from_name: Daniel Arnold

subject: [Foundation-l] Instant Commons : INCORRECT

body:
Am Freitag, 09. Juni 2006 09:16 schrieb Brion Vibber:
> > http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Against_policy
> >
> > You have two choices:
> > * Slow deletion with (anymous) unlinking (see CheckUsage tab on top) in
> > all wikis including RTL wikis (great "fun" for LTR-people like me) and
> > maybe getting some messages that you should login there and talk to them
> > in let us say Hindi... And don't forget to check out the user "gallery"
> > of the uploader (see at his user page the tab "gallery", one copyvio
> > promises 5 more...)
>
> Killed a few, removed apparently bogus notices from a couple. Will revisit
> regularly, suggest you all do the same.
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

Thanks a lot I just saw the deletion log an hour ago. :-)

As http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=5716 had been introduced in
MediaWiki in order to reduce the reupload of alread deleted files i'd be
courious if it had any positive effect since its introduction. Maybe a
reupload/deletions comparison previous to its introduction and the same
afterwards. Would be interesting to know as we would have a sign if our
current ideas reducing copyvios from the beginning make sense at all.

Any further volunteers that are already Commons admins (I won't create new
ones ;-) that are sick of "where we are headed" debates and just want to do
stuff?

Arnomane


list: wikimedia-l

source: pipermail-mbox


list: wikien-l

from_name: Matt Brown

subject: [WikiEN-l] Lovely.

body:
On 6/9/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 6/9/06, Mark Gallagher <m.g.gallagher at student.canberra.edu.au> wrote:
> > I agree with you 180%.
> >
> > That is to say, *yes*:
> > - Wikipedians should not be editing from work
> > - The relationship between a Wikipedian and his boss is none of our
> >   business (*nor* is it the business of Wikipedia Review).
>
> Those statements are in conflict. We shouldn't care at all where or
> how Wikipedians edit.
>
> FWIW, I do most of my editing from work.

Exactly: whether or not a Wikipedian should be editing from work is a
matter for them and their employers.  We should neither approve nor
disapprove; we know nothing of the circumstances.

-Matt


subject: [WikiEN-l] Lovely.

body:
On 6/9/06, Mark Gallagher <m.g.gallagher at student.canberra.edu.au> wrote:
> Harrassment is an unvarnished Bad Thing.  Those who tracked down
> Katefan0 --- who, as has been pointed out repeatedly, was a *bloody
> good* administrator --- out of sheer malice towards people like you and
> I (I assume Wiktionary admins are no holier than your counterparts
> here), who telephoned her boss --- again, out of undirected malice
> against admins in general, --- who forced her to leave Wikipedia, and
> who invented fictional ethics complaints after the fact in a vain
> attempt to justify their behaviour, do not need our encouragement.  The
> reverse, it would seem to me, is in order.

It's worth pointing out that at no point has anyone said that Katefan0
was editing from work.

One is not safe from malicious complaints to one's employer simply
because one has never used work equipment or work time to edit
Wikipedia.

Unfortunately, too many employers are hyper-sensitive to bad publicity
to the degree that any complaint about an employee, regardless of
merit and regardless of whether it is to do with their activities
wholly outside of work, is a black mark.

An interesting aside: in some US states, including California,
employees cannot be fired or disciplined for political participation.
Thus, if your edits are to politics-related articles, you have a
degree of safety not found if you edit wholly unremarkable and
uncontroversial stuff ...

-Matt


from_name: Steve Bennett

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

body:
On 6/9/06, Kelly Martin <kelly.lynn.martin at gmail.com> wrote:
> I occasionally think about running for bureaucrat, but realize that by
> doing so I would be implicitly supporting the RfA system, which I have
> grave objections to and which I think should be reformed or eliminated
> entirely.

If you want to start a formal discussion about it, I'm all ears and mouths.

Steve


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

body:
On 6/9/06, MacGyverMagic/Mgm <macgyvermagic at gmail.com> wrote:
> Well, what's the point in blanking a page? The history would still be
> retained and it doesn't save any space.

Uh, I didn't really understand the complaint about old article
suggestions being stored in the first place. But if we really don't
want anons to be able to create articles (in the sense that an entry
on AfC is itself an article) that persist, then we should delete them
all periodically...

> Anyway, I want to correct a few misconceptions.
> AFC people aren't overworked the way deletion admins would be because AFC
> work doesn't require admin abilities. The overworkedness is simply due to
> the fact only a small number of people are tending to it. If my initial
> message can get more people interested in joining the workload for each
> individual person would go down.

Yep. I try and help out sometimes, but it's pretty repetitive...

> Lastly, I prefer the current situation to anons being able to create new
> pages. It's easier to evaluate a suggestion and post it if it's good than to
> spend half an hour deleting unsuitable entries from the main namespace.

Yep. Also, the created articles tend to meet the basic requirements
for a Wikipedia article:

- Suitable definition of subject
- Basic style (bolded subject)
- At least one source
- At least one category
- Stub tag

Which is more than can be said for a lot of articles created by
"established" Wikipedians.

Steve


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Shinjiman

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

body:
Hsiang-Tai Chien <htchien1225 at ...> writes:

>
> OK, "there are too many writing scripts for Chinese, so no auto-converter
should be implemeneted on
> Commons", is this your opinion?
>
> I still think auto-converter can help many Chinese people on Commons. Too
many writing scripts should not
> be a reason to stop it. Take zh.wp for example, the auto-converter helps
many Chinese people to understand
> the article, I believe it can also benifit Commons' Chinese users.
>
> BTW, if the Commons' community still think auto-converter is not OK for
them, then I will accept it.
> However, it seems this subject does not have much attention amount the
Commons' community.
>
> Regards,
> H.T.
>

The point is that not only Chinese users are using Commons, also the Japanese
and Korean using Commons too. As currently the MediaWiki software are using
the Unicode characters, the CJK ideographs not only denotes for the Chinese
language, and also some ideographs applies on Japanese or Korean Kanji.

Also being enable the auto-converter on the server, it needs to change the
$wgContLanguage into "zh" which zh includes the auto-converter. Don't forget
the Serbian language currently uses the auto-converter in language wiki sites
also. This is messed up the language scripts among several languages if we
apply the auto-converter in non-language based wiki sites, hence that any auto-
converter should not be implemented on them.

regards
Man


subject: [WikiEN-l] Objective oversight needed

body:
On 6/9/06, Guy Chapman aka JzG <guy.chapman at spamcop.net> wrote:
> For example, almost every instance of "are" should be replaced by
> "would be" since no large scale implementation has ever existed.

Fwiw, I don't necessarily agree. Take this paragraph:
--
One possible control algorithm places vehicles in imaginary moving
"slots" that go around the loops of track. Real vehicles are allocated
a slot by track-side controllers. On-board computers maintain their
position by using a negative feedback loop to stay near the center of
the commanded slot. One way vehicles can keep track of their position
is by integrating the input from speedometers, using periodic check
points to compensate for cumulative errors.
--
I don't have a problem with "Real vehicles are allocated..." when we
have already made clear that the system is "possible". We describe how
things *do* work in the fictional system. This does not seem very
different to me than saying "Under the proposed foobar download
management system, users are charged for each download..."

Just my humble opinion. (when was the last time you saw that written out?)

Steve


subject: [WikiEN-l] Lovely.

body:
On 6/9/06, Mark Gallagher <m.g.gallagher at student.canberra.edu.au> wrote:
> I agree with you 180%.
>
> That is to say, *yes*:
> - Wikipedians should not be editing from work
> - The relationship between a Wikipedian and his boss is none of our
>   business (*nor* is it the business of Wikipedia Review).

Those statements are in conflict. We shouldn't care at all where or
how Wikipedians edit.

FWIW, I do most of my editing from work.

Steve


body:
Brianna Laugher <brianna.laugher at ...> writes:

>
> On 09/06/06, Hsiang-Tai Chien <htchien1225 at ...> wrote:
> > zh-cn: Chinese language used in China, Simplified Chinese
> > zh-hk: Chinese language used in Hong Kong, Traditional Chinese
> > zh-sg: Chinese language used in Singapore, Traditional Chinese
> > zh-tw: Chinese language used in Taiwan, Traditional Chinese
> >
> > Although they are all Chinese, however, they use different terminologies
for the same thing due to the
> culture changes in the areas. It's not just that simple with Han-S and Han-
T. Also not a macro language I think.
> >
> > I know it might not be easy for an non-Chinese to understand this, but
it's the language we live with it day by day.
>
> So are you suggesting we should stick to these distinctions? And we
> should have four zh-versions of all pages and templates? Because the
> tendency I have noticed is to use "zh-hans" and "zh-hant" which are
> nothing official. It would be nice at least if there was some
> consistency.
>
> Brianna
>

The "zh-hans" and "zh-hant" tags are introdeced as the assignments of language
tags by IANA. (see http://www.iana.org/assignments/language-tags for list of
assignments), I don't have much idea the stuffs that comes from IANA is
official or not. -_-||

regards
Man


from_name: Lord Voldemort

body:
On 6/9/06, Kelly Martin <kelly.lynn.martin at gmail.com> wrote:
>We should have stopped this a year ago, but we weren't paying attention,
> and now we have a lot of bad admins to show for it.

Uhh... "a lot of bad admins"?  Care to clarify "bad admins"? Care to
provide evidence of "a lot" of them? --LV


list: foundation-l

from_name: Kelly Martin

subject: [Foundation-l] Would you consider being on the Board?

body:
On 6/9/06, Andre Engels <andreengels at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2006/6/9, Angela <beesley at gmail.com>:
>
> > If it was intended for someone specifically, I would have asked that
> > person privately rather than posting to the list.  This was not
> > intended as a "polite pretext" to anything, but a genuine query as to
> > whether there would be anyone willing to be on the Board if the Board
> > were about to appoint someone.
>
> I definitely would be willing if asked, but I did not react because I
> considered myself too little qualified to actually run, solicit or
> whatever.

My main reason for not volunteering is not that I don't feel qualified
(after watching the recent discussions in here, I realize that I am
quite qualified for the role), but rather because I do not wish to
make the time commitment required to serve on the Board as it
currently operates.

Once the Wikimedia Board starts acting like a nonprofit board, cuts
its meeting frequency to a more reasonable 3 to 6 meetings a year, and
decides to delegate authority to an appropriate cast of professional
and volunteer administrators (instead of trying to run the entire
organization itself), then I would be interested.  However, I simply
don't have the time to participate in the micromanaging disaster that
is the current Board of Directors; the way they're trying to run it is
is a full-time job and I can't afford to give up my current full-time
job  for a position that doesn't pay anything.

Kelly


from_name: Gregory Szorc

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

body:
On 6/6/06, Steve Bennett <stevage at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Assuming this is a general question not specifically related to
> MediaWiki, the general answer is that exceptions should only be used
> for exceptional circumstances, and likely failures are better off
> handled with return codes. It's better to use exceptions for weird
> things like running out of memory, suddenly being unable to access the
> disk, or an assertion failing, rather than something as banal as a bad
> filename being supplied, for instance.

In languages where you have hardware-level access and can detect hardware
issues, exceptions make sense.  For a language such as PHP where you don't
have such low-level access and will not run into such issues, the severity
threshold for using an exception is lowered, IMO.  Personally, I handle
errors in PHP using a custom error handler as follows:

If something wrong happens in a function, you call trigger_error() and pass
an error message and severity constant.  I override PHP's error handler with
set_error_handler().  In my custom error handler function, if the error
severity is great enough to warrant program termination, I throw an
exception.  If not, the error simply gets logged or handled in its own way.
Basically, I use exceptions to terminate program execution and return types
to alter program execution.

Greg


from_name: Gregory Maxwell

body:
On 6/9/06, Angela <beesley at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 6/9/06, Anthony DiPierro <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:
> > You don't honestly believe that everyone interested in a Board
> > position saw that message and answered you, do you?
>
> I expect anyone serious about joining the Board this year to be
> reading this mailing list. They couldn't possibly have a thorough
> enough understanding of what the Foundation is about without doing
> that, and for a community representative (as opposed to the outsiders
> who may be appointed), I do expect them to be participating in
> foundation issues before they're appointed, as well as being active on
> the projects.

Participating in foundation issues doesn't mean wading into a troll fest.

I can assure you that there are other people who are interested that
didn't bother contacting you.


body:
On 6/9/06, Kelly Martin <kelly.lynn.martin at gmail.com> wrote:
[snip]
> Once the Wikimedia Board starts acting like a nonprofit board, cuts
> its meeting frequency to a more reasonable 3 to 6 meetings a year, and
> decides to delegate authority to an appropriate cast of professional
> and volunteer administrators (instead of trying to run the entire
> organization itself), then I would be interested.  However, I simply
> don't have the time to participate in the micromanaging disaster that
> is the current Board of Directors; the way they're trying to run it is
> is a full-time job and I can't afford to give up my current full-time
> job  for a position that doesn't pay anything.

I usually hate me too, but Kelly really hit the mark with her comment
here. It is unreasonable to expect any board to undertake the daily
operation of the organization and the perceived need to select people
suitable for daily chores will just end up compelling us to select
people who are unsuitable for driving our long term mission.

We are not the only charitable organization in the world, yet we seem
to know so little of what has been earned by others.  ... But what
else should we expect from a group with tens of thousands of
participants which still has substantial difficulty getting 40 man
hours a week applied to resolving problems which are bringing us into
disrepute in international news. To get something as simple as libel
patrolling going we need to be slammed on three news networks, have
unilateral staff action which is met with widespread whining, and we
must receive a personal appeal from god^WJimbo... and still we still
do a fairly weak job.


from_name: Angela

body:
I'm very surprised that the only people who are interested in a Board
position are Fred Bauder, Walter van Kalken, Erik Moeller, The
Cunctator, and the two people who wrote to me off-list.

On 6/6/06, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> Sorry Fred, I think you misunderstood Angela's email. I believe this
> was an entree intended for someone specifically, at least thats the
> impression I got, and the email is just a mere polite pretext. Is this
> not the case?

If it was intended for someone specifically, I would have asked that
person privately rather than posting to the list.  This was not
intended as a "polite pretext" to anything, but a genuine query as to
whether there would be anyone willing to be on the Board if the Board
were about to appoint someone.

On 6/7/06, Erik Moeller <eloquence at gmail.com> wrote:
> Do you think the Executive Director (CEO) would also be on the Board
> at the same time?

No, the (interim) executive director position is not a Board position.
That person will be reporting to the Board.

Angela.


list: commons-l

from_name: Brianna Laugher

subject: [Commons-l] some statistics

body:
I counted these by hand, so there could be mistakes.

[[Category:against policy]] has nearly 1000 items. These are items
that should be speedy deleted as obvious copyright violations.
Literally, these are supposed to be deleted on sight.

[[Category:Unknown - March 2006]] has over 1000 items. These are items
that were tagged as missing source information in March. They should
be speedy deleted after 7 days.

[[Category:Unknown - April 2006]] has around 1400 items.

[[Category:Unknown - May 2006]] has an astounding 2600-2800 items for
deletion. (You know you're in trouble when you count "1000" and the
file names are still at "D")

[[Category:Unknown - June 2006]] has something incredible like over
4000 items for deletion...and it's only June 9th!!!
OK actually all the categories 1 June - 8 June have less than 200
items each, so something weird is going on. I don't know where all
those extra items are coming from. Hm it looks like some are people
misusing the 'Unknown' template and they somehow get added to the
current month. Ah... yes, that is it.

[[Category:Incomplete license]] has about 400 items. (For some, their
7 days might not have expired yet.)

[[Category:Images with no copyright tag]] has about 500 items. I think
this is all Orgullobot's work (only recently had a bot tag all new
uploads with this tag if there's no license tag).

[[Category:Duplicate]] has about 800 items. These are non-essential deletion.

[[Template:Delete] links to some 2000 items (although some of those
are policy pages, for example). But even then I think there must be a
gap between that template and [[Commons:Deletion requests]].

Just at a rough guess, there are probably about 200 items listed on
[[Commons:Deletion requests]]. And these are supposed to be deletions
requiring discussion (and for some reason today I see another 43 (!)
"delete this because there's an SVG" nominations just from one user :/
). These are supposed to be important cases that can set precedents.
How can admins even find these debates let alone take part in them?
This page (the template) is 247kb. No wonder <10 admins (of over 130)
regularly look at it.

I don't think it is an exaggeration to say, it doesn't matter how many
admins we have, or how hard they work, we cannot realistically reduce
this backlog by using the current methods we follow.

On the 8th June less than 250 items were deleted (including categories
and articles, etc). Same on the 7th June.

....................................
?????????????????????
....................................

Is this something we should not worry about?
Or how can we ever solve it? Over 12,000 images waiting to be deleted.

A severely depressed,
Brianna /[[user:pfctdayelise]]


from_name: Anthony DiPierro

body:
On 6/9/06, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> We are not the only charitable organization in the world, yet we seem
> to know so little of what has been earned by others.  ... But what
> else should we expect from a group with tens of thousands of
> participants which still has substantial difficulty getting 40 man
> hours a week applied to resolving problems which are bringing us into
> disrepute in international news.

The thing is, the vast majority of those tens of thousands of
participants don't really care about the foundation.  They just want
to work on a free encyclopedia/free news reporting service/free image
repository/whatever.

It'd be interesting if nothing else to see just what percentage of
Wikipedians have any desire at all of being Wikimedians.

Anthony


body:
OK, I didn't really want to open a debate on the merits of traditional
vs simplified Chinese. Any comments on how MediaWiki treats Chinese?
Does anyone think it makes sense to have zh/zh-tw/zh-cn/zh-sg/zg-hk
language choices?

Does anyone have a problem with making that a choice between zh-hans
and zh-hant?

To the developer-types, how hard is it to change these things?

Brianna


list: textbook-l

from_name: Robert Scott Horning

subject: [Textbook-l] Game Guides

body:
Cormac Lawler wrote:

>On 6/8/06, Robert Scott Horning <robert_horning at netzero.net> wrote:
>
>[snip some intersting stuff]
>
>
>>So are the various Wikia projects considered sister projects to
>>Wikimedia projects?  Local links (not external references) exist going
>>both ways, including to the Uncyclopedia.  My understanding was that
>>they were very distinct groups (Wikia and Wikimedia) and the policies
>>and even existance of a Wikia project has no bearing on Wikimedia
>>projects.  Apparently this line is being blurred considerably now with
>>the new textbook only philosophy for Wikibooks, and it does have an
>>impact on future content being developed on Wikibooks.  Moving the
>>How-to books to the How-to Wikia seems like an attempt (to me) of
>>capturing Wikibooks content without having to do any work, especially
>>given that the how-to books on Wikibooks predate the How-to Wikia.  Six
>>months ago the idea would have been considered ludicrious to even
>>suggest removing the how-to books.
>>
>>--
>>Robert Scott Horning
>>
>>
>>
>
>Wikia and Wikimedia are very clearly separate entities with different
>philosophies - as I would put it, basically, Wikimedia is for the
>dissemination of information and knowledge, whereas the purpose of
>Wikia is for building communities around common interests.
>
>Do you mean, though, that the 'How-to' books are being removed from
>Wikibooks to Wikia, or simply used there under the GFDL? I hope it's
>the latter, but, if the former, which ones? There are very clearly
>How-to books that belong on Wikibooks (and that would very definitely
>be useful as part of an accredited course).
>
There is a group on Wikibooks, following the textbook only philosophy to
an extreme, that suggests How-to books do not belong on Wikibooks
either, along with the removal of Video Game texts and even biographies
were suggested for removal.  One of the justifications for this is that
Wikia projects exist now for these subjects and as such they are no
longer needed on Wikibooks.  Yes, I agree that Wikia projects can copy
Wikimedia content as far as they care to, as can anybody else including
other website developers.  The point here is that the How-to books are
being copied to another site and then explicitly removed from Wikibooks,
with only a link on the "main page" to where the "new" content
location.... now on a Wikia site.  This is also happening with the video
game guides, and one of my complaints about the process, as it seems as
though the very people setting up the policies, Jimbo and Angela, have a
vested interest in moving the content that goes beyond simply trying to
improve Wikimedia projects.

I am not certain how the financial picture of Wikia is right now, but I
would guess that it is more of a hobby for Jimbo rather than any
significant source of revenue.  Still, the suggestion is that this push
to move content from Wikibooks to Wikia sites may be financially
motivated to help bolster Wikia sites, at the expense of Wikibooks.  I
know this is a serious charge, and one that hasn't really been
completely addressed.  Most Wikia sites are supported by advertising
revenue, mainly banner ads and Google.

As far as How-to books being textbooks or not, I think they certainly
qualify as instructional reading material.  If you apply this much more
loose definition to what is a textbook, there certainly were some items
on Wikibooks that wouldn't even meet this standard, such as the
Jokebook.  Indeed the VfD for the Jokebook invoked this philosophy, but
the defenders of the Jokebook really couldn't suggest that it was any
sort of instructional material of any kind.  While "How to cause havoc"
was also instructional material, it was largely the advocacy of, or
instruction suggesting that you do, illegal activity that was the main
motivation for its removal.

What has really surprised me, and I think shows how rediculous the drive
to remove content from Wikibooks has gone, was the reaction I got to
suggesting a formal textbook about video game design focusing on Doom
was met with substantial resistance and even outright rejection.  I even
cited specific univsersity courses and majors from prominent accredited
educational institutions to demonstrate that such a textbook would not
only exist, but might even be useful for teaching one of these formal
courses.  I still contend that content like this is being rejected
because of the topic alone.

Also lost in all of this is what role stubs might play in the developing
of content on Wikibooks, and if some of the content on the chopping
block might be useful to be transformed into something much more
substantial and textbook like (or at least book-like.  Unfortunately,
but best example of how this was done to date is with the Monopoly
guide, which originally was a blatant copyright violation with some
minor changes, deleted and turned into some very substantial content
given the subject matter.

>
>I can't say much on Wikibooks' policies, as I simply don't participate
>in Wikibooks enough, or know enough about its history. Lord Voldemort
>has some interesting questions here, and I can't resist answering one
>of them in particular:
>
>"3. Who has control over the overall content of Wikibooks? The
>Wikimedia Foundation, the WMF Board, the community of Wikibookians?"
>
>As far as I see it: the community has control over the content, and
>the board bears the legal liability for the content. Jimbo's unique
>part in this is that he retains the power to dictate policy where he
>deems necessary, and when he thinks a project has veered off course
>significantly from its goals or the goals of the foundation. I'm not
>sure of what other times he has exercised this power, apart from the
>recent debate about the content of Wikibooks - maybe someone else,
>perhaps Jimbo himself, can clarify this.
>
>That's all for now..
>
>Cormac
>
>
If this really were something about legal liability, such as dealing
with copyright violations and a textbook about assassinating the
President of the USA, I would be more than willing to remove such
content from Wikibooks.  Indeed even potentially damaging books such as
ones talking about amature pharmacology (using recreational drugs) and
making bombs have been removed from Wikibooks already, or are held to a
very tight leash.  This is something I support and I wish that the video
game guide debate was really about this.  I fail to see where the legal
liability rests, however, to hosting video game guides even under the
most relaxed sort of policies permitting this sort of content.  Other
policies such as requiring the GFDL and maintaining NPOV standards I
believe is more than sufficient to keep the tax-exempt status for the
Wikimedia Foundation.

In terms of suggesting that Wikibooks become more textbook oriented, it
has been suggested that we make the textbooks we do have much more
prominent on the front page (this has already happened) and try to make
sure books recieving awards such as the Book of the Month also try to
follow a more textbook emphasis.  I think this is reasonable, and a
pro-active approach to try and reward those formal textbooks should be
done, with the video game guides and other such books relegated to the
backwater parts of Wikibooks.  If the concern is that people are linking
directly to deep content within Wikibooks that is substantially
non-textbook like (as happened with the Wikimania proceedings), invoking
the "Wikibooks is not a web hosting service" is sufficient to remove
such content, through the normal VfD process.

I would imagine some of the concern over video game guides is about this
issue as well, where external websites like a video game BBS or yahoo
mailing list is linking to Wikibooks and other Wikimedia projects, using
the pages as a semi-private wiki dedicated to that group of individuals.
 Mind you, this is not one of the justifications for removal of the
video game guides, although it would be something I would consider to be
a valid argument against such pages on Wikibooks.  Based on edit count
alone, I would suspect the Runescape price guide was one of those pages
that had been (and still is BTW) linked on several external websites
where editors of that page have no contact with the rest of the
Wikibooks community, nor even know that a Runescape wikibook with more
information even existed.

--
Robert Scott Horning


from_name: Sabine Cretella

subject: [Foundation-l] Commissions, committees - discussions et al ...

body:
Could we please stop for some days? It does not make sense to struggle
and fight and get rigid on one or the other side. Discussions are
getting too emotional and that does not help anyone.

Please understand: committees are growing bit by bit - it is already
difficult to work in a small group - it will be even more difficult to
work in a large group. That initially committees or commissions work by
invitation makes sense, because people who know each other come together
and it will be easier to organise initial work (and it is not said that
even if we know each other we have the same opinions and thoughts).

Being all of us people who do this in their free time, having to cope
with all sorts of problems, I suppose that for now we should grow slowly
if we want to assure that things go the right way.

It does not mean that we don't want to discuss or communicate - it is
just a matter of fact that each one of us has 24 hours a day - eight of
which are occupied with work (normally) - eight of them should be sleep
(I hardly ever reach that amount ;-). Then there is family life, social
life and the projects.

Of course everyone of us has his/her favourite project (nobody can deny
this), everyone of us tries to do things the best way he/she can,
everyone of us has his/her own way to express, often things are screwed
up because of misinterpretation and not knowing the other person well
enough - or we seem to know someone, but really don't because we are not
"listening enough" (and I am not an exception to this).

Please consider also one thing: written messages can be easily
misunderstood because of two very simple facts:

1) the writer does not know in which emotional state the person reading
his/her message is and therefore interpretation of written text can vary
a lot
2) the reader does not know in which emotional state the writer was at
the time of writing

Then: there is that time delay effect: while you are writing about a
problem, the problem itself can already be on its way to solution or
already solved.

Now people will think: "well, so we should not put any emotions in
written messages" ... uhm ... really that is impossible, because we are
human beings.

I myself very often avoid to mix into discussions - because of the above
reasons and not because of not having an own opinion. It could easily
happen that I write an emotional loaded message without really noting it
- and who reads then would have huge problems to understand the reason:
it could be a relative not being well, the kids making simply too much
trouble, a fight with a friend or simply the oven that did not work when
I wanted to make "that pizza" or the parrot making terrible noise having
learnt how the phone rings etc.

That's why very often it makes sense to answer privately if you think
something with a message is wrong - or just wait a day or two to make
sure you really want to write something the way you did in first place.

Strange days will always happen - the more people are toghether in one
place the more often such problems will arise.

So please: let's keep calm for some days - things will work out well :-)
I believe in positivity.

Best wishes from Italy.

Sabine

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


from_name: Brion Vibber

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

body:
Death Phoenix wrote:
> On 6/6/06, Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:
>> Problem templates are mostly those which start an HTML tag in one
>> template, then
>> finish it in another. For instance if {{table-header}} contains a <table>,
>> and
>> then the table rows and final </table> are in another template entirely.
>> These
>> have always broken on regular MediaWiki -- the template is required to
>> close its
>> own tags -- though they sometimes appeared to work on Wikipedia due to
>> bugs with
>> our HTML handling when Tidy is enabled.
>>
>
> Does this affect templates that use a <div> tag in one and a </div> tag in
> another? This affects many voting archive templates, such as {{at}}/{{ab}}
> or {{rfaf}}/{{rfab}}.

Yes.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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from_name: Rob Church

subject: [Wikitech-l] Extension CharInsert

body:
On 09/06/06, Uwe Baumbach <U.Baumbach at web.de> wrote:
> 1. Where can I find source and doc for extension CharInsert?

http://svn.wikimedia.org/viewvc/mediawiki/trunk/extensions/CharInsert/CharInsert.php?view=log

> 2. Is it suitable for 1.5.8 ?

It worked with 1.5.8 the last time I checked, but it might have been
updated so as to break 1.5.x support since then.

Rob Church


subject: [Textbook-l] Fw: Game guides (same email but with line breaks)

body:
On 6/9/06, Jon <thagudearbh at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> It would be useful if Jimmy would comment on the questions asked [snip]

Yes, while I appreciate all of you guys' help, I am interested in
hearing Jimbo's answers to all or at least some of my questions.
While your answers are informative, I think getting a few simple
answers from The Big Cheese will go a long way forwarding a civil
discussion.  Thanks.
--LV


subject: [Textbook-l] Game guides

body:
Jon wrote:

>It would be useful if Jimmy would comment on the questions asked, but I would like to make the following comments (the numbers refer to Lord Voldemort's initial email):
>
>1, 2. My understanding is that Wikibooks' purpose always has been to provide textbooks. Article II of the Wikimedia Foundation bylaws says, in part, refers to  "... a collection of e-book resources aimed specifically toward students (such as textbooks and annotated public domain books) named Wikibooks".  (see http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_bylaws )
>

I've said it before and I'll say it again.  This clause was put into the
bylaws completely without any participation by the Wikibooks community
or input of any kind.  It was also created (the bylaws) well after
Wikibooks was a well established project, and the video game guides were
already a major section with their own bookshelf.  Refering to this
section as the constitutional basis for why these books need to be
deleted is patently a false assumption and does nothing to help the
argument to keep or remove these Wikibooks.  In addition, the bylaws
don't go into specific project policies, but only give a general broad
definition as to what (at the time) the Wikimedia Foundation did do when
it was incorporated.  There is also the very broad general clause of "to
encourage the further growth and development of open content, social
software WikiWiki-based projects".  I fail to see how any of this
content violates that clause of the bylaws.

The bylaws were never intended to be used in this fashion to restrict
the scope of existing projects beyond what they were when the bylaws
were adopted.

>3. The Wikimedia Foundation, operating through its Board, have overall control of Wikibooks (they set its scope in the Foundation bylaws, and can choose to change this or to close the project if they see fit). However, subject to this, Wikibookians deal with the day to day editing of the site, including the setting of site policies (whilst this is subject to them being consistent with what the WMF says, the WMF is very hands-off in this regard).
>
There is also the preceedent that this is a very unusual move from the
history of other Wikimedia projects, including Wikipedia.  So far I
havn't seen anybody suggesting that the video game Wikiprojects be
removed from Wikipedia, for instance.  About the only time I've seen a
major action on the part of the WMF taking a decisive role in the
*CONTENT* of a Wikimedia project was with the temporary closure and
restart of the French Wikiquote, where large quantities of non-free
(read copyrighted) content was added in violation of project policy in
general.  This was indeed a legal liability to the WMF, and they needed
to act decisively on that issue.  I fail to see how the video game
guides rise to that level of critical importance that such intervention
is necessary with Wikibooks, and specifically en.wikibooks, where I
don't see any attempt to address this with the other wikibooks projects
in other languages either.

>
>4, 5. Games guides are not textbooks. Therefore they do not fit within Wikibooks' purpose.
>
Define game guides and textbooks, and you might have a point.  The very
definition of these words is subject to a huge range of interpretations
and is the real crux of the argument here.  I would agree that a video
game walk-through is not a textbook, and was something being addressed
by the video game guidelines/policies before this whole argument turned
that effort into a farce.  Several video game books did need to either
be deleted or modified, but it didn't have to be so dramatic, and could
have been dealt with through more community concensus and editor
participation.  Again my complaint was that Wikibooks were deleted
without even so much as a VfD, even when they contained dozens or more
pages of content from hundreds of different contributors.  That didn't
have to happen.

>6, 7. Wikibooks' contributors must work within the defined scope of the project. They are on a very free rein as to what they do, but they cannot extend this scope. Requests for scope changes and new Wikimedia projects can be made on Metawiki.
>
Again, even the Meta wiki is a more recent development than Wikibooks,
and I have never seen such a "scope change" for any project, except
perhaps the Wikiversity proposal.  And that was to split Wikiversity
from Wikibook.  The red tape to accomplish such a task has proven to be
so incredible that I'm surprised that anybody tries any more.  In
addition, the scope of Wikibooks has been well defined, especially
through the "What is Wikibooks?" and "What Wikibooks is not" pages.
 Until recently, the largest problem was seeing Wikibooks become
Wikipedia II, where people would write duplicate Wikipedia articles on
Wikibooks, or using Wikibooks to host original public domain source
material.  I have been very active in trying to define the relationship
between Wikibooks and the other Wikimedia sister projects in this
regard, and there has been some success in this regard.

> 8. "Textbook" has its normal English meaning. There is no special Wikibooks definition of it. A textbook on games, game design, history of games that would assist someone studying them would be within Wikibooks' scope. Note, however, that no-one would reasonably describe a simple games walkthrough as a textbook. They might call it a guide or perhaps, at a push, a manual, but it would not be a textbook in the normal sense.
>
>9. A straightforward guide on a board game would not normally be described as a textbook. As for game guides, however, it would be possible to write a detailed textbook on some board games suitable for students.
>
>10, 11. The talk of an "accredited institution" metric appears to have been suggested mostly by those speaking out in favour of keeping games guides, with the idea of rubbishing it as providing too narrow an inclusion criterion. We don't need such a metric - the general test is whether the book is or is not a textbook (but see my qualification of this below). An "accredited institution" metric along the lines of "if a subject is studied in a number of accredited institutions it can be deemed worthy of study" may be acceptable in the sense that textbook subjects meeting that test should be allowed. However, any such test should not be limiting - there are many worthwhile subjects for study that do not meet that test that are within Wikibooks' scope.
>
>12. Inevitably the removal of game guides from Wikibooks will see those who only edited those areas of Wikibooks leave. It will also see those who spent some of their time on Wikibooks on editing game guides, and some time on textbooks, reduce the time they spend on Wikibooks. On the other hand, a more focused Wikibooks will help attract other new editors committed to providing quality open-content textbooks.
>
I totally disagree on this point, and it is a point that we certainly
don't see eye to eye on.  I do believe that contributors are leaving
that have contributed to other areas of Wikibooks, and this is a far too
callous attitude to hold a certain segment of the Wikibooks community
with contempt.  Video game books were an excellent way for new
contributors to "get their feet wet" in editing some content that they
didn't feel they needed a PhD in order to make some meaningful
contributions.  Rather than simply outright deletion of this content, we
should have been pushing to raise the standards of the existing content.

Also, I see here a huge contempt for new contributors of any kind.  I
believe that education and patience is a better answer to deal with
people new to Wikimedia projects, not a brazen removal of their effort
and a few harsh words or even just two or three words like "not a
textbook" to explain why their contribution has been deleted.  These new
contributors is the lifeblood of the project and how Wikibooks will grow
to be successful.

>13. I would add the following. "Textbook" has its normal English meaning. There are many possible subject areas and styles for textbooks. The word should be interpreted widely on Wikibooks, but the meaning should not be stretched so as to include texts that are clearly not textbooks in any sense of the word. There are also some subjects that are innately inappropriate as subjects of textbooks, or which would be deemed unsuitable - these are few and far between, but might include textbooks extolling black (or white) supremacy, a textbook to train people in terrorism, a textbook on a little recognised constructed language (such as one I have just made up, or which literally only a handful of people have any interest in). Other than extreme cases such as these (which can be discussed on WB:VFD), all textbooks should be welcome on Wikibooks.
>
>X. There has not been a suggestion that all "How-tos" were removed. Jimbo has noted that some "How-tos" should be removed (which was certainly true at the time). This unfortunately, but I believe erroneously, was picked up by some to mean that all How-tos should be removed.
>
>Y. Eric Moeller's suggestion of renaming Wikibooks to Wikitextbooks has some merit. Although "Wikitextbooks" is longer and less sexy, it would make clearer to everyone what Wikibooks' scope is. Many people, particularly on Wikipedia, incorrectly think that any book content is suitable for Wikibooks. This is a misconception that really should be removed.
>
I think this is the wrong move, and something that was brought up in the
very beginning of Wikibooks, when it was originally textbooks.wikipedia

It was felt at the time by the project founder, Karl Wick, that
Wikibooks could be much more than simply college textbooks.  I can't put
any words into his mouth, but if you read the archives of this mailing
list you can see some of the discussions about that point.  As it is, we
have more than just university-level books, but for almost every age
group and over a huge variety of subjects.  The very name of the project
suggests that Wikibooks is about books.... a topic exposition that is
much longer than an encyclopedia article.  That is why I have long
contended that any topic on Wikipedia could be expanded into a full
Wikibook, which is why the current Wikipedia forking policy (to
Wikibooks) is written the way it is right now.  If a very long Wikipedia
article is being trimmed down to fit within their 32k article limit, I
don't see a reason why it couldn't be moved to Wikibooks as a stub to be
expanded on Wikibooks.  And that is any article on any topic currently
within the scope of Wikipedia.  Explain why this shouldn't be the case?

>
>Kind regards
>
>Jon
>(jguk)
>
>

--
Robert Scott Horning


from_name: Guy Chapman aka JzG

subject: [WikiEN-l] Objective oversight needed

body:
On Fri, 9 Jun 2006 11:08:20 +0200, you wrote:

>I don't have a problem with "Real vehicles are allocated..." when we
>have already made clear that the system is "possible". We describe how
>things *do* work in the fictional system. This does not seem very
>different to me than saying "Under the proposed foobar download
>management system, users are charged for each download..."

Sure, some of the text is OK.  Some is not.  For example, the first
para of the overview stated that it was a system serving a wide area,
but not one of the pilots (including the two in build) does this -
they all serve a small number of destinations from a possibly larger
number of embarkation points.

Guy (JzG)
--
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG


from_name: maru dubshinki

body:
On 6/9/06, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 6/9/06, Jesse W <jessw at netwood.net> wrote:
....
> > Not that there are not
> > real issues (there were real issues behind the deletionist/inclusionist
> > fight too),
>
> Deletionist/inclusionist issue is real. Largly due to the problem that
> prior to wikipedia no one appears to have given much though to what an
> encyopedia is. but what we should include/what we should not include
> is a serious issue.
>
>
> --
> geni

That's close, but not quite it. I think what it is more about is that
previously encyclopedias were written by fairly homogenous "elites",
if you will, and that the inherent economic limits meant that they
were forced to stay within the area of "no-brainers", subjects which
were to them obviously encyclopedia-worthy, which they could easily
reach consensus on, being fairly homogenous elites. But by the same
token, that means that they never had to grapple with any edge issues,
whereas we do, as en has by and large exhausted a good many of the
obviously encyclopedia-worthy articles (though not all, or else we
wouldn't have the missing encyclopedia article project), and so must
confront the margins; and of course, Wikipedia is hardly written by a
fairly homogenous elite, regardless of whatever it may have started
life as, or the realities of its power structure.

~maru


subject: [Wikitech-l] Researcher needs help

body:
On 6/9/06, Mark Bell <typewritermark at gmail.com> wrote:
> Folks,
>
> I have had success. I need to do a few more tests but then i shoud be able
> to post a whole historyflow tutorial on my site.
>
> The pictures are amazing!

Can't wait to see!

Steve


from_name: geni

subject: [WikiEN-l] Fixit tasks / bannerization

body:
On 6/9/06, stevertigo <vertigosteve at yahoo.com> wrote:
> And since this is primarily a site for editing
> editable stuff, and there are plenty of other things
> to focus people on, why perchance not use the
> bannerspace for other Fixit tasks as well?

Because people don't like banners. They take up space and seeing the
same message several thousand times becomes tiresome.

--
geni


from_name: Death Phoenix

subject:
[WikiEN-l] "refactoring" signatures (was: cancelation of the
	deletion review of the satanism userbox)

body:
On 6/6/06, Guettarda <guettarda at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 6/6/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > On 6/6/06, Guettarda <guettarda at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > Now, to get onto userboxes that are really disruptive, how about the
> > ones
> > > that say "This user contributes in American English" or "This user
> > > contributes in British English".  Isn't this, in essence, a rejection
> on
> > > Wikipedia's policy on accepting both AE and BE?  Sure, on talk pages
> and
> > one
> >
> > Surprisingly, it's actually relevant. You're supposed to respect the
> > preferences of the first contributor to an article. What better way to
> > find out their preferences than checking their user page?
> >
> > (I'm only being slightly facetious)
>
> Well, I'd say that only holds if they expressed on.  If I were to write a
> stub and use no words that differ between BE and AE, and someone else
> comes
> along and writes an article using AE, the "first user preference" is
> their's, not mine.  Anyway, expressing a preference ("prefers BE" or
> "prefers AE") is fine.  Saying that they "contribute" in AE/BE says "I
> don't
> want to compromise".  If I write an article about an American topic, I
> should use AE, not matter how much it grates.
>

*sigh* People pursuing BE and AE should see what it's like to be a writer
who has to write a certain way because our style guide says so. Our company
writes in AE, while I personally dislike AE and prefer to write in BE as
much as possible. I write in AE in my company because I'd likely get fired
if I didn't.

I'm on a Wiki that uses AE exclusively (the Ultronomicon, a Star Control
Wiki) because the Star Control game itself was written in AE, despite the
fact that several main contributors, including the "founder" prefer to use
BE. Therefore, our contributions to the main articlespace are in AE while
most of the talk pages are in BE.

I prefer to to write in BE, but when I see people trying to convert American
articles to BE, such as [[Special Activities Division]], it annoys me
greatly. Same with British articles to AE (such as [[Harry Potter]]). This
also applies to articles that could be written in either AE or BE, but were
first written in one form, and people come to convert it over. I wish I
could apply a category or template to indicate that the article is written
in AE, and please piss off with the BE conversions (and vice versa).


body:
On 6/6/06, Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:
>
> Problem templates are mostly those which start an HTML tag in one
> template, then
> finish it in another. For instance if {{table-header}} contains a <table>,
> and
> then the table rows and final </table> are in another template entirely.
> These
> have always broken on regular MediaWiki -- the template is required to
> close its
> own tags -- though they sometimes appeared to work on Wikipedia due to
> bugs with
> our HTML handling when Tidy is enabled.
>

Does this affect templates that use a <div> tag in one and a </div> tag in
another? This affects many voting archive templates, such as {{at}}/{{ab}}
or {{rfaf}}/{{rfab}}.


from_name: Magnus Manske

subject: [Commons-l] some statistics

body:
Brianna Laugher schrieb:
>
> Any more ideas?
>
Always ;-)

How about a tool (outside commons, maybe on the toolserver) that finds
(supposedly) evil-tagged images that have not been touched for the
mandatory seven-days period (and the talk page hasn't been touched
either). All images on the tool page would meet the condition "these can
be deleted, unless it is obvious to a human that they shouldn't".

The page could display the (thumbnailed) image, the text, maybe also the
date(s) involved, and a "delete" button which will open the delete page
on commons, prefilled (assuimg you're logged in as admin). Maybe it
could be tied into the CommonsTicker somehow, to show "this image is
currently in use on en and de".

This might increase the speed of decision making and execution (!)
significantly. A "disassembly line" for admins, so to speak.

Magnus


from_name: Daniel Arnold

body:
Am Freitag, 09. Juni 2006 05:10 schrieb amgine at saewyc.net:
> [...] Fair Use is absolutely necessary for Wikinews.

Why do you think so? Do you know http://de.wikinews.org ? They have a free
images only policy like de.wikipedia. Neither de.wikinews nor de.wikipedia
suffer a fundamental problem because of that. Quite the contrary. And of
course they are everything else but text deserts.

I simply don't understand why every article needs under any circumstance an
image even if it is ripped of somebodies else property. There are so many
ways getting a free one and if there's none avaliable just make your text
even more better.

Quality matters not nice illustrated pages illustrated for the sake of
illustration.

> The fact Fair Use in any form is not
> accepted on Commons is the reason Wikinews project sites now have file
> uploads; Commons was not being useful to this project in this regard.

There is a Wikimedia goal: We create free content not *any* content. What is
the difference between Wikinews and CNN? Wikinews is (at least should be)
totally freely licensed. If you make a proprietary Wikinews you have nothing
which makes your project special compared to the zillions of other news
websites.

The same applies to Commons: There's Getty Images and Corbis already. We don't
want to copy them (in every aspect). We want to become the radical new freely
licensed media repository of the world. This is what makes the real
difference between us and them for the outside people.

> I do not know about others, but this sounds to me very much like Commons is
> dictating image policy to the projects, and not the other way around the
> way Commons was set up to be.

We are not a mere helper project of Wikipedia. Our community has evolved
beside the helper aspect a strong own identity. People need to have a unique
vision in order to work happily in a project. A second row helper project is
nothing you can be proud of. And of course ths "second row helper project
attitude" has caused our current problems. People throw their files over the
wall and are simply not interested in getting licensing right (and because of
that there are many inactive admins, as they don't see the unique vision of
Commons and are thus not interested in clean up).

> While I greatly respect the work Commons
> does, when it interferes or harms the projects I have little respect for
> the actions of Commons.

I am justt tired of being sensible because even with this deletion speed we
can't chatch up with all these ingorant or bad faith people that think
copyvios are a good thing:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ALog&type=delete&user=&page=

Arnomane


body:
On 6/9/06, Kelly Martin <kelly.lynn.martin at gmail.com> wrote:
> No, it's more along the lines of what would happen if I were to be
> desysoped by a "community process"... in the long term, it might help
> to undermine that process and our admin promotion process generally,
> which I think would be a good thing.

Not really. No one wikipedian could really effect something with that
much inertia.  With admins picking up increaseing control RFA is one
of the last ways none admins can really infulence the project.
Realisticaly you are looking at a cold dead hands situation if you
want to remove it.

> I occasionally think about running for bureaucrat, but realize that by
> doing so I would be implicitly supporting the RfA system, which I have
> grave objections to and which I think should be reformed or eliminated
> entirely.
>

you did run:

[[Wikipedia:Requests_for_bureaucratship/Kelly_Martin]]

--
geni


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

body:
On 6/9/06, MacGyverMagic/Mgm <macgyvermagic at gmail.com> wrote:
> Well, what's the point in blanking a page? The history would still be
> retained and it doesn't save any space.
>

Google doesn't spider page histories

--
geni


subject: [WikiEN-l] Fixit tasks / bannerization

body:
On 6/9/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 6/9/06, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Because people don't like banners. They take up space and seeing the
> > same message several thousand times becomes tiresome.
>
> Could similar logic for the "You have new messages" be employed? That
> is, once you've clicked on the relevant link, it goes away?

I don't know any way to do this within the current software and I
suspect it would still anoy people.

--
geni


from_name: effe iets anders

body:
<snip>

2006/6/9, Angela <beesley at gmail.com>:
> I'm very surprised that the only people who are interested in a Board
> position are Fred Bauder, Walter van Kalken, Erik Moeller, The
> Cunctator, and the two people who wrote to me off-list.
</snip>

I am not really surprized. For a lot of people counts that they have
already a lot of "jobs" on the Wikimedia-projets. Good people with
enough spare time to do besides that the membership of the board will
be very rare. So that means people have to be found who are prepared
to turn off some other jobs they have done for a while, or are doing
right now. That makes it of course hard to think about it.

But that is not the only reason. I think there will also be for a lot
of people the thought "I won't be good enough for the board". Not as
in I won't be elected, but as in I wouldn't deliver a good enough job.
We can see now already how hard it must be to be a boardmember, but we
can't imagine probably how much happens what we don't know of. I think
this might be a very important reason. A lot of people let it slip
through their mind, I confess, it slipped through mine too, but let
the idea go, as the goal might be too high, as it might cost too much
time. When there comes a moment that the board will be expanded, I
certainly hope so, there should be some changes to make it for more
people possible to join the board. I don't have a solution for you,
I'm sorry, but maybe this might be a little bit on the way to it. Try
to make the job easier to do besides other obligations.

Greetings, Lodewijk

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


subject: [WikiEN-l] Objective oversight needed

references:
<ur7i8255fq4d3j0spjr42mbk40r8j998kq@4ax.com>
	<gq8i82t79504m1og5f1a20vn1b5066tfgj@4ax.com>
	<b8ceeef70606090208q7e696bb1p4a6c7e6958ebb801@mail.gmail.com>
	<6sri825j495csrl5d2rju4st2c0jeb11nb@4ax.com>
	<b8ceeef70606090654p6ff93ef8m8fb5aa3dc55fa093@mail.gmail.com>

body:
On Fri, 9 Jun 2006 15:54:24 +0200, you wrote:

>I recall having read it previously and being quite
>impressed at the ingeniousness of these ideas...

Indeed.  Like all conjuring tricks, as long as you don't look up the
magician's sleeve it all appears very slick :-)

Guy (JzG)
--
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG


from_name: Hsiang-Tai Chien

body:
True. We Chinese wikipedians will have different terminologies in different areas. On zh.wp we use the auto-converter to show the terminology the wikipedian wish to see.

On zh.wp if you do not wish to use the auto-converter, you can use -{zh-cn: keyowrd term in CN; zh-hk: keyword term in HK; zh-sg: keyowrd term in SG; zh-tw: keyword term in TW}- to solve the issue.

H.T.
{{User:zh:Htchien}}

Mark Williamson <node.ue at gmail.com> ?? The standard Traditional Chinese of Hong Kong and that of Taiwan have
differences in terinology.

I know that Hong Kong used to use different country names, but
post-unification I think they adopted traditional transliterations of
Mainland forms. Boohoo!

But Hong Kong does have soem different ones.

No idea about S'pore, despite my love for the country. NEver was able
to find anythign about it. I do know that many Chinese in Singapore
don't know Mandarin, thoguh.

Mark

On 08/06/06, Brianna Laugher
 wrote:
> OK, I didn't really want to open a debate on the merits of traditional
> vs simplified Chinese. Any comments on how MediaWiki treats Chinese?
> Does anyone think it makes sense to have zh/zh-tw/zh-cn/zh-sg/zg-hk
> language choices?
>
> Does anyone have a problem with making that a choice between zh-hans
> and zh-hant?
>
> To the developer-types, how hard is it to change these things?
>
> Brianna
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>

--
Refije dirije lanm� yo paske nou posede pw? bato.
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from_name: Steve Bennett

subject: [WikiEN-l] Objective oversight needed

references:
<ur7i8255fq4d3j0spjr42mbk40r8j998kq@4ax.com>
	<gq8i82t79504m1og5f1a20vn1b5066tfgj@4ax.com>
	<b8ceeef70606090208q7e696bb1p4a6c7e6958ebb801@mail.gmail.com>
	<6sri825j495csrl5d2rju4st2c0jeb11nb@4ax.com>

body:
On 6/9/06, Guy Chapman aka JzG <guy.chapman at spamcop.net> wrote:
> Sure, some of the text is OK.  Some is not.  For example, the first
> para of the overview stated that it was a system serving a wide area,
> but not one of the pilots (including the two in build) does this -
> they all serve a small number of destinations from a possibly larger
> number of embarkation points.

Ok, I wasn't vouching for the validity or neutrality of the article as
a whole :) I recall having read it previously and being quite
impressed at the ingeniousness of these ideas...

Steve


body:
Yes, Vipuser is a CN user, however his opinion is been widely discussed on zh.wp and is mostly accepted by many HK / ZH / SG users and admins.

It also forms a policy template in http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Policy-convert

H.T.
{{User:zh:Htchien}}

Mark Williamson <node.ue at gmail.com> ?? It was my view that Vipuser promoted his side because he is a
Simplified user and so has not had experience with such errors.

Mark

On 08/06/06, Shinjiman  wrote:
> See also:
>
> http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:%E4%B8%AD%E6%96%87%E7%B9%81%E7%AE%80%
> E4%BD%93%E9%97%AE%E9%A2%98
>
> There's such discussion regarding whether such converter is implemented or not
> (this is composed by Vipuser according to the page history), however Node ue
> and I disagree with these because there will be some problem if such converter
> is being implemented. See also the talk page for Node ue:
> http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Node_ue, and Vipuser argues with
> that issue.
>
> cheers
> Man
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>

--
Refije dirije lanm� yo paske nou posede pw? bato.
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Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

 ___________________________________________________
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body:
zh-cn: Chinese language used in China, Simplified Chinese
zh-hk: Chinese language used in Hong Kong, Traditional Chinese
zh-sg: Chinese language used in Singapore, Traditional Chinese
zh-tw: Chinese language used in Taiwan, Traditional Chinese

Although they are all Chinese, however, they use different terminologies for the same thing due to the culture changes in the areas. It's not just that simple with Han-S and Han-T. Also not a macro language I think.

I know it might not be easy for an non-Chinese to understand this, but it's the language we live with it day by day.

Regards,
H.T.
en-wp: [[User:Htchien]]
zh-wp: [[User:Htchien]]

Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> ?? Brianna Laugher wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I posted this on commons-l a week ago to apparent deaf ears.
>
> While browsing in my Special:Preferences today, I noticed that we
> apparently support no less than five variants of Chinese:
>
> zh
> zh-cn (simplified, as used by the Chinese mainland)
> zh-hk (Hong Kong, traditional)
> zh-sg (Singapore, simplified)
> zh-tw (Taiwan, traditional)
>
> Is there a reason these codes have been set up as country codes rather
> than, say, zh-hans and zh-hant? (Han Chinese, simplified/traditional -
> these are codes that the Chinese translators on Commons have
> favoured.)
>
> Is there thought to be any distinction between zh-sg and zh-cn?
>
> Can the 'automatic converter' thing that zh.wp has be turned on for
> the Commons, so we can stop this unnecessary 'translation' between
> scripts anyway? (And then we just offer "zh".)
>
> cheers,
> Brianna
> en.{wp,wb}|commons|meta:user:pfctdayelise
Hoi,
I assume that what is called zh-cn is actually cmn-Hans and that zh-tw
is cmn-Hant (Mandarin). I do not really appreciate what I have to
understand by Singaporian or Hong Kong Chinese. The problem with zh
(zho) is that in ISO-639-3 it is considered a macro language and it is
really ambiguous what is to be understood by it.
Thanks,
    Gerard

_______________________________________________
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http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

 ___________________________________________________
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from_name: Cormac Lawler

subject: [Textbook-l] Game Guides

body:
On 6/8/06, Robert Scott Horning <robert_horning at netzero.net> wrote:

[snip some intersting stuff]
>
> So are the various Wikia projects considered sister projects to
> Wikimedia projects?  Local links (not external references) exist going
> both ways, including to the Uncyclopedia.  My understanding was that
> they were very distinct groups (Wikia and Wikimedia) and the policies
> and even existance of a Wikia project has no bearing on Wikimedia
> projects.  Apparently this line is being blurred considerably now with
> the new textbook only philosophy for Wikibooks, and it does have an
> impact on future content being developed on Wikibooks.  Moving the
> How-to books to the How-to Wikia seems like an attempt (to me) of
> capturing Wikibooks content without having to do any work, especially
> given that the how-to books on Wikibooks predate the How-to Wikia.  Six
> months ago the idea would have been considered ludicrious to even
> suggest removing the how-to books.
>
> --
> Robert Scott Horning
>

Wikia and Wikimedia are very clearly separate entities with different
philosophies - as I would put it, basically, Wikimedia is for the
dissemination of information and knowledge, whereas the purpose of
Wikia is for building communities around common interests.

Do you mean, though, that the 'How-to' books are being removed from
Wikibooks to Wikia, or simply used there under the GFDL? I hope it's
the latter, but, if the former, which ones? There are very clearly
How-to books that belong on Wikibooks (and that would very definitely
be useful as part of an accredited course).

I can't say much on Wikibooks' policies, as I simply don't participate
in Wikibooks enough, or know enough about its history. Lord Voldemort
has some interesting questions here, and I can't resist answering one
of them in particular:

"3. Who has control over the overall content of Wikibooks? The
Wikimedia Foundation, the WMF Board, the community of Wikibookians?"

As far as I see it: the community has control over the content, and
the board bears the legal liability for the content. Jimbo's unique
part in this is that he retains the power to dictate policy where he
deems necessary, and when he thinks a project has veered off course
significantly from its goals or the goals of the foundation. I'm not
sure of what other times he has exercised this power, apart from the
recent debate about the content of Wikibooks - maybe someone else,
perhaps Jimbo himself, can clarify this.

That's all for now..

Cormac


subject: [WikiEN-l] Fixit tasks / bannerization

body:
On 6/9/06, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> Because people don't like banners. They take up space and seeing the
> same message several thousand times becomes tiresome.

Could similar logic for the "You have new messages" be employed? That
is, once you've clicked on the relevant link, it goes away?

Steve


from_name: Jesse W

body:
On Jun 9, 2006, at 4:32 PM, Steve Bennett wrote:
> We have articles on every single episode of most major TV shows, and
> lots of
> minor ones. You would never see that in any encyclopaedia.

You would not see that in the Encyclopedia of Late 20th Century
American Television?  Really?  Or do you mean in any "general"
encyclopedia.  Because certainly, Wikipedia reaches the level of a
specialized encyclopedia in a number of areas, like television shows -
but (I hope), we don't go too much beyond that.

Jesse Weinstein


from_name: Delirium

subject: [WikiEN-l] "refactoring" signatures

body:
Death Phoenix wrote:

>I prefer to to write in BE, but when I see people trying to convert American
>articles to BE, such as [[Special Activities Division]], it annoys me
>greatly. Same with British articles to AE (such as [[Harry Potter]]). This
>also applies to articles that could be written in either AE or BE, but were
>first written in one form, and people come to convert it over.
>
Aren't our policies already pretty well settled in telling people not to
do either one of those things?

-Mark


body:
Gregory Maxwell wrote:

>We've avoided a lot of problems with copyright holders on media by
>simply being very responsive. While we've had instances of people
>quite angry at us over mirrored text that we can't control.  Images
>are an especially weak point for us from a copyright perspective, so
>our ability to be more responsive (due to a lack of mirroring) has
>been fortunate.
>
>
Isn't the entire *point* of Commons to encourage mirroring?  It's
supposed to be a resource for the general public, not our own private
Wikimedia Foundation image repository.  People are already encouraged to
copy images from there and use them; I don't see why legally providing a
different way to do what we already encourage people to do would make
things different.

-Mark


from_name: Gregory Maxwell

body:
On 6/9/06, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
> Isn't the entire *point* of Commons to encourage mirroring?  It's
> supposed to be a resource for the general public, not our own private
> Wikimedia Foundation image repository.  People are already encouraged to
> copy images from there and use them; I don't see why legally providing a
> different way to do what we already encourage people to do would make
> things different.

At this point I'd say that encouraging and providing automated tools
for widespread commons mirroring at this point would be irresponsible.

And the claim that we encourage it today can not be supported. When
was the last commons dump? November 2005.  How many people have
downloaded the 300 gig archive?

1?


from_name: Jon

subject: [Textbook-l] Game guides

body:
It would be useful if Jimmy would comment on the questions asked, but I would like to make the following comments (the numbers refer to Lord Voldemort's initial email):

1, 2. My understanding is that Wikibooks' purpose always has been to provide textbooks. Article II of the Wikimedia Foundation bylaws says, in part, refers to  "... a collection of e-book resources aimed specifically toward students (such as textbooks and annotated public domain books) named Wikibooks".  (see http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_bylaws )

3. The Wikimedia Foundation, operating through its Board, have overall control of Wikibooks (they set its scope in the Foundation bylaws, and can choose to change this or to close the project if they see fit). However, subject to this, Wikibookians deal with the day to day editing of the site, including the setting of site policies (whilst this is subject to them being consistent with what the WMF says, the WMF is very hands-off in this regard).

4, 5. Games guides are not textbooks. Therefore they do not fit within Wikibooks' purpose.

6, 7. Wikibooks' contributors must work within the defined scope of the project. They are on a very free rein as to what they do, but they cannot extend this scope. Requests for scope changes and new Wikimedia projects can be made on Metawiki.

8. "Textbook" has its normal English meaning. There is no special Wikibooks definition of it. A textbook on games, game design, history of games that would assist someone studying them would be within Wikibooks' scope. Note, however, that no-one would reasonably describe a simple games walkthrough as a textbook. They might call it a guide or perhaps, at a push, a manual, but it would not be a textbook in the normal sense.

9. A straightforward guide on a board game would not normally be described as a textbook. As for game guides, however, it would be possible to write a detailed textbook on some board games suitable for students.

10, 11. The talk of an "accredited institution" metric appears to have been suggested mostly by those speaking out in favour of keeping games guides, with the idea of rubbishing it as providing too narrow an inclusion criterion. We don't need such a metric - the general test is whether the book is or is not a textbook (but see my qualification of this below). An "accredited institution" metric along the lines of "if a subject is studied in a number of accredited institutions it can be deemed worthy of study" may be acceptable in the sense that textbook subjects meeting that test should be allowed. However, any such test should not be limiting - there are many worthwhile subjects for study that do not meet that test that are within Wikibooks' scope.

12. Inevitably the removal of game guides from Wikibooks will see those who only edited those areas of Wikibooks leave. It will also see those who spent some of their time on Wikibooks on editing game guides, and some time on textbooks, reduce the time they spend on Wikibooks. On the other hand, a more focused Wikibooks will help attract other new editors committed to providing quality open-content textbooks.

13. I would add the following. "Textbook" has its normal English meaning. There are many possible subject areas and styles for textbooks. The word should be interpreted widely on Wikibooks, but the meaning should not be stretched so as to include texts that are clearly not textbooks in any sense of the word. There are also some subjects that are innately inappropriate as subjects of textbooks, or which would be deemed unsuitable - these are few and far between, but might include textbooks extolling black (or white) supremacy, a textbook to train people in terrorism, a textbook on a little recognised constructed language (such as one I have just made up, or which literally only a handful of people have any interest in). Other than extreme cases such as these (which can be discussed on WB:VFD), all textbooks should be welcome on Wikibooks.

X. There has not been a suggestion that all "How-tos" were removed. Jimbo has noted that some "How-tos" should be removed (which was certainly true at the time). This unfortunately, but I believe erroneously, was picked up by some to mean that all How-tos should be removed.

Y. Eric Moeller's suggestion of renaming Wikibooks to Wikitextbooks has some merit. Although "Wikitextbooks" is longer and less sexy, it would make clearer to everyone what Wikibooks' scope is. Many people, particularly on Wikipedia, incorrectly think that any book content is suitable for Wikibooks. This is a misconception that really should be removed.

Kind regards

Jon
(jguk)


body:
Gregory Maxwell wrote:

>And the claim that we encourage it today can not be supported. When
>was the last commons dump? November 2005.  How many people have
>downloaded the 300 gig archive?
>
>
We encourage people to copy images; I don't see what different it would
make whether we encourage any one person to copy all the images at the
same time, or instead encourage many people to each copy some of the
images at their leisure.

We explicitly say: "Unlike traditional media repositories Wikimedia
Commons is free. Everyone is allowed to copy, use and modify any files
here freely as long the source and the authors are credited and as long
you release your copies/improvements under the same freedom to others."

What legal difference would it make if: 1) we encourage people to copy,
use, and modify files, which we provide in a format in which it's quite
easy to do so; and 2) we encourage people to do the same, but provide
them in a format that is slightly easier still to use?

-Mark


from_name: George Herbert

body:
On 6/9/06, Jesse W <jessw at netwood.net> wrote:
> On Jun 9, 2006, at 4:32 PM, Steve Bennett wrote:
> > We have articles on every single episode of most major TV shows, and
> > lots of
> > minor ones. You would never see that in any encyclopaedia.
>
> You would not see that in the Encyclopedia of Late 20th Century
> American Television?  Really?  Or do you mean in any "general"
> encyclopedia.  Because certainly, Wikipedia reaches the level of a
> specialized encyclopedia in a number of areas, like television shows -
> but (I hope), we don't go too much beyond that.

Out of curiosity, why?

Obviously storage space becomes a limit at some point, but there seems
to be little visible limit to the interest of people in documenting
things.

What, exactly, does an end-state Wikipedia project look like, to those
who would want us to stop adding new articles at some point?  How and
when would you say "stop"?

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


from_name: Essjay

subject: [Commons-l] some statistics

body:
Magnus Manske wrote:
> Solution A:
> Increase the number of admins, which will increase the number of deletions.
>
True, but also increases the number of controversial deletions; on a
normal project, any time you delete something, you risk being yelled at
by the people on that project. On Commons, you risk being yelled at by
everybody involved with Wikimedia. That's a lot of pressure to put on
someone, especially when they can't easily leave a "Hey, I noticed
[image] seems to need deletion, but you're using it" message (because we
have hundreds of languages, and nobody can hope to speak them all).
> Solution B:
> Have a bot automatically delete files in certain categories that have
> been there since X days.
>
The vandals will love this one: "Hey, want to really wreak havoc? Go
start tagging images with this category. Do it to images with
descriptions in small languages, where there's not likely to be anyone
who can tell you're actually vandalizing, or anyone watching the image
to know to untag it. Even better if you do it to a hundred at a time;
they'll assume you're a good contributor, and won't eve ask you
questions! Then, this bot will come along and delete it for you, and
they won't be able to get it back!"
> Solution C:
> I would expect that most problematic uploads come from new users.
> Disable the creation of new users (or their ability to upload) while the
> total backlog is >X files (no pun intended).
Mmmm, DOS opportunity from the same vandals: Tag all kinds of images, no
matter what they are, with deletion notices, it will stop new user
creation [or uploads by new users] until they can get it back down.
Don't worry, even if they revert you, you'll still DOS them for a while,
waste thier time, and by the time they've caught you and started
reverting, you'll have another account and be doing it again!
> Have a messaage displayed prominently to put social pressure on the admins ;-)
>
Attention, admins: Quickly, resign adminship, because no matter what
you're doing, you're going to be blamed for the problem! Oh, and note to
vandals: All the admins are resigning, now's the time to hit, because
there's even less of them to stop you!
> (disclaimer: I am not an admin on commons)
>
> Magnus
Now, don't get me wrong, my responses above are comically
over-dramatized to make the point. They're all good ideas (except that
last one, don't blame the admins!), they're just prone to abuse, and
with the language-barriers and lack of staff on Commons, it'd be an open
and waiting target.

I am a Commons admin, and the thing that scares me most about Commons
admin work is deletion: Almost everything on Commons, if deleted, cannot
be recovered, and Commons materials are used on all Wikimedia projects.
There are good tools, like the one that checks usage on other projects,
and I'm glad we have them, but we still have the problem that there is a
major language barrier, and very low participation from projects.

However, the thing that would make me feel most comfortable deleting
would be a way of getting things back. If deleted images could be
recovered, I'd have no problem whatsoever with deleting things in those
categories left and right. And, it solves the problems raised above with
the idea of deleting by bot: As long as we know we can get it back, why not?

I'm sure that the reason images aren't recoverable is an issue of space:
We don't have the server space to store tens of thousands of images that
were deemed unwanted. Likewise, we don't want to be holding on to copies
of images that could get us in trouble, like copyvios. However, it would
be incredibly useful to be able to restore an image that shouldn't have
been deleted. I wonder if it wouldn't be possible to hold on to deleted
images for a period of time, and to then have them be automatically
purged. Though I've never gone to a deleted page and been unable to
restore content, I'm told that it is possible for very old deleted pages
to be purged off entirely, so I wonder if something similar couldnt' be
done for images.

It seems to me that an image being deleted is something you would
probably notice right away (at least within, say, 7 days) if the image
was really important; would it be possible to make it so that deleted
images were kept for 7 days, an then purged after that? Even if it was
only done on Commons (and it strikes me, it would be a feature that
other wikis would want as well, to deal with the possibility of a
compromised/rouge admin account) it would help tremendously, because we
would no longer have to worry about being in hot water if we deleted
something that was mistagged. It might produce a space problem for the
first week, while we were all cutting through the 12,000 image backlog,
but after that, it seems to me the space requirement of just holding on
to things for a week wouldn't be that much. (I'm not a programmer, but
common sense suggests moving an image from a to b doesn't really
increase the amount of space required by the image, it just adds a log
entry, which should be fairly cheap.)

Since we have a developer on the list, thinking about possible solutions
<lays out a carrot under a box to trap Magnus> perhaps he could provide
us with some more information on what would be needed to make this
happen, and perhaps even provide the needed code to make it happen.

I'll pledge, personally, to delete at least 1,000 of the backlogged
images if this is implemented.

Essjay

--
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Essjay
Wikipedia:The Free Encyclopedia
http://www.wikipedia.org/


from_name: Fred LaCroix

subject: [Wikitech-l] Newbie SMTP troubles

body:
Hi,

  I've got Mediawiki 1.6.6 running on a Windows XP SP2 system with Apache 2.2, php 5.1.4, PEAR's Mail package ver. 1.1.10 and MySQL 5.0.21.  This PC is being run behind a firewall and will be accessed only by internal users.  The system is up and running and I can login, create new discussions, edit...etc but when I try to "Confirm your email address" by pushing the "Mail a confirmation code" button, all I get is a blank page and no email is sent.

  My localsetting.php file contains the following:

  $wgEnableEmail = true;
$wgEnableUserEmail = true;

  $wgEmergencyContact = "wikiadminl at internaltest.com";
$wgPasswordSender = "wikiadmin at internaltest.com";
$wgSMTP             = array(
 "host"     => '192.168.1.2',
 "IDHost"   => 'internaltest.com',
 "port"     => "25",
# 'auth'     => false,
 "auth"     => true,
 "username" => 'wikiadmin',
 "password" => 'BlahBlah'

  For "host" I have tried the ip address of the system, the machine name, smtp.machine name, smpt.machine name.FQDN but no luck.

  My php.ini has:

  [mail function]
; For Win32 only.
SMTP = 192.168.1.2
smtp_port = 25

  ; For Win32 only.
sendmail_from = wikiadmin at internaltest.com

  Any suggestions that could be offered would be appreciated.

  Thanks.

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


from_name: Anthony DiPierro

body:
On 6/9/06, Alison Wheeler <wikimedia at alisonwheeler.com> wrote:
> On Fri, June 9, 2006 17:57, Anthony DiPierro wrote:
> > The thing is, the vast majority of those tens of thousands of
> > participants don't really care about the foundation.  They just want
> > to work on a free encyclopedia/free news reporting service/free image
> > repository/whatever.
> > It'd be interesting if nothing else to see just what percentage of
> > Wikipedians have any desire at all of being Wikimedians.
>
> except that the real thing is, you can't separate the two. Wikipedia (and
> Wikibooks, Wiktionary, etc) all exist not by the grace of god, but by the
> grace of Wikimedia (Foundation).

Sure, someone has to collect the donations and pay for the servers.
I'm not saying the Foundation doesn't play an important role in
Wikipedia et. al.  But the fact that the Foundation plays an important
role in Wikipedia doesn't mean all Wikipedians have to concern
themselves with it.

> If someone wants to play rough with a
> Wikipedia entry they don't go after the individual editors and try and
> trace all the IP addresses, but look to the legal body responsible for
> that entry, WMF. As such, whether they are aware they "care about the
> foundation" or not, we need to educate them better that they need to.
>
> It's a bit like people who don't vote as they say it isn't relevant to
> them. WMF is relevant to *every* editor and reader of every project.
>
> Alison Wheeler

Actually, I don't agree with that at all.  The Red Cross doesn't
require you to vote for their board of directors or even care about
the mission of the Red Cross in order to give blood.  Why should
Wikipedians be required to get involved with Wikimedia in order to
contribute text?

Anthony


subject: [WikiEN-l] "refactoring" signatures

body:
On 6/9/06, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
>
> Death Phoenix wrote:
>
> >I prefer to to write in BE, but when I see people trying to convert
> American
> >articles to BE, such as [[Special Activities Division]], it annoys me
> >greatly. Same with British articles to AE (such as [[Harry Potter]]).
> This
> >also applies to articles that could be written in either AE or BE, but
> were
> >first written in one form, and people come to convert it over.
> >
> Aren't our policies already pretty well settled in telling people not to
> do either one of those things?
>

Yes, but that doesn't stop people from doing it.


body:
On 6/9/06, Kelly Martin <kelly.lynn.martin at gmail.com> wrote:
> Exactly why it needs to be removed now before it becomes completely
> entrenched.  First we started getting people who wanted adminship to
> have control, and now they have adminship, and are taking control.

In the end there is no certian way of telling how people will turn out
until they become admins. for the most part RFA works.

Admins are not meant to be able to exercise a significant degree of
control over the project. That they can is not RFA's fault.

>  We
> should have stopped this a year ago, but we weren't paying attention,
> and now we have a lot of bad admins to show for it.
>

Not really. 721 fully active admins. Number of those doing things I
regard as negative comes in single figures.

> That was, um, what, seven months ago?  My attitudes have changed
> rather significantly since then, as have those of the project.
>
> Kelly

Project hasn't changed much in seven months. Deletionist/inclusionist
wars have largly ended. Userbox issue has appeared. FRA and FC
standards have gone up but real chnage has been pretty minimal
certianly compared to say my first 7 months on the project (arbcom
just starting up introduction of the template namespace and the lose
of msg:)

--
geni


body:
On 6/9/06, Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:
>
> Death Phoenix wrote:
> > On 6/6/06, Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:
> >> Problem templates are mostly those which start an HTML tag in one
> >> template, then
> >> finish it in another. For instance if {{table-header}} contains a
> <table>,
> >> and
> >> then the table rows and final </table> are in another template
> entirely.
> >> These
> >> have always broken on regular MediaWiki -- the template is required to
> >> close its
> >> own tags -- though they sometimes appeared to work on Wikipedia due to
> >> bugs with
> >> our HTML handling when Tidy is enabled.
> >>
> >
> > Does this affect templates that use a <div> tag in one and a </div> tag
> in
> > another? This affects many voting archive templates, such as
> {{at}}/{{ab}}
> > or {{rfaf}}/{{rfab}}.
>
> Yes.
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
>

Hmmm... these templates are almost always substed rather than being
transcluded. Will substing the template serve as a workaround for this?


subject: [WikiEN-l] Objective oversight needed

references:
<ur7i8255fq4d3j0spjr42mbk40r8j998kq@4ax.com>
	<gq8i82t79504m1og5f1a20vn1b5066tfgj@4ax.com>
	<b8ceeef70606090208q7e696bb1p4a6c7e6958ebb801@mail.gmail.com>
	<6sri825j495csrl5d2rju4st2c0jeb11nb@4ax.com>
	<b8ceeef70606090654p6ff93ef8m8fb5aa3dc55fa093@mail.gmail.com>
	<jf2j82puqa93ev9hrbf9m5hkp30rp7fucm@4ax.com>

body:
On 6/9/06, Guy Chapman aka JzG <guy.chapman at spamcop.net> wrote:
> On Fri, 9 Jun 2006 15:54:24 +0200, you wrote:
>
> >I recall having read it previously and being quite
> >impressed at the ingeniousness of these ideas...
>
> Indeed.  Like all conjuring tricks, as long as you don't look up the
> magician's sleeve it all appears very slick :-)

Hell, I don't care if it ever happens. It's just like reading Star
Wars for me. :)

Steve


subject: [Commons-l] some statistics

body:
On 6/9/06, Essjay <essjaywiki at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm sure that the reason images aren't recoverable is an issue of space:
> We don't have the server space to store tens of thousands of images that
> were deemed unwanted. Likewise, we don't want to be holding on to copies
> of images that could get us in trouble, like copyvios.

I'd guess it's more of a historical accident.  Undeletion of images
just wasn't very important during the early years of the project, and
no one got around to implementing it.  There's at least one
enhancement request in bugzilla,
http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2099.

> Since we have a developer on the list, thinking about possible solutions
> <lays out a carrot under a box to trap Magnus> perhaps he could provide
> us with some more information on what would be needed to make this
> happen, and perhaps even provide the needed code to make it happen.
>
> I'll pledge, personally, to delete at least 1,000 of the backlogged
> images if this is implemented.
>
> Essjay

Looking at the bug report, someone else has pledged $50 on top of that :).

Anthony


body:
On 6/9/06, Jesse W <jessw at netwood.net> wrote:
> On Jun 9, 2006, at 9:44 AM, geni wrote:
> > Project hasn't changed much in seven months.
>
> > Deletionist/inclusionist wars have largly ended. Userbox issue has
> > appeared.
> And, IMO, that's the single biggest evidence in favor of the idea that
> the userbox issue is far less a substantive issue, and far more simply
> the current Wikipedia-wide "conflict du jour".

Pretty much. The real conflict on wikipedia is between the pro and
rather less pro process groups but  for the most part that involves
less shouting. Instead both sides write highly detailed essays at each
other.

>  Not that there are not
> real issues (there were real issues behind the deletionist/inclusionist
> fight too),

Deletionist/inclusionist issue is real. Largly due to the problem that
prior to wikipedia no one appears to have given much though to what an
encyopedia is. but hwta we should include/what we should not include
is a serious issue.

--
geni


from_name: Andre Engels

body:
2006/6/9, Angela <beesley at gmail.com>:

> If it was intended for someone specifically, I would have asked that
> person privately rather than posting to the list.  This was not
> intended as a "polite pretext" to anything, but a genuine query as to
> whether there would be anyone willing to be on the Board if the Board
> were about to appoint someone.

I definitely would be willing if asked, but I did not react because I
considered myself too little qualified to actually run, solicit or
whatever.

--
Andre Engels, andreengels at gmail.com
ICQ: 6260644  --  Skype: a_engels


body:
Thanks for correcting me.

H.T.

Mark Williamson <node.ue at gmail.com> ?? Singapore uses Simplified, officially.

Mark

On 09/06/06, Hsiang-Tai Chien  wrote:
> zh-cn: Chinese language used in China, Simplified Chinese
> zh-hk: Chinese language used in Hong Kong, Traditional Chinese
> zh-sg: Chinese language used in Singapore, Traditional Chinese
> zh-tw: Chinese language used in Taiwan, Traditional Chinese
>
> Although they are all Chinese, however, they use different terminologies for the same thing due to the culture changes in the areas. It's not just that simple with Han-S and Han-T. Also not a macro language I think.
>
> I know it might not be easy for an non-Chinese to understand this, but it's the language we live with it day by day.
>
> Regards,
> H.T.
> en-wp: [[User:Htchien]]
> zh-wp: [[User:Htchien]]

 ___________________________________________________
 ??? Yahoo!?????? 7.0???????????
 http://messenger.yahoo.com.tw/


body:
OK, "there are too many writing scripts for Chinese, so no auto-converter should be implemeneted on Commons", is this your opinion?

I still think auto-converter can help many Chinese people on Commons. Too many writing scripts should not be a reason to stop it. Take zh.wp for example, the auto-converter helps many Chinese people to understand the article, I believe it can also benifit Commons' Chinese users.

BTW, if the Commons' community still think auto-converter is not OK for them, then I will accept it. However, it seems this subject does not have much attention amount the Commons' community.

Regards,
H.T.

Shinjiman <shinjiman at gmail.com> ?? Hsiang-Tai Chien  writes:

>
> zh-cn: Chinese language used in China, Simplified Chinese
> zh-hk: Chinese language used in Hong Kong, Traditional Chinese
> zh-sg: Chinese language used in Singapore, Traditional Chinese
> zh-tw: Chinese language used in Taiwan, Traditional Chinese
>
> Although they are all Chinese, however, they use different terminologies for
the same thing due to the
> culture changes in the areas. It's not just that simple with Han-S and Han-
T. Also not a macro language I think.
>
> I know it might not be easy for an non-Chinese to understand this, but it's
the language we live with it day by day.
>
> Regards,
> H.T.
> en-wp: [[User:Htchien]]
> zh-wp: [[User:Htchien]]
>

Generally the language codes ahould be all right, however that should be more
correct form to using the language tags, by defination of language tags, IANA
( http://www.iana.org/assignments/language-tags ):

zh: Chinese, only generally "Chinese" or Zhong Wen (??)

zh-hans: Simplified Chinese language
zh-hant: Traditional Chinese language

zh-cn: Chinese language used in Mainland China
zh-hk: Chinese language used in Hong Kong
zh-mo: Chinese language used in Macau
zh-sg: Chinese language used in Singapore
zh-tw: Chinese language used in Taiwan

zh-hans-cn: Chinese language used in Mainland China, Simplified Chinese
zh-hans-hk: Chinese language used in Hong Kong, Simplified Chinese
zh-hans-mo: Chinese language used in Macau, Simplified Chinese
zh-hans-sg: Chinese language used in Singapore, Simplified Chinese
zh-hans-tw: Chinese language used in Taiwan, Simplified Chinese

zh-hant-cn: Chinese language used in Mainland China, Trititional Chinese
zh-hant-hk: Chinese language used in Hong Kong, Trititional Chinese
zh-hant-mo: Chinese language used in Macau, Trititional Chinese
zh-hant-sg: Chinese language used in Singapore, Trititional Chinese
zh-hant-tw: Chinese language used in Taiwan, Trititional Chinese

Don't forget there are many writing scripts besides the Simplified/Tratitional
scripts and localised scripts ( and don't dorget there's have script language
for Maacau too :) ).

regards
Man
 ___________________________________________________
 ??? Yahoo!?????? 7.0???????????
 http://messenger.yahoo.com.tw/


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: mboverload

subject: [Wikipedia-l] My first message

body:
I'm just going to be the noob and let you all know I just joined...so hi =)
I'm User:mboverload on en.wikipedia