from_name: Phroziac

subject: [WikiEN-l] One Where We Blew It

body:
{{sofixit}} :P
Completely agree though.

On 9/5/05, Ryan Norton <wxprojects at comcast.net> wrote:
> Hi there,
>
>  > because of the mob of pissy deletionists who dominate VfD
>
> So I take it you are a pissy inclusionist then? :)
>
> In all seriousness though it is a difficult issue. I think the more
> recent controversial ones like Stardestroyer.net (its 3rd VfD which
> finally resulted in its demise) and trekbbs one or whatever highlight
> this.
>
> VfD itself is an interesting mentality that is really easy to get
> sucked into. Even though are many fairly notable websites that get
> canned because they fall just short of WB:WEB for example, many other
> articles that don't meet it get kept for other reasons, such as because
> they are entertaining (GNAA, List of Ethnic Stereotypes etc. etc.).
>
> The system does work in a sense though. For example, a couple a put up
> there that were of somewhat non-notable websites, but were written very
> well, got deleted rather soundly with a surprising turnout given the
> subject matter (and some funny but demeaning jokes from the voters).
>
> Of course, I say it works in the sense that you're making a strict
> encyclopedia, which tends to go against the wikiway (I mean the C2
> wikiway not the wikipedia wikiway :)). In fact when I first came to WP
> a long time ago I thought that was the way it worked... and was
> surprised to see VfD and other venues to removing content.
>
> I myself got sucked into it earlier on (admittedly its quite fun and a
> great way to inflate your edit count), plus there are a lot of
> old-timers there (who probably are deletionists themselves ;)). Lately,
> I've been realizing that there needs to be more inclusionists voting
> there (although some self-described inclusionists seem to vote delete
> on everything anyway...).
>
> Maybe it gets back to the old argument that you need people who are
> really familiar with the subject to judge it. Who knows...
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

--
signature


list: wikien-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: MAURICE FRANK

subject: [Wikien-l] Looking at the real world

body:
Message: 5
Date: Sat, 03 Sep 2005 16:18:46 -0500
From: Jeff Heikkinen <jeff.h at shaw.ca>
Subject: [Wikien-l] Looking at the real world
To: wikien-l at Wikipedia.org
Message-ID: <431A1336.4010607 at shaw.ca>
Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed;
charset=ISO-8859-1
> You agreed to the license independantly of any of
t>he
>other BS you keep spewing;
Wrong. I did not agree to the dishonourings of process
 that took place. Nobody in the outside world thinks
you have a case in claiming that a license agreement
applies to contributors at the same time as not
applying to your running of the site.

You have had your defense in front of the community
>>that you keep
>demanding.

Where?

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


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Rowan Collins

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re: Improvement request: redirect, synonyms,
	fuzzy system (ENG/ITA)

body:
On 05/09/05, Timwi <timwi at gmx.net> wrote:

> I think most of those questions are quite easy to answer once you
> realise that (a) 99% of people looking for a topic do so via the search
> box, not the URL; (b) when someone links to an article, they do it via
> the URL, not the search box. Hence:

Ah - this is indeed a distinction I hadn't considered; I guess I'm
just too "stuck" in the traditional wiki concept that internal links
are what holds everything together. Personally, I almost never use the
search box, because I know the naming conventions and the URL form,
and just guess that way; this may be silly of me.

> > * How do you deal with the fact that a given title can be both an
> > article in its own right, and an alias defined by another article?
>
> The URL should display the article. The search box should give a
> selection of both possibilities.

So, an internal link to [[Foo]] would always go to the article "Foo",
if it existed, but typing "Foo" and clicking "Go" might come up with a
list of alternatives instead; I guess that could work. Of course, this
isn't nearly as related to redirects as earlier discussion suggested,
being more like an enhancement to the search facility (a way of
manually stuffing things into the results) than giving alternative
titles to pages.

> > * How do you keep the code efficient if it has to check two places
> > (the list of redirects and the list of actual pages) every time it
> > wants to look up a title?
>
> Caching.

I was referring more to the fact that during the course of a request,
many many titles may be looked up in the database; if they had to be
looked up in a separate 'alias' table as well (not a necessary part of
the implementation, but one some were suggesting), the number of
queries would, AFAICS, effectively double. But this is moot if you're
only talking about search functions, not links.

> > * If you abandon the current "redirect created by magic page content",
> > how do you convert a page to an alias, or vice versa?
>
> You don't "convert" a page to an alias; you just create the alias, and
> independently of that, delete the page (if that is what you want to do).
> Similarly, removing an alias and creating a page should also be separate
> actions.

If no interaction with internal links is implied, then yes, that makes
sense. If you wanted links to be able to point at aliases, too, I
guess you could add an automatic disambiguation message at the top of
the page ("$1 is also defined as an alias for $2[, $3[, etc]]") -
preferably with appropriate links for managing the aliases.

> > * What happens when somebody tries to create an alias which is already
> > a page, or which is already an alias for something else?
>
> The alias gets created as always. Now if someone searches for the alias,
> it should (obviously) list all the pages that have this alias. The same
> should probably happen to the URL if there is no actual page at that
> title; although I wouldn't mind having the URL display the "page does
> not exist" screen so that it is easier to create a page at that title.

If these aliases are only intended for searching, they should
definitely not display as though the page existed - they should
probably be displayed in a clear box above the "page does not exist
screen", both for search results and "URLs" (since linking to a page
that doesn't exist is a bit like searching; linking to a page that
does exist is less so).

> > * What happens when you remove something from the list of aliases?
>
> The alias gets removed. Duh. :-) We already have this happening with
> categories.

Again, I was thinking of aliases as being more similar to redirects -
a way of defining a particular title as being an alias for exactly one
page (many aliases, but each with only one target). In the context of
a many-to-many mapping, of course this is a no-brainer. If other
people were thinking in terms of many-to-many, my apologies for not
cottoning on sooner - as far as I know, you're the first one to make
this explicit.

With this in mind, let's revisit the question of whether these could
replace at least some redirects. It seems to me that if they did, they
would actually end up replacing disambiguation pages as well - if a
title was associated with only one alias, it would redirect, if more
than one, disambiguate. For example, "BT" could be an alias for
various pages which might have that name if they weren't in conflict,
with the summaries stored somewhere with the aliases themselves (and
perhaps editable from both the disambig page *and* the target one).
Some kind of warning or protection *would* then be needed when
creating a page in place of one or more aliases, as this would affect
the operation of all links referencing that title (turning the
redirect into a "See also" message, or the disambig page into a "For
other uses..." reference, akin to current en.wp "see [[<foo>
(disambiguation)]]")

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Angela

subject: [Wikipedia-l] New request for Cantonese Wikipedia: vote at 29-6

body:
On 9/5/05, Mark Williamson <node.ue at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> All political, sociolinguistic, and practical arguments aside, there
> are currently 29 votes in support of a separate Cantonese Wikipedia
> and 6 against (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposal_for_Sinitic_linguistic_policy#Vote_-_.E6.8A.95.E7.A5.A8).

Since this hasn't yet been advertised on the Chinese Wikipedia, I
suggest we leave the vote open for another couple of weeks. I have
just posted details about on the Chinese mailing list, and hopefully
someone there will be able to translate it to advertise the vote on
our existing Chinese language wikis. I think it is only fair to allow
the people on those projects to at least be aware of a proposal which
is liable to take away editors from their own wiki.

Angela.


body:
On 9/5/05, Walter van Kalken <walter at vankalken.net> wrote:

> I found our policy with regards to Chinese languages stranger and
> stranger. We do not do this if we open another Germanic or Romanic
> language pedia!

It's not policy. There is no policy for creating new languages (just a
draft one at <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposed_policy_for_wikis_in_new_languages>).
I was just giving my opinion, and I feel that the relevant communities
should be told about any language proposals, not only Sinetic ones. If
some dialect of English were proposed, it would be very unfair to try
to hide that from the existing English language communities within
Wikimedia.

Angela.


from_name: Mark Gallagher

subject: [WikiEN-l] Block on false (and never even reported) 3RR

body:
G'day Alphax,

> David Mertz, Ph.D. wrote:
> <snip>
>
>>(I wouldn't be so petty as to report it to mediation if it is not
>>repeated).
>
> And you took it to the mailing list because...?

Well, everyone needs the chance to whinge, right?

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

--
No virus found in this outgoing message.
Checked by AVG Anti-Virus.
Version: 7.0.344 / Virus Database: 267.10.18/89 - Release Date: 2/09/2005


from_name: J.F. de Wolff

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: One Where We Blew It

body:
I agree with Phil's observation, but it's not just the
[[profanity|****]] deletionists that are to blame. There are honestly
too many people so hungry for attention that they continuously seek
to make Wikipedia aware of their unnotability. These characters are
an undesired effect of being completely open, and cause pollution of
good material with their own vanity. It is them we should blame to a
large degree for our failure to distinguish between bona fide and
shockingly unnotable.

When it comes to webcomics, it is extremely hard (for a non-insider)
to make a judgment between notable and non-notable, which is exactly
the point in having guidelines. I know this is elitist, but in these
matters an uninformed opinion is a potentially destructive one.

Jfdwolff

--
No virus found in this outgoing message.
Checked by AVG Anti-Virus.
Version: 7.0.344 / Virus Database: 267.10.18/89 - Release Date: 02/09/2005


from_name: geni

subject: [WikiEN-l] One Where We Blew It

body:
On 9/5/05, Snowspinner <Snowspinner at gmail.com> wrote:
> I thought people should be aware of the recent creation of a fork off
> of Wikipedia at www.comixpedia.org.
>
> This is a wiki intended for webcomics.

Specialist wikis are to be expected.

> It exists separate from Wikipedia because we blew it big time with
> the webcomics community.
>

We shall see. Forks of wikipedia don't tend to do too well in the long run

--
geni


from_name: Jack Lynch

subject: [WikiEN-l] One Where We Blew It

body:
One time some mean people tried to delete Cat Town

http://www.spatch.net/cattown/episode1.html


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Project: This wikipedia-related article is a stub...

body:
This stub-related article is a stub.

On 9/6/05, Elisabeth Bauer <elian at djini.de> wrote:
>  From wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:
> "The Persian Wikipedia is the Persian language version of Wikipedia. As
> the Persian language is written right to left, so is the website."
>
> I just realized that the English Wikipedia has articles on quite a
> number of wikipedia language editions:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedias_by_language
>
> But hey, isn't there more to say about it than just outdated numbers of
> articles or the writing direction? Doesn't each wikipedia have something
> unique, a special culture, notable events which are not milestones?
>
> Spend a while to polish the article about your wikipedia to spare it the
> fate of rotting as a "wikipedia-related stub" in the cleanup department ;-)
>
> greetings,
> elian
>
> PS: In the german wikipedia these articles would probably have been
> deleted as irrelevant...ehemm...that's our specific culture
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>

--
signature


from_name: Walter van Kalken

body:
> I think it is only fair to allow
>the people on those projects to at least be aware of a proposal which
>is liable to take away editors from their own wiki.
>
>Angela.
>_______________________________________________
>
>
I found our policy with regards to Chinese languages stranger and
stranger. We do not do this if we open another Germanic or Romanic
language pedia! Why do we do this with sinetic languages? The Manderin
wikipedia is a large one! The loss of a few editors will not really
detrimentally effect them. The government in Beijing is against
promotion of any Sinetic  language but Mandarin. It is known that a
couple of Chinese editors from mainland China have been frustrating any
opening of any Sinetic language pedia in the past.

Waerth/Walter


from_name: Skyring

subject: [WikiEN-l] Looking at the real world

body:
On 9/6/05, James D. Forrester <james at jdforrester.org> wrote:

> However, wikien-l is not the place to query your ban by the Arbitration
> Committee; it is not a community matter, but one for the Board, and
> Jimbo in particular. Feel free to email them about it. Certainly, feel
> free to cease emailing /us/ about it, unendingly and pointlessly.

Protesting injustice is never pointless, James. The USA was founded in
such a spirit.

You've already admitted here that the process is unfair; you can't
seriously expect me - or anyone else - to have much respect for
Wikipedia's version of due process after that.

--
Peter in Canberra


from_name: Elisabeth Bauer

body:
 From wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:
"The Persian Wikipedia is the Persian language version of Wikipedia. As
the Persian language is written right to left, so is the website."

I just realized that the English Wikipedia has articles on quite a
number of wikipedia language editions:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedias_by_language

But hey, isn't there more to say about it than just outdated numbers of
articles or the writing direction? Doesn't each wikipedia have something
unique, a special culture, notable events which are not milestones?

Spend a while to polish the article about your wikipedia to spare it the
fate of rotting as a "wikipedia-related stub" in the cleanup department ;-)

greetings,
elian

PS: In the german wikipedia these articles would probably have been
deleted as irrelevant...ehemm...that's our specific culture


subject: [WikiEN-l] Looking at the real world

body:
On 9/6/05, Karl A. Krueger <kkrueger at whoi.edu> wrote:
> On Sat, Sep 03, 2005 at 12:24:07PM +1000, Skyring wrote:
> > On 9/3/05, James D. Forrester <james at jdforrester.org> wrote:
> > > And further, accessing a computer system without authorisation is
> > > illegal in the US, the UK, and Australia, to name but a few countries;
> > > given that you are banned from Wikipedia, any edits that you were to
> > > make would constitute such an illegal act. Several sysops, and not just
> > > Mackensen, have suggested that you may well be doing this, violating
> > > your ban order. Perhaps you might want to think about finding another
> > > place to play, Skyring?
> >
> > Thanks, James. Given that Wikipedia doesn't require checking of
> > real-life identification before allowing access to the system, I can't
> > see your theory lasting too long in any court.
>
> I can't see as "real-life identification" matters.  Permission to access
> the system is withdrawn from a person, not an "identification".  Once
> that permission is withdrawn, access is unauthorized.

Wikipedia doesn't identify real-life people when permitting access.
For a crime to occur, you've got to satisfy the conditions laid down
in the law. James' legal threats amount to nothing.

--
Peter in Canberra


from_name: Tomasz Wegrzanowski

body:
On Tue, Sep 06, 2005 at 05:49:47AM +0200, Elisabeth Bauer wrote:
> PS: In the german wikipedia these articles would probably have been
> deleted as irrelevant...ehemm...that's our specific culture

Are you sure they would ? Major wikipedias are among the most
important websites of the net, with interesting history
and a lot of influence over the internet culture at large.

You wouldn't want the paper 'pedias write about wikipedia before
the wikipedia does ?


from_name: Andrew Lih

body:
Angela is right - the Proposal_for_Sinitic_linguistic_policy failed to
make an open call to the ZH community for their opinion.

Due diligence has not been performed. My suggestions from July:

http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2005-July/041203.html
http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2005-July/041207.html

were not heeded. The voting page does not have complete background
materials;  nor was the page translated into Chinese, the main
relevant community; nor was the announcement made to wikizh-l or the
main zh.wikipedia.org community pages.

Personal differences aside, the organizer of a vote, as an implicit
"overseer," should show restraint in terms of commenting on individual
votes and as a result, influencing the votes on the page.

One reason the final (sixth) GNAA VfD was accepted after several
controversial rounds of voting was because of how professionally the
vote was administered. We should learn from that.

-Andrew (User:Fuzheado)

On 9/6/05, Angela <beesley at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 9/5/05, Walter van Kalken <walter at vankalken.net> wrote:
>
> > I found our policy with regards to Chinese languages stranger and
> > stranger. We do not do this if we open another Germanic or Romanic
> > language pedia!
>
> It's not policy. There is no policy for creating new languages (just a
> draft one at <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposed_policy_for_wikis_in_new_languages>).
> I was just giving my opinion, and I feel that the relevant communities
> should be told about any language proposals, not only Sinetic ones. If
> some dialect of English were proposed, it would be very unfair to try
> to hide that from the existing English language communities within
> Wikimedia.
>
> Angela.
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


list: commons-l

from_name: Anthere

subject: [Commons-l] Re: Birthday

body:
David Benbennick wrote:

> The picture of the day for September 6,
> http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:Potd/2005-09-6, is
> http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Dandelion_clock.jpg.
>
> Let's change it to a birthday cake!

Speaking of which ....

I would suggest that a little report on commons be put in Quarto, as it
is one of our very successful project.

There is already mention of the Ars Electronica. But no more.
See here : http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WQ/Draft#Wikicommons

Would there be a little more flesh to add to this ? Everyone is welcome
to do so (and please sign :-))

Anthere


from_name: Sabine Cretella

body:
Ahhhh Elian, I see: we need your article on the stub-gnomes even in
English ... well I am trying to translate it into Italian, it is fun,
but really quite a difficult task as it has many of those "fine
meanings" that don't need translation, but you need to re-write the
whole text giving the same meanings in the other language to it (I
already wrote it once and then re-wrote .... but it still lacks
something) .... so I suppose the litteral translation "stub gnome" in
English does not work well ... maybe we should think about Snowwhite and
her "dwarfs" - so these could be come the "stub-dwarfs" ;-)

So who are going to be the English writing stub-dwarfs that make some
nice present to these articles "giving" a bit more information :-)

Well: I am not contributing much to wikipedias (I am more concentrated
on wiktionary) ... simply because my home are "languages" ;-) and this
mail is about them :-)

Ciao!

Sabine

Elisabeth Bauer wrote:

> From wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:
> "The Persian Wikipedia is the Persian language version of Wikipedia.
> As the Persian language is written right to left, so is the website."
>
> I just realized that the English Wikipedia has articles on quite a
> number of wikipedia language editions:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedias_by_language
>
> But hey, isn't there more to say about it than just outdated numbers
> of articles or the writing direction? Doesn't each wikipedia have
> something unique, a special culture, notable events which are not
> milestones?
>
> Spend a while to polish the article about your wikipedia to spare it
> the fate of rotting as a "wikipedia-related stub" in the cleanup
> department ;-)
>
> greetings,
> elian
>
> PS: In the german wikipedia these articles would probably have been
> deleted as irrelevant...ehemm...that's our specific culture

___________________________________
Yahoo! Mail: gratis 1GB per i messaggi e allegati da 10MB
http://mail.yahoo.it


list: foundation-l

from_name: rfrangi at coopetition.it

body:
I understood that this foundation drive was going to last until it's end date (sept. 9th) even in case of an earlier achievement of our goal. Did I miss something?

Roberto Frangi (Snowdog)

 Da: Tim Starling <t.starling at physics.unimelb.edu.au>
 Data: Tue, 06 Sep 2005 16:41:22 +1000
 A: foundation-l at wikimedia.org
 Oggetto: [Foundation-l] Donation drive stopped early with insufficient funds
	collected

I'm wondering why the donation drive was stopped early, before the
enough money was collected to cover the Foundation's Q3 budget of
$198,000. After our discussion in August about the German chapter, I
thought it was fairly clear that those funds could not be used for the
general operating expenses of the Florida Foundation.

So the fundraising drive raised $220,849 - $36,866 = $183,983 towards
the operating costs of the Foundation. This leaves a shortfall of
$198,000 - $184,983 = $14,017.

The Verein has nominated a few things that they would like to spend
money on, such as hardware within Germany, and that's all very well, I'm
sure it will help with our general mission. But those costs are not part
of the Florida Q3 budget, they are part of the Verein budget. So the
shortfall still remains.

This is really just an accounting error. What needs to be done now is
the Florida budget needs to be revised downwards, by cutting out items
that might instead be purchased by the Verein. Then the Verein needs to
produce their own budget. Only then will we have a consisent story to
tell to our generous donors.

-- Tim Starling

_______________________________________________
foundation-l mailing list
foundation-l at wikimedia.org
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l


subject:
[Foundation-l] Donation drive stopped early with insufficient
	funds collected


list: wikimedia-l


from_name: Bruynsf at cs.com

subject: [WikiEN-l] Zoe's Abuse of Power as a Sysop

body:
Zoe, a Sysop on Wikipedia, has seriously abused her position of authority and
responsibility at my expense. I have a technical problem on my computer (see
User Talk: Moriori) that has caused some minor problems in messages that I
send. Zoe sent me a message on my user talk (User Talk: Felix Frederick Bruyns)
to tell me not to edit others' messages. I attempted, through a third party, to
communicate with Zoe and clarify the situation. That third party (User:
Dmcdevit), however, failed to communicate my message. I did not send my message to
Zoe directly because I had already responded to  many complaints about editing
problems and since one of those complaints came from Dmcdevit, I attempted to
save time by sending only one message instead of two. In clear violation of
the "assume good faith" Wikipedia policy, however, Zoe sent me an official
warning accusing me of deliberate vandalism. I responded by telling her that I
would seek arbitration if she continued to lodge such accusations against me.
She, in turn, blocked me from Wikipedia and claimed that my editing problems
could not possibly have been accidental (Again, See: User Talk: Moriori). Her
official reasons for blocking me were the vandalism that I never committed and my
warnings that I would seek arbitration, which she termed "threats".
Furthermore, finding that I could not reach the administrative noticeboard to plead my
case and not having an individual e-mail address, I resorted to attempting to
start new accounts, but I was still blocked, at one point from my own user
page. In addition, because of my name changes, Zoe accused me of "spamming" and
blocked me for one year. My specific knowledge of her deliberate abuse of power
comes most of all, however, from these comments (emphasis mine): "I have a
very low opinion of spammers. Besides, I'm in the middle of several brush fires
and am quite irritable right now." (User talk: Dragons flight). This clearly
indicates that her abusive behavior towards me is unprofessional and
irresponsible and that she allows her moods to determine her decisions in her very
important role as a sysop, which I assert to be unacceptable. I understand that you
typically delete many messages of this type within twelve hours. I would
request, however, that you take a close look into this particular case, as Zoe's
behavior is causing me, an innocent user, to be the victim of the subjective
feelings of a sysop who obviously does not understand or does not respect the
responsibility of her position. I am not requesting that any punitive measures be
taken against Zoe, but I would strongly request that I be unblocked and
allowed to continue normal activities on Wikipedia. As for the editing problems,
shortly before Zoe initiated her inappropriate actions against me I had decided
to contact a computer expert within Wikipedia the following day to solve the
problem. I repeat, Zoe has abused her power as a sysop and used it express her
personal feelings arbitrarily in a hurtful way towards an innocent Wikipedia
user, and I trust that you will take appropriate action to stop her from any
further persecution of me or of any other well-intentioned users. Thank you very
much. User: Felix Frederick Bruyns


from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [WikiEN-l] Encarta article list

body:
--- David Gerard <fun at thingy.apana.org.au> wrote:
> If xsomeone could email these pages to me (to dgerard at gmail dot com by
> preference), I will put them up in private web space of my own and say
> "fuck 'em".

That may be OK for now, but longer term we should combine all the lists by
letter, weed out duplicates, and then rename the entries based on our naming
conventions. We can do this letter by letter and only work on a small number of
letters at a time. I don?t think that would have nearly as serious copyright
concerns as what we were doing. It will also make a better list to work from.

-- mav

______________________________________________________
Click here to donate to the Hurricane Katrina relief effort.
http://store.yahoo.com/redcross-donate3/


from_name: Poor, Edmund W

subject: [WikiEN-l] Quality tags

body:
> From: Daniel P. B. Smith [mailto:dpbsmith at verizon.net]
>
> Back in June, I complained that a little particle of misinformation
> from Wikipedia had gotten lodged in my brain, and might potentially
> have affected my car-purchasing decision. Specifically, I was
> referring to an article that characterized the Toyota Echo, as a
> "flop" in the U.S. whose sales had tanked in 2004 and was due to be
> discontinued--despite continuing success in many other countries,
> including Canada.

When Wikipedia fails, this is the typical way it does fail. Someone
makes insufficient effort to balance the article.

Now that summer is over, I will renew my Quarterly Qall for Quality
(oops, typo! ;-) at Wikipedia.

We need a kind of rating scheme or quality assurance system or
certification mechanism. It's not a problem of designing the software
for this. Tim and Erik and Magnus and Brion and all the rest are
superbly capable. But *they* are not going to take the lead in this.
*We* must decide that we want some means of assuring readers that they
are getting reliable information.

Once again, I suggest that we let users "review" a given "version" of
an article and (using a "new" software feature) "mark" that version as:

* "patrolled" (as in Recent Changes "simple vandalism" patrol)
* "accurate" (i.e. "I am personally convinced that Everything
  this article says is true and correct."
* "balanced" (i.e., nothing has been left out or downplayed)

For problems:
* "graffiti" (or "vandalism" = someone has messed up this version,
  but I don't have the time, inclination or ability to undo the damage)
* "inaccurate" (contains mistakes, which we *hope* they'll mention on
  the talk page)
* "bias" (tells one side of a story, especially in a raging controversy)

Now where we take it from here is really up for grabs. Some people won't
even care about these tags. We can set the default to ignore quality
tags unless you "opt in".

RC patrollers might like to know WHO has reviewed a version. If Mav says
he's checked the diff for "simple vandalism", I wouldn't give it a
second thought. He's the champ. He used to check EVERY change (!) when
traffic was slow enough. Now that there are often 100s of edits per
minute, this work needs to be split up. I would be happy to put in an
hour, from time to time, if only I knew "who else" had certified a
certain article version as "patrolled". I'd ignore known troublemakers,
for example. Double check newbies, and not even bother reviewing the
work of people I come to trust.

Knowing that a particular VERSION of an article had been certified as
"balanced" would help Administrators if an edit war flares up. If they
need to protect the article, they could go back to the last version
which had been marked "balanced" by someone they trust. To be fair, they
would almost certainly have to pick a version certified by someone other
than themselves - unless they weren't involved in the dispute.

For the looming print version (or CD / DVD version), we could
automatically choose article versions which have a suitable combination
of Approval Tags and Problem tags. (My own preference would be
"patrolled" and no "graffiti".) A library might insist on "accurate" and
"balanced" with no "inaccurate" or "bias".

We can let people use the tags as a filtering system. When browsing or
looking up information, you might want to see:

* the most recent version which HAS the tags you like;

Or

* the most recent version which DOES NOT HAVE any of the tags you hate

Or

* the most recent version which has all the tags you like and none of
the tags you hate.

But when you went to edit, you'd see the latest version same as before.
Perhaps you'd get a notice saying "This is the latest version. You were
looking at yesterday's / last week's version."

What do you all think?


from_name: Michael Turley

subject: [WikiEN-l] Quality tags

body:
On 9/6/05, Poor, Edmund W <Edmund.W.Poor at abc.com> wrote:
>
> > From: Daniel P. B. Smith [mailto:dpbsmith at verizon.net]
> >
> > Back in June, I complained that a little particle of misinformation
> > from Wikipedia had gotten lodged in my brain, and might potentially
> > have affected my car-purchasing decision. Specifically, I was
> > referring to an article that characterized the Toyota Echo, as a
> > "flop" in the U.S. whose sales had tanked in 2004 and was due to be
> > discontinued--despite continuing success in many other countries,
> > including Canada.
>
> When Wikipedia fails, this is the typical way it does fail. Someone
> makes insufficient effort to balance the article.

In this case, there was no balance to add. Several sources were claiming the
Echo's demise in the US market, and none were claiming it would continue.

Now that summer is over, I will renew my Quarterly Qall for Quality
> (oops, typo! ;-) at Wikipedia.
>
> We need a kind of rating scheme or quality assurance system or
> certification mechanism. It's not a problem of designing the software
> for this. Tim and Erik and Magnus and Brion and all the rest are
> superbly capable. But *they* are not going to take the lead in this.
> *We* must decide that we want some means of assuring readers that they
> are getting reliable information.
>
> Once again, I suggest that we let users "review" a given "version" of
> an article and (using a "new" software feature) "mark" that version as:
>
> * "patrolled" (as in Recent Changes "simple vandalism" patrol)
> * "accurate" (i.e. "I am personally convinced that Everything
> this article says is true and correct."
> * "balanced" (i.e., nothing has been left out or downplayed)
>
> For problems:
> * "graffiti" (or "vandalism" = someone has messed up this version,
> but I don't have the time, inclination or ability to undo the damage)
> * "inaccurate" (contains mistakes, which we *hope* they'll mention on
> the talk page)
> * "bias" (tells one side of a story, especially in a raging controversy)

In this case, tagging an article would cause more problems than it would
solve. When information changes, we don't want the "certified valid" version
to be based on out of date information.

Also, certification is simply inserting a POV into the article's metadata.
It is a reader's POV, but nonetheless, that's what it is.

Now where we take it from here is really up for grabs. Some people won't
> even care about these tags. We can set the default to ignore quality
> tags unless you "opt in".
>
> RC patrollers might like to know WHO has reviewed a version. If Mav says
> he's checked the diff for "simple vandalism", I wouldn't give it a
> second thought. He's the champ. He used to check EVERY change (!) when
> traffic was slow enough. Now that there are often 100s of edits per
> minute, this work needs to be split up. I would be happy to put in an
> hour, from time to time, if only I knew "who else" had certified a
> certain article version as "patrolled". I'd ignore known troublemakers,
> for example. Double check newbies, and not even bother reviewing the
> work of people I come to trust.
>
> Knowing that a particular VERSION of an article had been certified as
> "balanced" would help Administrators if an edit war flares up. If they
> need to protect the article, they could go back to the last version
> which had been marked "balanced" by someone they trust. To be fair, they
> would almost certainly have to pick a version certified by someone other
> than themselves - unless they weren't involved in the dispute.

I don't see the value in article certification, as it's just another form of
voting. With as fast as articles change in Wikipedia, I could spend a whole
day every week "recertifying" articles on my watch list. On busy articles,
most of them would get edited again before any significant number of people
cast their votes on them, so we'd have a dozen or two versions in the
article history, each with one vote. I don't see value in that.

Further, would such article voting appear in recent changes and watchlists?
I watch almost everything I've voted on, so I can explain my vote or discuss
the votes of others. I don't think I'd expect this to be any different.

I would rather have more personalized watch lists. When I watch an article,
I want to be able to review the latest edits, then "check off" that article
in my watch list to say "I'm OK with those edits, take this article off my
watch list until the article changes again" or not "check off" the article
so that I may review it more carefully later. If items were removed from my
watchlist as I checked them, I could probably watch 10 times as many items
or more.

For the looming print version (or CD / DVD version), we could
> automatically choose article versions which have a suitable combination
> of Approval Tags and Problem tags. (My own preference would be
> "patrolled" and no "graffiti".) A library might insist on "accurate" and
> "balanced" with no "inaccurate" or "bias".
>
> We can let people use the tags as a filtering system. When browsing or
> looking up information, you might want to see:
>
> * the most recent version which HAS the tags you like;
>
> Or
>
> * the most recent version which DOES NOT HAVE any of the tags you hate
>
> Or
>
> * the most recent version which has all the tags you like and none of
> the tags you hate.
>
> But when you went to edit, you'd see the latest version same as before.
> Perhaps you'd get a notice saying "This is the latest version. You were
> looking at yesterday's / last week's version."
>
> What do you all think?

The short version of my opinion: I don't think this is capable of keeping up
with Wikipedia's changes, not because of the software, but because of
limited editor time.

I think if the watchlists are made more efficient, we'll get a far better
return on the developers' time investment.

--
Michael Turley
User:Unfocused


subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia misinformation, revisited

body:
On 9/5/05, Daniel P. B. Smith <dpbsmith at verizon.net> wrote:
>
> Back in June, I complained that a little particle of misinformation
> from Wikipedia had gotten lodged in my brain, and might potentially
> have affected my car-purchasing decision. Specifically, I was
> referring to an article that characterized the Toyota Echo, as a
> "flop" in the U.S. whose sales had tanked in 2004 and was due to be
> discontinued--despite continuing success in many other countries,
> including Canada.
>
> I challenged this, and Michael Turley responded that "The Echo is a
> failure, and is being discontinued." He referenced http://
> www.detnews.com/2005/autosinsider/0501/14/B02-58761.htm<http://www.detnews.com/2005/autosinsider/0501/14/B02-58761.htm>which indeed
> says "Toyota to pull compact Echo from lineup in '06"
>
> Yet I just got my October 2005 copy of Consumer Reports, and right
> there on page 14 the Toyota Echo is billed among the "New and
> Notable: Cars to Watch in 2006-2007." They say "It should continue as
> a fuel-efficient small car... Small cars often grow with redesigns so
> you may see a longer, wider Echo and possibly a hatchback version."
>
> So, just what's going on? I'm not really complaining about Wikipedia
> here, since what it says is backed up by "The Detroit News Auto
> Insider," but if the Echo is being replaced by an improved Echo--
> that's not exactly my idea of a "flop" that's been "discontinued."
>
> By that measure, every refreshing of a car model line could be
> described as a "flop."

It now looks like we have sources who disagree.

AutoWeek 8/22/05: (http://www.autoweek.com/news.cms?newsId=102996)

*"Echo:* This underachieving subcompact sedan gets replaced by the
European-market Yaris this fall. The Echo name will be retired, but it is
not known what name will be used. A sedan and a five-door hatchback will be
offered. This 2006 vehicle likely will be powered by a 1.5-liter engine
developing about 110 hp."

I don't know who is right, but AutoWeek is usually a very reliable source of
upcoming model changes in my experience.

--
Michael Turley
User:Unfocused


from_name: Domas Mituzas

subject:
[Foundation-l] Donation drive stopped early with
	insufficientfunds collected

body:
We can always stop serving requests after our performance goal with current budget is reached. Huh ;-/

Domas


subject: [WikiEN-l] Quality tags

body:
> * "patrolled" (as in Recent Changes "simple vandalism" patrol)
> * "accurate" (i.e. "I am personally convinced that Everything
> this article says is true and correct."
 > * "inaccurate" (contains mistakes, which we *hope* they'll mention on
> the talk page)

These two tags aren't a bad idea; however, accuracy is a subjective term,
often. Is it accurate in the mind of the tagger, or accurate in the mind of
the encyclopedia? Also, the problem with dating occurs, because an article
on, say, [[Ayn Rand]] may be accurate today. But if she writes a new book,
or converts to communism, or kills 5 people in New Hampshire, the article,
while still factually true, needs to be fixed. Tagging would not solve many
problems there.

> * "graffiti" (or "vandalism" = someone has messed up this version,
> but I don't have the time, inclination or ability to undo the damage)

That's what, hopefully, users use IRC for. Alternatively, there are pages
(Administrators' Noticeboard, while not the ideal place, would be a good
start) to report vandalism that has been left unchecked.

> * "balanced" (i.e., nothing has been left out or downplayed)
> * "bias" (tells one side of a story, especially in a raging controversy)

 Again, balance and bias is subjective, perhaps even more so than accuracy.
[[George W. Bush]], while usually a great article, is occasionally tagged
with a "neutrality/NPOV" notice. While, occasionally, the progression of
time will result in the article gaining biased information, more often it's
just a disgruntled person, who either supports Bush and doesn't like
information that tends to go against him, or absolutely hates Bush, and is
mad because his/her Xanga blog link about how "bush sux0rs!" keeps getting
removed. Controversy would be even worse if there were an official status
for this.

--
Sincerely,
Ral315
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Ral315


from_name: Snowspinner

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: One Where We Blew It

body:
On Sep 6, 2005, at 5:21 AM, Alphax wrote:
>
> Now if the webcomics community feels wronged by the Wikipedia
> community,
> I am sorry. But we cannot help it if we find an article on our
> encyclopedia which fails our notability guidlines. It is not the
> job of
> Wikipedia, *and never will be*, to make things notable.

Which notability guidelines are these? The terrible webcomic ones
that I outlined the problems of? Or the ones at [[WP:NOT]] where it
says there are "no practical limit to the number of topics we can
cover other than verifiability and the other points presented on this
page?"

I mean, we're not talking about someone's garage band with a single
self-released EP here. Articles are getting deleted that are
verifiable articles on webcomics with substantial readerships. Elf
Only Inn was picked up by the biggest webcomic syndicate online.
Deleted.

And what on Earth does it mean to be notable outside its community?
For a webcomic to be notable outside its own fans? Outside of
webcomics fans in general? We're willing to have an article on each
individual Simpsons episode (Explicitly - it's on the meta page
"Wikipedia is not paper"). Are these notable outside of Simpsons
fans? Or is the judgment that Simpsons fandom is somehow more notable
than webcomics fandom? And if so, who's making that judgment?

-Snowspinner


from_name: Stan Shebs

body:
Boris Lohnzweiger wrote:

>Roger wrote:
>
>
>>The German WP doesn't keep articles
>>just because the subject is notable. If an article is too short, it
>>will get deleted unless someone expands it (IIRC a time limit of a few
>>days is quite common).
>>
>
>This is not correct. There are a number of two or three line articles that have been on the German Wikipedia for at least a year and nobody is planning to delete them. According to German WP deletion rules shortness doesn't justify a deletion and deletion is only a means of last resort ("letztes Mittel") if other measures fail. If it weren't that way, would we have almost 300,000 articles then?
>
The conclusion that I take away from this thread is that yes,
each wikipedia has its own culture and preferred practices, and
it would be extraordinarily useful to have articles describing
all that. Even just a translated summary of distinctive policy
pages would be helpful to people who are not fluent in the other
WP's language. For instance, if I were interested in whether the
Russian WP accepts "fair use" images, an English WP article on
the Russian WP would probably be a more reliable way to find out
than by posting an English-language question on the Russian
equivalent of village pump.

Stan


from_name: Angela

body:
On 9/6/05, Tim Starling <t.starling at physics.unimelb.edu.au> wrote:
> I'm wondering why the donation drive was stopped early, before the
> enough money was collected to cover the Foundation's Q3 budget of
> $198,000. After our discussion in August about the German chapter, I
> thought it was fairly clear that those funds could not be used for the
> general operating expenses of the Florida Foundation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Revert

I expect the people editing the sitenotice were unaware that the drive
was meant to be a "21-day" one rather than one which would end when
the initial goal was met, as it was last time.

Angela.


from_name: Guettarda

body:
Felix

You really need to look at how you address people and address conflict. Your
complaint about Moriori was posted, verbatim, in dozens of separate places.
Posting the same message in a
whole lot of places is considered spamming.

Several people pointed out that your edits were breaking other people's
comments. Whatever the cause, it isn't like you were unaware of the problem.
You really should check to make sure you didn't do it after posting to a
talk page. If you know you are creating a problem you should clean it up,
not rely on other people to clean it up for you.

Other users do not constitute "official channels", and it is not the job of
admins or mediators to act as intermediaries. You should have communicated
with Zoe directly, not asked Dmcdevit to convey you message for you -
everyone on this site is a volunteer, there are no paid staff. In addition,
you need to talk with people (not at them) and you need to lay off the
demands a little. Again, we are all in the same boat here. A little more
conversation and a few less "I demand satisfaction or I will see you in
court" type exchanges would go a long way. This is a community, not a
structured bureacracy. Yelling at people never helps. You say that when you
told Zoe that you would "seek arbitration" she called it a "threat". It is a
threat.

Creating new accounts to bypass a block is strictly forbidden. What's the
point of blocking someone for misconduct if they can just come back under a
new name? You have asked that "punitive action" be taken against Zoe, but
all she did was enforce the rules. Inserting hard returns into people's
comments is considered vandalism. If it was unintentional, as you say, then
you should have fixed it when it happened. Sure, admins should not let their
mood cloud their decisions, but then, every admin decision can be undone by
other admins. If you had come here and pleaded your case, accepted
responsibility for what you had done wrong, resolving to behave in a more
collegial manner in the future, someone would have unblocked you. Your
actions met the definitions of "vandalism" and "spamming", even if you did
not intend them to. You have engaged in sockpuppetry. And you have consumed
hours of people like Dmcdevit's, Flcelloguy's and Duncharris's time (and
those are just the people who's Talk pages I watch), repeating the same
complaint over and over. This isn't a business, you don't get and can't
demand instant responses.

As for "resuming your normal activities on Wikipedia" - they have mostly
consisted of a battle to get apologies from people who have offended you.
Leaving the Moriori issue aside (which you both agreed to settle) you still
have a long list of people from whom you have "demanded" apologies for
perceived slights. And a word to the wise - people who want to get into
vendettas should really start with an easier target than Raul/Mark. Other
than Jimbo and the Stewards, I dount there is anyone more
powerful/influential in En.

Ian


from_name: Ryan Bobko

subject: [Wikitech-l] Skinning A wiki

body:
Hi Matt,
I've done some extensive work with skinning MediaWiki over the last
couple months. Things like displaying different styles on depending on
what actual wiki page was showing (and making db calls in some places to
figure that out...).

That said, I found I got the biggest bang for my buck (by far) simply
changing the stylesheets. If you look at the page source for MediaWiki,
you'll find that pretty much everything has a CSS class associated with
it, which makes hiding/showing/moving things on the page very easy. I'm
continually impressed with this aspect (as well as others, of course) of
the software.

Contact me offline if you have specific questions; I'd be happy to walk
you through some examples.

ry

> Hello,
>
> I was wondering if anyone here has any experience or has any
information on
> skinning wiki's.
> I am looking for perhaps some white papers and or a tutorial. I am
surprised
> not to find more on the web on it since it is no easy task for those not
> already tempered with the daunting task.
>
> Anyways, any info on skinning a wiki would be really appreciated - I am
> trying to find folks who want to share any lessons learned or
information on
> the matter.
>
> Thank you.
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>
>


from_name: Jeff Heikkinen

body:
Guettarda wrote:
> Felix

(lots of wise things)

> Ian

It's funny, I could copy/paste that, change a few words here and there,
and it would be the perfect response to Mr Frank as well. And from what
I've seen, nearly every other seriously disruptive user. Interesting how
they seem to fall in such similar patterns.

--
Jeff Heikkinen
jeff.h at shaw.ca

"Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never
stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and
neither do we."
			-- George W. Bush, Washington, D.C., Aug. 5, 2004


body:
[[User:Felix Frederick Bruyns]]:

Ignoring the random line breaks, which you claim to be something wrong with
your computer, and yet they don't happen on every edit, just certain ones,
let's look at everything else involved in the block.

Your first edit was to [[Wikipedia:Speedy deletions]], in which you state,
"Please delete my user page, along with that of "Felix F. Bruyns" (who ,
needless to say, is also me), since I have decided that I cannot reform
Wikipedia of its immorality and that I should not associate with such a vile
libertine and libertarian website in any way." You continue on a long tirade
that I won't copy on this mailing list, see
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Speedy_deletions&diff=prev&oldid=22314473

Looking at your other contributions, it's plain to see that Zoe was probably
right in blocking you. Since you created an account on September 1st, 152 of
your 207 edits have been on User talk pages, and most of the edits were
inflammatory in nature. I bring up an edit to Zoe's talk page, in which you
state, "I am the wrong man to bully and bluster in this way as you will
learn in arbitration. You crossed a line against me on several levels and I
will request every possible punitive measure against your libel and threats
on the highest level of arbitration." See
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Zoe&diff=prev&oldid=22678674

You removed a conversation from Raul654's talk page at least four times,
including
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Raul654&diff=prev&oldid=22668553and
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Raul654&diff=prev&oldid=22664500

You removed a conversation from a June 2004 archive page, when you were
still editing as an IP, because users referred to you as a "troll". (I have
since restored this). Which they had a good point about. See
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia%3AVillage_pump%2FJune_2004_archive_1&diff=22360625&oldid=16517495

And, most of all, you're threatening, accusing, and annoying some of the
most respected members of the Wikipedia community. That, I cannot accept or
ignore.

I had no part in the dispute between Felix and other editors, but it's plain
to see that Felix was wrong. All of the above edits were serious violations
of Wikipedia guidelines and policies. And I'm sure I've missed others.

--
Sincerely,
Ral315
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Ral315


from_name: Fred Bauder

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Repeated abusing of me by Mr. Vrba

body:
The Arbitration Committee on En can do nothing.

Fred

On Sep 6, 2005, at 12:48 PM, V?t Zv?novec wrote:

>> As a Steward, I state that we do not take actions on requests of
>> single
>> persons, but only at the request of communities.
>>
> OK. Three persons is not enough, isn't it? How can I get request of
> the
> community when I am blocked?
>
>
>> Unless you can show me evidence that your request is carried by a
>> broader
>> group within the Czech Wikipedia, I will not take any action, and
>> I am quite
>> convinced that my colleagues have the same opinion on this.
>>
> OK. What else I should have do? Ask ArbCom at en:? On cs: there's
> none. Or
> directly Wikimedia's Board of Trustees?
>
>     Yours faithfully,
>             V?t Zv?novec
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


from_name: Mathieu Jondet

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Implementing a multi-language support website like
	DevMo

body:
Hi all,
  I'd like to have some hints on how i could be able to configure a
multi-language website with Mediawiki in the same way as it was set up
at DevMo (http://developer.mozilla.org) ?

  The setup I want is to have uri in the form :
* http://www.mywebsite.com/en/ for english
* http://www.mywebsite.com/fr/ for french
* http://www.mywebsite.com/es/ for spanish
* etc ...

  I want to set it up on a GNU / Linux Debian server with Apache.

  I'm afraid the only way to do this is to set-up as much mediawiki
install as I have languages and then generate interwiki links.

  Is that right ?

Thanks.

Mathieu


from_name: Ryan Norton

subject: [WikiEN-l] One Where We Blew It

body:
Hi,

On Tuesday, September 6, 2005, at 02:01  PM, Jack Lynch wrote:

> VFD certainly won't pass, why don't we put ''it'' to a vote? ;)
>
> Jack (Sam Sp;ade)
>
> On 9/6/05, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> I move:
>>>
>>> 1. VFD or AFD or whatever it's called be shut down entirely. No
>>> article
>>>    deletion other than CSD, copyvios and similar. VFD is sufficiently
>>>    damaging that *nothing at all* would be better than it existing in
>>>    any present form.
>> I don't see much damage. but then I avoid the place if at all posible
>>

That's the problem though - by avoiding it its just contributing to the
problem....

>>> 2. A month to discuss new deletion mechanisms. 1 should get the keen
>>>    deletionists very interested indeed.
>>> 3. A vote. Nothing passes with under 75% support.
>>
>> nothing will pass
>>

Not even the rename passed, as it was done more in the name of WP:BOLD
- which is a good thing I think.  Not a good thing that they were
claiming consensus while doing it which inflamed a lot of tensions
though.

Also, I do wish we could do David's #1. I think the real question is
how much of the original wikiway does wikipedia want to follow....

Ryan


from_name: Jeremy Dunck

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Grammar for mediawiki markup?

body:
On 9/6/05, Timwi <timwi at gmx.net> wrote:
> However, it does not parse HTML tags yet. This is the main reason it's
> not in use, and also the main reason I have lost interest in developing
> it further. Maybe other syntax elements are missing too, but I can't
> think of any just now.

Thanks Timwi.  Is this because of tag soup?  No offense, but what was
the challenge?


from_name: Roger Luethi

body:
On Tue, 06 Sep 2005 06:34:53 +0200, Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 06, 2005 at 05:49:47AM +0200, Elisabeth Bauer wrote:
> > PS: In the german wikipedia these articles would probably have been
> > deleted as irrelevant...ehemm...that's our specific culture
>
> Are you sure they would ? Major wikipedias are among the most
> important websites of the net, with interesting history
> and a lot of influence over the internet culture at large.

It's a pretty safe assumption, yes. The German WP doesn't keep articles
just because the subject is notable. If an article is too short, it
will get deleted unless someone expands it (IIRC a time limit of a few
days is quite common).

Roger


from_name: Phil Sandifer

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: One Where We Blew It

body:
On 9/6/05, Alphax <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:

> Maybe you want to check [[WP:N]]. Just because something exists doesn't
> make it notable.

This is the same [[WP:N]] that starts with a big note that there is no
Wikipedia policy on notability, right?

-Snowspinner


from_name: Travis Mason-Bushman

subject: [WikiEN-l] One Where We Blew It

body:
On 9/6/05 2:22 PM, "Sam Korn" <smoddy at gmail.com> wrote:

> This is a question to which I don't know the answer.  If we can get an
> answer (and I doubt we will), then it would determine the whole future
> of Wikipedia.
>
> The question is fundementally "what is more important, wiki-, or -pedia?"

Our social policies are not a suicide pact. They are in place to help us
write the encyclopedia... We need to take due process seriously, but we also
need to remember: this is not a democracy, this is not an experiment in
anarchy, it's a project to make the world a better place by giving away a
free encyclopedia.
--Jimbo Wales

That says it all to me.

-FCYTravis @ en.wikipedia


from_name: Matt Mozer

subject: [Wikitech-l] Skinning A wiki

body:
Hello,

I was wondering if anyone here has any experience or has any information on
skinning wiki's.
I am looking for perhaps some white papers and or a tutorial. I am surprised
not to find more on the web on it since it is no easy task for those not
already tempered with the daunting task.

Anyways, any info on skinning a wiki would be really appreciated - I am
trying to find folks who want to share any lessons learned or information on
the matter.

Thank you.


from_name: Andrew Gray

subject: [WikiEN-l] Quality tags

body:
On 06/09/05, Poor, Edmund W <Edmund.W.Poor at abc.com> wrote:

> RC patrollers might like to know WHO has reviewed a version. If Mav says
> he's checked the diff for "simple vandalism", I wouldn't give it a
> second thought. He's the champ. He used to check EVERY change (!) when
> traffic was slow enough. Now that there are often 100s of edits per
> minute, this work needs to be split up. I would be happy to put in an
> hour, from time to time, if only I knew "who else" had certified a
> certain article version as "patrolled". I'd ignore known troublemakers,
> for example. Double check newbies, and not even bother reviewing the
> work of people I come to trust.

I haven't used it, but doesn't CDVF allow this functionality to some
degree, with whitelisting &c?

> For the looming print version (or CD / DVD version), we could
> automatically choose article versions which have a suitable combination
> of Approval Tags and Problem tags. (My own preference would be
> "patrolled" and no "graffiti".) A library might insist on "accurate" and
> "balanced" with no "inaccurate" or "bias".

Note that, thanks to transclusion, "no graffiti" does not mean it
doesn't have giant images of penises stuck everwhere across it...

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


from_name: Daniel Mayer

body:
--- Tim Starling <t.starling at physics.unimelb.edu.au> wrote:
> I'm wondering why the donation drive was stopped early, before the
> enough money was collected to cover the Foundation's Q3 budget of
> $198,000.

Er - the drive did not stop. I don?t recall the sitewide message going down.

> After our discussion in August about the German chapter, I
> thought it was fairly clear that those funds could not be used for the
> general operating expenses of the Florida Foundation.\

That is a technical issue, not a policy one. My suggestion is for the German
chapter to act on one of their hosting offers, buy a bunch of servers to use as
squids and then we can work out the ownership issues later.

> So the fundraising drive raised $220,849 - $36,866 = $183,983 towards
> the operating costs of the Foundation. This leaves a shortfall of
> $198,000 - $184,983 = $14,017.

Not a shortfall. A squid in Germany will negate the need for buying one in
Florida. The budget is based on needs; it is even likely that if the Yahoo!
servers go online this quarter, then that will negate the need for buying a
whole bunch of servers. The money saved would then roll-over into the next
quarter?s budget.

> This is really just an accounting error. What needs to be done now is
> the Florida budget needs to be revised downwards, by cutting out items
> that might instead be purchased by the Verein. Then the Verein needs to
> produce their own budget. Only then will we have a consisent story to
> tell to our generous donors.

If we don?t spend as much as we thought we?d need, then the left-over amount
simply rolls over into the next quarter?s budget. Alternatively, the board
could pass a supplementary budget for special projects that the un-spent money
can be used on. It is my understanding that this is what was going to happen
for everything collected above the $198,000 budget.

So yeah, the budgeting is a bit weird. But that is necessary due to the fact
that we have global needs and more than one organization collecting money.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

______________________________________________________
Click here to donate to the Hurricane Katrina relief effort.
http://store.yahoo.com/redcross-donate3/


from_name: Bass, Joshua L

subject: [Wikitech-l] Skinning A wiki

body:
I was in the same boat as you are currently only a few weeks ago. The
wiki skins are based entirely on stylesheets, which is something I knew
very little about. This means, that objects on the page are located
based on the .css file where the class and id's are called out, rather
than where they are positioned within the skin.php (monobook.php) file
(to an extent). You can however develop a skin from the ground up as
long as you take into account the required fields.

I started with the monobook skin and add a header. This can be done
several ways. I chose to add a table around the entire skin, adding a
left table cell, center table cell, and right table cell. The left and
right table cells are used to "frame" the wiki. The center table cell
houses the contents of the wiki.

To get a header, I inserted a table at the top of the center table cell
and gave it dimensions required for my header (i.e. height="150"). There
I put my site menu and logo.

I had to change the css for the tabs (labled p-cactions in the monobook
skin) in order to located them below the header.

There are still a few bugs, but the skin is 99% complete. See it in
action here:
http://www.350z-tech.com/wiki

-----Original Message-----
From: wikitech-l-bounces at wikimedia.org
[mailto:wikitech-l-bounces at wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Thomas Koll
Sent: Tuesday, September 06, 2005 2:48 PM
To: mattmozer at gmail.com; Wikimedia developers
Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] Skinning A wiki

Am 06.09.2005 um 21:42 schrieb Matt Mozer:
> I was wondering if anyone here has any experience or has any
> information on
> skinning wiki's.
> I am looking for perhaps some white papers and or a tutorial. I am
> surprised
> not to find more on the web on it since it is no easy task for
> those not
> already tempered with the daunting task.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Skins and
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Gallery_of_user_styles

ciao, tom

--
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benutzer:TomK32
http://www.tomk32.de

_______________________________________________
Wikitech-l mailing list
Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Upload overwrite restrictions

body:
Timwi wrote:
> Just so I understand this right --
>
> If an image exists in BOTH locations, then I can overwrite it freely,
> but if someone then deletes the LOCAL one, then suddenly everyone loses
> the right to upload that image because the shared one is now used?
>
> It seems a bit weird, but it also makes sense. :)

Correct. If there is an already existing local image with a given name,
the shared one is ignored/irrelevant.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 253 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
URL: <http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/attachments/20050906/31ce3be7/attachment.pgp>


subject: [Wikitech-l] Skinning A wiki

body:
Well I'm a newbie coder/skinner :) I will try your method.

-----Original Message-----
From: wikitech-l-bounces at wikimedia.org
[mailto:wikitech-l-bounces at wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Thomas Koll
Sent: Tuesday, September 06, 2005 3:14 PM
To: Wikimedia developers
Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] Skinning A wiki

Am 06.09.2005 um 22:00 schrieb Bass, Joshua L:
> To get a header, I inserted a table at the top of the center table
> cell
> and gave it dimensions required for my header (i.e. height="150").
> There
> I put my site menu and logo.

That's so 90ies.

Better solution (untested):
give #logo position: absolute; left: 0; top: 0; width: 100%
use background-image in #logo to display your image.
for the three menus, put them into the sidebar where the should be and
use position: absolute; right: 0; top: 0; to position them. make sure
that #column-content and #column-one have a fitting margin-top

(found a nice hint for the margin: and padding: values : TRouBLe ;-)

ciao, tom
--
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benutzer:TomK32
http://www.tomk32.de

_______________________________________________
Wikitech-l mailing list
Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l


from_name: JAY JG

subject: [WikiEN-l] One Where We Blew It

body:
>From: fun at thingy.apana.org.au (David Gerard)
>
>I move:
>
>1. VFD or AFD or whatever it's called be shut down entirely. No article
>    deletion other than CSD, copyvios and similar. VFD is sufficiently
>    damaging that *nothing at all* would be better than it existing in
>    any present form.
>2. A month to discuss new deletion mechanisms. 1 should get the keen
>    deletionists very interested indeed.
>3. A vote. Nothing passes with under 75% support.

I move to replace point 1 of your proposal with:

1. Keep current VFD/AFD process for now, as it's generally working pretty
well.

The rest seems a good idea.

Jay.


from_name: Boris Lohnzweiger

body:
Roger wrote:

> The German WP doesn't keep articles
> just because the subject is notable. If an article is too short, it
> will get deleted unless someone expands it (IIRC a time limit of a few
> days is quite common).

This is not correct. There are a number of two or three line articles that have been on the German Wikipedia for at least a year and nobody is planning to delete them. According to German WP deletion rules shortness doesn't justify a deletion and deletion is only a means of last resort ("letztes Mittel") if other measures fail. If it weren't that way, would we have almost 300,000 articles then?

Boris

_________________________________________________________________________
Mit der Gruppen-SMS von WEB.DE FreeMail k?nnen Sie eine SMS an alle
Freunde gleichzeitig schicken: http://freemail.web.de/features/?mc=021179


from_name: Александр Сигачёв

subject: [Wikitech-l] Problem with plural forms

body:
It's a problen about plural forms in some languages. Example, where
are 3 form of plural in Russian,  depending on "count mod 10".

Some translations (transliteration):

120 articles = 120 statEY
121 articles = 121 statYA
122 articles = 122 statYI
123 articles = 123 statYI
125 articles = 125 statEY
126 articles = 126 statEY

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plural

So I have written function "convertPluralForm" in Language.php and
LanguageRu.php. Invoked:

  {{NUMBEROFARTICLES}}
{{pluralform:{{NUMBEROFARTICLES}}|wordform1|wordform2|wordform3}}

and it's fine, but it don't work in MediaWiki messages. Examle in
"MediaWiki:categoryarticlecount" ("There are $1 articles in this
category."), because in

 $1 {{pluralform:$1|wordform1|wordform2|wordform3}}

substitution of number occurs later, than a call of function (function
pluralform receives not number, but a string "$1").

Any ideas?

--
meta:ajvol


subject: [WikiEN-l] One Where We Blew It

body:
On 9/6/05, David Gerard <fun at thingy.apana.org.au> wrote:
>
>
> Tch! And I remember you ranting on IRC about how rude the inclusionists
> were on VFD and how the deletionists would never be so obnoxious ...
>
> Note, by the way, that the spurious deletion criteria for webcomics is a
> symptom of the spurious criterion of "notability". Which has repeatedly
> been rejected as policy.
>
> I move:
>
> 1. VFD or AFD or whatever it's called be shut down entirely. No article
> deletion other than CSD, copyvios and similar. VFD is sufficiently
> damaging that *nothing at all* would be better than it existing in
> any present form.
> 2. A month to discuss new deletion mechanisms. 1 should get the keen
> deletionists very interested indeed.
> 3. A vote. Nothing passes with under 75% support.
>
>
> - d.
>

As sad as AfD can occasionally be, it's an effective tool for band vanity,
etc. If we're going to get rid of AfD, we need to do one or more of the
following things first:

1. Expand CSD to include things like band vanity, etc. that get submitted to
AfD on a daily basis.
2. Replace AfD with something better and easier.
3. Allow administrators to delete pages on site, replacing them with a
notice similar to {{deletedpage}}, and allowing all relevant debate on VfU
(controversial, but perhaps an easier system than VfD is right now).

I don't think removing AfD entirely will solve anything; rather, I think
accomplished trolls will start to add nonsense that *barely* passes CSD, but
is unencyclopedic, or even non-factual in nature. The United States nearly
collapsed until the Constitution was written, because the Articles of
Confederation were as well as having no policy at all. Such would be the
case if we deleted the main deletion mechanism.

--
Sincerely,
Ral315
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Ral315


subject: [WikiEN-l] Protecting nonexistent pages

body:
On 9/6/05, David Gerard <fun at thingy.apana.org.au> wrote:
>
> ABCD (en.abcd at gmail.com) [050904 16:39]:
> > On 9/4/05, Ryan W. (Merovingian) wrote:
>
> > > [[User:Lucky 6.9]] and I have been discussing this possibilty: What if
> > > one was able to proect a deleted/nonexistent page? The same page would
> > > not be created over and over if it has no place in Wikipedia. When the
> > > clueless newbie/troll/vandal goes away, it can be unprotected, just
> > > like normal. The best defense for this is the fact that the
> > > {{deletedpage}} template would become obsolete. In addition, it would
> > > be a relief on the servers (even if it's minor). Any thoughts?
>
> > Submitted to bugzilla as bug# 3357
> > <http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3357>.
>
>
> We already do this in some cases, in the form of creating a blank page and
> protecting the blank page for a while. I'm not sure we need to add a
> feature to MediaWiki.
>
>
> - d.
>

I think the goal of this feature would be to get rid of the need to create a
blank page and protect it. Looking at [[Special:Shortpages]], for example,
is nearly impossible, because of all the deletedpage templates in there.
What they're advocating is making this unnecessary.

--
Sincerely,
Ral315
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Ral315


from_name: Magnus Manske

subject: [WikiEN-l] Quality tags

body:
Poor, Edmund W wrote:

> What do you all think?
>
I think we should stick to Jimbos plan and turn the validation feature
loose and see what happens; then decide base on the data we gather.

It was working OK before Wikimania, and still should...

I know, Brion is busy with the XML export/import and a zillion other
things, but if you find a few minutes, maybe you could give it a quick
check and turn it on? If it drags the servers down, it can always be
turned off again...

Magnus
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 253 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
Url : http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/attachments/20050906/bc5557c1/attachment.pgp


from_name: Tim Starling

subject:
[Foundation-l] Donation drive stopped early with insufficient funds
	collected

body:
I'm wondering why the donation drive was stopped early, before the
enough money was collected to cover the Foundation's Q3 budget of
$198,000. After our discussion in August about the German chapter, I
thought it was fairly clear that those funds could not be used for the
general operating expenses of the Florida Foundation.

So the fundraising drive raised $220,849 - $36,866 = $183,983 towards
the operating costs of the Foundation. This leaves a shortfall of
$198,000 - $184,983 = $14,017.

The Verein has nominated a few things that they would like to spend
money on, such as hardware within Germany, and that's all very well, I'm
sure it will help with our general mission. But those costs are not part
of the Florida Q3 budget, they are part of the Verein budget. So the
shortfall still remains.

This is really just an accounting error. What needs to be done now is
the Florida budget needs to be revised downwards, by cutting out items
that might instead be purchased by the Verein. Then the Verein needs to
produce their own budget. Only then will we have a consisent story to
tell to our generous donors.

-- Tim Starling


from_name: Paweł Dembowski

body:
> It's a pretty safe assumption, yes. The German WP doesn't keep articles
> just because the subject is notable. If an article is too short, it
> will get deleted unless someone expands it (IIRC a time limit of a few
> days is quite common).
> Roger

It seems to me that Swedish Wikipedia is quite the opposite - they
have over 100,000 articles mostly because of the huge amount of
substubs...

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


from_name: Mark Williamson

body:
>From what I can tell, the situation had already been resolved with the
agreement that Vit would only edit on talkpages, and there was an
agreement in place which he did not break, but he was banned anyways.

When another admin unbanned him, someone somehow started the process
of desysopping that person, so now any other people who may support
him have been intimidated.

Mark

On 06/09/05, Angela <beesley at gmail.com> wrote:
> The Board's role is not to interfere in user disputes. Two members of
> the Board, myself and Anthere, have already commented on this matter,
> on Meta, but in our position as members of the community, not as
> members of the Board. The Czech Wikipedia has 14 admins, which seems
> to me enough people to watch over each other's actions and reverse
> unfair blocks if those occur. I don't see what the Board could do if
> the community there has decided that you should be de-adminned or
> blocked. Do you have dispute resolution mechanisms in place on that
> Wikipedia? Is there another user you trust who could try to mediate
> for you?
>
> Angela.
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>

--
SI HOC LEGERE SCIS NIMIVM ERVDITIONIS HABES
QVANTVM MATERIAE MATERIETVR MARMOTA MONAX SI MARMOTA MONAX MATERIAM
POSSIT MATERIARI
ESTNE VOLVMEN IN TOGA AN SOLVM TIBI LIBET ME VIDERE


from_name: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason

subject: [Wikitech-l] Problem with plural forms

body:
I changed it from {{pluralform:}} to just {{plural:}}, however it
should be able to handle more than three forms of the word, since some
languages have more plurals than that.


from_name: Jack Lynch

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: One Where We Blew It

body:
Deletionist simpson fans.

Jack (Sam Spade)

> And what on Earth does it mean to be notable outside its community?
> For a webcomic to be notable outside its own fans? Outside of
> webcomics fans in general? We're willing to have an article on each
> individual Simpsons episode (Explicitly - it's on the meta page
> "Wikipedia is not paper"). Are these notable outside of Simpsons
> fans? Or is the judgment that Simpsons fandom is somehow more notable
> than webcomics fandom? And if so, who's making that judgment?
>
> -Snowspinner


from_name: Sophie Petterka

body:
Dear Angela,

I wanted to contact you since sometimes now but was hinder to do so and
couldn't found the way to do so.
Thats why I am using that mail to tell you about the problem.

It is about a site, english, called Talk Bogdanovs affair"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:213.237.21.6

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Bogdanov_Affair

For about 2 weeks ago, one of the user, YBM, begin to deleet all my edit on
this site and hindered me to can say anything on that site.
I had discovered some pretty annoying informations about that personns and
its real reasons to be opposed to the Bogdanovs.
Pretending that the problem was scientifics inaccuracies, he was in fact,
during 2 whole years, attacking the Bogdanovs and their books based on an
ideologie called "postsituationism" and which rules are to create a falsh
assuption that something is wrong and to get as many "idiots" (as they call
them in their web site) to follow them.
The higher the idiot are, the beter: here it will be scientists, and they
fooled some!
They use all kind of tricks, fordgery of documents put at disposition on
line, falsh identity, write letters to the employer of the people they
attack, insult the people, accuse them of being uneducated, to disposed of
those having the necessary scientific bagground to dismantle their
accusations, and denial.
The found I made was done through earlier victims from that group, and
essentially of YBM, who contacted me, and told me about what happened to
them 2 years ago, prior to this Bogdanovs affair. They are writers, one of
them a cooking book, and they became victims of the savage attacks of YBM,
and this postsituationists organisation, which costed them their job.
YBM stopped when he saw a chance at getting even bigger and more
international with the Bogdanovs story.
A paper was edited against their thesis in a scientific journal, but a
dementie was given 4 days later.
Nonetheless, YBm begin his home made story who has now put much discredit on
the Bogdanovs brothers and their thesis and their book, and has involved
thousands of people and known scientists.
It was therefor very important that I came out with this vital information
about hte truth of the all story, the bluff it all was.
YBM tried to hinder me doing so by remov?ng my edit as many times as I put
it on, and using the revert function which I didn't knew about at that time.
I wrote to C?sar (C?r?al at killer) from the equivalent french site about it,
but he was busy at that time and couldn't do much to help me.
I was suddendly bannished from the site, as YBM had accused me of being the
one vandalizing the site, and convinced an admi of it.
I tried subsequently to explain the other users and the admi that it wasn't
so, and explecitly asked for the course of action to take in case of
security flaw in form of a user accusing another user of vandalism when this
user was in fact the one performing it.
I didn't received any answer, but a threat and was accused by the dmi to
have deleeted her answer??!!!
Of course I didn't have, but was banished for a week!
I was very angry at the turn of event, and during the time I was banished,
this sudden appearing admi did deleete all my posts and delleeted all the
entire site (!) up to the 2nd of september!
This site was opened in march this year so you can imagine all the
informations who went out.
This include the scientificals proove from the doctors Igor and Grichka
Bogdanov, evidences against all the points of attack made by their
detractors.
All the important links are also gone.
This has been doen from an admi who had never been on this site and never
interested herself for this affair and didn't knew about the past of people
like YBM.
For exemple on the french wiki about this subject, but also all over the
web, and his forums where he attack the Bogdanovs based on their physical
appearences and age...
He has on this site also given the title "GARBAGE" to 2 of my edit, among
them this revelation about his true motives, which I changed to "VERY
IMPORTANT STATEMENT" that he changed again for garbage and accused me of
vandalisme on my own articles!!
Which was taken as serious by the admi who banished me subsequently from the
site!
Without noticing that he also had deleeted my texts, and also that he was
using and abusing of the revert function every night, reverting the site up
to 7 times per hours.
No warning nor punishment was given to this YBM about that, and he wasn't
even accused of havin?g done so, but I was!!!
On the top of that, the first time I was banish, for 24 hours, it was
without warning at all, without explainations, and the name of the admi
having banished me was Cereal at killer, whom I was in constant contact with,
and whom i was refering of the sabotage I was victim of by YBM, each and
every night, often several times by night.
He couldn't do a thing has he didn't knew any admi from the english
site...and I didn't knew enough about the wiki communications system, and
there was no admi name on my site, so I didn't knew who else to contact.
It was very frustrationg to be put the hand on the mouth for more than a
week and not able to do anything or contact anybody about it, as the
criminal was accusing me of sabotaging the site, at the same time.
I think that it is about time to gather people together and to decide what
to do about this YBM, and about the conduct of this admi who deleeted all
the site.
out of 8 users, 5 are against the changes that the admi have performed and
don't feel free to express themselves as she always take side on YBM and
blame any attempts made to contradict him.
On the 3 other users, one is YBM and I am not in touch with the others, but
one of them must be julien who used to send me private mail as to ask for my
mening and in fact insulted me many times.
Until I very seriously convinced him to stop mailing me.
It occur one week before YBM begin to deleete all my articles on the site.
This YBM is engeneer in informatic and could have done many things, among it
put the name of cereal killer as the admi having banished me, thought it
wasn't C?sar who did it.
The admi of this site who have sabotage all the site is Bishonen, a girl,
and the admi who is looking at it for C?sar since yesterday is Sam Hocevar.
But.. as most of the site, 95 to 99 %, has been deleeted by the grace of
Bishonen, it remain difficult for someone to conduct an enquiry on this
affair now.
I was banished a week, finishing today, and what i come back to is a dead
zone.
Bishonen removed all the day after she had taken care to displace me on an
isolated place where I could shout loud and be heard by nobody.
I couldn't either visit any of the other site of wiki during this banishing
period, nor write an email to the administrator of the site,or any other
administrators.
She pretended that if i had any proove of her wrongness she will upheave
this banishment immediatly, but in fact she never aswered my questions but
answered once about something all apart from the subject.
She also accused me on the site of having abused of the revert function,
knowing it was impossible as I had first known about it after she had
banished me once for a day, and that YBM tried again to remove my articles,
and I replaced it using that function. From that time he stopped to remove
my articles, as it will have been much easier for me to replace them, but i
was banished for a week the day after, on the accusation that I had deleeted
the answer of Bishonen on the site.
I had done nothing of the kind, and asked for her to remove her accusations
from the site: she had even put it as a title of her answer, with my name on
it...
I do not like to see this stalinistic censorship governing on wiki, not do i
like to see those machiavelics methods used by unpunished users, nor the
threatening methods used by this admi to keep all the other users dancing on
her key note, without a word against the outrageous sabotage who is taking
place on the site.

I would like you to take a look at it and to have a discussion with the
creator of Wiki, about what to do to inforce security and prevent that a
user performing sabotages use of wiki security system against such to report
his victims as being those vandalazing the site or his own articles?
What can i do as a user when a admi make error or deliberatly take side with
this kind of person, and threaten all others?
I have been told goodnight stories and now I would like to see som real
facts, actions taking place.
Can wiki tolerate this kind of behaviour without reacting?
Whom can a user contact directly when this kind of thing occur, wihtout
having to wait 2 weeks like here, and before the whole site is destroyed
beyond recognition, and in a way who will seriously handicapped any enquiry.
Many times I felt like if I had to do the job of the admi as this one wasn't
anywhere to be seen. And now that he is not asked for he is there all the
time and bloking everybody to intervene except for YBM.
How can the replacement of my own texts and title be considered as
vandalism, and how can the guy who did it be left in peace and protected?

I have been seriously hurted by this chain of event and by the unjustice who
continue to dominate this affair.
I don't think it is allright to just look the other way and let this be asit
is "until next time".
I ask for justice and i am in the right to do so.
This Bishonen admi made laugh at the first amendment, I replied to her by
asking her, " well, where would you be without it, and what wiki?
It will also be a good idea to look at the communication site of this
Bishonen where she is talking with some of her friends admi?, and this YBM,
agree with him about that my IP signature is anonymous (!!) and decide to
banish me for a week.
I always signed with Sophie XAL followed by my ip adress who appear by
pushing on the signature button.
I think that this is too much and that this story against the Bogdanovs has
to end.
I founded the piece of evidence to stop all those speculations, after only 3
weeks following this affair, and it was so important that YBM was ready to
go all that way to hinder me to show it as all the people who had followed
him until now will see who he really was, and what were his real motives all
along: manipulations on line.
An experiment, in virtual reality, as some philosophers made thought
experiments.
And now the best, how to manipulate an admi on wiki, and get all the
mountain of evidences to diseappear in 48 hours.

I hope that YOU will be able to act decisively and that YOU are the one that
I should have contacted from the beginning.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:213.237.21.6

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Bogdanov_Affair

Best regards,

Sophie Petterka
sophie at nostromo.dk
0045 35 82 31 39
Copenhaguen
Danmark

----- Original Message -----
From: "Angela" <beesley at gmail.com>
To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List" <foundation-l at wikimedia.org>
Sent: Tuesday, September 06, 2005 12:01 PM
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Donation drive stopped early with
insufficientfunds collected

On 9/6/05, Tim Starling <t.starling at physics.unimelb.edu.au> wrote:
> I'm wondering why the donation drive was stopped early, before the
> enough money was collected to cover the Foundation's Q3 budget of
> $198,000. After our discussion in August about the German chapter, I
> thought it was fairly clear that those funds could not be used for the
> general operating expenses of the Florida Foundation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Revert

I expect the people editing the sitenotice were unaware that the drive
was meant to be a "21-day" one rather than one which would end when
the initial goal was met, as it was last time.

Angela.
_______________________________________________
foundation-l mailing list
foundation-l at wikimedia.org
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l


body:
I think that the problem is how much value is placed on article count.

Rather, we should place the value on size in bytes -- obviously, some
languages take up more or less space than others, but it does seem to
work better: some Wikis with high article counts but low amounts of
content appear lower or on the same level with Wikis with low article
counts but relatively high amounts of content.

For example, see br.wiki, scn.wiki, li.wiki, compare them with
bn.wiki, sa.wiki (much of the size of sa.wiki is artificial as well
due to whole sections of the Rgveda being copied verbatim when they
really belong in Wikisource), and gd.wiki.

In fact, you can tell just how nasty so many of the articles on
sa.wiki are by taking a look at this image:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wikistats/EN/PlotDatabaseSize7.png

It's the only wiki of such a size to have the vast majority of its
growth in giant leaps like that, which is indicative of a bot or some
other fast, low-quality article adding technique.

Mark

On 06/09/05, Tomasz Wegrzanowski <taw at users.sf.net> wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 06, 2005 at 11:52:21PM +0200, Lars Aronsson wrote:
> > Pawe? Dembowski wrote:
> > > It seems to me that Swedish Wikipedia is quite the opposite - they
> > > have over 100,000 articles mostly because of the huge amount of
> > > substubs...
> >
> > I agree that this is embarrasing and should be addressed. I think
> > that the Danish Wikipedia, with 30,000 articles, has an even
> > higher percentage of (sub-)stubs than the Swedish one, but this is
> > just a feeling and I have no numbers to prove this.  We need a
> > statistic for the amount of (sub-)stubs, so we can talk verifiable
> > numbers (and set goals) instead of guestimates.  How do we define
> > that?  Is the ">200 ch" count ("alternative" article count, [1])
> > in Erik Zachte's Wikistats a good metric?  Or the percentage of
> > articles longer than 0.5 kilobytes [2]?  I think 200 characters is
> > an OK stub, but perhaps a substub is less than 70 characters?
> > This leaves us with the Special:Shortpages page.  That page has
> > the advantage of being instantly updated, which Wikistats is not.
> >
> > The Swedish Wikipedia has 421 articles (0.4% of 102K) shorter than
> > 70 bytes and the Danish has 351 (1.1% of 31K).  As a comparison,
> > the Dutch Wikipedia has 79 (0.08% of 89K) and the Polish has 387
> > (0.4% of 93K).  This makes the Polish look just as bad as the
> > Swedish, since both have 0.4% of articles shorter than 70 bytes.
> > But perhaps a substub should be defined at 50 bytes instead?
> > Or 100 bytes or 150?
>
> Numbers like 0.4% of articles tell more about effectiveness
> of the wikicleaning process than about the typical article.
> (and by the way, Special:Shortpages is not updated live
> on WikiMedia servers)
>
> Just take a look at the list of shortest pages on Polish
> Wikipedia - they're almost all:
> * Redirects (what are they doing on the list ?)
> * Disambiguation pages without descriptions for the links.
>   Sometimes articles have titles so obvious that {{disambig}} +
>   list of the links is enough.
> * A few cases of things that look like leftovers of the
>   past technical problems
> * A few cases of things that should be immediately deteled,
>   but have been missed or are simply too recent and will
>   be deleted soon
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>

--
SI HOC LEGERE SCIS NIMIVM ERVDITIONIS HABES
QVANTVM MATERIAE MATERIETVR MARMOTA MONAX SI MARMOTA MONAX MATERIAM
POSSIT MATERIARI
ESTNE VOLVMEN IN TOGA AN SOLVM TIBI LIBET ME VIDERE


body:
> The Poles are on their way to 100.000 as well by botway that create a
> lot of stubs. So are the Italian and Portugese which to my surprise are
> gaining on nl: very rapidly ... probably also by bot-stub-adding ... I
> wish them good luck and I hope that having more info in their own
> languages available will attract more contributors :)
> Waerth/Walter

Well, the bot articles are often better than man-made stubs, and they
are great as templates for further expansion. It would be a good idea
to make a project at meta for collecting such data to be used by bots.

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


from_name: Alfio Puglisi

body:
On Tue, 6 Sep 2005, Walter van Kalken wrote:

>>
> The Poles are on their way to 100.000 as well by botway that create a lot of
> stubs. So are the Italian and Portugese which to my surprise are gaining on
> nl: very rapidly ... probably also by bot-stub-adding ... I wish them good
> luck and I hope that having more info in their own languages available will
> attract more contributors :)

Italian will go in about a month from 60,000 to 100,000 mostly by bots
adding stubs about geographical places. There is already a project to
expands those stubs to reasonable quality, translating whatever info is
available in the town's native language wikipedia - and from other
languages, of course. In the meantime, the usual 4,000 new articles/month
rate has not changed much.

The popularity of bots, due to the rapid increase, has also promoted the
development of many bots dedicated to fix ortography and layout issues,
so existing pages are rapidly improving.

Alfio


from_name: Traroth

body:
And what's with "don't kill the stub" ?

Traroth

--- Roger Luethi <collector at hellgate.ch> a ?crit :

> It's a pretty safe assumption, yes. The German WP
> doesn't keep articles
> just because the subject is notable. If an article
> is too short, it
> will get deleted unless someone expands it (IIRC a
> time limit of a few
> days is quite common).
>
> Roger

___________________________________________________________________________
Appel audio GRATUIT partout dans le monde avec le nouveau Yahoo! Messenger
T?l?chargez cette version sur http://fr.messenger.yahoo.com


from_name: Chris Jenkinson

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

Bruynsf at cs.com wrote:
[...]

I found your message incredibly hard to read as you didn't use
paragraphs. Could you explain what "technical problems" you have? What
do you think has happened which led to Zoe's accusations against you?

Chris

- --
Chris Jenkinson
chris at starglade.org
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.1 (MingW32)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

iD8DBQFDHcnEEq6+ijeBrJ8RArhuAKCkO7FsvSaP3X7JR+ccAFaG6fVW6wCePojy
Ru9ePEWi+5Zcpm36ilM/BOw=
=9fg4
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----


from_name: Dan Grey

subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Wikimedia meeting today

body:
On 01/09/05, Aphaia <aphaia at gmail.com> wrote:
> Another technical solution is cross-project message inclusion -
> MediaWiki allows it technically but disabled if I recall correctly.
> Does it make a sense all WikiMedia project can include pages on a
> certain closed wiki, like foundation wiki and all project share a same
> noticeboard ? (a sort of shared sitenotice, but more lengthy message
> can be put in this project-wide). noticeboard).

I asked dammit if this was possible a few weeks ago, as it would
undoubtedly be a brilliant thing. He made some slightly pained
noises... and that was it. I took it as a "no" :-).

Dan


subject: [Foundation-l] What? Why? Who?

body:
On 01/09/05, Angela <beesley at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 8/31/05, Dan Grey <dangrey at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > BBC reply:
> >
> > Hi Dan, thanks for your email. The top searches are the
> > most-searched-for terms over an hour long period
>
> Extended BBC reply:
>
> ... "after we apply one filter, manual, to this list which removes
> duplications, massive spelling errors and offensive data."

Sorry, I should've been clear. I forwarded the mail in its entirety.
There was no "extended reply".

Dan


subject: [Foundation-l] What? Why? Who?


from_name: Michael Turley

subject: [WikiEN-l] One Where We Blew It

body:
On 9/6/05, Travis Mason-Bushman <travis at gpsports-eng.com> wrote:
> On 9/6/05 2:22 PM, "Sam Korn" <smoddy at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > This is a question to which I don't know the answer.  If we can get an
> > answer (and I doubt we will), then it would determine the whole future
> > of Wikipedia.
> >
> > The question is fundementally "what is more important, wiki-, or -pedia?"
>
> Our social policies are not a suicide pact. They are in place to help us
> write the encyclopedia... We need to take due process seriously, but we also
> need to remember: this is not a democracy, this is not an experiment in
> anarchy, it's a project to make the world a better place by giving away a
> free encyclopedia.
> --Jimbo Wales
>
> That says it all to me.
>
> -FCYTravis @ en.wikipedia

"Imagine a world in which every person has free access to the sum of
all human knowledge. That's what we're doing.   And we need your
help."

The line between knowledge and trivia is becoming smaller.  As the
power of computers to store, sort, retreive, and present information
in meaningful ways increases, our need for exclusivity, born in the
days of chiseled stone slabs, clay tablets, and painted pottery, fades
rapidly.

Something revolutionary has begun.

Until we face media shortage, a real relevant question is "At what
point does a combination of data become knowledge worth recording?"

--
Michael Turley
User:Unfocused