the political vessel is all sail and no ballast.
? Thomas Jefferson to Henry Dearborn

[It is a] happy truth that man is capable of self-government, and only rendered otherwise by the moral degradation designedly superinduced on him by the wicked acts of his tyrant.
? Thomas Jefferson to M. de Marbois

I am not discouraged by [a] little difficulty; nor have I any doubt that the result of our experiment will be, that men are capable of governing themselves without a master.
? Thomas Jefferson to T. B. Hollis

The hand of the people... has proved that government to be the strongest of which every man feels himself a part.
? Thomas Jefferson to Edward Tiffin

We think in America that it is necessary to introduce the people into every department of government as far as they are capable of exercising it, and that this is the only way to insure a long-continued and honest administration of its powers.
? Thomas Jefferson to Abbe Arnoux
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
It has been argued, in this mailing list, that Wikipedia is a company, and that many companies are run as a successful hierarchy with only a profit motive to keep the grunts in line.  In making this argument, however, we have to realize that we don't pay the grunts anything.  They are only here because they think they can make a real difference.  When they figure out that only the top administrators have any real power to influence the content of articles, they make a few vain appeals to "level the playing field" and then leave in frustration.

Now that we have grown to an unwieldy size, it is painfully obvious that we cannot continue top-down approval of writings.  Yesterday, User:Carbonite deleted an entire article without reading the definitions involved or understanding the issues. (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Carbonite&oldid=23635316#The_United_States_Declaration_of_Independence) I feel confident that, if he had time to read the article he was redirecting toward, he would have realized that the people involved were doing nothing but trying to slam the U.S. Declaration of Independence via POV conclusions and original research.  Carbonite did not have time to look at his actions objectively for the same reason that the Soviet Union found its task unwieldy: top-down micromanagement of large-scale social interactions takes too long.  The only efficient way to keep Wikipedia going at this point in our growth, is to make it self-manageable.  Giving up top-down control sounds like a risk, but many of
 the greatest thinkers of history are behind us, and look at the result if we don't: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Carbonite&oldid=23635316#The_United_States_Declaration_of_Independence

Thank you for your consideration and, hopefully, your action,
Zephram Stark  zephramstark at yahoo.com
432-224-6991

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


from_name: Jack & Naree

body: does Wikipedia own the Wikipaedia.org <http://Wikipaedia.org> domain name?


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia English English

body:
phonetic English is the path to global Balkanisation.

 P.S.
> I am currently doing a Swedish course in a group of 21 different
> nationalities. The English speaking people have by far the worst
> pronunciation, where the Americans are worse than the Scottish,
> Canadians or Australians (we don't have any English people). The worst
> way to write down a pronunciation is by trying to write it phonetically in
> English - you end up with pronunciations that are totally different from
> the
> way it is actually pronounced. My name is NOT pronounced "Gair-Rid Hole" -
> not even near (see [[en:User:Gerritholl]] for how it is), but I can't
> think
> of a closer approximation using this "phonetic transcription".
>
> --
> Temperature in Lule?, Norrbotten, Sweden:
> | Current temperature 05-09-20 20:09:50 10.5 degrees Celsius ( 51.0F) |
> --
> Det finns inte d?ligt v?der, bara d?liga kl?der.
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


body:
On 20/09/05, Jack & Naree <jack.macdaddy at gmail.com> wrote:
> does Wikipedia own the Wikipaedia.org <http://Wikipaedia.org> domain name?

Half a second spent loading the site suggests no.

Logic suggests this is because "Wikipedia" is an invented word, and
the person who invented it decided it was spelled that way.

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


body:
On 9/20/05, Ryan Delaney <ryan.delaney at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> On 9/20/05, Tony Sidaway <f.crdfa at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >
> > We should speedily delete obvious rubbish, and we do.
>
>
> No, we don't. A ton of obvious rubbish must be sent to AfD because it's
> not covered by the CSD. Band vanity is the most obvious example, but there
> are many others, such as: neologisms, corporate vanity, personal
> essays/rants. No one can give any good reason why these should be
> deliberated upon, but they are, all in the name of making sure we never,
> ever delete a good article by accident; even if that means making editors
> who could be using their time to write articles deliberate on the merits of
> garbage.
>
> - Ryan
>
>
> Yes, of course you're right, though I agree with Kelly that RC patrol is
the most frequent user of IAR.

Afd does fulfil a need by letting us delete vanity and rants with a clean
conscience, you're quite right. What I'm saying, and I'm sorry I have to
repeat this, is that whatever it is that AfD does, it doesn't scale.

By the way, impressions can be deceptive. I just looked at AfD for September
1, chosen at random. I could have sworn that the delete rate in AfD must be
around 90% if not higher, but I'll be buggered if I can find over 73
deletes, speedies, transwikis and whatnot out of 102 nominations. 71%.

So I randomly chose September 5. 88 out of 138. 63%.

So maybe this is a recent thing? August 20. 75 out of 102. 73%.

Further back? April 12. 41 out of 68. 60%.

Definitely not what I expected.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] English - a sub-vernacular of Norman French

body:
I can only respond that "I will fight you on the beaches..." [I'm sure
you know the rest] ;)

On 20/09/05, Giuseppe DAngelo <pippudoz at yahoo.it> wrote:
> English a germanic language?  Impossible! An absurd notion! Lunacy!  Exaggeration!  Unadulterated opinionated insanity!  Essentially misdirected ill conceived viewpoints. Troublesome tempestuous tapestries.  As tasteless as a tarty tarantella. Significantly senseless.  Quintessentially unquotable.  Positively preposterous. Necessarily nonplussed and nominally abnormal. Exponentially and exceedingly uneventful.  Undeveloped, uncorroborated, irresponsible, and finally, bountifully morally bankrupt.  I opine that I have proven my point.

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


body:
HHamilto at doe.k12.ga.us wrote:
> OurMedia.org may serve as a nice home for the video for an ASL-English
> wikipedia. It seems to have no restrictions on video size. Wikipedia can
> house the English text and link to the video file at OurMedia.
> Also for the wiki in wikipedia. Consider a video file the same as an image
> file in wikipedia.In Wikipedia, an image file cannot be edited other than
> by replacement. A video could be "edited via replacement" the same way.
> Words and sentences in Wikipedia are also done this way. If I change "lion"
> to "king of the beasts" I have essentially edited via replacement.
>

So you are proposing that each word/sentance in ASL would have its own
video file, and these are "joined" somehow, with instructions as to how
they are joined coming from some kind of Wikitext? That might work.

PS. There /are/ image files which can be edited other than by
replacement, they are called Scalable Vector Graphics
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scalable_Vector_Graphics).

--
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body:
On 20/09/05, Rowan Collins <rowan.collins at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 20/09/05, Jack & Naree <jack.macdaddy at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Thus, if an American types a search for "color", they get the article in
> > their orthography with the headword "color"; and if a
> > non-American-English-speaker types in "colour", they get the article in
> > their orthography with the headword "colour".
>
> And what if they search for "red", which version does it link to?

 a single version of course, as mentioned, and as is surely obvious.

> ...for words with different meanings but identical orthographies you get a
> > disambiguation page;
>
> Fine, logical, and what I would presume we'd do already.

 Like "Asian" for instance. This word has markedly different connotations.
You could of course, include a section on the difference between US-EN and
CW-EN meaning if warrented (I worry about edit jerks/twats) - or simpler
still, a Wikitionary link.

> for articles about the same subject that have a
> > different word for the thing - like Aubergine (Am-En "Eggplant") for
> > example: you get a page for each; in each respective orthography.
>
> Why? Just because the headword is different, you suggest we manually
> copy all changes to one onto the other?

 perhaps headwords are the problem.

 Or perhaps the entry on that
> plant in a US encyclopedia and in a UK one would be fundamentally
> different in some way?

 in some articles, they may well be (and no, I don't have a list - I have a
life).

 And what, as I say, of other articles which
> happen to mention, and probably link to, the term in one form or the
> other? Should they link both?

 yes; in each form, the [[same way it works now]]

Somebody has mentionned that something similar is done on Wiktionary,
> but that is a very different situation: in a dictionary, the entire
> article is discussing the headword, as a word; in an encyclopedia, on
> the other hand, the article is discussing the entity denoted by the
> headword. That is, a dictionary entry for "aubergine" is discussing
> the meaning, etymology, etc of that string of letters; an encyclopedia
> entry for "aubergine" is discussing the plant itself, using the string
> of letters merely as a label. It follows that whereas the dictionary
> entries for the words "aubergine" and "eggplant" are distinct (because
> they are two different words), the encyclopedia entries under those
> two words will always be *exactly the same* - you might even put the
> article under its scientific classification, but you'd still be
> discussing the same plant (and you wouldn't suddenly be discussing it
> in Latin, either).

 yes, you can

I'm sorry to labour the point, but this is the major problem with
> splitting up articles by dialect,

 this is not dialect; this is orthography.

whether in separate wikis or not -
> it means that all those articles have to be written twice, or
> constantly kept in synch

 not necessarily

, *even though they are for almost entirely
> identical*. This seems to me a complete and blatant waste of effort.

 to you, perhaps, but these are clearly two seperate languages, plenty of
"blatant waste of effort" is invested in creating wikis for tiny, pointless
languages and dialects: Ossetic, Tartar, Walloon, Interlingua, Limburgish,
Western Frisian, Asturian, Sicilian, Scots, Macedonian, Esperanto, the list
is bloody endless.
*You've even got the two forms of Norwegian! Yet English English speakers
have to accept American-English!*
I mean how different is bloody Asturian from Spanish?!
If all these tiny latin, germanic and slavic dialects can get away with it
because they have very slightly different orthographies, then why not
English?

Now, a few months back, when the orthography converter for Chinese was
> being written (and please bear in mind that Chinese really does have
> multiple different orthographies - they're related, but they're more
> like different alphabets than the odd spelling difference)

 I know, I've got a degree in Chinese and Japanese.

, it was
> suggested that something similar might be used in English (and
> Scandinavian, and various other situations). I was opposed to that,
> too, but less so - if implemented well, it would require very little
> additional effort (discounting the effort of those implementing it),
> because it would be automatic.
>
> Indeed, the main problem would be defining the various variants (it
> would be as arrogant to claim there are only two "proper" forms of
> English as to claim there is only one)

 there really are only two orthographies. Canadian and Australian just
aren't anywhere near divergent enough.

 and making sure the right
> things were "corrected" in the right way. And, as people pointed out,
> there'd still be arguments over what the "correct" version was within
> a particular variety,

 eg?

 and there'd still be compromises needed on
> grammar and punctuation issues, etc etc

 grammar and punctuation is a different issue - one for edit whores.

> Can we try and reach some consensus on this?
>
> As others have pointed out, you seem to me to be very much in the
> minority on this; everyone else seems to subscribe more-or-less to the
> current consensus that it's really not that big a problem, and
> certainly not worth multiplying our workload to avoid.

 the "we're all against you" playground routine doesn't wash. It's no
surprise for a handful of Americans and Americanised types to oppose this,
but I doubt you'd get the same from Brits and Irish.
If this is to be an inclusive, uniting project, then this issue over
American-English hegemony needs to be resolved in a fair way.

--
> Rowan Collins BSc
> [IMSoP]
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


list: foundation-l

from_name: Dariusz Siedlecki

subject: [Foundation-l] The Wikinews Licensure Poll is closed

body:
After two weeks of voting, the Wikinews community has chosen which
license they'd like for their project. I won't post the full results
here, but you can view them on Meta -
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikinews/Licensure_Poll

Now... The winner is CC-By 2.5, with the attribution to the Wiki. The
license is one-way-compatible with the GFDL. It gained 27 votes of
support from Wikinewsies with only four votes against.

It needs to be mentioned, that the GFDL gained 11 opposing votes from
Wikinewsies, with only one vote of support. But the combination of
GFDL and CC-By 2.5 gained 8 votes of support, with only one opposing
vote.

The Wikinews License 0.2, based on the BSD license, gained 14 votes of
support, but 8 people were against it.

Not many people were interested in the other licenses, so... I think
that's it. The Wikinews community choosed CC-By 2.5 for the Wikinews
project. Now it's up to the Board to decide on the project license.
So... What does everyone say?

--
Pozdrawiam,
Dariusz "Datrio" Siedlecki


list: wikimedia-l


body:
>
>
> Just a quick reply to this, but in a phrase I think I've picked up
> from the American media:
> I call bullshit on this.
>
> I have never, ever, heard anyone claim that US English "has the right
> to be considered the standard form of English".

 Neither have I; however when you create the largest free global on-line
encyclopaedia and include a single language called English, wherein most of
the articles are written in an orthography described by the OED as
American-English, then it hardly needs verbalising.

 I've heard, and
> shared, the opinion that US English is a recognisable, valid, and
> hugely influential form of English,

 Clearly.

but that is a very different
> point.
>
> I have also heard, from you, the equally bogus claim that what you
> call "English English", but might more commonly be called "UK",
> "Commonwealth", "Queen's", or "BBC" English has the right to be
> considered the standard form. I have never heard a convincing argument
> as to why it has that right.

 I actually initially wrote "English (as in the country) English (as in the
language)" but didn't pedantically repeat that over and over again (to avoid
RSI).
 Convincing - see my thought experiment below.

> It's patently obvious
> > it's a dialect, with it's own orthography and it's simply wrong for the
> > headword in English to be written in a dialect of English in a dialectal
> > orthography and presented as the standard form, when it's not.
>
> As for this bit, I think I and others have already refuted

 denied, bitched, put their fingers in their ears yes; but "refuted" implies
it was academically proved.

 this at
> some length on the other thread, but:
> 1) there is no such thing as "the standard form"
> 2) US English is a dialect of English
> 3) UK English is another dialect of English

 what's UK English?

4) neither of those labels is all that accurate, since those 2
> dialects most definitely do not cover all usage in those 2 countries
>
> So, yes, it's simply wrong to present US English as "the standard
> form"; but it's just as wrong to present any other dialect, including
> your precious "Queen's English

 I don't call it the queens english; I call it English, the language of
England.

", as "the standard form", because *both
> are equally valid*.
>
>
> Here's a thought experiment for you, to avoid reading too much into
> the term "English": picture an imaginary language, we'll call it
> "Blibbish". Now, to simplify, let's pretend there is a single version
> of Blibbish spoken in Fooland, and a single one in Bargia. They are
> both Blibbish, both from the same historical roots, but due to the
> unfortunate location of a large body of sea-water between Fooland and
> Bargia, they have evolved somewhat separately over the last couple of
> centuries. Older versions of Blibbish were only spoken in Fooland,
> because Bargia hadn't been discovered yet, but those old versions are
> all extinct now - replaced by the two "competing" versions. Now, come
> up with a good reason why either version of Blibbish should be
> considered "superior" or "more standard" than the other.

 a Logical Fallacy.
 1. the countries should be called Blibbland and the United States of
Bargia, because Blibbish is autochthonous to Blibbland, it was born there,
and exported with the expansion of the Blibbish Empire.
 Bargia was a collection of Blibbish colonies that gained independence, and
over time Bargian offshoot of Blibbish, experienced it's own unique influx
of cultural input from refugees and events, and evolved into what can only
accurately be described as Bargian-Blibbish.
 Meanwhile, back in Blibbland, Blibbish continued to be spoken by the
Blibbish people continuing to evolve in parallel with the newer Bargian
dialect of Blibbish, which now includes new spellings, meanings,
pronounciations - as different as any Slavic, Germanic or Romance dialect.
 Explain to the Blibbish people why they should suddenly change the name of
their language, and accept Bargian orthography and Bargianisms, now that
Bargia is bigger than Blibbland?

--
> Rowan Collins BSc
> [IMSoP]
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Anglicised English British English

body:
Puddl Duk wrote:
> On 9/20/05, Mark Williamson <node.ue at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>Oh god... those stupid silent letters.
>>
>>"Oh gee we like Latin so much!!! Let's insert a letter for no good
>>reason."
>>
>>Island, receipt, etc
>
>
> and why have four syllables when you can have FIVE !!
>
> Aluminium
>

Because the IUPAC (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IUPAC) says so ;)
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium#Spelling for more fun :)

--
Alphax                      |   /"\
Encrypted Email Preferred   |   \ /     ASCII Ribbon Campaign
OpenPGP key ID: 0xF874C613  |    X   Against HTML email & vCards
http://tinyurl.com/cc9up    |   / \


from_name: David Gerard

subject: [WikiEN-l] en: DVD in the works!

body:
http://www.smh.com.au/news/next/world-of-knowledge-in-your-hands/2005/09/19/1126981972296.html

A fellow called Jason King. Doesn't give his en: Wikipedia username.
The DVD is basically a Knoppix disk running a readable Wikipedia

- d.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] en: DVD in the works!


subject: [WikiEN-l] Placeopedia, combining Wikipedia with Google Maps

body:
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Placeopedia-or-Where-Wikipedia-Meets-Google-Maps-8877.shtml

So far for the UK mostly.

- d.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Placeopedia, combining Wikipedia with Google Maps


body:
> does Wikipedia own the Wikipaedia.org <http://Wikipaedia.org> domain name?

Apparently it was cybersquatted.

--
Ausir
Wikipedia, wolna encyklopedia
http://pl.wikipedia.org


from_name: Michael Snow

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Esquire article on Wikipedia

body:
Mark Pellegrini wrote:

> The page is pretty self explanatory. A journalist for Esquire
> magazine, A.J. Jacobs, did a story about Wikipedia,
> and then posted it on Wikipedia so that Wikipedians can edit it.

People who are not familiar with Jacobs may wish to check out the
Wikipedia article on him and note the subject of his most recent book.
You can also get a quick synopsis of the book's impact on Wikipedia and
the blogosphere from a recent Signpost article
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2005-08-01/Votes_for_deletion).

By the way, nobody seems to have asked what should be an essential
question for us while we're collaborating on a journalism project, which
is, "What's our deadline?"

--Michael Snow


from_name: Tony Sidaway

body:
On 9/20/05, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> http://news.softpedia.com/news/Placeopedia-or-Where-Wikipedia-Meets-Google-Maps-8877.shtml
>
> So far for the UK mostly.
>

Brilliant! It has satellite mode! I can see my house! <waves>


body:
On 20/09/05, Jack & Naree <jack.macdaddy at gmail.com> wrote:
> > And what if they search for "red", which version does it link to?
>
> a single version of course, as mentioned, and as is surely obvious.

No, I meant would it link to "color", "colour", or both.

> > Why? Just because the headword is different, you suggest we manually
> > copy all changes to one onto the other?
>
> perhaps headwords are the problem.

Then perhaps a solution to that problem, such as one article having
multiple headwords, might be more appropriate?

> > Or perhaps the entry on that
> > plant in a US encyclopedia and in a UK one would be fundamentally
> > different in some way?
>
> in some articles, they may well be (and no, I don't have a list - I have a
> life).

Sure; and some don't; and some articles which don't have varying
"orthographies" might contain different information. If it's a really
fundamental difference, we use "disambiguation" of some form; if it's
a more minor difference, the difference is incorporated and/or
discussed in the article itself. There is no correlation between
needing such disambiguation or discussion and having two spellings, so
why build a policy as though there were?

> > And what, as I say, of other articles which
> > happen to mention, and probably link to, the term in one form or the
> > other? Should they link both?
>
> yes; in each form, the [[same way it works now]]

So a British reader might come upon a sentence saying "it is made from
[[eggplant]]/[[aubergine]]", and, seeing that the two articles were
separate, assume that these were alternative ingredients. Then,
following the links, they might realise that the two were actually the
same text copy-and-pasted with a bit of search-and-replace, and wonder
why on earth we didn't just have one article.

> > Somebody has mentionned that something similar is done on Wiktionary,
> > but that is a very different situation: in a dictionary, the entire
> > article is discussing the headword, as a word; in an encyclopedia, on
> > the other hand, the article is discussing the entity denoted by the
> > headword. That is, a dictionary entry for "aubergine" is discussing
> > the meaning, etymology, etc of that string of letters; an encyclopedia
> > entry for "aubergine" is discussing the plant itself, using the string
> > of letters merely as a label. It follows that whereas the dictionary
> > entries for the words "aubergine" and "eggplant" are distinct (because
> > they are two different words), the encyclopedia entries under those
> > two words will always be *exactly the same* - you might even put the
> > article under its scientific classification, but you'd still be
> > discussing the same plant (and you wouldn't suddenly be discussing it
> > in Latin, either).
>
> yes, you can

Can what? I was trying to point the absurdity of treating "aubergine"
and "eggplant" as different subjects. But if you want a question to
respond to, what "orthography" would you write the article in if it
was under its scientific classification? Such an article would contain
exactly the same *information* whichever of the 3 headwords you filed
it under, so the only possible reason for having more than one would
be to "translate" a few usage differences to suit the same dialect as
the headword [I note from the Wikipedia article that this *wouldn't*
be possible in this case, because there are two species, but the point
stands]

> > whether in separate wikis or not -
> > it means that all those articles have to be written twice, or
> > constantly kept in synch
>
> not necessarily

Well, since any "good" edit to the article "eggplant" would also be a
"good" edit to the article "aubergine" (except for those edits
correcting orthographical differences), I fail to see how
synchronisation could be avoided.

> to you, perhaps, but these are clearly two seperate languages

No. They are *arguably* two separate languages, though I've heard few
people take such a strong stance, except in jest. If it was at all
clear, we wouldn't be having this argument.

> "blatant waste of effort" is invested in creating wikis for tiny, pointless
> languages and dialects: Ossetic, Tartar, Walloon, Interlingua, Limburgish,
> Western Frisian, Asturian, Sicilian, Scots, Macedonian, Esperanto, the list
> is bloody endless.

So, because we have wikis in languages which are "pointless" but
unambiguously distinct languages, we should not have wikis which
include minor variations of the same language?

But I won't go into this - if you want to read endless debates about
wiki creation policy, go to
http://mail.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/ Yes, we have lots of
wikis. Yes, a lot of them are controversial. No, you're not the only
one who thinks we have too many. No, you're not the first to suggest
merging some similar ones. Right now, however, we're discussing the
particular case of the English wiki, not some other case with
different political, linguistic, and geographic facts.

> You've even got the two forms of Norwegian! Yet English English speakers
> have to accept American-English!

And "American-English" speakers have to accept a little bit of
"English English" in return. Most of us learn to live with it.

> > Indeed, the main problem would be defining the various variants (it
> > would be as arrogant to claim there are only two "proper" forms of
> > English as to claim there is only one)
>
> there really are only two orthographies. Canadian and Australian just aren't
> anywhere near divergent enough.

I'm sure Canadians and Australians will be pleased to hear you
pronounce that from your golden pedestal. As will Indians, New
Zealanders, South Africans, etc etc. [It was pointed out, for
instance, that an Australian user would not wish to select either "US"
nor "British" spellings, because they would naturally use a mixture of
the two.]

> > and there'd still be compromises needed on
> > grammar and punctuation issues, etc etc
>
> grammar and punctuation is a different issue - one for edit whores.

Why? Because it doesn't annoy you as much as spelling does? Because
it's not as straght-forward to "correct"? It seems to be very much
part of the same issue if you ask me.

> the "we're all against you" playground routine doesn't wash. It's no
> surprise for a handful of Americans and Americanised types to oppose this,
> but I doubt you'd get the same from Brits and Irish.
> If this is to be an inclusive, uniting project, then this issue over
> American-English hegemony needs to be resolved in a fair way.

I am British, born and bred, and strongly object to being labelled
"Americanised" simply because I am pragmatic enough to put up with two
spellings of the word "colour". I hate to say this, but you're
beginning to remind me of a much-discussed-on-this-list anti-semitic
individual (sorry, "White Nationalist") who believed Wikipedia was run
by a Zionist Conspiracy of Jews, with the unaware support of "useful
idiots". I am not a "useful idiot" of either a Jewish or an American
conspiracy, I am an individual who tries to examine propositions
logically and reach his own conclusions.

That rant over, I would characterise it more as you coming and saying
"I'm against all of you" than us saying "we're all against you" - you
have yet to prove that there is even an issue to solve (except
inasmuch as it is stopping you from contributing; and the more I hear
of your biases, the less of a problem that seems).

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


from_name: Jim Breen

subject: [Wiktionary-l] English orthographies

body:
Greetings,

[Gerard Meijssen (Re: [Wiktionary-l] English orthographies) writes:]
>> Jim Breen wrote:
>> >[Gerard Meijssen ([Wiktionary-l] English orthographies) writes:]
>> >>>1) English, American English and other orthographies are treated as
>> >>>seperate entities.
>> >
>> >I think this will be a disaster.
>> >
>> >Can you explain why "jewellery" and "jewelry" cannot be alternatives
>> >within the one entry?

>> In the database design,
>> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_Wiktionary_data_design , an
>> Expression is a number of characters that make up a valid occurrence in
>> a language. Therefore every spelling IS a different Expression.

OK, so the short answer is that the UW database was designed that way.

I predict it will be a mess. It is also at variance with all the
lexicographical databases I have seen.

>> The English used in Britain, the United States, Australia etc is
>> significantly different.

Nonsense.

>> This can be found in the difference in
>> vocabulary and the difference in orthography.

Both the spelling and vocabulary differ only to a very small extent.

>> Typically when considering
>> spelling, the way the English, American, Australian spell differently
>> makes it a different orthography. This is reflected in there being
>> English, American etc dead wood dictionaries. In a project like UW where
>> we collect all words of all languages, it makes sense to reflect this.

By all means collect them and reflect them, but don't foster the
impression that they are a major issue, because they aren't. Also don't
fall into the trap of thinking that you can neatly compartmentalize
English spellings into strict country groups. Different mixes of spellings
are used right across the English-speaking world.

BTW, spelling and orthography are different things. Orthography refers
to the writing system, i.e. "a method of representing the sounds of a
language by written or printed symbols" (to quote Wordnet.) English
is written with one orthographical system.

To a large extent I don't really care that much about "jewellery" and
"jewelry" being in their own entries in English, because they are only a
few percent of words. Where this approach will be a total disaster is
with Japanese, where most words can be and are written in two or
more scripts, and where spelling variations are rife. The idea that the
meaning, POS, etc. etc. for a word will be replicated again and again
and again for each writing variant is too awful to contemplate.

To be blunt, it sounds like the UW database design was done with one
or a few languages in mind, and the others are being told to fall into
line.

Cheers

Jim

--
Jim Breen                                http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/
Clayton School of Information Technology,               Tel: +61 3 9905 9554
Monash University, VIC 3800, Australia                  Fax: +61 3 9905 5146
(Monash Provider No. 00008C)                ???????@??????


from_name: Lars Aronsson

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia English English

body:
Jack & Naree wrote:
> Phil Boswell <phil.boswell at gmail.com> wrote:
> > "Jack & Naree" <jack.macdaddy at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > Can we try and reach some consensus on this?
> >
> > I suspect that what you are failing to realise is that there has already
> > been a consensus
>
>  consensus between Americans, non-native English speakers, and unpatriotic
> Americanised English-speakers.

The consensus is that "Jack & Naree" are trolling and should
better leave this list before they are banned.

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


from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Reboots of doom

body:
?var Arnfj?r? Bjarmason wrote:
>>The one thing that came to my mind is: why does anyone log into zwinger
>>in the first place?  Since it's this horribly frightening SPOF, ought we
>>to not avoid even _looking_ at it funny?
>
> One reason is that some things are installed on it that aren't (afaik)
> installed anywhere else, like dsh(1) which is required for scap(1) and
> sync-file(1)

*nod*

This doesn't sound like a particular hard technical challenge to solve. ;-)

--Jimbo


from_name: Marco Chiesa

subject: [Wikipedia-l] English stats

body:
By the way, does en.wiki have / has en.wiki got its own mailing list? Why
aren't most of these threads there? I think ASL belongs here (being ASL a
language on its own), but Wikipedia English English doesn't yet.

Cruccone

On 9/20/05, Lars Aronsson <lars at aronsson.se> wrote:
>
>
> In the last two weeks this list saw 233 messages with "English" in
> the Subject line. The most common ("Re:" removed) were:
>
> 95 Subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia English English
> 45 Subject: [Wikipedia-l] new request for ASL/English wikipedia
> 30 Subject: [Wikipedia-l] Sample ASL/English entry
> 22 Subject: [Wikipedia-l] Anglicised English British English
> 9 Subject: [Wikipedia-l] Request for AS/English Wikipedia
> 9 Subject: [Wikipedia-l] OurMedia for ASL-English video
>
> None of these discussions are expected to lead anywhere in the
> near future. Please wake me up when you have some ASL websites
> that I can look at, or when you have reached consensus on
> color/colour spelling.
>
> The most of these pointless messages were posted by:
>
> 27 From: Mark Williamson
> 21 From: Gerard Meijssen
> 19 From: Jack & Naree
> 19 From: Alphax
> 16 From: Andrew Gray
> 12 From: James R. Johnson
>
> I admit to having written 2 of the messages, and this is my 3rd.
>
> In 1945 Vannevar Bush wrote an article about the Memex, but he
> never built one. In 1960 Ted Nelson started to design the Xanadu
> system, but have you seen it in operation? The aspect that makes
> Wikipedia stand out is that it exists. We will continue to be
> more successful than those old losers if we keep smalltalk to a
> minimum and get back to work on ideas that we can implement.
>
>
> --
> Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
> Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


from_name: John Platt

body:
Oh please! I joined this when the servers were down. I love to be a troll. I
do it all the time on Groklaw, and paraphrased my wikipedia profile there.
Generally I am more comfortable lurking on this list, and I would hope that
most of us are experienced enough to understand that any discussion of
English, its dialects and origins, stands a very good chance of
disintegrating the way this has. Please let's try to be edifying.

On 9/20/05, Rowan Collins <rowan.collins at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I can only respond that "I will fight you on the beaches..." [I'm sure
> you know the rest] ;)
>
> On 20/09/05, Giuseppe DAngelo <pippudoz at yahoo.it> wrote:
> > English a germanic language? Impossible! An absurd notion! Lunacy!
> Exaggeration! Unadulterated opinionated insanity! Essentially misdirected
> ill conceived viewpoints. Troublesome tempestuous tapestries. As tasteless
> as a tarty tarantella. Significantly senseless. Quintessentially unquotable.
> Positively preposterous. Necessarily nonplussed and nominally abnormal.
> Exponentially and exceedingly uneventful. Undeveloped, uncorroborated,
> irresponsible, and finally, bountifully morally bankrupt. I opine that I
> have proven my point.
>
> --
> Rowan Collins BSc
> [IMSoP]
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


from_name: James R. Johnson

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Anglo-Saxon wiki

body:
Just a few Random articles from the Anglo-Saxon wiki:

Jeanette - http://ang.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeanette_Biederman
Radio -  http://ang.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%AAtweorp
Worcestershire sauce -
http://ang.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weogornaceastersc%C4%ABrs%C4%93aw
Crow leek - http://ang.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allium_vineale

James

-----Original Message-----
From: wikipedia-l-bounces at Wikimedia.org
[mailto:wikipedia-l-bounces at Wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of James R. Johnson
Sent: Tuesday, September 20, 2005 1:08 AM
To: wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
Subject: [Wikipedia-l] Anglo-Saxon wiki

Hi all,

            Just wanted to inform everyone of the newest Anglo-Saxon
article: Janice Rogers Brown.

James

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


body:
On 20/09/05, Jack & Naree <jack.macdaddy at gmail.com> wrote:
> Neither have I; however when you create the largest free global on-line
> encyclopaedia and include a single language called English, wherein most of
> the articles are written in an orthography described by the OED as
> American-English, then it hardly needs verbalising.

Current Wikipedia policy does not stipulate, encourage, or condone a
situation where the majority of content is in "American-English". It
is actually aimed at having a roughly even split, but there's probably
a slight majority simply because there are that many more people -
and, specifically, Internet users - in the US than in the UK. If this
bias is more significant than I am imagining, it is by accident, not
design, and has nothing to do with the "right to be considered
standard".

> > I have also heard, from you, the equally bogus claim that what you
> > call "English English", but might more commonly be called "UK",
> > "Commonwealth", "Queen's", or "BBC" English has the right to be
> > considered the standard form.
>
> I actually initially wrote "English (as in the country) English (as in the
> language)" but didn't pedantically repeat that over and over again (to avoid
> RSI).

I understood you perfectly well; it's just not a commonly used label
for the variety of English you're discussing, partly because it is
ugly repeating the word, and partly because it doesn't map that
strongly to the geopolitical area known as England.

> > As for this bit, I think I and others have already refuted
>
> denied, bitched, put their fingers in their ears yes; but "refuted" implies
> it was academically proved.

I wrote a long message, explaining my reasoning for there believing
there is no "standard" form of English. I didn't want to repeat all
that, so I merely pointed out that I had already done so. I used
"refuted" only to mean "already answered".

> what's UK English?

The variety of English spoken in the UK. As valid a label, I would
think, as "English English", since neither area is that great a match
for where the variety is spoken. You'll notice I also use "US
English", because Canadians and South Americans occasionally object to
"American English" [the words "USian" and "UKian" have entered
Wikipedia jargon for exactly this reason]; I didn't pick you up on it,
though, because I knew what you meant.

> > So, yes, it's simply wrong to present US English as "the standard
> > form"; but it's just as wrong to present any other dialect, including
> > your precious "Queen's English
>
> I don't call it the queens english; I call it English, the language of
> England.

That's entirely up to you; it's still the same thing.

> 1. the countries should be called Blibbland and the United States of Bargia,
> because Blibbish is autochthonous to Blibbland, it was born there, and
> exported with the expansion of the Blibbish Empire.

No. This is exactly the faulty logic I was trying to exclude.
"English" and "England" come from what I think was the Latin name for
a particular tribe of Scandinavian invaders, the "Angles" - one of a
number of tribes we commonly refer to as the "Anglo-Saxons". The
language they spoke - an early form of English - came with them across
the sea, and was planted in Britain by bloody conquest. [The previous
inhabitants, whom they rudely called "welas" - "foreigners" -  spoke a
completely different language, one of whose descendants is still known
as "welsh"]

Languages aren't "born" anywhere; there is no point where they begin.
So, while "English" developed a lot after being imported from
Scandinavia, it had already developed a lot in getting there. Its
speakers had, long ago, crossed the Urals, from the central steppes
where - if my memory serves me right - it is conjectured that all
Indo-European languages were, in fact born. That is, the one language
of which everything from Portugese to Punjabi is an "offshoot", whose
"standard" is now lost to history. It evolved into versions like
Celtic, Romance, and Germanic, and then further into different
versions of each of those; if English was "born" in England, it was a
pretty long labour!

The same goes for the other major shifts in English, such as the
influence of the Normans - who, confusingly, were originally "Norse
men", also from Scandinavia, but who had taken up a Romance language
instead of a Germanic one.

The point about "Blibbish" being from "Fooland" is that you should not
attach too much meaning to names - they are often rather misleading.

> Meanwhile, back in Blibbland, Blibbish continued to be spoken by the
> Blibbish people continuing to evolve in parallel

So you agree, then, that English/Blibbish continued to evolve even in
the area where it had already been for a few hundred years (since
those pesky Angles brought it there). In what sense, then, is this a
"continuation" but the other an "offshoot"? Why not just call them
both "offshoots"? After all, they're all offshoots of
Proto-Indo-European, really...

> Explain to the Blibbish people why they should suddenly change the name of
> their language, and accept Bargian orthography and Bargianisms, now that
> Bargia is bigger than Blibbland?

When have I suggested that the name of a language be changed?
When have I argued that, because one country is bigger than another,
its language should be given priority?

I've argued that both should be accepted, for sure - in the interest
of productivity and peaceful relations, I would hope that the
Blibb/Foolanders and Bargians could accept that since their languages
are largely the same, they could not make a big deal about mixing
them. I've also argued that they should accept even more minor
versions of the language - though you seem opposed to this.

I've also argued that the Blibblanders should not claim "ownership" of
Blibbish just because their name shares a root with that of the
language - because language would still exist without any labels, and
because the idea of "owning" it is completely irrelevant. The
important point is how best to use that language, whatever its
name(s).

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


subject: [Wikipedia-l] English stats

body:
In the last two weeks this list saw 233 messages with "English" in
the Subject line.  The most common ("Re:" removed) were:

 95 Subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia English English
 45 Subject: [Wikipedia-l] new request for ASL/English wikipedia
 30 Subject: [Wikipedia-l] Sample ASL/English entry
 22 Subject: [Wikipedia-l] Anglicised English British English
  9 Subject: [Wikipedia-l] Request for AS/English Wikipedia
  9 Subject: [Wikipedia-l] OurMedia for ASL-English video

None of these discussions are expected to lead anywhere in the
near future.  Please wake me up when you have some ASL websites
that I can look at, or when you have reached consensus on
color/colour spelling.

The most of these pointless messages were posted by:

 27 From: Mark Williamson
 21 From: Gerard Meijssen
 19 From: Jack & Naree
 19 From: Alphax
 16 From: Andrew Gray
 12 From: James R. Johnson

I admit to having written 2 of the messages, and this is my 3rd.

In 1945 Vannevar Bush wrote an article about the Memex, but he
never built one.  In 1960 Ted Nelson started to design the Xanadu
system, but have you seen it in operation?  The aspect that makes
Wikipedia stand out is that it exists.  We will continue to be
more successful than those old losers if we keep smalltalk to a
minimum and get back to work on ideas that we can implement.

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


from_name: MacGyverMagic/Mgm

body:
On 9/20/05, Tony Sidaway <f.crdfa at gmail.com> wrote:
> <snip>
>
> Bottom line: AfD doesn't scale. Whatever problems may exist with AfD's
> tendency to randomly delete a selection of perfectly reasonable articles,
> and VFU's growing unwillingness to rectify this, the problem will decrease
> in significance in the long term as page creation rates accelerate
> inexorably beyond the reach of AfD, and possibly even any defensible
> extension of speedy deletion.
>
> Perhaps requiring editors to sit a short examination on deletion policy
> would help to keep inappropriate nominations down and increase the overall
> capacity of AfD, but this would not address the problem of scale.
>
AFD only doesn't scale for people who want to vote on all listed articles.
Only vote for articles that need the votes and to ones where you can
add something to the discussion. Based on a stable amount of around
100 listed articles on a given day, it should take a voter over an
hour-and-half to go through all the nominations which is just not
possible.(This assumes they spend at least 1 minute checking the
article and formulating their vote).

If anyone can get through AFD and vote on all nominations under an
hour (as someone previously stated in some AFD discussion on this
list), either they're only checking speedy deletable articles, or
they're not giving the article due attention.


from_name: Giuseppe DAngelo

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: English - a sub-vernacular of Norman French

body:
Touch?!

9. Re: English - a sub-vernacular of Norman French (Rowan Collins)
Date: Tue, 20 Sep 2005 21:55:05 +0100
From: Rowan Collins
Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] English - a sub-vernacular of Norman French
To: wikipedia-l at wikimedia.org
Message-ID: <9f02ca4c05092013557f11e85f at mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1

I can only respond that "I will fight you on the beaches..." [I'm sure
you know the rest] ;)

On 20/09/05, Giuseppe DAngelo
wrote:
> English a germanic language? Impossible! An absurd notion! Lunacy! Exaggeration! Unadulterated opinionated insanity! Essentially misdirected ill conceived viewpoints. Troublesome tempestuous tapestries. As tasteless as a tarty tarantella. Significantly senseless. Quintessentially unquotable. Positively preposterous. Necessarily nonplussed and nominally abnormal. Exponentially and exceedingly uneventful. Undeveloped, uncorroborated, irresponsible, and finally, bountifully morally bankrupt. I opine that I have proven my point.
--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]

---------------------------------
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from_name: Guettarda

subject: [WikiEN-l] User categories and lists

body:
The List of Caribbean Wikipedians was redirected to the Category:Caribbean
Wikipedians tonight. Thus I learned about Wikipedia:User categorisation.
While I realised that these cats (Wikipedians in Foo) were spreading, I was
shocked to realise that this page was telling people to redirect lists to
categories. Maybe I missed the discussion at the Village Pump, but I could
not figure out what the point of this change was.

The List of Caribbean Wikipedians is a working resource associated with the
Caribbean Wikipedians' notice board. It serves a purpose in the improvement
of Caribbean-related articles. So why must it be removed? In addition,
although there are 17 names on the list, there are only 4 names in the
Category, and over a dozen national sub-categories...sub-categories which
are so badly named that I cannot add myself to one of them (I am not in
Trinidad and Tobago). The best case scenario would leave the names scattered
through over a dozen categories, with no clue as to whether they had any
interest in matters arising from the notice board or not.

Am I the only one who is bothered by projects which set out to remove useful
material? True, some of the lists are too long to be useful, and true, it's
"fun" to be able to add a link to your user page saying that you in Foo (not
from, not associated with...in). But what sort of a project focusses on the
appearance of the Wikipedia namespace instead of focussing on usefulness? Or
is it no longer true that we are here to write an encyclopaedia?

Ian (Guettarda)


from_name: Nicholas Moreau

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Placeopedia, combining Wikipedia with Google Maps

body:
It's expanded to the rest of the world, since the
original blog entry was created.

Nick/Zanimum

From: David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com>
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Placeopedia-or-Where-Wikipedia-Meets-Google-Maps-8877.shtml
So far for the UK mostly.
- d.

___________________________________________________________
Yahoo! Messenger - NEW crystal clear PC to PC calling worldwide with voicemail http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com


from_name: Andrew Dunbar

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Reboots of doom

body:
On 9/20/05, Tim Starling <t.starling at physics.unimelb.edu.au> wrote:
> Jimmy Wales wrote:
> > ?var Arnfj?r? Bjarmason wrote:
> >
> >>>The one thing that came to my mind is: why does anyone log into zwinger
> >>>in the first place?  Since it's this horribly frightening SPOF, ought we
> >>>to not avoid even _looking_ at it funny?
> >>
> >>One reason is that some things are installed on it that aren't (afaik)
> >>installed anywhere else, like dsh(1) which is required for scap(1) and
> >>sync-file(1)
> >
> >
> > *nod*
> >
> > This doesn't sound like a particular hard technical challenge to solve.
> ;-)
>
> dsh is already installed on albert, and I've got a cron job set up to
> synchronise the node group files. I did this based on the theory that if
> zwinger fails, we'll use albert instead. Trouble is, albert is a SPOF
> too. We could set up another host as a bastion, but as Mark said on IRC,
> zwinger is fine as a bastion, but it's underpowered for an NFS server
> (no RAID). Once the next batch of DB servers arrives, we can move one of
> the old DB servers (e.g. bacon or suda) into NFS duty, and thereby
> relieve zwinger of that task.
>
> -- Tim Starling
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>

--
http://linguaphile.sf.net


from_name: Tim Starling

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Search broken

body:
Magnus Manske wrote:
> On de.wikipedia, repeatedly:
>
> Fatal error: Call to a member function on a non-object in
> /usr/local/apache/common-local/php-1.5/extensions/LuceneSearch.php on
> line 400

Looks fine to me.

Context display for full text search results has been disabled while we
have most of our database hardware offline. It was responsible for a
large part of the load on samuel, especially the CPU load.

-- Tim Starling


from_name: Juanma Barranquero

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Upgrading from 1.4.9 to 1.5rc4

body:
On 9/20/05, Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:

> The list is just a default when there's not a wiki page for the books
> list defined; customizations are meant to be done in the wiki.

Aha, that's the datum I was missing.

AFAICS, MediaWiki:Booksources contains the name of a page in the
{{ns:4}} namespace, which is used verbatim, except that MAGICNUMBER is
substituted by the ISBN.

Nice, though not the most documented of features :)

--
                    /L/e/k/t/u


from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [Commons-l] Trademarks

body:
Jimmy Wales:
> I would also vote to delete them.
>
> _Obviously_ we have permission to use _our own_ logos.  But our usual
> NPOV approach tends to require us not to give ourselves special
> treatment. :-)

A solution to this issue might be to enable selective inline linking, so
that an image can be used by providing just a URL, such as:

http://bla.org/myimage.jpg

This is disabled on many (all?) projects (vandalism, external traffic),
but it would be possible to restrict it to our own domain, and to put
non-free content in a restricted space. This could also include the
Creative Commons license logos, which are equally non-free, but used on
all our projects for the license templates.

Erik


subject: [Commons-l] Introducing FlickrLickr

body:
Jimmy Wales:

> How accurate is the metadata at flickr?  Presumably for photos that
> people take themselves and upload, it is 100% accurate by definition.
>
> But I worry about copyvios at Flickr leaking into Commons.

The metadata at Flickr is decent, if very POV and personal.
Photographers often tell little stories about how a photo came to be.
Some tags are a bit silly -- for some reason, people feel the need to
tag all their photos with "photo", or with their first name.

It's important to recognize that Flickr is first of all used as a
repository for people to directly upload photos from their digital
cameras to the Net. As such, there is an abundance of wedding and
birthday photos, holiday and tourist shots, road trip series, and the
like. Many photos are part of such a sequence.

This is very different from the Commons, where the primary usage pattern
is "I want to put this image in an article", and newbies tend to resort
very liberally to external, copyrighted content to do so. A very
rigorous content screening process also seems to keep Flickr clean both
of porn and copyright violations.

 From the point of view of the FlickrLickr project, it helps that we are
processing the content oldest first. The material we are looking through
at the moment has been on Flickr for more than a year. Most copyright
questions I've had to think about in the first few batches were more of
the kind: "Is it OK for a logo to be visible in this shot?" "Is this
sculpture copyrighted?"

Finally, at the moment, every batch is reviewed twice (the preselection
by the FlickrLickr user, and the final pre-upload copyedit by myself).
This has already led to a number of problem cases being filtered, such
as a photo taken from Indymedia and uploaded to Flickr under CC-BY with
the note "from Indymedia". I think we can handle the copyright issue,
using common sense and good judgment.

> But if we're importing large quantities of questionably-licensed data
> from Flickr, and then Flickr bans the person for doing something wrong,
> how do we know about it?

Should there be a truly dramatic case of someone managing to get away
with uploading hundreds of copyvios over a year or so, there's a chance
we'll hear about it - but if we want to be really sure, it would be cool
if Flickr could make its user block or deletion log visible somehow.

I've sent you a FlickrLickr account by separate mail. I'll also write a
little report after we've finished looking through the first 10,000 images.

Best,

Erik


from_name: Keith Old

subject: [WikiEN-l] AfD Threshold being Revised Downward Again?

body:
Folks,

There is no potential tipping point that I can see for information being
added to the system other than the capacity of the system to organise and
retrieve information.

The reason I say this is that we see:

   - at least one national, provincial or even municipal election held a
   week on average with new people being elected;
    - albums, movies and books being released each week;
   - musicians, actors, directors and authors becoming notable as a
   result of above regularly;
   - launch of notable new companies and businesses through IPOs and
   other processes;
   - a steady flow of scientific discoveries ;
   - notable national disasters occurring regularly (we have had two very
   significant ones occur within twelve months in the Indian Ocean tsunami and
   Hurricane Katrina); and
    - regular launch of notable new products.

The only potential limit is the capacity of the system to organise and
retrieve such information.

Keith
aka Capitalistroadster

On 9/21/05, Geoff Burling <llywrch at agora.rdrop.com> wrote:
>
> On Tue, 20 Sep 2005, Tony Sidaway wrote:
>
> > A couple of days ago I was on the verge of taking this matter very
> > seriously.
> >
> > Then I looked at the net growth rate of the Wikipedia page count. Around
> > 1500 new pages per day remaining undeleted after seven days. I compared
> it
> > to the sclerotic maximum capacity of Articles for Deletion (AfD)
> (average of
> > 112 listings per day early June to early September) and the fact that
> AfD
> > participants complain bitterly about their inability to keep up with AfD
> at
> > present.
> >
> Tony's observation reminds me of a question I've pondered off & on over
> the last couple of months, which I'm adding to the mail list on the off
> chance someone may want to study it.
>
> Simply put: is there a point in Wikipedia's size where it's current growth
> will taper off or stop? I don't mean to repeat the old chestnut that
> knowledge is somehow finite: put in different words, is there a certain
> point where contributors will find it far easier to work on existing
> articles than to contribute new ones?
>
> (This is a problem that I doubt we'll encounter until Wikipedia reaches
> somewhere between 5 & 10 million articles, but I think it is a potential
> problem.)
>
> > Bottom line: AfD doesn't scale. Whatever problems may exist with AfD's
> > tendency to randomly delete a selection of perfectly reasonable
> articles,
> > and VFU's growing unwillingness to rectify this, the problem will
> decrease
> > in significance in the long term as page creation rates accelerate
> > inexorably beyond the reach of AfD, and possibly even any defensible
> > extension of speedy deletion.
>
> If there is such a tipping point, we may find that AfD (in whatever form
> it has at the time) not only will be able to keep up with the flow, but
> may actually reduce the size of Wikipedia!
>
> Nevertheless, I admit Tony addresses a problem that will likely be seen
> far sooner than mine.
>
> Geoff
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


from_name: dpbsmith at verizon.net

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Potential Wikipedian growing pains

body:
>From: David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com>

>Nowadays I pretty much tell new contributors "just write a few
>paragraphs and INCLUDE REFERENCES and don't worry about the fancy
>markup for now. Just INCLUDE THE REFERENCES and people will know it's
>a real article about a real thing."

That's good. Something like that needs to be in Wikipedia:Your first article.