subject: [Foundation-l] 9/11 wikipedia

body:
gediza at gmail.com wrote:
> 9-11 wikipedia needs to be moved. I can understand why its usefull and why
> it should be kept. I lost people I know in the incident as well. However it
> is impractical to have a memorial wikipedia in wikipedia/wikimedia namespace
> which is about human knowlege. How people feel about 9/11 is not knowlege.

It's an archive of pages that were removed from Wikipedia. You do know this, right?

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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list: foundation-l

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from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Foundation-l] 9/11 wikipedia

body:
gediza at gmail.com wrote:
> 9-11 wikipedia needs to be moved. I can understand why its usefull and why
> it should be kept. I lost people I know in the incident as well. However it
> is impractical to have a memorial wikipedia in wikipedia/wikimedia namespace
> which is about human knowlege. How people feel about 9/11 is not knowlege.

It's an archive of pages that were removed from Wikipedia. You do know this, right?

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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list: wikimedia-l

subject: [Foundation-l] 9/11 wikipedia

body:
gediza at gmail.com wrote:
> 9-11 wikipedia needs to be moved. I can understand why its usefull and why
> it should be kept. I lost people I know in the incident as well. However it
> is impractical to have a memorial wikipedia in wikipedia/wikimedia namespace
> which is about human knowlege. How people feel about 9/11 is not knowlege.

It's an archive of pages that were removed from Wikipedia. You do know this, right?

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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subject: [Foundation-l] 9/11 wikipedia

body:
gediza at gmail.com wrote:
> 9-11 wikipedia needs to be moved. I can understand why its usefull and why
> it should be kept. I lost people I know in the incident as well. However it
> is impractical to have a memorial wikipedia in wikipedia/wikimedia namespace
> which is about human knowlege. How people feel about 9/11 is not knowlege.

It's an archive of pages that were removed from Wikipedia. You do know this, right?

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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list: wikien-l

from_name: geni

subject: [WikiEN-l] Notability meta-guidelines

body:
On 1/19/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:

> I actually don't see /how/ you could create 30 articles on a single
> Pok?mon character without violating a) WP:NOR, b) WP:V, c) copyright, d)
> the laws of physics.
>

One for the pokemons appearence on the cards. One for it's apearence
in the gameboy game. Once for it's appearence in the TV show. One for
it's appearence in popular culture. One for the band named after that
pokemon. One for it's role in the great pokemon contriversy on
wikipedia.

yeah ok thats all I can think of at short notice
--
geni


from_name: Steve Bennett

subject: [WikiEN-l] Notability meta-guidelines

body:
On 1/19/06, Peter Mackay <peter.mackay at bigpond.com> wrote:
>Well, yes, but it paves the way, you see. The question seems to be,
>for notability: "Where do you draw the line?"

Well, yes. But before you even draw the line, you must ask "roughly
what kinds of things do we want IN, and what kinds of things do we
want OUT?"

> And again I make the point that if DG is getting hot under the collar about
> the buyers, sellers, collectors and experts of dolls starting up their own
> wiki because they are concerned that their articles will be deleted by
> ignorant teenagers, then what on earth is wrong with including fast food
> outlets, which are worth far more than even the most expensive doll on eBay.

I didn't follow the thread, but presumably they weren't listing
individual copies of models of dolls, but rather the model as a whole?
Similarly, the Ray's pizza shop example was about a phenomenon of
similarly-named shops, without delving into the locations of
individual members.

> Not that I'm arguing for a string of articles on fish and chip shops, but
> the criteria for notability must necessarily be flexible depending on the
> topic.

I think we should first have these "meta-guidelines" established,
independently of any domain.  We should work out once and for all why
we even want to have notability guidelines. Mostly this seems to be
expressed as "Wikipedia isn't paper, but let's get real here" or
"Space is cheap, but it isn't free".

Once we have such meta-guidelines (or call them "general principles"
or "notability policy" or something if you like), then individual
domains can express those meta-guidelines in ways that make sense for
the domain.  Starting from scratch for each domain, as is the case
now, means one domain may be turfing out every article which doesn't
satisfy rigid criteria for inclusion while another turfs out almost
nothing. Hence, popular but very local music groups get turfed. And
inconsequential beetles get kept.

Steve


from_name: Rob

subject: [WikiEN-l] AFD courtesy problem

body:
Agreed. If we set a policy using deletion to store old edits, then we might
run into problems in other areas.  People like Siegenthaler who are the
victims of libel, for example, could justifiably complain that the offensive
material was not really deleted when we delete it.  Of course it's not
visible, but after all, if it never goes away, why call it deletion?

On 1/19/06, Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen at shaw.ca> wrote:
>
> Deletion really is a bad way to "store" something.


subject: [WikiEN-l] AFD courtesy problem

body:
On 1/19/06, Sam Korn <smoddy at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 1/19/06, Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen at shaw.ca> wrote:
> > Until the deleted version database gets purged again.
>
> Database dumps should mean that nothing is ever irretrievable.
>
> --
> Sam

I don't think the deleted stuff is included in database dumps. At lot
of stuff gets killed before it can turn up in any database dump (an
article's first week on wikipedia is it's most dangerious).

--
geni


from_name: Alphax (Wikipedia email)

subject: [WikiEN-l] Notability meta-guidelines

body:
Steve Bennett wrote:
> Hi,
>   There are a great deal of arguments over what is and isn't notable
> in various fields, but not much agreement on what the goals of having
> notability guidelines at all - or why we want to delete well written
> articles about arguably "unimportant" topics. In particular, as
> someone recently pointed out, why we want to (hypothetically) keep a
> stub written about a species of extinct beetle little is known about,
> while we would delete a page about an internet chat site with
> thousands of active users.
>
> I suggest that there are some underlying, unspoken principles at play here:
>
> 1) A subject should not become *more notable* by appearing in
> Wikipedia.  {The vanity principle}
>

# Support ~~~~

> 2) A subject should not appear in Wikipedia when many more subjects in
> its category or field do not. {The insignificance principle}
>

# Support ~~~~

> 3) Imaginary or fictitious subjects have less right to appear in
> Wikipedia than other subjects. {The fancruft principle}
>

# Support ~~~~

> I believe that 1) is the crux of vanity concerns. No one really cares
> about the dataspace wasted on Jimmy Bob's Groovy Garage Band. But we
> object to the idea that Wikipedia is being harnessed as an advertising
> medium.
>
> The second principle I think is one that should be spoken. We then
> have a logical argument for rejecting an article about an
> uninteresting street in an outer suburb of Wagga Wagga:
> a) There are hardly any interesting streets in this suburb in WP
> b) There are hardly any interesting streets in Wagga Wagga at all in WP
> c) There are hardly any streets in any major cities in Australia listed.
>
> Thus we can say, "come back when c, b and a have been fulfilled to some extent".
>

The problem is when people make arguments to the effect of "Major cities
are not encyclopedic material", ie. they decide that /nothing/ is
allowed to be written about a particular topic. Now, I know that this is
a ridiculous example, but not much more rediculous than some arguments
that have been succesfully argued by *hundreds* of editors at AfD. Yes,
the vast majority of the world are morons, and WP is (to an extent)
representative of that in the everyday goings-on at AfD.

> The third principle explains the repugnance with which some editors
> treat "fancruft". Notability and popularity are disregarded, and this
> principle comes through: "We" simply don't want a lot of articles
> about any fictitious subject. This obviously causes tension with the
> large numbers of editors who want to create thirty articles about
> their favourite Pok?mon character.
>

I actually don't see /how/ you could create 30 articles on a single
Pok?mon character without violating a) WP:NOR, b) WP:V, c) copyright, d)
the laws of physics.

> So my first question is: Do these principles adequately explain most
> of the other notability guidelines?
>

Yes, with WP:NOR and WP:V doing a good job at covering just about
everything else - most of what /could/ be called "nn, d." can more
succinctly be summed up as "The subject of this article is non-notable
because what has been written amounts to original research and is not
verifiable". I've been arguing this for about a year now.

> If so, then the community is faced with two questions:
> a) Do we accept these meta guidelines? Do we want to add others?

Well, a while ago someone said "there are /no/ notability guidlines",
and I almost believed it. Of course, this was before I realised what a
trollpit AfD was; we quite clearly *do* have notability guidelines, cf.
WP:BIO, WP:CORP, WP:MUSIC, etc.

> b) How do we publish these meta guidelines, and how do we make sure
> they are taken into account into all other notability guidelines?
>

Put them up at [[Wikipedia:Notability guidelines]]?

--
Alphax - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax
Contributor to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia
"We make the internet not suck" - Jimbo Wales
Public key: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax/OpenPGP

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subject: [WikiEN-l] Notability meta-guidelines

body:
Haukur ?orgeirsson wrote:
> I write my share of articles here on things I happen to be interested in.
> A number of times the topics I've chosen to write about have zero English
> language Google hits and no coverage on the Web in any language.
>

That is enough for some people to slap an AfD tag on it. Yes, we
apparantly have editors who have never heard of books or libraries - the
/only/ measure of whether something really exists or not is whether or
not you can get Google hits for it.

> Yet an article of mine has never ever been submitted to AfD. No-one has
> even made the mere suggestion that an article I've written should be
> deleted. I think there might be three reasons for this:
>
> 1. People trust that an experienced editor is submitting articles on
> reasonably worthy topics.
> 2. I cite my sources.
> 3. I write about old stuff.
>
> I think the third reason may actually be the most important one. People
> are worried about non-notable companies using Wikipedia to advertise their
> stuff. No-one is worried about abuse of Wikipedia to promote obscure 11th
> century runic inscriptions.
>
> So, I think the idea runs like this: "If it happened 1000 years ago and
> someone still cares enough about it to write an article then it's probably
> notable enough to keep."
>

Interestingly, people /will/ try and delete something if the subject is
only 100-200 years old, but it's perfectly acceptable to have articles
on every X in Y where Y is 1000 times larger that all other Z, where Y
is a member of Z, and yet not allowed to have articles on other X's in
W, where W is also a member of Z, and W is 10000 times smaller than Y...

--
Alphax - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax
Contributor to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia
"We make the internet not suck" - Jimbo Wales
Public key: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax/OpenPGP

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subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Notability meta-guidelines

body:
Steve Bennett wrote:
>>"Steve Bennett" <stevage at gmail.com> wrote in
>>message
>>news:f1c3529e0601180739x58cee2bai8424268f8cd0eb30 at mail.gmail.c
>
> om...
> [snip]
>
>>3) Imaginary or fictitious subjects have less right to appear in
>>Wikipedia than other subjects. {The fancruft principle}
>
>
>>That takes care of those pesky religious articles, and the literature,
>
> and
>
>>the TV programmes, and the movies ...
>
>
>>On what basis do you make this particular claim?
>
>
> Ok I was definitely unclear :) I am trying to find the rationale behind
> people's revulsion of "fancruft". I don't see the derogatory word
> "cruft" used to describe any subject on wikipedia, no matter how
> esoteric, that is based on the physical world.

Wrong. I've seen articles called "mathcruft", "puzzlecruft",
"schoolcruft", "roadcruft"...

"nn. Yankcruft, d." ?

--
Alphax - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax
Contributor to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia
"We make the internet not suck" - Jimbo Wales
Public key: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax/OpenPGP
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list: wikitech-l

from_name: ea

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re: Automatic Capitalisation: als, br, nah,
 sr Wiktionary - please turn off

body:
Hello, I just wanted to ask if this has been noticed or if I better
should make this request in Bugzilla?
Many thanks in advance,
greetings Elisabeth Anderl (aka Spacebirdy)

>Date: Tue, 17 Jan 2006 14:47:10 +0100
>From: ea <a9502784 at unet.univie.ac.at>
>Subject: [Wikitech-l] Automatic Capitalisation: als, br, nah, sr
>	Wiktionary - please turn off
>To: wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
>Message-ID: <43CCF55E.5050503 at unet.univie.ac.at>
>Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
>
>Hello, please could you turn off the automatic capitalisation on the
>following four Wiktionaries: als, br, nah, sr
>
>1.) http://als.wiktionary.org
>The native speaker Melancholie is supporting this request on the
>Alemannic Wiktionary, see:
>http://als.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Stammtisch#ZuTun
>and
>http://de.wiktionary.org/wiki/Benutzer_Diskussion:Melancholie#Automatic_Capitalisation
>
>
>2.,3.) The Breton and Nahuatl Wiktionaries have no community yet, but it
>would make sense to turn the capitalisation off because Nahuatl is
>mostly written decapitalised and also Breton does differ between
>capitalised and non capitalised words.
>http://br.wiktionary.org
>http://nah.wiktionary.org
>
>
>4.) http://sr.wiktionary.org
>see the voting:
>http://sr.wiktionary.org/wiki/??????????:?????_?????????#??????_?????
>(http://sr.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D0%92%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%B8%D1%80%D0%B5%D1%87%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%BA:%D0%9E%D0%BF%D1%88%D1%82%D0%B5_%D0%B4%D0%B8%D1%81%D0%BA%D1%83%D1%81%D0%B8%D1%98%D0%B5#.D0.92.D0.B5.D0.BB.D0.B8.D0.BA.D0.B0_.D1.81.D0.BB.D0.BE.D0.B2.D0.B0)
>
>
>It makes perfect sense to turn off the autocapitalisation while those
>Wiktionaries are still small.
>Als has 1 (2) active members willing to make the necessary changes
>afterwards,
>on Br there is no work to do at all, on Nah I myself will do the changes
>(which also are very few).
>on Sr there is a community which is in favor of the changes (with no
>votes against) and willing to do the changes.
>
>Many thanks in advance,
>best regards
>Elisabeth Anderl (aka Spacebirdy)
>
>
>
>
>------------------------------
>
>_______________________________________________
>Wikitech-l mailing list
>Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>
>


from_name: Stephen Bain

subject: [WikiEN-l] Students Expose Sex Offender Through Wikipedia Research

body:
On 1/19/06, stevertigo <vertigosteve at yahoo.com> wrote:
> MGM wrote:
> > Yes, it is quite appropriate. It was covered in this
> > week's issue of the Wikipedia Signpost.
>
> SB wrote:
> > "It's a win for the wiki system."
>
> Im having formatting problems, so Ive replied here:
> http://www.livejournal.com/users/stevertigo/444.html

I had missed that there's an article in the main namespace on the guy.
I think it's good the story is getting covered, and it's a useful
illustration of how the wiki system (use of history, talk pages) can
work well. I'm not so sure about the guy having an article though.

--
Stephen Bain
stephen.bain at gmail.com


from_name: Tony Bowden

subject: [Wikitech-l] Installation specific tags in <head>?

body:
On Thu, Jan 19, 2006 at 11:43:45PM +1100, Stephen Bain wrote:
> > Question 1: Is there some alternative to modifying this file that I've
> > missed? I know that there's the option for user-specific javascript, but
> > I'm looking for something similar, where I can edit a page to change the
> > JavaScript used by everyone.
> There's global css and js files for several of the skins, in the
> Mediawiki namespace. For example, on enwiki:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Monobook.js
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Monobook.css
> So everyone using the Monobook skin gets those files. You don't need
> to modify any code, it's all stored in the database.

AIUI though, there's no way from within a Javascript file like this to
load another remote Javascript file (i.e. the one from Google's
servers).

Tony


subject: [WikiEN-l] Notability meta-guidelines

body:
I was talking about beetles, not bad drummers :)

Steve

On 1/19/06, Haukur ?orgeirsson <haukurth at hi.is> wrote:
> > Hence, popular but very local music groups get turfed. And
> > inconsequential beetles get kept.
>
> You mean we should keep [[Bob's locally popular garage band]] and delete
> [[Ringo Starr]]? :)
>
> Regards,
> Haukur
>
> _______________________________________________
> 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: Matt Brown

subject: [WikiEN-l] Notability meta-guidelines

body:
On 1/19/06, Steve Bennett <stevage at gmail.com> wrote:
> [[WP:MUSIC]] seems pretty rigid to me.

WP:MUSIC has its problems.  Even so, IMO, WP:MUSIC is more useful as a
quick check in which passing its guidelines affirms notability with no
further argument required.  Failing the WP:MUSIC guideline just means
that none of the quick and easy ways of describing the subject's
importance work.  It doesn't mean that the subject is not notable for
a less common reason.

-Matt


from_name: gediza at gmail.com

subject: [Foundation-l] 9/11 wikipedia

body:
9-11 wikipedia needs to be moved. I can understand why its usefull and why
it should be kept. I lost people I know in the incident as well. However it
is impractical to have a memorial wikipedia in wikipedia/wikimedia namespace
which is about human knowlege. How people feel about 9/11 is not knowlege.

Anyways vote is avalible at:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/9/11_wiki_move_proposal
                          Cool Cat


subject: [Foundation-l] 9/11 wikipedia


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [WikiEN-l] Pointless deletions, bogus guidelines

body:
geni wrote:

>On 1/19/06, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
>
>
>>When process must be the basis for a decision it must do the least harm;
>>it should give the best opportunity for a real resolution.  In
>>situations where sysops differ process shouold favour keeping in the
>>general case.
>>
>>
>So our inclusion standards are set but the most liberal sysops? I
>really don't think that is an acceptable way of doing things (apart
>from anything else it makes the issue very personal).
>
Not exactly, but by those who would want standards to do least harm, or
who would like peace in the community.  If you want to take that
personally that's your problem.

>>A least harm approach could still favouur deletion in
>>cases where legal problems such as copyvios, libel or privacy are a
>>major factor.  When the only issue is notability we are talking abour a
>>highly subjective concept; that explains why it has been such a
>>perennial problem.  When undeletion depends almost completely on whether
>>the deletion process was followed correctly rather than on content it's
>>clear that process has become overly dominant.
>>
>>
>almost There are cases where deletion has been reversed for being an
>incorrect descision
>
That statement seems on a par with those people who say that they have a
best friend that's black.

>>John's argument is like that of any other politicians who like things
>>the way they are.  I don't think that Tony is wholly ignoring the
>>process; it's more like civil disobedience.  Civil disobedience is a
>>perfectly acceptable way of opposing unjust laws.
>>
>>
>You just accused Tony of dissruption. And [[WP:POINT]] violations.
>
Who would be so fucking foolish as to twist praise for civil
disobedience into an accusation of disruption.

>I would suggest that you rethink any position that results in useing
>terms such as "unjust laws" to refure to wikipedia policy.
>
It doesn't take much rethinking to reaffirm what I said.  There are
whole countries where any suggestion that it can promulgate unjust laws
would result in severe consequences.  Was it my error to believe that
Wikipedia was not one of those countries?

>>Dealing with a single article should not need to involve a person in a
>>broad unending discussion of general process.  If a person feels that a
>>particular corporation is notable, that needs to be discussed on its own
>>merits.  Falling back on general process ignores the fact that the
>>financial pages form a larger part of daily newspapers than comic strips.
>>
>>
>Not it doesn't. From [[WP:CORP]]:
>
>"The company or corporation has been the subject of multiple
>non-trivial published works whose source is independent of the company
>itself."
>
That kind of rule parrotting suggests that you don't spend a hell of a
lot of time looking at the financial pages of newspapers.

Ec


from_name: Guettarda

subject:
[WikiEN-l] FYI: www.wikipedia.de does not longer redirect to
	de.wikipedia.org on a temporary basis

body:
While I don't know a whole lot about the law, and even less about German
law, I find this baffling.  If it were a minor I could see there being some
logic, if it was a living person I could see some sort of "defamation" issue
(although that would be stretching it).  I don't understand what the issue
is here ("we don't want our family's good name sullied by linking it with
him"???), and I most certainly don't understand what the legal grounds are
for requiring the name to be removed.

Ian (Guettarda)


from_name: Haukur Þorgeirsson

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Fair use images on user pages and enforcement

body:
> Short quotes of text also tend to be the kind of fair dealing which is
> broadly accepted by all countries and is essentially indistinguishable
> from "not copyrighted".

Perhaps. Certainly no-one will object that a particular article contains,
say, a short quote from a particular Bible translation. But when you pile
up articles like that in an organized way you essentially enable people to
read the whole translation. Start here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_1:1

Read the KJV translation of the verse. Then click on next verse and the
read the KJV translation of that. Proceed until you run out of verses.

I understand that the copyright of the KJV is enforced in Britain. Would
this series of articles be in violation of British law? Mostly an academic
question, I think, but you get my point. It's probably no coincidence that
the translations chosen for this Bible verse project are (almost
everywhere) in the public domain.

- - -

A few months back we established here on the mailing list that our use of
this featured picture:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:LindisfarneFol27rIncipitMatt.jpg

is in violation of British law. In fact a great many images where we rely
on Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp. could not be legally used in a
Wikipedia published outside of the United States of America.

A Wikipedia which restricted itself to content which is free to use by
everyone in every jurisdiction would have to let go of a lot of good
stuff. It would be a very painful sacrifice and I doubt it would be worth
it.

My guess is that the blasted GFDL is currently causing more problems for
reuse than fair use content is.

Regards,
Haukur


from_name: Gordon Mohr

subject: [Wikitech-l] categories as tags

body:
I've put some stub notes about related possibilities at:

   http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Del.icio.us-style_Tags_for_MediaWiki

- Gordon

Steve Block wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I hope this is the right place to ask this, but basically I was
> wondering if I could get a developer's opinion on whether it would be
> possible to have the category system work more like the tagging systems
> used by del.icio.us or flickr.  There's a bit of a discussion at the
> village pump,
> http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia%3AVillage_pump_%28technical%29&diff=35850492&oldid=35849116
> which might better explain the concept, but the idea is to bypass a lot
> of the problems the current system causes with regards to categorisation
> by gender, ethnicity, nationality, faith and sexual orientation.  Any
> thoughts?
>
> Steve Block
>
>


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Andreas Vilén

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Re: Registering www.wikipedia.se for
	sv.wikipedia.org

body:
The difference is that Switzerland and Denmark have several common
languages for different geographical locations (as well as Finland as
I have pointed out... Why aren't www.wikipedia.fi or
www.wikipedia.co.uk portals?) To force www.wikipedia.se to be a portal
to Swedish and then all the minority languages of Sweden is just
absurd.

/Andreas

On 1/19/06, Mark Williamson <node.ue at gmail.com> wrote:
> I don't think they would if you had it redirect to the Swedish
> Wikipedia. Wikipedia is for languages, not countries.
>
> Please see, for example, http://www.wikipedia.ch or
> http://www.wikipedia.dk or http://wikimedia.co.uk
>
> Mark
>
> On 18/01/06, Andreas Vil?n <andreas.vilen at gmail.com> wrote:
> > This is taking NPOV to the extreme... 99% of all people living in
> > Sweden except to get to a site in Swedish when they go to a website
> > with the ending .se, probably most Swedish Finns would go to
> > www.wikipedia.se (and surely not sv.wikipedia.org) if they wanted to
> > find Wikipedia in Swedish, not www.wikipedia.fi. But as I have said
> > numerous times, this is another discussion.
> >
> > The question is: "Is it possible to get Wikimedia to pay for the
> > domain name www.wikipedia.se?"
> >
> > /Andreas
> > On 1/18/06, Phil Boswell <phil.boswell at gmail.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > "Andreas Vil?n" <andreas.vilen at gmail.com>
> > > wrote in message
> > > news:cb099c010601180538p372b1ef3q1d762142d2ab1196 at mail.gmail.com...
> > > [snip]
> > > > All top domains I search for are redirects to their country's primary
> > > > language, I don't see why www.wikipedia.se shouldn't. In fact, since
> > > > wikipedia.fi is, that would be pure discrimination. Especially since
> > > > Swedish is far more widespread in Finland than Finnish is in Sweden.
> > >
> > > Maybe they should therefore be updated to provide proper portal
> > > facilities...unless there's a chapter in that country in which case surely
> > > they ought to be doing something with "their site"?
> > > --
> > > Phil
> > > [[en:User:Phil Boswell]]
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > _______________________________________________
> > > Wikipedia-l mailing list
> > > Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> > > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
> > >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Wikipedia-l mailing list
> > Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
> >
>
>
> --
> "Take away their language, destroy their souls." -- Joseph Stalin
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


from_name: Evan Martin

body:
On 1/19/06, Tony Bowden <tony-wikitech at kasei.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 19, 2006 at 11:43:45PM +1100, Stephen Bain wrote:
> > There's global css and js files for several of the skins, in the
> > Mediawiki namespace. For example, on enwiki:
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Monobook.js
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Monobook.css
> > So everyone using the Monobook skin gets those files. You don't need
> > to modify any code, it's all stored in the database.
>
> AIUI though, there's no way from within a Javascript file like this to
> load another remote Javascript file (i.e. the one from Google's
> servers).

I don't know the full scope of this particular problem, but I believe
using document.write() to put out a <script> tag works.  Beware,
though, for this introduces more latency (the source document has to
wait for the inserted one to load).


from_name: Habj

subject: [Wikipedia-l] "adminship is no big deal"

body:
I have read the discussion with great interest.

Svwiki started out letting pretty much everyone becoming an admin, and
remained this way a long time. Our most complex troll ever, clever and
mixing good contribution with direct destructive actions, became an
admin, and used the position to "bite people" (not only newbies) -
when stripped of his admin priviledges, he got a lot nicer.

We have several admins who would never be elected if they were
nominted for adminship today - this is the main reason why many of us
wants a system where admins are elected for say a year, not forever,
and my guess we will have this new system running within a year.  I
see a group of admins who speak to newbies "from above"; the message
is "I know the rules here, you don't". They could do the same if they
weren't admins, of course - but my belief is these people would use a
softer tone if non-admins. One or two of those who don't want clearly
unsuitable admins to be removed from office (maybe because this admin
realises he wouldn't get reelected?) tell me "adminship is no big deal
- it is you who are making it into a big deal." It is logikal - if
adminship is no big deal, what is so bad with having some admins who
don't respect other people's views?

If I don't know everyone in the community, I will judge them partly
from other people's opinions. The admin hat gives it's carrier a
certain credibility, earned or not. The response a user gets in
discussions tell me what informal status this person has in the group,
so to speak, but finding someone in the list of administrators also
tells me "this is a trusted member, so maybe what he says isn't so bad
as it first sounded to me". When an admin is being unjust to newbies,
people don't speak up since you don't want to create a fight. There
are other ways of getting a position where your words are a bit
"heavier" than others, but getting adminship is an important one.

The main reason I spent a long time at the swedish wiki competitor,
susning.nu, rather than at Swedish Wikipedia was that I felt treated
badly by a person who wasn't just an admin, but one of the "heavy
names", one of the influentual ones. He felt his adminship had nothing
to do with his actions towards me, and his judgement of me based on
little information...  nothing at all. I strongly felt it had. When
exposed to unjust actions from an admin, you kind of believe there is
the wiki concensus behind it. Why should I expect anything good from
places where people who are elected to some kind of position don't
treat me with respect?

In my eyes, it comes down to - if we keep saying "adminship is no big
deal", does this make the adminship a lesser deal, or do we just keep
saying something that isn't true and thus prevents us from seeing the
reality? Personally, I resigned from adminship without anyone asking
me to do so since I felt I could do more good as a non-admin. I have
my position in the community regardless of admin status, so it doesn't
make much of a difference. In my opinion, it is those whose position
in the group relies heavily on their adminship, who are most unwilling
to loose it.

/Habj


from_name: Justin Cormack

body:
On 19 Jan 2006, at 14:33, Haukur ?orgeirsson wrote:

>> Short quotes of text also tend to be the kind of fair dealing
>> which is
>> broadly accepted by all countries and is essentially
>> indistinguishable
>> from "not copyrighted".
>
> Perhaps. Certainly no-one will object that a particular article
> contains,
> say, a short quote from a particular Bible translation. But when
> you pile
> up articles like that in an organized way you essentially enable
> people to
> read the whole translation. Start here:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_1:1
>
> Read the KJV translation of the verse. Then click on next verse and
> the
> read the KJV translation of that. Proceed until you run out of verses.
>
> I understand that the copyright of the KJV is enforced in Britain.
> Would
> this series of articles be in violation of British law? Mostly an
> academic
> question, I think, but you get my point. It's probably no
> coincidence that
> the translations chosen for this Bible verse project are (almost
> everywhere) in the public domain.

Yes, using the KJV is a big problem. Its a rather strange anomoly of
British
law. Importing the KJV is illegal. I would discourage them from using
it.

> - - -
>
> A few months back we established here on the mailing list that our
> use of
> this featured picture:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:LindisfarneFol27rIncipitMatt.jpg
>
> is in violation of British law. In fact a great many images where
> we rely
> on Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp. could not be legally used in a
> Wikipedia published outside of the United States of America.

Jimbo has said that he would like to be sued so that something like
Bridgeman can be tried in the UK. I would expect it to be ok.

> A Wikipedia which restricted itself to content which is free to use by
> everyone in every jurisdiction would have to let go of a lot of good
> stuff. It would be a very painful sacrifice and I doubt it would be
> worth
> it.

Thats not necessary - so long as stuff is tagged so that anyone say
making
printed copies in a particular jurisdiction can remove stuff.

Justinc


from_name: charles matthews

subject: [WikiEN-l] Notability meta-guidelines

body:
 "Steve Bennett" wrote

>Hence, popular but very local music groups get turfed. And
inconsequential beetles get kept.

You know, one of the most important aspects of policy development  here has
been negative: not to attempt such policies as would rigidly define
'notability', which in its way is almost as bogus a concept as 'celebrity'.
And, pragmatically speaking, that has been a huge success, with some known
drawbacks which get a large amount of attention.

Charles


subject: [WikiEN-l] Notability meta-guidelines

body:
Steve Bennett wrote

>[[WP:MUSIC]] seems pretty rigid to me.

>No?

It may be - I've never looked.  But if so, it is not as a result of any
'central directive'.

Charles


subject: [WikiEN-l] 9/11 wikipedia


from_name: Carbonite

subject: [WikiEN-l] a new category for the living

body:
On 1/19/06, David Boothroyd <david at election.demon.co.uk> wrote:
> "charles matthews" <charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> writes:
> >Bryan Derksen wrote
> >
> >>  It'd help locate some of those if the living-person list were sorted by
> >>  birth year, everyone over 120 years or so old is probably missing a death
> >>  date.
> >
> >I'm beginning to wonder about all this.
> >
> >Adding [[Category:Living person]] - is that suppposed to be fact-checked or
> >what?  [[Category:No death date]], that would be fine.
>
> A while back I wrote an article about [[Elizabeth Cass]] who was a minor
> cause celebre in 1887. She was born in 1863 but never hit the headlines
> again. I assume she died sometime in the 1920s or 1930s but nowhere is
> there any confirmation. She has a birth year category but no death year
> category.
>
> Would she be tagged as a 'Living person'?

As a side note, there is [[Category:Year of death missing]] for those
people that are known to be dead, but we don't currently have a
verifiable year of death. Unless Elizabeth Cass is setting some world
records for longevity, she'd probably be a good candidate for the
category. In fact, I'm going to add it right now.

Carbonite


from_name: Jimmy Wales

body:
> This is a useful concept - we can set up a meaningful Living Bio
> patrol! - but how many biographies do we have? (I would *guess* 90% of
> our bio articles would have living subjects.)
>
> Remember that Category:stub was sorted because it became unusably huge
> - if your article name didn't start with A, it wouldn't get looked at.
> Our living bios *should* be sorted into many categories; presumably we
> will have an assiduous Living Bio sorting project?

I absolutely agree that the category should not become unmanageably
large.  I don't know what the best way to subcategorize it might be.

We know at the foundation level that living people's bios are among the
most time consuming issues we have to deal with.  These articles are
magnets for trolls and vandals and people with a personal vendetta, and
then they are also targets for people who want to change their own
article (*cough*) because it has errors, etc.

The new bio policy page is super duper excellent and the concept here is
to provide a tool for editors to be able to meaningfully sort through them.


body:
Sean Barrett wrote:
> charles matthews stated for the record:
>
>
>>>Adding [[Category:Living person]] - is that suppposed to be fact-checked
>>>or what?  [[Category:No death date]], that would be fine.
>>>
>>>Charles

I'm totally flexible on the name of the category, and this suggestion
seems sensible enough to me.  It also holds some promise of us someday
being able to actually automate it with a proper metadata system.

--Jimbo


from_name: David Gerard

body:
Danny wrote:

>I am writing this to announce the creation of a new category
>on Wikipedia-English: [[Category:Living people]]. The category
>should include the articles of all people who are still alive.

This is a useful concept - we can set up a meaningful Living Bio
patrol! - but how many biographies do we have? (I would *guess* 90% of
our bio articles would have living subjects.)

Remember that Category:stub was sorted because it became unusably huge
- if your article name didn't start with A, it wouldn't get looked at.
Our living bios *should* be sorted into many categories; presumably we
will have an assiduous Living Bio sorting project?

- d.


from_name: Chris Jenkinson

body:
David Gerard wrote:
> This is a useful concept - we can set up a meaningful Living Bio
> patrol! - but how many biographies do we have? (I would *guess* 90% of
> our bio articles would have living subjects.)
>
> Remember that Category:stub was sorted because it became unusably huge
> - if your article name didn't start with A, it wouldn't get looked at.
> Our living bios *should* be sorted into many categories; presumably we
> will have an assiduous Living Bio sorting project?

That Wikinews feature which selects articles which are two chosen
categories would be useful.

Chris

--
Chris Jenkinson
chris at starglade.org

"Mistrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful."
  -- Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra


from_name: Kim, Young J (NBC Universal)

subject: [Wikitech-l] Oracle and wikimedia question

body:
Hi there,

I am working on little internal project using wikimedia and am facing the
problem.
What they want to do is they want to get the user information from Oracle,
but all the other data from MySql.
Is this possible?  Is there any forum or source site where I can get the
help from?
I lost here...

Your help would be really appreciated.

Thanks.

--------------
Young Joon Kim
NBC Universal [iGate]

One CNBC Plaza
900 Sylvan Avenue
Englewood Cliffs, NJ 07632
Tel: 201-735-3874
Cell: 732-236-4306


from_name: Steve Bennett

subject: [WikiEN-l] Notability meta-guidelines

body:
[[WP:MUSIC]] seems pretty rigid to me.

No?

Steve

On 1/19/06, charles matthews <charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:
>  "Steve Bennett" wrote
>
> >Hence, popular but very local music groups get turfed. And
> inconsequential beetles get kept.
>
> You know, one of the most important aspects of policy development  here has
> been negative: not to attempt such policies as would rigidly define
> 'notability', which in its way is almost as bogus a concept as 'celebrity'.
> And, pragmatically speaking, that has been a huge success, with some known
> drawbacks which get a large amount of attention.
>
> Charles
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> 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: Anthony DiPierro

subject: [Foundation-l] 9/11 wikipedia

body:
On 1/19/06, Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:
> gediza at gmail.com wrote:
> > 9-11 wikipedia needs to be moved. I can understand why its usefull and why
> > it should be kept. I lost people I know in the incident as well. However it
> > is impractical to have a memorial wikipedia in wikipedia/wikimedia namespace
> > which is about human knowlege. How people feel about 9/11 is not knowlege.
>
> It's an archive of pages that were removed from Wikipedia. You do know this, right?
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
>

What I want to know is by what logic one can conclude that "How people
feel about 9/11 is not knowlege."  I assume I'm just misreading that
sentence somehow, though, because no one else has challenged that
statement which seems to me to be clearly false.

Anthony


subject: [Foundation-l] 9/11 wikipedia


from_name: Abigail Brady

body:
On 19/01/06, Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen at shaw.ca> wrote:
> Carbonite wrote:
> > What about implementing a Special page that lists all articles with a
> > birth date category, but not a death date category? This would
> > effectively be the same as a "Living People" category (after fixing
> > articles that mistakenly omit a death category).
> >
> It'd help locate some of those if the living-person list were sorted by
> birth year, everyone over 120 years or so old is probably missing a
> death date.

Maybe [[Category:Living person born in 19xx]] categories, which can
feed into the [[Category:Living person]] and [[Category:Born in 19xx]]
?

--
Abi


from_name: Ray Saintonge

body:
For most American deaths since 1930-something, the Social Security Death
Index of the Social Security Administration can be useful.

Ec

Rob wrote:

>Did you try a full text search of a newspaper database?  I don't know what
>coverage of British newspapers is like, but I assume it's comparable to US
>databases.  When I want to research one of those not quite famous enough for
>Britannica people I can just pull up their New York Times obit from ProQuest
>through my library.
>
>Speaking of which, [[Category:Year of death missing]] is a great idea, and
>I'm going to see if I can find obits on some of these people.
>
>On 1/19/06, David Boothroyd <david at election.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>
>
>>A while back I wrote an article about [[Elizabeth Cass]] who was a minor
>>cause celebre in 1887. She was born in 1863 but never hit the headlines
>>again. I assume she died sometime in the 1920s or 1930s but nowhere is
>>there any confirmation. She has a birth year category but no death year
>>category.
>>


body:
Bryan Derksen wrote

> It'd help locate some of those if the living-person list were sorted by
> birth year, everyone over 120 years or so old is probably missing a death
> date.

I'm beginning to wonder about all this.

Adding [[Category:Living person]] - is that suppposed to be fact-checked or
what?  [[Category:No death date]], that would be fine.

Charles


from_name: Nathan Reed

subject: [WikiEN-l] interwikilinks - WP forgot the World WP came from

body:
There's a list at:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Interwiki_map

I'm not sure if it's complete.

-N.
On 1/19/06, Sam Korn <smoddy at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 1/19/06, Heinz <h-j.luecking at t-online.de> wrote:
> > WP forgot the World WP came from
> >
> > There is a Wiki-World beside WP.
> >
> > I can'nt understand why wikipedia is dominating evreything. Wikipedia is
> > like a black hole. So my q. is. : Why dont exist any other
> > interwiki-links beside de:wp etc., beside wikipedia ?
>
> Interwiki links do exist to other websites.  Off the top of my head, I
> can think of c: for Wikicities, meatball: for Meatball Wiki and wiki:
> for c2.com/cgi/wiki
>
> --
> Sam
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

--
Nathan Reed
nathanreed at gmail.com


from_name: Martin Baumann

subject: [Wikitech-l] renaming index.php to index.cgi

body:
I did this. I had to change the rights of index.cgi and the wiki
directory. Now it works. I can upload files!!!
But at the same time the design changed. The skin is 'MonoBook' but it
looks like 'Simple'. I have no idea where
this came from.

Has anyone had similar problems yet? Any idea what could go wrong?

Thanks, MB

Rob Church schrieb:

>Change the value of $wgScript and related variables in
>LocalSettings.php to prevent MediaWiki from redirecting back to
>index.php.
>
>
>Rob Church
>
>On 17/01/06, Martin Baumann <mailsgetlost at web.de> wrote:
>
>
>>Hi everyone!
>>
>>First of all I explain the problem.
>>I installed and configured mediawiki and it works so far. The only problem is uploading files.
>>
>>The server used here is used by a lot of users. Therefore it is configurated in a way that makes it necessary for all php scripts that do file operations (such as uploading images) to be renamed to cgi and add a new line in the beginning that calls the correct interpreter for this cgi script. Only this way safe mode restrictions can be handled on this machine.
>>
>>A disadvantage of this is that cgi scrips are ran more slowly than php scripts on this server. Therefore it would be best to use index.cgi for uploading images and index.php for all other purposes.
>>
>>I tried to use index.cgi only: I renamed index.php to index.cgi and added the interpretar line into it. Further I replaced 'index.php' calls in all media wiki script files by 'index.cgi' calls.
>>But it didn't work: when I opend the index.cgi in a browser (I tried several browsers) it took some time and then the following error was shown:
>>Redirection limit for this URL exceeded.
>>
>>Is there a simple way to make changes to media wiki such that it is started as a cgi and not as php script file?
>>Does anyone have experience with this?
>>
>>Thanks, MB
>>______________________________________________________________
>>Verschicken Sie romantische, coole und witzige Bilder per SMS!
>>Jetzt bei WEB.DE FreeMail: http://f.web.de/?mc=021193
>>
>>_______________________________________________
>>Wikitech-l mailing list
>>Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
>>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>>
>>
>>
>_______________________________________________
>Wikitech-l mailing list
>Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>
>
>


from_name: Rob

body:
Did you try a full text search of a newspaper database?  I don't know what
coverage of British newspapers is like, but I assume it's comparable to US
databases.  When I want to research one of those not quite famous enough for
Britannica people I can just pull up their New York Times obit from ProQuest
through my library.

Speaking of which, [[Category:Year of death missing]] is a great idea, and
I'm going to see if I can find obits on some of these people.

On 1/19/06, David Boothroyd <david at election.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>
> A while back I wrote an article about [[Elizabeth Cass]] who was a minor
> cause celebre in 1887. She was born in 1863 but never hit the headlines
> again. I assume she died sometime in the 1920s or 1930s but nowhere is
> there any confirmation. She has a birth year category but no death year
> category.


from_name: Phil Boswell

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: a new category for the living

body:
"David Gerard" <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote in
message news:fbad4e140601190755n65c8e01bg at mail.gmail.com...
[snip]
> Remember that Category:stub was sorted because it became unusably huge
> - if your article name didn't start with A, it wouldn't get looked at.
> Our living bios *should* be sorted into many categories; presumably we
> will have an assiduous Living Bio sorting project?

I think the difference here would be that it was intended that someone
should actually visit each and every stub article to improve it.

This new category would be used mainly, I suspect, as some sort of RC Filter
so that changes to those biographies can be spotted instantly.

Obviously, it would be handy if it were possible to display an article's
**removal** from a given category as well as other changes :-)
--
Phil
[[en:User:Phil Boswell]]


from_name: Andrew Gray

body:
On 18/01/06, Steve Bennett <stevage at gmail.com> wrote:

> >On what basis do you make this particular claim?
>
> Ok I was definitely unclear :) I am trying to find the rationale behind
> people's revulsion of "fancruft". I don't see the derogatory word
> "cruft" used to describe any subject on wikipedia, no matter how
> esoteric, that is based on the physical world.

Classic counterexample: nominating a handful of articles on *physical
elements* as "sciencecruft".

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


from_name: Fastfission

references:
<20060116082830.GP20211@andromeda.dapyr.net>
	<2487477A-0722-4E58-932B-D0B9B911F75E@specialbusservice.com>
	<dqj9et$g3q$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<F2C540C7-F5F3-45EF-B070-082C09C64DAF@specialbusservice.com>
	<98dd099a0601180655w6512a5ecpdcf967084f1bb56e@mail.gmail.com>
	<8AF2C0A5-2A8E-445B-A519-6C24A5D0DDA9@specialbusservice.com>

body:
I don't think that thumbnail CD covers really have any great value on
the whole, and I think a court would be very suspicious of someone
saying that the sheer number of thumbnails somehow made what was a set
of separate "fair uses" into a massive, singular "unfair use". But I
could of course be wrong, but that's my feeling on it.

FF

On 1/18/06, Justin Cormack <justin at specialbusservice.com> wrote:
>
> On 18 Jan 2006, at 14:55, Fastfission wrote:
>
> > I'm not sure about this. If it is fair use in one instance, it
> > should be
> > fair use in all instances. I don't think there is a legal
> > difference between
> > having one fair use magazine cover and having 200, providing each
> > use meets
> > the fair use standards. In cases where multiple-sources from a single
> > copyright holder were held not to be fair use (i.e. Twin Peaks) it was
> > because the sum collection of the uses really did take away from
> > the use of
> > the original source (i.e. was basically a detailed plot abridgment
> > and could
> > be read without watching the shows). I don't think that's the same
> > thing as
> > using a large number of completely separate magazine or DVD covers. At
> > least, that's my understanding of it.
>
> Copying will always be considered by the court __as a whole__. Thats
> very clear.
>
> With magazine covers, if we had say downloaded (made up example; I
> havent
> looked into where they came from) the Official Playboy Magazine Cover
> website
> and stuck them all in wikipedia then we would be liable - we would be
> taking
> advertising revenue from their website thus causing damages.
> Regardless of
> the amount of important critical commentary we make on them.
>
> CD covers even in thumbnail form now have commercial value en masse, for
> marketing purposes.
>
> Of course there isnt much case law yet, anything could happen. IANAL. I
> expect we shall hear from a lawyer soon.
>
> Justinc
>
> _______________________________________________
> 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: David Boothroyd

body:
"charles matthews" <charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> writes:
>Bryan Derksen wrote
>
>>  It'd help locate some of those if the living-person list were sorted by
>>  birth year, everyone over 120 years or so old is probably missing a death
>>  date.
>
>I'm beginning to wonder about all this.
>
>Adding [[Category:Living person]] - is that suppposed to be fact-checked or
>what?  [[Category:No death date]], that would be fine.

A while back I wrote an article about [[Elizabeth Cass]] who was a minor
cause celebre in 1887. She was born in 1863 but never hit the headlines
again. I assume she died sometime in the 1920s or 1930s but nowhere is
there any confirmation. She has a birth year category but no death year
category.

Would she be tagged as a 'Living person'?
--
David Boothroyd - http://www.election.demon.co.uk
david at election.demon.co.uk (home)
dboothroyd at westminster.gov.uk (council)


from_name: Mathias Schindler

subject:
[WikiEN-l] FYI: www.wikipedia.de does not longer redirect to
 de.wikipedia.org on a temporary basis

body:
http://www.p2pnet.net/story/7660 "Wikipedia Germany offline"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tron_(hacker)

His family does not wish his full name to be used, and many German
newspapers refer to him as "Boris F." On 14 December 2005 the parents
obtained a temporary restraining order in a Berlin court against
Wikimedia Foundation Inc. because its freely editable online
encyclopedia, Wikipedia, mentioned the full name in its German language
version. The order prohibits the Foundation from mentioning the full
name on any website under the domain "wikipedia.org". It furthermore
requires the Foundation to name a representative in Germany within two
weeks following the decision.[3]

This was widely reported in the Dutch and German press [4]. German law
requires that the order be delivered within four weeks. The initial
order was however mistakenly addressed to Saint Petersburg, Russia
rather than to Saint Petersburg, Florida; this was corrected five days
later. It is unclear how the German court can enforce the order in the
United States.

On 17 January 2006, a preliminary injunction from a court in Berlin
prohibited the Wikimedia Deutschland e.V. [1] local chapter from linking
to German Wikipedia, resulting in the change of the wikipedia.de address
from a link to German Wikipedia to a page explaining the situation,
although the page does not mention Tron.[5] Wikimedia Deutschland e.V.
confirmed to the internet news site golem.de that the new injunction is
linked to the prior case against the Wikimedia Foundation and was issued
on behalf of the same plaintiffs. Wikimedia Deutschland e.V. is cited as
willing to stand against the injunction, arguing that no valid case is
seen and the freedom of the press must be defended.[6]

Because Andy M?ller-Maguhn, being one of the spokespersons of the Chaos
Computer Club, is involved deeply into the case on side of the
plaintiffs, some media reported this as a case of the Chaos Computer
Club against Wikipedia. The Chaos Computer Club itself, however, issued
a statement, that this is a case between a few of its members and
Wikipedia, and that the CCC does not take any position in this.[7]

The Austrian online magazine "futurezone" interviewed Andy M?ller-Maguhn
on 19 January 2006 about the case and its backgrounds. Maguhn admitted
that the true reason behind the incident is a fictitious work recently
published by a german author in which the main actor has the same
(civil) name as Tron. The parents sent a protest to the publisher but
were turned down with the argument that the German Wikipedia does use
the name as well. In turn M?ller-Maguhn asked German Wikipedia to remove
the name, but was turned down for a number of reason, including failure
to present proof that he is entitled to speak and act on behalf of the
parents.[8][9]

    1. ^ zdnet.co.uk: "High-stakes hacking, Euro-style", by Bob
Sullivan, 25 October 2000
    2. ^ Wired News: "Out of Chaos Comes Order", by David Hudson, 28
December 1998
    3. ^ Telepolis: "Hacker leben nicht gef?hrlich", by Burkhard
Schr?der, 10 January 2006 (in German)
    4. ^ Spiegel Online: "Streit um Tron: Darf man einen Hacker beim
Namen nennen?", by Holger Dambeck, 10 Januar 2006 (in German)
    5. ^ Heise Newsticker: "Domain wikipeda.de ist zurzeit au?er
Betrieb", by Andreas Wilkens, 19 January 2006 (in German)
    6. ^ golem.de: "Wikipedia.de derzeit abgeschaltet", by Andreas
Donath, 19 January 2006 (in German)
    7. ^ CCC: "Klarstellung zu Wikipedia vs. Tron", by Frank Rieger, 13
January 2006 (in German)
    8. ^ futurezone: "'Einstweilige' gegen Wikipedia.de", by unnamed
author, 19 January 2006 (in German)
    9. ^ German Wikipedia: Archived Discussion about the Article "Tron
(Hacker)", various authors


from_name: Steve Block

subject: [Wikitech-l] categories as tags

body:
Hi,

I hope this is the right place to ask this, but basically I was
wondering if I could get a developer's opinion on whether it would be
possible to have the category system work more like the tagging systems
used by del.icio.us or flickr.  There's a bit of a discussion at the
village pump,
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia%3AVillage_pump_%28technical%29&diff=35850492&oldid=35849116
which might better explain the concept, but the idea is to bypass a lot
of the problems the current system causes with regards to categorisation
by gender, ethnicity, nationality, faith and sexual orientation.  Any
thoughts?

Steve Block

--
No virus found in this outgoing message.
Checked by AVG Free Edition.
Version: 7.1.375 / Virus Database: 267.14.20/234 - Release Date: 18/01/06


from_name: geni

body:
On 1/19/06, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> When process must be the basis for a decision it must do the least harm;
> it should give the best opportunity for a real resolution.  In
> situations where sysops differ process shouold favour keeping in the
> general case.

So our inclusion standards are set but the most liberal sysops? I
really don't think that is an acceptable way of doing things (apart
from anything else it makes the issue very personal).

> A least harm approach could still favouur deletion in
> cases where legal problems such as copyvios, libel or privacy are a
> major factor.  When the only issue is notability we are talking abour a
> highly subjective concept; that explains why it has been such a
> perennial problem.  When undeletion depends almost completely on whether
> the deletion process was followed correctly rather than on content it's
> clear that process has become overly dominant.
>

almost There are cases where deletion has been reversed for being an
incorrect descision

> John's argument is like that of any other politicians who like things
> the way they are.  I don't think that Tony is wholly ignoring the
> process; it's more like civil disobedience.  Civil disobedience is a
> perfectly acceptable way of opposing unjust laws.

You just accused Tony of dissruption. And [[WP:POINT]] violations.

I would suggest that you rethink any position that results in useing
terms such as "unjust laws" to refure to wikipedia policy.

> Dealing with a single article should not need to involve a person in a
> broad unending discussion of general process.  If a person feels that a
> particular corporation is notable, that needs to be discussed on its own
> merits.  Falling back on general process ignores the fact that the
> financial pages form a larger part of daily newspapers than comic strips.
>
> Ec

Not it doesn't. From [[WP:CORP]]:

"The company or corporation has been the subject of multiple
non-trivial published works whose source is independent of the company
itself."

--
geni


body:
On 1/19/06, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> Haukur ?orgeirsson wrote:
>
> >>I was very involved in the fair use project until a few months ago
> >>when I realised that there was no hope and "fair use" will destroy
> >>wikipedia. I am now mostly contributing to commons and writing a few
> >>articles. I am still interested (when I get time) in writing tools
> >>to make it easier to fork a free version of wikipedia without fair use
> >>images.
> >>
> >>
> >Every other article I write quotes a copyrighted text (=fair use). You
> >might have a hard time yanking that out :)
> >
> It's remarkable that many of these discussions about fair use too often
> tend to reduce the scope of the discussion to fair use images.
>
> Ec

Mostly because for the most part people seem to understand how to use
fair use text (it is a bit hard to write a legit encyopedia article
that uses quotes in a way that is not fair use).

--
geni


body:
On 1/19/06, Andrew Gray <shimgray at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 18/01/06, Steve Bennett <stevage at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > >On what basis do you make this particular claim?
> >
> > Ok I was definitely unclear :) I am trying to find the rationale behind
> > people's revulsion of "fancruft". I don't see the derogatory word
> > "cruft" used to describe any subject on wikipedia, no matter how
> > esoteric, that is based on the physical world.
>
> Classic counterexample: nominating a handful of articles on *physical
> elements* as "sciencecruft".
>
> --
> - Andrew Gray
>   andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk

are we talking about physical elements that are know to exist or ones
that are subject to speculation in only a couple of papers?

--
geni


from_name: Nathan Russell

body:
On 1/19/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> Danny wrote:
>
> >I am writing this to announce the creation of a new category
> >on Wikipedia-English: [[Category:Living people]]. The category
> >should include the articles of all people who are still alive.
>
>
> This is a useful concept - we can set up a meaningful Living Bio
> patrol! - but how many biographies do we have? (I would *guess* 90% of
> our bio articles would have living subjects.)
>
> Remember that Category:stub was sorted because it became unusably huge
> - if your article name didn't start with A, it wouldn't get looked at.
> Our living bios *should* be sorted into many categories; presumably we
> will have an assiduous Living Bio sorting project?
>
>
> - d.

Agree.  Over-broad and unuseful categories generally need to go (or
have articles moved into sub-categories, as has been done with for
example Harry Potter character categories).  At one point we had a
[[Category:Millionaires]], which was deleted because it would have to
include about half our bio articles.  This one would be even bigger.

Nathan


from_name: Peter Mackay

subject: [WikiEN-l] Notability meta-guidelines

body:
> From: wikien-l-bounces at Wikipedia.org
> [mailto:wikien-l-bounces at Wikipedia.org] On Behalf Of Steve Bennett

> > There is an entry for [[Ray's Pizza]]...
>
> If it's been mentioned on the Simpsons, Seinfeld and
> Futurama, I suspect it's more notable than a single fast food
> shop in Melbourne :)

Well, yes, but it paves the way, you see. The question seems to be, for
notability: "Where do you draw the line?"

And again I make the point that if DG is getting hot under the collar about
the buyers, sellers, collectors and experts of dolls starting up their own
wiki because they are concerned that their articles will be deleted by
ignorant teenagers, then what on earth is wrong with including fast food
outlets, which are worth far more than even the most expensive doll on eBay.

Not that I'm arguing for a string of articles on fish and chip shops, but
the criteria for notability must necessarily be flexible depending on the
topic.

Pete, with a wedge of lemon


body:
> Classic counterexample: nominating a handful of articles on *physical
> elements* as "sciencecruft".

Yeah, looks like it was one troll (aptly named 'trollminator')
deliberately being provocative (probably to prove a point). All the
articles got kept. All the other uses of the term are references back to
that one.

Anyway, I'm starting to think that we should relax about "fancruft".
Anything that can be stated in an encyclopaedic fashion (X appears in
series 2 and 3 of show Y; according to this academic paper, X displays
repressed homosexuality) should be kept. The only true fancruft which
should go is pure speculation or unreferenced junk written about such
topics (X in series Y looks vaguely like Z in series W) or total trivia
(X and Y kiss 37 times in the first series, I COUNTED!).  But are there
really whole articles that should be destroyed for such a reason? Maybe
I need to browse the AfD archives some more :)

Steve


subject: [WikiEN-l] AFD courtesy problem

body:
On 1/17/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
>
> 2. At the close of all VfD debates, the discussion is deleted.  If there
> is a need to have a stub page left there to guide people to the fact
> that there was a prior debate, then create that stub fresh, with the
> history gone.  In the event it is needed, the history can always be
> resurrected by some admin.
>
> Is there anything wrong with this concept?

Alternative approach: Make it so that certain pages, with admin approval,
won't show up on Google or other search robots (use the META ROBOTS tag).
Write guidelines that say these can only be used for closed AFD debates. The
page itself should SCREAM that it doesn't show up in search engines so it is
easy to tell when it has been misapplied.

That way we have the benefit, for our internal use, of knowing past debates
and their results, but our dirty laundry won't be aired to the world (i.e.
Google).

FF


subject: [WikiEN-l] AFD courtesy problem

body:
Oh hey, looks like I missed two days of discussion. Nevermind!

FF

On 1/19/06, Fastfission <fastfission at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> On 1/17/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> >
> > 2. At the close of all VfD debates, the discussion is deleted.  If there
> > is a need to have a stub page left there to guide people to the fact
> > that there was a prior debate, then create that stub fresh, with the
> > history gone.  In the event it is needed, the history can always be
> > resurrected by some admin.
> >
> > Is there anything wrong with this concept?
>
>
> Alternative approach: Make it so that certain pages, with admin approval,
> won't show up on Google or other search robots (use the META ROBOTS tag).
> Write guidelines that say these can only be used for closed AFD debates. The
> page itself should SCREAM that it doesn't show up in search engines so it is
> easy to tell when it has been misapplied.
>
> That way we have the benefit, for our internal use, of knowing past
> debates and their results, but our dirty laundry won't be aired to the world
> (i.e. Google).
>
> FF
>
>


subject: [WikiEN-l] A Wikipedia lynching

body:
It's pretty clear that he doesn't mean a lynching in a literal sense, so it
doesn't count as libel under any interpretation.

FF

On 1/18/06, Rob Smith <nobs03 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> A editor recently accused others and their source, Prof. Harvey Klehr, of
> being part of a lynching.
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Harry_Magdoff_and_espionage&diff=34950836&oldid=34254772
> <
> http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Harry_Magdoff_and_espionage&diff=34950836&oldid=34254772
> >
>
>
> He has repeated these libels here
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:List_of_Americans_in_the_Venona_papers&diff=35566271&oldid=35564984
> <
> http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:List_of_Americans_in_the_Venona_papers&diff=35566271&oldid=35564984%C2%A0
> >
>
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Harry_Magdoff_and_espionage&diff=next&oldid=34975393
>
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_Americans_in_the_Venona_papers&diff=34527735&oldid=34519165
> <
> http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_Americans_in_the_Venona_papers&diff=34527735&oldid=34519165
> >
>
> alleging this 'Posse' Comitatus is part of a conspiracy to justify civil
> rights violations.
>
> Now the editor has filed an RfM to force insertion of defamatory criticism
> like this of Prof. Harvey Klehr in several articles
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_mediation#Significance_of_Venona.2C_List_of_Americans_in_the_Venona_papers.2C_and_Harry_Magdoff_and_espionage
>
> What the editor neglects to state in his RfM is his own conflict of
> interest, cited here
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Requests_for_arbitration/Nobs01_and_others/Evidence#Nobs01_view_of_Cberlet.27s_request
>
> and here
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Chip_Berlet#Human_Rights_Activist
>
> How long will this abuse of legitimate Wikipedia dispute resolution
> processes be tolerated?
>
> Nobs01
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


body:
On 19/01/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:

> I'm totally flexible on the name of the category, and this suggestion
> seems sensible enough to me.  It also holds some promise of us someday
> being able to actually automate it with a proper metadata system.

Have you noticed the testing of implementing [[Wikipedia:Persondata]],
roughly similar to the German metadata system? It's imperfect - it's
all inside the article, for a start, rather than real metadata - but
it's promising.

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


from_name: Stephen Bain

subject: [WikiEN-l] Notability meta-guidelines

body:
On 1/19/06, Steve Bennett <stevage at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 1) A subject should not become *more notable* by appearing in
> Wikipedia.  {The vanity principle}

I would put it this way: an article should not exist solely to make
its subject more notable. If an article makes the subject more well
known, alongside educating the reader about the topic of which the
subject forms a part, then that is no problem.

--
Stephen Bain
stephen.bain at gmail.com


from_name: Sam Korn

body:
On 1/19/06, Heinz <h-j.luecking at t-online.de> wrote:
> WP forgot the World WP came from
>
> There is a Wiki-World beside WP.
>
> I can'nt understand why wikipedia is dominating evreything. Wikipedia is
> like a black hole. So my q. is. : Why dont exist any other
> interwiki-links beside de:wp etc., beside wikipedia ?

Interwiki links do exist to other websites.  Off the top of my head, I
can think of c: for Wikicities, meatball: for Meatball Wiki and wiki:
for c2.com/cgi/wiki

--
Sam


subject: [Foundation-l] 9/11 wikipedia

body:
On 1/19/06, Anthony DiPierro <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:
> What I want to know is by what logic one can conclude that "How people
> feel about 9/11 is not knowlege."  I assume I'm just misreading that
> sentence somehow, though, because no one else has challenged that
> statement which seems to me to be clearly false.

Well, it's clearly not knowledge as would be used in other Wikimedia sites.

--
Sam


subject: [Foundation-l] 9/11 wikipedia


from_name: John Lee

body:
Haukur ?orgeirsson wrote:

>>The fact that nothing (except image deletions)
>>is permanent on Wikipedia makes [[WP:IAR]] work.
>>If someone doesn't believe that my [[WP:BOLD]]
>>invocation of [[WP:IAR]] was proper, they are free
>>to boldly revert it, or in the case of a deletion,
>>find one of those 700 admins to undelete it, in
>>which case a discussion can begin.
>>
>>
>
>This last sentence is the important point. When people challenge your
>ignoring of established process you have to sit down and discuss things
>with them - not just keep reverting to the version you think is better and
>say that discussion is a waste of time. This goes even when you think your
>view is "common sense" or "obviously correct". If it really is, you will
>be able to convince other Wikipedians of it. Our hobby is building an
>encyclopedia - many of us are quite reasonable people :)
>
>Process is basically a way of facilitating discussion and cooperation in
>this large collaborative project. That's why some of us think it's
>important, not for its own sake.
>
>Regards,
>Haukur
>
>
Strong ditto here. While process should never *ever* get in the way of
common sense, once people acting in good faith start reverting your
actions, it's time for process to step in. Process acts as a way to
limit the anarchy of IAR. It may be evil, but it's very much a necessary
evil. Also bear in mind that undermining one process often indirectly
erodes other processes. If an admin wheel wars over the deletion of an
article with other admins acting in good faith and gets away with it,
pretty soon new admins will figure, "Why not apply to this to blocking
wheel wars?" And so on.

Tony has been arguing that the deletion process is borked. That, I think
we can all agree on, even if we disagree on how it's broken. However,
that's not licence to wholly ignore it, unless you have no respect for
the establishment of process at all. If you seek the replacement of this
borked process by something better, once this goal is achieved, your
actions in ignoring process will eventually be used as an excuse by
other admins (no matter how well-meaning) to ignore the process you
support because in their opinion, it's borked. And if you don't seek the
replacement of this process, then you're just disrupting Wikipedia to
illustrate a point (or no point at all, maybe).

John Lee
([[User:Johnleemk]])


from_name: Tomer Chachamu

body:
It works for pages on the same subdomain (en.wikipedia.org) and maybe
also the same domain.

I can suggest the following solutions:
1) Edit security settings on users' computers to allow the loading of
remote javascript (unlikely)
2) Edit users' "hosts" file to map "r3m0t.wikipedia.org" to your own
server's IP address (= Google). Then use document.write() to include
the script.
3) Attempt to copy the script to a page in the subdomain. (Actually,
it will be unable to contact google.com)
4) Create a page in the subdomain which is a REDIRECT to the
javascript file on google.com

It's difficult to integrate sites from different domains, and perhaps
for good reason.

On 19/01/06, Evan Martin <evanm at google.com> wrote:
> On 1/19/06, Tony Bowden <tony-wikitech at kasei.com> wrote:
> > On Thu, Jan 19, 2006 at 11:43:45PM +1100, Stephen Bain wrote:
> > > There's global css and js files for several of the skins, in the
> > > Mediawiki namespace. For example, on enwiki:
> > > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Monobook.js
> > > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Monobook.css
> > > So everyone using the Monobook skin gets those files. You don't need
> > > to modify any code, it's all stored in the database.
> >
> > AIUI though, there's no way from within a Javascript file like this to
> > load another remote Javascript file (i.e. the one from Google's
> > servers).
>
> I don't know the full scope of this particular problem, but I believe
> using document.write() to put out a <script> tag works.  Beware,
> though, for this introduces more latency (the source document has to
> wait for the inserted one to load).
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>


body:
On 1/19/06, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> Not exactly, but by those who would want standards to do least harm, or
> who would like peace in the community.  If you want to take that
> personally that's your problem.
>

Strangly I would argue my standards would cause the least harm and I
certianly want peace in the community.

> That statement seems on a par with those people who say that they have a
> best friend that's black.

I fail to see the logic. The above also appears to be an appeal to emotion

> Who would be so fucking foolish as to twist praise for civil
> disobedience into an accusation of disruption.

Civil disobedience also causes dissruption. That is the whole point.

> It doesn't take much rethinking to reaffirm what I said.  There are
> whole countries where any suggestion that it can promulgate unjust laws
> would result in severe consequences.  Was it my error to believe that
> Wikipedia was not one of those countries?

Wikipedia is not a country.

> That kind of rule parrotting suggests that you don't spend a hell of a
> lot of time looking at the financial pages of newspapers.
>
> Ec

What is your chain of logic here?

--
geni


from_name: Heinz

body:
WP forgot the World WP came from

There is a Wiki-World beside WP.

I can'nt understand why wikipedia is dominating evreything. Wikipedia is
like a black hole. So my q. is. : Why dont exist any other
interwiki-links beside de:wp etc., beside wikipedia ?

Heinz


body:
On 1/19/06, Tony Bowden <tony-wikitech at kasei.com> wrote:
>
> Question 1: Is there some alternative to modifying this file that I've
> missed? I know that there's the option for user-specific javascript, but
> I'm looking for something similar, where I can edit a page to change the
> JavaScript used by everyone.

There's global css and js files for several of the skins, in the
Mediawiki namespace. For example, on enwiki:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Monobook.js
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Monobook.css
So everyone using the Monobook skin gets those files. You don't need
to modify any code, it's all stored in the database.

There is Mediawiki:Common.css, a css file which is common to all
skins, but I'm not sure whether there is support for a
Mediawiki:Common.js.

--
Stephen Bain
stephen.bain at gmail.com


subject: [WikiEN-l] AFD courtesy problem

body:
Sam Korn wrote:

>On 1/19/06, Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen at shaw.ca> wrote:
>
>
>>Until the deleted version database gets purged again.
>>
>>
>
>Database dumps should mean that nothing is ever irretrievable.
>
>--
>Sam
>
>
Problem is that we have 700 admins and...how many devs? In the event of
a crash, we'll need the devs to go digging through the dumps for trivial
material that really isn't worth their time. I don't see the point in
deleting the debates; just hide them from bots or something.

John Lee
([[User:Johnleemk]])


from_name: Gerard Meijssen

subject: [Wikitech-l] categories as tags

body:
Steve Block wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I hope this is the right place to ask this, but basically I was
> wondering if I could get a developer's opinion on whether it would be
> possible to have the category system work more like the tagging
> systems used by del.icio.us or flickr. There's a bit of a discussion
> at the village pump,
> http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia%3AVillage_pump_%28technical%29&diff=35850492&oldid=35849116
> which might better explain the concept, but the idea is to bypass a
> lot of the problems the current system causes with regards to
> categorisation by gender, ethnicity, nationality, faith and sexual
> orientation. Any thoughts?
>
> Steve Block
>
>
Hoi,
Yes, it could but I do not like the way Flickr works.. and that one is
as good as the del.icio.us stuff.. Yeah, I know. Have a read at the
proposal that has already been put forward,
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Using_Ultimate_Wiktionary_for_Commons
this is something that can be done in the not too distant future.

The reason why I do not like the Flickr stuff is because I cannot find a
??? in it. With the functionality we propose you can. While you are at it
have a read at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Multilingual_MediaWiki
because this will also have an application for Commons. We hope to start
the coding on this soon.

Thanks,
GerardM


from_name: Dan Jacobson

subject: [WikiEN-l] more low bandwidth user comments

body:
On Talk pages there is a link '+' for adding a comment.
Well why don't you spell out with English etc. what you mean instead
of just this geekspeak '+'.

OK, and if one clicks on this +, one must download 100+ KB of form,
just to add a comment.  Perhaps mostly rarely used accented chars
entry help stuff.

When one sees links like Discussion etc. you might as well give an
article count, e.g., Discussion (21 items). Mainly if there is no
discussion yet, I don't want to click, as I have nothing to say, just
want to see others.

And this 4 tilde for a signature biz. Can't you do this thru
cookie/preferences? How could I remember to do that each time.
No complicated sounding plugin for me.

I even made a script to add comments, that works as long as there is
no funny characters in the page name.
#usage eg. $0 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminating_vista
#to add a comment to it's Talk page without downloading the form
set -e
test $# -eq 1
case $1 in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/*);;*)exit 33;esac
p=$(basename $1) t=/tmp/wikipediacomment.html
wwwoffle -o \
'http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Miso&action=edit&section=new'|
perl -pwe 's@(action=")(/w/index.php)@$1http://en.wikipedia.org$2@;
  s/Talk:Miso/Talk:'$p'/g' > $t
firefox $t

On all pages there is "Go" "Search". Many don't know what "Go" means...

Anyways, hope this gets to wikien-l, where I suppose it is read (as
this is the best bug report address I know.)


from_name: Jama Poulsen

subject: [Wikitech-l] categories as tags

body:
On Fri, Jan 20, 2006 at 12:20:00AM +0100, Gerard Meijssen wrote:
> >I hope this is the right place to ask this, but basically I was
> >wondering if I could get a developer's opinion on whether it would be
> >possible to have the category system work more like the tagging
> >systems used by del.icio.us or flickr. There's a bit of a discussion
> >at the village pump,
> >http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia%3AVillage_pump_%28technical%29&diff=35850492&oldid=35849116
Brion is right that categories can be used just like common tags. Not personal
tags, thats not what a collaborative wiki is focussed on, perhaps in the future
you can tag your Wikipedia views (and then share that view with others, hehe).

Tags, categories, labels (whatever one calls them) can be used in multi-word
settings, some Tagging sites just used to have a one-word-per-tag limitation.

> >which might better explain the concept, but the idea is to bypass a lot of
> >the problems the current system causes with regards to categorisation by
> >gender, ethnicity, nationality, faith and sexual orientation. Any thoughts?

Indeed, the current Wikipedia usage for categories is to put a lot of
semantics into one category label. Eg. compare:

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Airlines_of_Spain
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Spain

  with:
  http://wikicompany.org/wiki/Category:Airline

Wikicompany tries to keep category labels 1-dimensional (which can still be
multi-word), so they can be used (and re-used!) as tags and more (see below).
There are some tricky things about doing this, but those are not unsolvable.

Also, the semantics of "Spain" on Wikicompany is different than on Wikipedia.
The use on Wikicompany refers specifically to the "service region" of a company
(not the company's base).

The real power of _shared_ (not private) tags is not gotton from their current
use on websites, since quantity, ambiquity and filtering become issues then.

Eg, a tag for Spain on Flickr can have so many different meanings, that the
tag becomes much weaker tool for finding what you want. Now, there are some
tag clustering workarounds for this, but thats just what these are IMO.

Whats really needed in combination with tags are semantic annotations.
The Semantic MediaWiki project is working on this
(http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Semantic_MediaWiki)

See my email to the SMW mailinglist about my progress on the RDF query system for
SMW: https://lists.wikicompany.org/pipermail/wikicompany-list/2006-January/000015.html

At the bottom the email also describes some issues relating to the
Categories-as-Tags topic.

Please join the SMW list to help discuss these issues further.

> Yes, it could but I do not like the way Flickr works.. and that one is
> as good as the del.icio.us stuff.. Yeah, I know. Have a read at the
> proposal that has already been put forward,
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Using_Ultimate_Wiktionary_for_Commons
> this is something that can be done in the not too distant future.

They demo is nice, but what I see seems to be a limited form of a graph-based
semanticweb annotation system. Perhaps the proposal is just whats needed for
the new Wiktionary, but I'm not sure this couldn't be done better using SMW
software meta-information models.

Is there actually any cooperation between these two projects?

> The reason why I do not like the Flickr stuff is because I cannot find a
> ?????? in it. With the functionality we propose you can. While you are at
> it have a read at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Multilingual_MediaWiki
> because this will also have an application for Commons. We hope to start
> the coding on this soon.

I agree with this, but the solution isn't to not use tags/labels/categories.
The real solution lies in a combination of various meta-info systems and a
powerful browse/search interface. For a project like Wikipedia a very flexible
solution is needed.

regards,

Jama Poulsen
http://wikicompany.org
http://debianlinux.net


from_name: Alphax (Wikipedia email)

subject: [WikiEN-l] Google Earth copyright (now that you bring it up)

body:
Anthony DiPierro wrote:
> On 1/19/06, Anthony DiPierro <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:
>
>>The challenge to Google's claim of copyright on the image (which in
>>itself was educational) didn't come until the image had already been
>>up there for months.  In fact, the image itself didn't even include a
>>claim of copyright by Google, it was from one of the very first
>>editions of the software when Google didn't yet have the audacity to
>>make such an obviously specious claim. (*)
>>
>>Anthony
>>
>
>
> (*) The image in question was exported from Google Earth (example at
> http://www.newrecruit.org/images/blog/googleearth/paris.jpg).  The
> compass on the bottom left was not present and neither was the
> copyright notice on the bottom right (not because I removed them, but
> because Google had not yet added them).  Like the image I presented
> there were no 3-D elements.  I think it's clear to anyone with any
> knowledge of copyright law that Google has *zero* copyright interest
> in such an image.  You don't get copyright on something simply because
> it is part of the output of a program you wrote, and all the rest of
> the possibly copyrighted features are held by someone else (in the
> case of my photo, the state of New Jersey).
>

I know in France the architect has copyright photos of their buildings,
but the State of New Jersey has copyright over your photo of...?

--
Alphax - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax
Contributor to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia
"We make the internet not suck" - Jimbo Wales
Public key: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax/OpenPGP
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from_name: Walter van Kalken

subject: [Foundation-l] 9/11 wikipedia

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:

>gediza at gmail.com wrote:
>
>
>>9-11 wikipedia needs to be moved. I can understand why its usefull and why
>>it should be kept. I lost people I know in the incident as well. However it
>>is impractical to have a memorial wikipedia in wikipedia/wikimedia namespace
>>which is about human knowlege. How people feel about 9/11 is not knowlege.
>>
>>
>
>It's an archive of pages that were removed from Wikipedia. You do know this, right?
>
>-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
>
>
Yep it is ironic the same happens with other stuff from wikipedia it
gets moved even though groups want to keep and than it gets deleted in
the end because nobody sees it anymore ..... recipes for instance.

Waerth/Walter


subject: [Foundation-l] 9/11 wikipedia


from_name: Jonathan

subject: [WikiEN-l] 3RR, a proposed update

body:
In response to an earlier message I sent, "Cleared as filed" and me,
Dzonatas, have discussed the issue somewhat. I've been unblocked early.
There is a concern I still have that isn't directed at "Cleared as filed."

I wrote the previous mail in haste, obviously. I only had a couple
minutes to spare and wanted to take advantage of time that the block
started.

The 3RR policy is valid. By pragmatic review, not every admin blocks
under the same conditions. This gives the effect of favoritism, either
personal or political.

I have many thought over many ideas in prevention, but I'll give just
one that is do-able.

If a user is under blocked under 3RR, allow a button to appear under the
  users page that directs the user to the policy. The button questions
the user to agree to stay in accordance with policy and not edit the
specific page for 24 hours. If the user agrees and presses the button,
the block is undone. This allows the user to continue to edit other
pages. If the user presses the button and resumes to edit the specific
page, the block is reinstated for a duration longer than 24 hours.

In the incidence with "Cleared as filed", I felt I was blocked
inappropriately. Other users now use such block as means for character
assassination. The above idea could allow an user to continue to talk on
the discussion page, which would show that the 3RR is not punitive by
default and prevent character assassination.

In the same incidence, another user continued to show disruption by the
use of tags to delete images that I have installed. The sources and
copyright status of the images were obvious enough by guidelines;
however, the user wanted to press the technicality of it. This user
reported the block for which "Cleared as filed" instated. It would seem
possible by this example that a user is able to game the system, get a
user blocked, and add content under speedy deletion. This is why I sent
the message in haste to report "Cleared as filed", as it would help make
notice to not be so hasty to install a block and allow discussion.

Obviously, not every admin has lots of time to investigate and often
blocks on "the wrong version." This update would allow an admin to
install a block and let the user to decide to unblock early if they
agree to adhere to temporary terms, which is simply to not edit the
specific article for a day. This continues to encourage discussion.

Respectfully,
Jonathan


from_name: Anthony DiPierro

body:
On 1/19/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:
> Anthony DiPierro wrote:
> > On 1/19/06, Anthony DiPierro <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:
> >
> >>The challenge to Google's claim of copyright on the image (which in
> >>itself was educational) didn't come until the image had already been
> >>up there for months.  In fact, the image itself didn't even include a
> >>claim of copyright by Google, it was from one of the very first
> >>editions of the software when Google didn't yet have the audacity to
> >>make such an obviously specious claim. (*)
> >>
> >>Anthony
> >>
> >
> >
> > (*) The image in question was exported from Google Earth (example at
> > http://www.newrecruit.org/images/blog/googleearth/paris.jpg).  The
> > compass on the bottom left was not present and neither was the
> > copyright notice on the bottom right (not because I removed them, but
> > because Google had not yet added them).  Like the image I presented
> > there were no 3-D elements.  I think it's clear to anyone with any
> > knowledge of copyright law that Google has *zero* copyright interest
> > in such an image.  You don't get copyright on something simply because
> > it is part of the output of a program you wrote, and all the rest of
> > the possibly copyrighted features are held by someone else (in the
> > case of my photo, the state of New Jersey).
> >
>
> I know in France the architect has copyright photos of their buildings,
> but the State of New Jersey has copyright over your photo of...?
>

It's not my photo I was talking about, but the aerial photos used in
Google Earth, which, in this particular case, were made as a work for
hire of the State of New Jersey.  Google obtained these aerial photos
and then manipulated them *per my instructions* and sent them to me.
As I'm the one who chose all the creative elements (the location, the
angle, the zoom level), I'm the one who owns the copyright on the
derivative work, not Google.  All they did was provide me with the
tools to create the image.  They own the copyright no more than
FUJIFILM owns the copyright to [[Image:Capemaypoint.JPG]] (which is
the actual photo I took from that location).

Frankly, I think this conclusion is pretty much indisputable by anyone
with basic knowledge of copyright law.  In fact, it follows naturally
from the absurdity of the law being any other way.  The Mozilla
Foundation (or is it the Mozilla Corporation?) doesn't own this text
simply because I used their software to create it.  Cakewalk doesn't
own the songs just 'cause they're created using their music production
software.  Corel doesn't own a painting because it was designed using
Corel Paint.  Likewise, Google doesn't own an image simply because you
used Google Earth to create it.

Discussing this issue is, in and of itself, educational.  And using an
image to facilitate such a discussion is fair use, which means it's
not illegal and not an act of civil disobediance.

Of course, that discussion was kept to the talk page.  The original
purpose of my creation and distribution of the image was to show how
well Google Earth can create a particular real life photo.  Even if
that's not educational (and it is), it's use for the purposes of
commentary, which in many ways is actually a stronger argument for
fair use than merely educational purposes anyway.

And frankly, Wikipedia should try to keep most, if not all, of its use
*in the article space* to *commentary*, not simply educational
purposes.  When you are commenting on a work, there is no real
substitute for the actual work itself.  Pretty much any other use
(save parody, which isn't really applicable to Wikipedia), can be
theoretically substituted rather adequetely without resorting to fair
use.  Even if Dolly the Sheep is dead and all the images of her are
copyrighted, it's still possible for an artist to look at *several*
images and create an original work which accurately depicts what the
sheep looks like.

Someone else mentioned how fair use images aren't treated like fair
use text.  Well, that's essentially how fair use text is treated.  If
you're commenting on the quote itself, then you use the quote itself.
If, instead, you're using the information contained in the quote, then
you read up on a bunch of different sources and paraphrase it, copying
the facts but not the expression.  The only real difference is that
there are a lot more Wikipedians who are skilled at writing but not
nearly as much at drawing.

Anyway, I've turned this into a rant about something completely
different.  Sorry.

Anthony


body:
> From: wikien-l-bounces at Wikipedia.org
> [mailto:wikien-l-bounces at Wikipedia.org] On Behalf Of Bryan Derksen

> Carbonite wrote:
> > What about implementing a Special page that lists all
> articles with a
> > birth date category, but not a death date category? This would
> > effectively be the same as a "Living People" category (after fixing
> > articles that mistakenly omit a death category).
> >
> It'd help locate some of those if the living-person list were
> sorted by birth year, everyone over 120 years or so old is
> probably missing a death date.

It's the articles that would be missing the death date; the people
themselves would not.

Pete


body:
> From: wikien-l-bounces at Wikipedia.org
> [mailto:wikien-l-bounces at Wikipedia.org] On Behalf Of Sean Barrett
>
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
>
> charles matthews stated for the record:
>
> > Adding [[Category:Living person]] - is that suppposed to be
> > fact-checked or what?  [[Category:No death date]], that
> would be fine.
> >
> > Charles
>
> Good point.  I suppose "I shook hands with him this morning"
> would be disallowed as original research.

Nor would it confirm the status of "living person".

Pete, who has shaken some very cold and limp hands in his time


from_name: Tony Bowden

body:
On Thu, Jan 19, 2006 at 11:31:54PM +0000, Tomer Chachamu wrote:
> It works for pages on the same subdomain (en.wikipedia.org) and maybe
> also the same domain.
...
> It's difficult to integrate sites from different domains, and perhaps
> for good reason.

This is why I'm looking for a solution that doesn't involve even trying
to do this, but just allows me to change the <head> generated in
mediawiki, without having to edit source (and remember to resync at each
upgrade)

Thanks,

Tony