from_name: Andrew Cates

subject: [Wikitech-l] received request for static offline copies

body:
I run http://fixedreference.org <http://fixedreference.org/>  (where
we've put static periodic copies of some of the WPs e.g.
http://july.fixedreference.org/fr/20040727/wikipedia/Accueil etc.) and I
have received a request from a charity which distributes 1500
refurbished computers a year to low income families in New York for a
static version of WikiPedia to put on the computers they distribute.

I don't have an offline static version. I guess it would take a few days
in Perl to write an offline static code. Am too busy at present. Anyone
prepared to help? I am user BozMo on en.

Oh, and you posted a request for people to help with static copies. Am
happy helping if you know what you want? I put up monthly copies of
whichever WPs people have asked me to anyway at present on FR.

BozMo (aka Andrew Cates)

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list: wikipedia-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Austin Hair

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Nauruan and this ugly message under each en:article

body:
> "Like many others"? Which browser is this? uhh... lynx? links? elinks?
> Even Internet Explorer 4 should support the little "hidden" trick that
> they just did, methinks.

Text browsers, screen readers, braille devices, thousands of antiquated
browser installations in libraries, educational institutions, developing
countries...

There's a reason we use XHTML and CSS to begin with; while my beef is so
minor as to be inconsequential, certain design choices strike me as
being a bit ironic.

--
Austin D. Hair <austin at austinhair.org>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Callidus
http://www.austinhair.org/
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list: wikitech-l

from_name: Timwi

subject: [Wikitech-l] Update test.wikipedia.org?

body:
Hi.

Would it be possible for someone to update test.wikipedia.org with the
newest stuff in HEAD, so that people can test my Recent Changes Patrol
feature?

Please notice that you will have to run
maintenance/archives/patch-rc-patrol.sql to add the new column to
recentchanges.

Thanks!
Timwi


list: wikien-l

from_name: Christopher Larberg

subject: [WikiEN-l] anons editing

body:
If you need another reason, check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_rifle<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_rifle>, which was just taken from a redirect to a full-fledged article by an anon.
-Slowking Man
  ----- Original Message -----
  From: Fennec Foxen<mailto:fennec at gmail.com>
  To: English Wikipedia<mailto:wikien-l at wikipedia.org>
  Sent: Monday, August 09, 2004 8:30 AM
  Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] anons editing

  On Sun, 8 Aug 2004 21:40:38 -0700 (PDT), zero 0000
  <nought_0000 at yahoo.com<mailto:nought_0000 at yahoo.com>> wrote:
  > In my almost-a-year editing Wikipedia, I am yet to hear a convincing
  > reason for allowing anons to edit at all, but saw plenty of cases when
  > I wished they couldn't.  Zero.

  Anonymous editors may become interested in Wikipedia and become
  non-anonymous. This occurs with greater frequency it would if the
  anonymous user was not able to experiment prior to registration.
  There's one- okay?
  _______________________________________________
  WikiEN-l mailing list
  WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org<mailto:WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org>
  http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l<http://mail.wikipediaorg/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l>
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from_name: Christiaan Briggs

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Wikipedia-logo merchandise: yawn

body:
Daniel P.B.Smith wrote:

> (But what do I know? I was raised by a mom who never allowed
> advertising within the sphere of her personal space. No containers of
> cream were ever placed on the table; the cream was always poured first
> into a pitcher. The idea of staring at Elsie, the Borden cow on the
> breakfast table was anathema to her. No bumper stickers on the Smith
> family car!)

Lucky bugger, the advertising in London drives me close to insanity
sometimes.
Christiaan


subject:
[WikiEN-l] Display reason for article deletion to anons? (was:
	anons and new articles)

body:
This is an excellent idea IMO. A friend of mine had one of his articles
deleted and he didn't know what for. He just thought it was a technical
problem and never came back.

Christiaan

On 8 Aug 2004, at 2:15 pm, Timwi wrote:

> One idea I was toying with in my mind recently is this. When sysops
> delete an article, the article goes back to saying "Wikipedia does not
> have an article with this title yet." Maybe we should actually let
> everyone (including anonymous users) know that there used to be an
> article, and (this is the important part) show the reason for its
> deletion.
>
> If a newbie goes back to see what happened to their article, and they
> see it gone, they are more likely to just put it back in (it looks to
> them more like a glitch in the system or an accident than a deliberate
> deleting). If it actually said "This article was deleted for the
> following reason: vandalism", they are more likely to ackowledge that
> putting their article back in is going to have the same effect again.


from_name: evan at wikitravel.org

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: New feature: Recent Changes Patrol

body:
On Mon, Aug 09, 2004 at 08:26:38AM +0100, Timwi wrote:

> >Did you make this feature optional? If not, could you, please?
>
> This feature does not take anything away, so making it "optional"
> doesn't make any sense. That's like saying "please could you make the
> wiki syntax for bold text optional?" - you don't have to use it. You can
> remove the highlighting using CSS.

Fine. Whatever. *I'll* make it optional.

~ESP


subject:
[WikiEN-l] Nationalist POV-pushing on Wikpedia: what to do? (was
	Azerbaijan and Iran related articles)

body:
Typical irrational response to rational points of criticism. By
labeling such argument as anti-American you simply make the term
obsolete or it even becomes a good thing, a moral obligation.

It's very similar to when people are labeled anti-Semites for acting on
their concern for the human rights of Palestinians. "Anti-Semitism"
then becomes a moral obligation. The term starts to have no meaning.

Christiaan

On 8 Aug 2004, at 8:24 pm, Rick wrote:

> Yawn.? Typical usual boring anti-American rant.? Get over it.
> ?
> RickK
>
> Jens Ropers <ropers at ropersonline.com> wrote:
> IMHO nationalist POV has been a problem on Wikipedia for a LOOONG time:
> U.S. nationalist POV, that is.
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subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Re: Nauruan and this ugly message under each
	en:article

body:
Austin Hair wrote:

> Rather than selectively hiding elements from print media,

That's the correct way of doing it.

> why not
> generate these using content: selectors?

Because then they won't show up when people print the page with a less
conforming browser.

Timwi


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] (no subject)

body:
karl at karllong.com wrote:
>       Warning: $wgProxyKey is insecure Can't find a writable temp
> directory for the XHTML template. Check that the TMP environment
> variable points to a writable directory, or that the default temp
> dir (/tmp) exists and is writable.

So have you done this?

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Rick

subject: [WikiEN-l] Nationalist POV-pushing on Wikpedia: what to do?

body:
But it doesn't work that way.  Take [[Gdansk]], for example.  We TRY to keep "In German, ''Danzig''", mainly because as far as a lot of English speakers are concerned, it still IS Danzig, and because that was the name it was known to English speakers for years up till about 20 years ago.  But the nationalists refuse to allow that -- at best, they'll throw in French spellings, spellings from three or four other obscure languages, or just delete the Danzig phrase altogether, as "Nazi".  They come back over and over again, with different anon or sockpuppet accounts, and replace it on a weekly basis.  They are unwilling to accept anything but THEIR POV.

RickK

"Poor, Edmund W" <Edmund.W.Poor at abc.com> wrote:
David Gerard wrote:

> Nationalist POV pushing is becoming a real problem on
> Wikipedia. Particularly in cases where it appears
> semi-official, as with these cases and with User:Levzur on
> Georgia-related articles. I suspect a series of AC rulings as
> we go isn't really the best way to approach the problem. What
> can we do abouthis sort of thing? Gdansk/Danzig is just the tip of it.

The only thing we can do about it is what we've always done about it,
and it's the best solution anyway:

DESCRIBE EACH SIDE'S POV

Say that according to _this_ group of nationalists, the situation is
like this. Then say that according to _that_ group of nationalists, the
situation is like that.

Here's an example, from a different controversy. Gay rights groups
generally maintain that the homosexual population of the US and/or UK is
at ten percent (10%). Conservatives say it's much lower: one or two
percent (1% to 2%) for males, two or three percent (2% to 3%) for
females.

So what should the Wikipedia article say? Should it endorse the side
which is obviously right? No, because it's a disputed matter. Each side
touts its own 'objective' scientific studies and asserts that they are
being totally sincere about "just wanting to tell the truth" about the
situation.

Enter the NPOV policy:

*According to the HRC, the US male homosexual percentage is 10% (or
whatever their website or books say)
*According to NARTH, the percentage is 1% to 2%.

We can also say:

*The general public is more sympathetic to HRC's views, and the higher
figure is generally used by mainstream journalists.
*Moreover, [[gay rights]] activists dismiss NARTH's research as
hopelessly biased due to the groups perceived "anti-gay" prejudice.

I didn't check just now, but I think that's pretty much how the
Wikipedia describes the topic now.

I think we should handle all Nationalist POV the same way: describe each
POV, and possibly indicate how widely held it is.

Ed Poor
_______________________________________________
WikiEN-l mailing list
WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

---------------------------------
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New and Improved Yahoo! Mail - Send 10MB messages!
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list: foundation-l

from_name: Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales

subject: [Foundation-l] Wikipedia-Freenode relations

body:
Elisabeth Bauer wrote:
> But even for those I think it's not necessary: Jimmy, Angela and Anthere
> are anyhow known as members of the board, so a cloak would have no
> effect whatsoever.  Or differently put: a cloak is for speaking "ex
> cathedra" and I doubt that this will happen very often.

Maybe I don't quite understand the issue, but one thing I like about
the cloak is that I don't have to worry about people pretending to be
me.  This seems like a legitimate danger since I'm pretty easy to
impersonate, ha ha, because I always say the same things.

--Jimbo


list: wikimedia-l


from_name: Fennec Foxen

subject: [WikiEN-l] anons editing

body:
On Sun, 8 Aug 2004 21:40:38 -0700 (PDT), zero 0000
<nought_0000 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> In my almost-a-year editing Wikipedia, I am yet to hear a convincing
> reason for allowing anons to edit at all, but saw plenty of cases when
> I wished they couldn't.  Zero.

Anonymous editors may become interested in Wikipedia and become
non-anonymous. This occurs with greater frequency it would if the
anonymous user was not able to experiment prior to registration.
There's one- okay?


body:
On Mon, 9 Aug 2004 03:18:02 -0700, Austin Hair <callidus at austinhair.org> wrote:
> Like many others, my browser is altogether ignorant of stylsheets, and

"Like many others"? Which browser is this? uhh... lynx? links? elinks?
Even Internet Explorer 4 should support the little "hidden" trick that
they just did, methinks.

--
You keep using that word...
I do not think it means what you think it means.


from_name: xmlizer

subject: [Wikitech-l] Watchlist...

body:
Hello

I found in bug list this bug

[ 578079 ] Nonexistent pages on watchlist.

It's a old one but the problem I wanted to mention was this

when you look at Special:Watchlist&magic=yes we can see that everithing
is blue

But as far as I known we can watch page that doesn't still exist and
even page that no more exist

Could it be feasible to see this list like other links in wikipedia
(blue if they exist, and red if not)

May be could it be an option

Thanks
Xmlizer


from_name: Paul Fierro

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: [Mediawiki-l] MediaWiki 1.3.0beta6 released

body:
On 08/06/2004 6:28 PM, Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:

> Morbus Iff wrote:
>> Incidentally, a side note about this. From what I've read, you cannot
>> set allow_url_fopen by using ini_set - it's an admin value only. I
>> think I saw an attempt to turn this off in one of the source files.
>> Is this "just in case" sorta stuff?
>
> An empirical test on 4.3.2 shows that you can indeed turn
> allow_url_fopen on and off via ini_set(), despite what the documentation
> says.
>
> They may have changed it and the documentation is incomplete, or it
> might be an old bug.

To clarify:

The allow_url_fopen option in php.ini was changed from PHP_INI_ALL to
PHP_INI_SYSTEM in PHP 4.3.5. So if you're running PHP 4.3.5+, you can't set
allow_url_fopen via ini_set().

Paul


body:
On the Nauruan wikipedia, they call their language Nauruose. On the interlinks it is called Nauruan. (http://na.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nauruose)

As languages are indicated in the way it is written in that language, I think this should be amended.

On en: there is this _ugly_ message like "Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nauri_language""

If this must be on each page, have it under the category with at least a blank line above it. The onus of referring to wikipedia is on the site that has copied wikipedia not for us to have this on our pages as well.

Thanks,
   GerardM


from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Recent changes patrol

body:
--- Pete/Pcb21 <pete_pcb21_wpmail at pcbartlett.com> wrote:
> Of course the initial system is game-able, and the hike to "3 checks"
> mentioned by mav above is game-able too. If an edit needs n different
> checks to count as checked a malevent user can simply create n+1
> accounts. (This gets progressively more difficult for the bad user as n
> increases; I reckon n=3 might be about the right level too).

Simple interim solution: Only allow Admins the ability to flag articles in this
way. When the problem you mention is fixed, the feature can be extended to all
non-newbie logged-in users.

Ideally this should eventually be a user pref since different people have
different ideas about trust (some may want three admins to look at a diff,
others may just want 2 non-newbie logged-in users to look at a diff).

-- mav

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
New and Improved Yahoo! Mail - Send 10MB messages!
http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail


from_name: Alfio Puglisi

body:
On Mon, 9 Aug 2004, Andrew Cates wrote:

>I don't have an offline static version. I guess it would take a few days
>in Perl to write an offline static code. Am too busy at present. Anyone
>prepared to help? I am user BozMo on en.

You seem to have used an (improved) version of my script to make those
pages. Depending on how long ago you downloaded it, there's better version
at http://www.tommasoconforti.com/wiki along with static archives in many
languages. The English version still isn't there, but there will be in a
couple of days.

Alfio


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Recent changes patrol

body:
Daniel P.B.Smith wrote:
>     From: Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com>
>
>
>     Neat! But who gets to mark an edit as "patrolled"? Letting an anon
>     or new user
>     do that would tend to defeat the purpose. Also, depending on a
>     single person's
>     judgment may be problematic as well. Ideally an article would need
>     to be viewed
>     by 3 non-newbies/anons to get the "patrolled" tag.

> I don't think so. It's not as if marked articles would never be looked
> at. The function of the feature, as I see it, is not to be technical
> armor against bad behavior and bad faith, but to reduce Wikistress by
> insuring that many eyes _do not_ look at new articles if many eyes are
> not needed.
>
> I think it's a very good idea.

The checked edits idea has been bumping around a lot (see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Checked_edits_brainstorming for
one round of the debate).

Of course the initial system is game-able, and the hike to "3 checks"
mentioned by mav above is game-able too. If an edit needs n different
checks to count as checked a malevent user can simply create n+1
accounts. (This gets progressively more difficult for the bad user as n
increases; I reckon n=3 might be about the right level too).

The solution to this is to say *who* has done the checking. Then we have
an embryonic version of the fabled web of trust.

But for now, I think it is fantastic this idea has been implemented. It
will help clean after the "vanilla vandals" who are far more numerous
than the seriously annoying malevalent users, who can and will meddle
with the system, and eventually get banned for it.

Thanks to Timwi.

Pete/Pcb21


from_name: Thomas Luft

subject: [Wikitech-l] New feature: Recent Changes Patrol

body:
Timwi wrote:

> I've committed a new feature I just wrote. Recent Changes Patrol. The
> commit message explains everything:
>
>     New feature: Recent Changes Patrol. All edits and new pages are
>     now highlighted on Special:Recentchanges and Special:Newpages
>     until someone "marks" them as "patrolled" using a special link.
>     For new pages, this link appears at the bottom of the article if
>     the link in Recent Changes or New Pages is followed. For all
>     other edits, this link appears only in the diff and only if the
>     diff link is followed from Recent Changes. (Might need to add
>     this functionality to Watchlist too; haven't done that yet.)

Hi,

I suggest to enable the approval only for other users than the one who
did the edit (if this is possible). Otherwise people submit their
changes and approve them on their own. Maybe you already programmed it
that way...
Regards

Thomas
[[de:Benutzer:Urbanus]]


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Recent Changes Patrol

body:
--- Timwi <timwi at gmx.net> wrote:
> I made it so that each wiki can be set up to allow either all logged-in
> users or only sysops to do this. (techtalk: set $wgOnlySysopsCanPatrol
> in LocalSettings.php)

Awesome! On En.wiki I'd say to set this to sysops until a more robust system is
in place (see below).

> I was going to make it so that you can't "patrol" your own edits, but I
> haven't done that yet. (techtalk: it would require an extra DB query)

Oh ya - hadn't thought about that. Speaking of extra DB queries, it would also
be nice for each user to be able to create white lists in his/her prefs. Then
edits by any user in the whitelist would not be bold in RC/new pages for them.
Being able to trust by proxy would also be nice. I could say that I trust Ed
Poor's judgment, for example, and his white list would also affect what I saw
on RC/new pages, but I would not be able to *directly* read his whitelist (Ed
would have to set his prefs to allow others to use his white list in this way;
default should be [share] though). Yeah, I know, yet more database queries. But
I can dream can't I! :)

> True. Fortunately, the database field I created (rc_patrolled) can be
> used to store a number, too, so it can be changed to be a counter, and
> the highlighting can be made to stay until the counter has reached a
> certain threshold.

That's wonderful! Make it so (2 sysops or 3 logged-in users depending on
whether or not non-admins have this feature) and give me the name of your
PayPal account and I'll send you 30 bucks US. I wish I could afford more, but
my boyfriend is tight fisted with household finances (he's still pissed about
all the money I've spent on Wikimedia domains). Publish your PayPal account
name on the mailing list and I'm sure others will send you a few more bucks.

I've been lax on RC patrol due to the huge volume and the fact that 90%+
(usually more like 95%+) of all edits I check were either good to begin with or
were already fixed. But this new feature will concentrate my effort more toward
the unchecked/lightly-checked edits, thus greatly reducing duplicated effort.

You rock Timwi!

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail - 50x more storage than other providers!
http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail


from_name: Ivan Krstic

body:
For all interested, I'm quoting below a message from Alfio Puglisi that
details the process of making an offline static version.

Alfio Puglisi wrote:
> The script used to make the html version is here:
>
> http://www.tommasoconforti.com/wiki/
> (bottom of the page)
>
> I used cygwin under Win2k, but should work with Linux also. To run the
> script you'll need to study a bit the various command line options. Here's
> what I normally use:
>
> perl wiki2static.pl -m3 -t3 -a ---prefix=dump/ --languag="en" 20040802.sql
>
> Where the last argument is the "cur" sql dump from download.wikimedia.org.
> You'll also need the texvc program for TeX math generation.
>
> This will *download* each and every image from the wikimedia server, so it
> will probably take hours if not days. Subsequent runs are faster because
> it only downloads new images.

Hope that helps.

Cheers,
Ivan.


subject: [WikiEN-l] anons editing

body:
zero 0000 wrote:
> In my almost-a-year editing Wikipedia, I am yet to hear a convincing
> reason for allowing anons to edit at all, but saw plenty of cases when
> I wished they couldn't.  Zero.

1. By keeping the barriers to entry low, we make it easy for new
people to get involved.  It's fairly common for people to make a few
edits as anons before they decide that this is a good project, at
which point they get a login and start to build a reputation.

2.  By allowing anons to edit, we actually encourage a certain type of
"drive by" vandal to self-sort themselves into an easily identified
category.  We allow sysops to ban ip numbers who do bad things on a
much lower standard than the standard for logged in users.  If we
forced all the random idiots to login before adding "FAG FAG FAG" to
the articles, we might have to weaken the "civil rights protections"
that we give to logged-in users.

--Jimbo


body:
> And the XHTML+CSS way is to ?display: none;? what you don?t want to show.
>
> Screen readers and Braille consoles don?t support it, that?s correct.
> Gives people a great way to place Skip the menu links on their sites :)

This is precisely the usage prescribed by display: none, and the way I
use it on many of my live sites to ensure WAI AAA compliance.  This is
not the usage being discussed, however; the matter at hand is the
generation of content for specific media--one specific medium, in fact,
out of the numerous possibilities.

>  Why, though, is it an ugly message?  Because of the word Nauri?  In
> that case it would be better to focus on getting the article renamed to
> ?Nauruan language?.  I don?t know any other reasons.

I have nothing against the Nauri or the Nauruan language; I'm sure
they're wonderful people with a robust and elegant tongue.  My complaint
is far more generic.  :)

--
Austin D. Hair <austin at austinhair.org>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Callidus
http://www.austinhair.org/
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from_name: prasad gadgil

subject: [Wikitech-l] machine translaton of the articles...

body:
Hi,

I have just joined, I am from mumbai, india. I would like to get the
articles translated in marathi, my mother tongue. Looking at the effort
and no of volunteers, this will not be usable in any reasonable amount
of time.

That has made me think of alternatives - machine translation. A state
funded institute has a software available but I don't have access to it
yet.

Pl. comment about this approach. Has this been tried for any other
language earlier.

Thanks & regards,
Prasad Gadgil

________________________________________________________________________
Yahoo! India Matrimony: Find your life partner online
Go to: http://yahoo.shaadi.com/india-matrimony


subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Unrelated HTML talk (was Nauruan and this ugly
 message under each en:article)

body:
Ralesk Ne'vennoyx wrote:
> Digging through HTML sources made me notice that on some places there
> are ' used as attribute value containers!

Sorry if that offends you. ' is easier to type in a string literal as it
doesn't require a backslash escape. :)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [Foundation-l] Wikiverse.org, limited progress

body:
Because I have had no success in discussing things with "Kate" of
wikiverse.org regarding their spamming of every single website we link
to, I have decided to escalate this and get their website shut down by
their ISP.

I have no idea whether 'hostingspot.biz' will help us out, but if they
don't we can surely escalate to their upline providers, including
abac.net and level3.net until someone does help.

Taking our free content, and using it to spam, it's horrible.

I should add that most of the people who complain to me about this,
the victims of the spam, are under the impression that wikiverse.org
is either *us* or *authorized by us*.

wikiverse does little to correct this misimpression, and much to
further it, including claims that their content is hosted in Florida,
which is not true as far as I can tell.

--Jimbo


subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Unrelated HTML talk (was Nauruan and this ugly
	message under each en:article)

body:
Ralesk Ne'vennoyx wrote:
> Brion Vibber wrote:
>> Ralesk Ne'vennoyx wrote:
>>> Digging through HTML sources made me notice that on some places there
>>> are ' used as attribute value containers!
>>
>> Sorry if that offends you. ' is easier to type in a string literal as
>> it doesn't require a backslash escape. :)
>
> *tilts his head* wasn?t though " the one true holy character accepted by
> W3C?  ?Tis not me, it?s the standards :)

Nope.

http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml/#sec-common-syn

AttValue   ::=   '"' ([^<&"] | Reference)* '"'
               |  "'" ([^<&'] | Reference)* "'"

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Christopher Mahan

body:
--- Roozbeh Pournader <roozbeh at gmail.com> wrote:

> Already done. Won't work. They go and remove the other side's POVs,
> or
> revert to the not-yet-NPOV-ed version.

pull in some admins, call for mediation, and keep yourself cool (a
walk outside works wonders)

=====
Chris Mahan
818.943.1850 cell
chris_mahan at yahoo.com
chris.mahan at gmail.com
http://www.christophermahan.com/

__________________________________
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from_name: millosh

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Request for the second Serbian Wikipedia

body:
Timwi wrote:
> You keep using the word "work". This suggests to me people don't want to
> have to *write* articles in Latin script. Perhaps you could clarify
> this. By any chance, do you mean that the community of Wikipedians on
> the Serbian Wikipedia don't want Latin-script articles on sr at all?

The question is complex and some of them will say "I don't want to work because it needs too much of time" (which is not true, of course), and some of them will be clear and say "I don't want Latin script at all". In both cases, they do not want Latin script at all!

Ray Saintonge wrote:
> This is puzzling.  If nobody wants a Latin alphabet version than why are
> we even bothering with this conversation?
>
> If a significant minority wants to have a Latin version, then a majority
> vote against that should not be an excuse for restricting the rights of
> the minority.  It appears that the technical means are available that will
> allow the two versions to co-exist in one project.

In this moment we have voting result 4:2 against usage of Latin script (and without any chance for change of result) with clear xenophobic message: Cyrillic script is the only Serbian script! (In real life, we have 50-50 usage of Cyrillic and Latin script; and Latin script is not used only by "significant minority"; it is very significant minority...)

I didn't ask for another Serbian project because I had not looked into another solutions. Usage of scripts is very hard political question in Serbia and I would like not to translate that political war into Wikipedia. I was thinking and thinking and secondary Serbian project (as I described) seems like the most reasonable. Yes, it may looks like wasting of resources; but, believe me, consequences are:

1) If we say that sr: has to have Latin script pages against the decision of majority on sr: we would have: a) Wikipedia will be marked as "anti-Serb" institution (English Wikipedia has mark because of wars about pages about Kosovo etc.); b) I will not have community support anymore because I did something against the will of majority.

2) If we make sp: as alternate project, it will be treated only as my caprice without any really bad consequence to other things.


from_name: Jens Ropers

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Sub-stub city

body:
see below:

On 9 Aug 2004, at 09:09, wikien-l-request at Wikipedia.org wrote:

> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 7
> Date: Mon, 9 Aug 2004 00:09:01 -0700 (PDT)
> From: Stephen Adair <SWAdair at computermail.net>
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Re: Sub-stub city
> To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Message-ID: <20040809070901.92DFAE4B9 at sitemail.everyone.net>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
>
> Thank you, Jens, for some very good advice.

No thank you! :-)
You're the one who's been doing a lot of hard work in the trenches.
:)

> Specialization is needed
> for a project this large, but maybe I've been specializing too much.
> Maybe what I need is to branch out more, spending less time on New
> Pages
> and more time elsewhere.  Calling all volunteers -- 20 minutes a day,
> New Pages wants --> YOU.  :-)

I have just had a look at [[Wikipedia:New_pages_patrol]], thinking that
maybe I could dig in for a bit.
Reading through that page, I'm astonished at the "sign up for the new
page patrol in 15-minute chunks" rule.

Is that /really/ required?

It seems seems to be a bar to (patrol duty) empty to me -- it's almost
as if it was "too official" -- any new patrol volunteer (including me)
will want to have a look at one or two new pages at a time and see how
s/he is getting on. Then /maybe/ progress from there. Again, is this
"signing off" really required? It seems to me that a decent flagging
system (as Timwi is implementing) will obsolete that, and I would think
that to be a huge step forward.

Any thoughts on that, anyone?

> Frankly I'm amazed by all the thought given to this topic already, both
> pro and con.  I agree with Timwi that a minimum byte count will not
> rule out someone holding down a key to make a really long test page,
> but I do think fewer people would do that.  I think a significant
> percentage would stop testing when they realized "Oh, wow.  It was
> actually about to create an article.  The only reason it didn't was
> that what I wrote was too short."  Maybe that's just me being naive,
> placing too much trust in the good intentions of others.  Maybe not.
> I still think a (low) minimum byte count would reduce the overall
> maintenance load for new pages without driving away potential new
> contributors.
>
> Oh, and I *love* the new Recent Changes Patrol feature Timwi is
> developing.

Yep. Good job, Timwi ! :-)

> Anything that will reduce redundancy in maintenance is
> wonderful.  Personally, I would pass on checking anything that had
> been reviewed by two admins.  Sure, there is a wide range of opinions
> even among admins, but that would satisfy my criteria for trust.
>
> Thank you,
> Stephen W. Adair
>
> P.S.  I had never encountered a word-wrap problem before.  'Sorry about
> the last e-mail.  For this one I've been hitting "Enter" at the end of
> each line.  I hope that improves readability.

Yea, weird one, that.
(Luckily /my/ Mac OS X Mail hasn't got a problem with your emails --
it's happy to wrap them at the window border. ;-)
Just curious: What email program are you using?

Thanks and regards,
Jens Ropers

There are two types of IT techs: The ones who watch soap operas and the
ones who watch progress bars.
http://www.ropersonline.com/elmo/#108681741955837683
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body:
prasad gadgil wrote:
> That has made me think of alternatives - machine translation. [..]
> Pl. comment about this approach. Has this been tried for any other
> language earlier.

I'm not clear on what you're asking about. Machine translation has
certainly been available for a variety of languages for quite some time,
e.g. http://www.google.com/language_tools or AltaVista Babelfish (I
believe they use the same SysTran backend). The technology keeps
improving, but even after working with state of the art, backpropagating
neural network-based translators, I remain unimpressed - don't have your
hopes up too high.

If you're proposing adding a new Wikipedia language purely on the basis
of translated articles, I do not believe that's been done, and it
probably wouldn't be a good idea. Getting people that speak your
language involved, and then having them individually use machine
translation on articles they want to work on, fix those up, and put them
into Wikipedia seems like a much better option.

Cheers,
Ivan.


from_name: Rene Pijlman

subject: [Wikitech-l] installation problem

body:
<karl at karllong.com>:
>I have acttually created a /tmp directory in my mediawiki directory and
>made it writable, I've also gone into the PHPTAL.php and changed the TMP
>variable to a foll path ie.
>/home/virtual/site22/fst/var/www/html/wiki/tmp, but that still results in
>the install seeming to hang  at "Warning: $wgProxyKey is insecure"

What dit you change exactly in PHPTAL.php?

--
Regards / Groeten,  http://www.leren.nl
Ren? Pijlman        http://www.applinet.nl


body:
--- "Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales" <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> I have no idea whether 'hostingspot.biz' will help us out, but if they
> don't we can surely escalate to their upline providers, including
> abac.net and level3.net until someone does help.
>
> Taking our free content, and using it to spam, it's horrible.

Yes it is.

Give 'em hell Jimbo!

-- mav

__________________________________
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subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Recent Changes Patrol

body:
--- Angela_ <beesley at gmail.com> wrote:
> If this is going to be implemented, it has to be made optional. Not
> everyone will want people to  know which recent changes they have
> looked at. Making it possible to check up on which pages a user is
> reading has privacy implications that need to be taken into account if
> this feature is written.

Sorry, I wasn't clear. The white list would be of *users* not articles. Sharing
your white list would be an obtion that could be de-selected, yes.

-- mav

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from_name: tic at tictric.net

subject: [Wikitech-l] installation problem

body:
>
>       Warning: set_time_limit(): Cannot set time limit in safe mode in
> /home/virtual/site22/fst/var/www/html/wiki/install-utils.inc on line
> 26
>     * PHP 4.3.3 ok
>     * PHP server API is apache; ok, using pretty URLs
> (index.php/Page_Title)
>     * Have XML / Latin1-UTF-8 conversion support.
>     * PHP's memory_limit is 8M. If this is too low, installation may
> fail!
> Attempting to raise limit to 20M... failed.

I wonder if that works at all with as little a memory_limit as 8M.
Have a chat with your hoster to increas to about 16M. That worked with me.

>     * Have zlib support; enabling output compression.
>     * Found GD graphics library built-in, image thumbnailing will be
> enabled if you enable uploads.
>     * Installation directory: /home/virtual/site22/fst/var/www/html/wiki
>     * Script URI path: /wiki
>       Warning: $wgProxyKey is insecure Can't find a writable temp
> directory for the XHTML template. Check that the TMP environment
> variable points to a writable directory, or that the default temp
> dir (/tmp) exists and is writable.

If I'm not mistaken you need the tmp-directory in your virtual host
setting to be writeable by your apache user.
Maybe you got a tmp directory like so /home/virtual/site22/fst/var/www/tmp
in the virtual_host config of your account (So it's outside docroot). That
virtual host directory may have permissions like drwxr_xr_x or just
drwx______ with you as owner and ftpuser as group.
That's something the apache user won't have any write permissions to. If
so, you can give that tmp directory write permissions like 777 or ask your
provider to do a chown apache-user.apache-user (www-data in my case) to
that tmp directory and it should work.

But that would mean your VirtualHost setup is being a poor, sad story.
I.e. not real useful.

--tictric

>
>
>
> I have acttually created a /tmp directory in my mediawiki directory and
> made it writable, I've also gone into the PHPTAL.php and changed the TMP
> variable to a foll path ie.
> /home/virtual/site22/fst/var/www/html/wiki/tmp, but that still results in
> the install seeming to hang  at "Warning: $wgProxyKey is insecure"
>
>
> Any help is appreciated,
>
> Karl
>
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Recent Changes Patrol

body:
--- Timwi <timwi at gmx.net> wrote:
> I've registered with the e-mail address timwi at gmx.net.  Is
> that all the information you need to send me money?  :-)

Yes - When the feature as described (what was coded so far plus my number set
addition) gets committed to CVS and is installed on test, I'll send away. :)

> > You rock Timwi!
>
> Don't get too overexcited :-) Firstly, the feature is not live yet;
> secondly, it is highly likely that a large number of users won't like
> the feature no matter how much I tweak it...

I don't think that will be an issue, if it is, then I'll give the naysayers
hell. :)

-- mav

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subject: [Wikitech-l] installation problem

body:
<karl at karllong.com>:
>I've actually found several tmp directories (writable by everyone):
>/home/virtual/site22/fst/tmp
>/home/virtual/site22/fst/var/tmp
>
>I'm not permissioned to write to /var/www/
>
>I wonder if there is somewhere I can tell the mediawiki installer to use
>on of those tmp directories.

Try adding this to LocalSettings.php:

   putenv("TMP=/home/virtual/site22/fst/tmp");

--
Regards / Groeten,  http://www.leren.nl
Ren? Pijlman        http://www.applinet.nl


from_name: Dan Drake

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Re: Nationalist POV-pushing on Wikpedia: what to do?
	(was Azerbaijan and Iran related articles)

body:
On Sun, 8 Aug 2004 14:37:15 UTC, Jens Ropers
<ropers at ropersonline.com> wrote:

> IMHO nationalist POV has been a problem on Wikipedia for a LOOONG time:
> U.S. nationalist POV, that is.
>...[snip fine example of malicious idiocy from a US source]
> ...
> Really folks, I do rarely, in this day and age, ever see people whose
> moral compasses and standards of truthfulness are so *seriously* out of
> whack as a certain group of U.S. "patriots".

Really?  You don't follow the various Middle East discussions much, do
you?

>...
>
> What I'm trying to say is that, _especially_ with the inherent pro-U.S.
> slant that's simply due to the large number of U.S. WP contributors,
> it's IMPOSSIBLE for "the rest of us" to go it alone in trying to
> balance things out. Given the said slant, I would like to appeal that
> seriously minded U.S. NPOVers _help wherever they can_ and -- keeping
> the above in mind -- always seek to apply _more_ restraint and a
> _stricter_ standard whenever there is a possible U.S. side to an issue.
> It's probably the only way we're going to get a lid on U.S. nationalist
> POV.

This, though, I have to consider a wee bit presumptuous.  This particular
list is infested with Americans, and I'm not sure I can even exhaust the
fingers of one hand in counting all those who are notably "conservative"
in the US sense, let alone rabid right-wing nationalists. The first one I
think of is no rabid nationalist, but a peace-maker.  As for the
hot-headed American who dismissed the above posting as another
anti-American rant: he contibuted, as apparently his most recent political
posting, a reply to some rabid nationalist loony concerning Michael Moore.
Perhaps what we really need is that all of us who reply to American
loonies (which I admit I don't often do because my main WP interests are
outside the polical-rants subjects) need to sign everything with "(US
citizen)".  Would that help the perception problem?

--
Dan Drake
dd at dandrake.com
http://www.dandrake.com

Whoever tries to imagine perfection simply reveals his own emptiness.
 --George Orwell


from_name: David Gerard

subject: [WikiEN-l] anons editing

body:
On 08/09/04 04:40, zero 0000 wrote:

> In my almost-a-year editing Wikipedia, I am yet to hear a convincing
> reason for allowing anons to edit at all, but saw plenty of cases when
> I wished they couldn't.  Zero.

Most good contributors start as anons. I'd say that's a pretty good
point in their favour. People are reluctant to get yet another goddamn
login.

- d.


from_name: Ralesk Ne'vennoyx

body:
Austin Hair wrote:

> There's a reason we use XHTML and CSS to begin with; while my beef is so
> minor as to be inconsequential, certain design choices strike me as
> being a bit ironic.
>

And the XHTML+CSS way is to ?display: none;? what you don?t want to show.

Screen readers and Braille consoles don?t support it, that?s correct.
Gives people a great way to place Skip the menu links on their sites :)
  Why, though, is it an ugly message?  Because of the word Nauri?  In
that case it would be better to focus on getting the article renamed to
?Nauruan language?.  I don?t know any other reasons.


body:
On 08/09/04 12:54, Poor, Edmund W wrote:

> The only thing we can do about it is what we've always done about it,
> and it's the best solution anyway:
> DESCRIBE EACH SIDE'S POV

You're not listening to the description of the actual problem. We get
floods of the idjits to the point where people stop bothering with the
problematic article. We get reversion warriors operating behind AOL
proxies. In the case of user:Levzur, we have what is apparently a paid
operative to push a particular POV.

You are responding with apparent homilies; please show their application
to e.g. a simple case like Gdansk/Danzig. Not just something that would
suffice for the (hypothetical) reasonable, but something that would
actually slow down the less reasonable.

It's one thing to come up with a theoretically optimal solution. It's
quite another to come up with a solution that is so obvious and elegant
as to actually slow down the flood of crap.

- d.


body:
Ralesk Ne'vennoyx wrote:

> Austin Hair wrote:
>
>> There's a reason we use XHTML and CSS to begin with; while my beef is so
>> minor as to be inconsequential, certain design choices strike me as
>> being a bit ironic.
>>
>
> And the XHTML+CSS way is to ?display: none;? what you don?t want to show.
>
> Screen readers and Braille consoles don?t support it, that?s correct. Gives people a great way to place Skip the menu links on their sites :)  Why, though, is it an ugly message?  Because of the word Nauri?  In that case it would be better to focus on getting the article renamed to ?Nauruan language?.  I don?t know any other reasons.
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>
>

Sorry, I did this awfull thing; two things in one message. Everyone has reacted to the ugly bits, they are fixed by the looks of it. Thanks.

The second thing was about the language "Nauru". According to http://na.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nauruose it is called Nauruose in that language. As all languages are indicated by their local name, this needs fixing. To me it looks like something systeme if not I would like to know where to fix it.

Thanks,
  GerardM


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Recent Changes Patrol

body:
--- Angela_ <beesley at gmail.com> wrote:
> Yes, but by having someone on your whitelist, you could see what they
> had looked at.

If they look at a diff and mark it as OK, then they should take responsibility
for it. If they don't want to take responsibility, then they should not not
mark it as being OK.

Nowhere have I seen that this would happen automatically just be looking at an
article. That would be silly as you rightly noted.

-- mav

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body:
Gerard.Meijssen wrote:

> The second thing was about the language "Nauru". According to http://na.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nauruose it is called Nauruose in that language. As all languages are indicated by their local name, this needs fixing. To me it looks like something systeme if not I would like to know where to fix it.
>

I don?t understand.

Hungarian is called magyar in Hungarian.
Interwiki is thus always ?Magyar (%hungarian-in-the-language-of-wiki%)?
Page about the Hungarian language is Magyar nyelv in wp:hu, but it
should never be that in the English wikipedia.  It should be called
?Hungarian (language)? with or without parentheses, whichever is preferred.

With this example, on wp:na, Nauruose is a perfectly good article title,
and on wp:en ?Nauruan language? (with or without parentheses), is again
perfectly valid.

I don?t think I understand your problem.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Recent Changes Patrol

body:
--- Timwi <timwi at gmx.net> wrote:
> Can you describe that addition in greater detail, so that I know exactly
> what I need to do?   How exactly will people alter the number, and what
> values should show up as what?

Nothing elaborate or hard at this point. Setting a sitewide value, as I
suggested (admin only for en.wiki and 2 admins to make things happen), would be
fine for now.

When viewing diffs, admins could be presented with a "checked for vandalism"
box they could click. Then as soon as two admins have selected that option,
then that page edit would be grayed out on RC and newpages (watchlists would be
nice, if that is easy to code, otherwise forget it for now). But if somebody
else finds a better way to do that, or if you think of a better way, then do
that instead.

-- mav

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subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Recent Changes Patrol

body:
--- Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> When viewing diffs,

Make that, "When viewing cur diffs"

-- mav

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body:
Ralesk Ne'vennoyx wrote:

> Gerard.Meijssen wrote:
>
>> The second thing was about the language "Nauru". According to http://na.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nauruose it is called Nauruose in that language. As all languages are indicated by their local name, this needs fixing. To me it looks like something systeme if not I would like to know where to fix it.
>>
>
> I don?t understand.
>
> Hungarian is called magyar in Hungarian.
> Interwiki is thus always ?Magyar (%hungarian-in-the-language-of-wiki%)?
> Page about the Hungarian language is Magyar nyelv in wp:hu, but it should never be that in the English wikipedia.  It should be called ?Hungarian (language)? with or without parentheses, whichever is preferred.
>
> With this example, on wp:na, Nauruose is a perfectly good article title, and on wp:en ?Nauruan language? (with or without parentheses), is again perfectly valid.
>
> I don?t think I understand your problem.
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>
>

The interwiki links say Nederlands for nl: or Deutsch for de: or ??? for ja: and therefore they should say "Nauruose" for each na: interwiki.

Thanks,
  GerardM


body:
Gerard.Meijssen wrote:

> The interwiki links say Nederlands for nl: or Deutsch for de: or ??? for ja: and therefore they should say "Nauruose" for each na: interwiki.
>

And I guess they don?t.  Okay, things are getting clearer now! :D


from_name: Karl Eichwalder

subject: [Wikitech-l] Alt-F (Re: Alt-B)

in_reply_to:
<shu0vexqkn.fsf@tux.gnu.franken.de> (Karl Eichwalder's message of
	"Sun, 08 Aug 2004 05:21:28 +0200")

references:
<pan.2004.06.08.12.30.14.532128@arvin.dk>
	<ca4qvk$jsu$1@sea.gmane.org> <shu0xlhq8p.fsf@tux.gnu.franken.de>
	<1086800687.1588.16.camel@venus> <shsmcr7ve5.fsf@tux.gnu.franken.de>
	<shk6y2pqws.fsf@tux.gnu.franken.de> <1087815572.1641.0.camel@venus>
	<shu0vexqkn.fsf@tux.gnu.franken.de>

body:
Karl Eichwalder <ke at gnu.franken.de> writes:

> Gabriel Wicke <lists at wikidev.net> writes:
>
>> On Sun, 2004-06-20 at 10:36 +0200, Karl Eichwalder wrote:
>
>>> > Gabriel Wicke <lists at wikidev.net> writes:
>>> >
>>> >> To switch them off, drop
>>> >>
>>> >> ta = false;
>>> >>
>>> >> in your monobook.js.
>
>> Works fine for me with Firefox, did you reload after changing monobook.
>> js?
>
> It works for Alt-B, but Alt-F still does not work.

Alt-F is still stolen by the UI (User Interface) - please acknowledge
the problem.

--
                                                         |      ,__o
                                                         |    _-\_<,
http://www.gnu.franken.de/ke/                            |   (*)/'(*)


from_name: John Lee

subject: [WikiEN-l] Markiing a version with a status flag

body:
Flagging edits is a good idea, but anything more customisable than "show
me all Recent Changes that
HAVEN'T GOT an 'RC Cleared' flag attached to them" is asking for server
trouble. Somebody more qualified than me should probably be tackling
this, though.

John Lee (User:Johnleemk)

Poor, Edmund W wrote:

>One idea that came out of the Boston meeting was very similar to what
>Maveric asked for: a way of reducing duplicate effort on RC patrol.
>
>The idea is very simple conceptually, and ought to be fairly easy for
>our noble, selfless team of hard-working developers to implement.
>
>Every user can "flag" a particular version of an article with a status
>code, such as:
>
>* RC Cleared: I have glanced at the diff and certify that this latest
>edit was NOT "simple vandalism" (i.e, graffiti like "Jerry has big ones"
>or "Toby loves Christine").
>
>* Unfair revert: Looks like someone is ignoring everyone else's
>contributions and trying to make the article endorse their own POV.
>
>If Mav or someone else I've come to trust has flagged a particular
>version of an article as "RC Cleared" (or whatever we end up calling
>it), then:
>
>1. I don't have to bother re-doing his work: I can go on and check the
>next edit in the Recent Changes queue.
>
>2. I might not even want to see that version in my custom RC list. That
>is, I'd like an option that says to show me all Recent Changes that
>HAVEN'T GOT an "RC Cleared" flag attached to them
>
>We might even fine-tune option #2, if it's not too hard for the
>developers: let each user specify a short list of "trusted users". Then
>the option would be to show all Recent Changes that DON'T HAVE an "RC
>Cleared" flag from anyone in my "trusted users" set.
>
>(The SQL code for this is trivial, by the way.)
>
>With a flag like "Unfair revert", we could sort articles by:
>
>* Current version has more than 2 "Unfair revert" flags; or,
>
>* More than a total of 5 "Unfair revert" flags have been placed on all
>versions of this article in the last 3 days.
>
>(Each user could specify parameters like "more than 3 flags" on current
>version, or "more than 12 total in the last 5 hours".)
>
>The questions are:
>
>A. Does anyone else want this?
>B. Will it slow down the server?
>C. Is it valuable enough to justify trying it out?
>
>Ed Poor
>Developer Emeritus
>
>


from_name: Bill Clark

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Quoting, dashes, and HTML entities

body:
On Tue, 10 Aug 2004 02:29:46 +0100, Timwi <timwi at gmx.net> wrote:

> I don't know that many languages myself; I'm only being as open-minded
> as possible. There is no grounds upon which to base the assumption that
> dashes must necessarily be surrounded by spaces in all languages. Even
> in English, many people don't put spaces around m-dashes.

IIRC, the Manual of Style even says that date intervals should NOT
have surrounding whitespace when using m-dashes.

-Bill Clark


subject: [WikiEN-l] anons editing

body:
Fennec Foxen <fennec at gmail.com> wrote:

> Message: 2
> Date: Mon, 9 Aug 2004 11:30:19 -0400
> From: Fennec Foxen <fennec at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] anons editing
> To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at wikipedia.org>
> Message-ID: <3406cd4e040809083024802bdf at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII
>
> On Sun, 8 Aug 2004 21:40:38 -0700 (PDT), zero 0000
> <nought_0000 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>> In my almost-a-year editing Wikipedia, I am yet to hear a convincing
>> reason for allowing anons to edit at all, but saw plenty of cases when
>> I wished they couldn't.  Zero.
>
> Anonymous editors may become interested in Wikipedia and become
> non-anonymous. This occurs with greater frequency it would if the
> anonymous user was not able to experiment prior to registration.

That's /precisely/ how things went in my case: I went from anon to
account holder. I simply wouldn't /be/ a Wikipedian today had it not
been for anon editing starting me out on this path.

Also, in this SPAM day and SPAM age, people SPAM are SPAM weary of SPAM
giving SPAM their email address to SPAM any website they SPAM haven't
grown to trust.
And people will not get to that stage of trust as easily if they don't
get "hooked" on editing.
(Yes, I know, you don't even /have/ to give an email address to create
an account w/ the WP, but people will just not even proceed to signup,
because they /expect/ they have to give their email address there --
after all, their experience is that most other websites require it.)

Plus, let's face it: Anons are like any other group: Sometimes we like
their edits, sometimes we don't. Sometimes they cause us mischief (and
[[Hanlon's razor]] applies). But how would that be different from /any
other/ arbitrarily selected group of contributors (like
male/female/Caucasian/African/Asian/gay/straight, etc. etc.)?
I even think we should be _more_ lenient with anons than with any other
group, because again, people progress from anon to account holder, so
maybe there's a higher percentage of anons who are just new and thus
make more newbie mistakes.

Thanks and regards,
Jens Ropers

There are two types of IT techs: The ones who watch soap operas and the
ones who watch progress bars.
http://www.ropersonline.com/elmo/#108681741955837683

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from_name: Timwi

body:
Thomas Luft wrote:

> I suggest to enable the approval only for other users than the one who
> did the edit (if this is possible).

I was going to do it this way, but I haven't yet.


body:
Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote:
> You mentioned that the vote is 4:2, but that there are not many users.
> Can you give us the overall vote totals (not just the ratio)?  If it
> is exactly 4 to 2, is that really enough people to be making such a
> controversial policy?
>
> Perhaps the time is not ripe yet to make such a decision.

Serbian Wikipedia doesn't have a lot of active users. Also, there are some new users without right to vote for that question. I don't think that we will have much better situation at the end of August, when voting would be closed.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Recent Changes Patrol

body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:

>>I was going to make it so that you can't "patrol" your own edits, but I
>>haven't done that yet. (techtalk: it would require an extra DB query)
>
> it would also
> be nice for each user to be able to create white lists in his/her prefs.

Sorry, but that is starting to sound a little bit too complicated for my
taste :-)

> give me the name of your PayPal account

I didn't have one so far, but I've always wanted one, so I've created
one now.  I've registered with the e-mail address timwi at gmx.net.  Is
that all the information you need to send me money?  :-)

> You rock Timwi!

Don't get too overexcited :-) Firstly, the feature is not live yet;
secondly, it is highly likely that a large number of users won't like
the feature no matter how much I tweak it...

However, I am very happy at the positive response so far.  Thank you.

Timwi


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [WikiEN-l] anons editing

body:
Fennec Foxen wrote:

><nought_0000 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>
>>In my almost-a-year editing Wikipedia, I am yet to hear a convincing
>>reason for allowing anons to edit at all, but saw plenty of cases when
>>I wished they couldn't.  Zero.
>>
>>
>
>Anonymous editors may become interested in Wikipedia and become
>non-anonymous. This occurs with greater frequency it would if the
>anonymous user was not able to experiment prior to registration.
>There's one- okay?
>
That's an important point.  I tried things for a couple weeks before I
was addicted enough to join.

Agressively insisting that a person be registered on his first day would
be like a drug dealer warning a first time client about addiction. :-)
That's not good for business.

Ec


from_name: Jens Frank

body:
On Mon, Aug 09, 2004 at 10:48:14AM -0700, evan at wikitravel.org wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 09, 2004 at 08:26:38AM +0100, Timwi wrote:
>
> > >Did you make this feature optional? If not, could you, please?
> >
> > This feature does not take anything away, so making it "optional"
> > doesn't make any sense. That's like saying "please could you make the
> > wiki syntax for bold text optional?" - you don't have to use it. You can
> > remove the highlighting using CSS.
>
> Fine. Whatever. *I'll* make it optional.
>
Set $wgUseRCPatrol = false; in LocalSettings.php to disable this feature.

Regards,

	JeLuF


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Markiing a version with a status flag

body:
John Lee wrote:

> Flagging edits is a good idea, but anything more customisable than "show
> me all Recent Changes that
> HAVEN'T GOT an 'RC Cleared' flag attached to them" is asking for server
> trouble. Somebody more qualified than me should probably be tackling
> this, though.

Well, the "RC cleared flag" need not be a flag; it can be an integer.
Theoretically, we can assign pretty much any meaning to pretty much any
integer.  For example, we could view it as a "score", and people can
increase or decrease the score depending on whether they think the edit
was good or not.  Then we can show everything below, say, 5 in yellow
and everything below 0 in red.  Thanks to the power of CSS, these
colours would be entirely customisable without any further code changes.

Currently (the way I have made it so far) this integer can only take the
values 0 or 1, and once it is set to 1, it cannot be changed anymore.

Timwi


body:
millosh wrote:

> Also, there are
> some new users without right to vote for that question.

Does this mean you are explicitly excluding certain users from the vote?
  Wouldn't that be unfair?

I am a long-time contributor to the English Wikipedia, but have never
used the Serbian one.  Will I be allowed to vote?  I think I should be,
and my vote would be that Latin and Cyrillic script should coexist on
the same Wiki.

Timwi


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Nauruan and this ugly message under each en:article

body:
Austin Hair wrote:

> This is precisely the usage prescribed by display: none, and the way I
> use it on many of my live sites to ensure WAI AAA compliance.  This is
> not the usage being discussed, however; the matter at hand is the
> generation of content for specific media--one specific medium, in fact,
> out of the numerous possibilities.
>

Ooookay, re-read the first thing, and finally I understand.

1) interwiki links should say Nauruose
2) everywhere there is this ?Retrieved from "%URL% "? text which isn?t
aesthetic.  It can be translated though, that?s a good thing!

Digging through HTML sources made me notice that on some places there
are ' used as attribute value containers!

Here?s something from wp:de

W?rterbuch
Deutsch - Nauruisch (http://www.trussel.com/kir/naudel.htm)

Grrr!  Really!


body:
Gerard.Meijssen wrote:

> On the Nauruan wikipedia, they call their language Nauruose. On the interlinks it is called Nauruan. (http://na.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nauruose)

I have committed in this change to CVS.


from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Recent Changes Patrol

body:
--- Timwi <timwi at gmx.net> wrote:
> I have thought of another problem.  Do they have to be different admins?
>   Currently I am not keeping track of who did the approving, so it is
> perfectly possible for the same admin to raise the value twice (and this
> can happen inadvertently very easily: just accidentally hit the link twice).

Well at this stage I think we can live with that just as we lived for months
with a rollback feature that rolled back *any* top edit (sometimes resulting in
restored vandalism). I'm sure this will get refined more in the future.

But if you feel up to the task and have time, then by all means plunge forward.

> Well, this already exists, except it's not a box, but a link, and it
> doesn't say "checked for vandalism", but "mark as patrolled".  :-)

That works. :)

> The way I have done it now, the edits are not greyed out, but instead
> unchecked edits are highlighted with a yellow background colour, and
> checked ones display as they do now.  I thought of greying things out
> first, but it looked really rubbish when most of Recent Changes was
> marked as patrolled.

OK - that works too.

> > (watchlists would be
> > nice, if that is easy to code, otherwise forget it for now).
>
> Unfortunately, this is not easy, because for some reason the Watchlist
> was made to use the 'cur' table rather than the 'recentchanges' table.
> I was told that the main reason is that recentchanges only goes back one
> week, while people might want to have a Watchlist that goes back
> further.  In return, the Watchlist displays only the most recent edit
> for each page on your Watchlist.

A future feature then.

-- mav

> Timwi
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

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


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Wikipedia-Freenode relations

body:
Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote:

> Maybe I don't quite understand the issue, but one thing I like about
> the cloak is that I don't have to worry about people pretending to be
> me.

You don't need a cloak to have this security. If you simply identify
yourself using NickServ, you will get something like this:

	(your nick) is an identified user

in your whois.

Timwi


body:
Timwi wrote:

> millosh wrote:
>
>> Also, there are some new users without right to vote for that question.
>
> Does this mean you are explicitly excluding certain users from the
> vote?  Wouldn't that be unfair?
>
> I am a long-time contributor to the English Wikipedia, but have never
> used the Serbian one.  Will I be allowed to vote?  I think I should
> be, and my vote would be that Latin and Cyrillic script should coexist
> on the same Wiki.

I don't edit on sr, so I wouldn't expect to have that right there.
English has had its own restrictions on certain things where a person
would need some number of edits, or some amount of time before editing.
I suspect that that's what's going on in their project.

Binding votes only make things work.  33% is a significant minority.  We
have Wikis for languages with far less credibility.  Votes in this
situation thend to impose the "tyranny of the majority".  A better
approach is to have both sides recognize the rights and desires of the
other, and try to accomodate them.

I think that most of us non-Serbian speakers would vote like Timwi.  Not
having separate British and American version for English was a very
positive early decision.

Ec


body:
Brion Vibber wrote:

> Ralesk Ne'vennoyx wrote:
>
>> Digging through HTML sources made me notice that on some places there
>> are ' used as attribute value containers!
>
>
> Sorry if that offends you. ' is easier to type in a string literal as it
> doesn't require a backslash escape. :)

*tilts his head* wasn?t though " the one true holy character accepted by
W3C?  ?Tis not me, it?s the standards :)


from_name: Walter Vermeir

subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Wikiverse.org, limited progress

body:
Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote:

[cut]
> Taking our free content, and using it to spam, it's horrible.

The also are using the Wikipedia favicon.

> I should add that most of the people who complain to me about this,
> the victims of the spam, are under the impression that wikiverse.org
> is either *us* or *authorized by us*.

Maybe put a notice about it on en.wikipedia.

--
[[w:nl:gebruiker:walter]]


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Recent Changes Patrol

body:
On Mon, 9 Aug 2004 12:40:22 -0700 (PDT), Daniel Mayer wrote:

> ... it would also
> be nice for each user to be able to create white lists in his/her prefs. Then
> edits by any user in the whitelist would not be bold in RC/new pages for them.

If this is going to be implemented, it has to be made optional. Not
everyone will want people to  know which recent changes they have
looked at. Making it possible to check up on which pages a user is
reading has privacy implications that need to be taken into account if
this feature is written.

Angela.


from_name: Dietrich von Hase

subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Copyright issues...walking on thin ice

body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:

>--- Dietrich von Hase <hase at akademie.de> wrote:
>
>
>>....
>>As cameras are around today nearly everywhere and it is easy for
>>everybody to make photos and there is also much open content or public
>>domain material around - I personally think that it would not harm the
>>success of Wikipedia in any way when fair use images are no more
>>included. The growth rate of the number of images published on Wikipedia
>>is about 25% a month - much larger then the growth rate of articles.
>>
>>
>
>Until time machines are created so that the cameras you talk about could be
>used to snap photos of people now dead, events now past, and places now gone,
>we will continue to need to use low resolution versions of these images.
>
>
You are completely right, sorry, I forgot this aspect of possible topics
and it will still take some time until time machines get public
utilities for all Wikipedians ;-).

Nevertheless there is a vast number of images in public domain for these
times either because copyright has already run out or because it is
public domain material anyhow for time periods where at present the
usual copyright period exists for copyrighted material.

It would be interesting to know whether Wikimedia ever really had to
deal with a copyright violation legal case regarding pictures published
or individuals publishing images in Wikipedia under fair use. If it is
really more a theoretical then a practical question to deal with today -
then it may be better to wait until  a real case happens.The potential
financial damage could not be overwhelming if its only one picture which
is under discussion.

Dietrich

>
>


from_name: Christopher Larberg

subject: [WikiEN-l] anons editing

body:
Now now, Wikipedia isn't addicti...er, sorry, just had to refresh Recent Changes.
-Slowking Man
  ----- Original Message -----
  From: Ray Saintonge<mailto:saintonge at telus.net>
  To: English Wikipedia<mailto:wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
  Sent: Monday, August 09, 2004 11:04 PM
  Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] anons editing

  That's an important point.  I tried things for a couple weeks before I
  was addicted enough to join.

  Agressively insisting that a person be registered on his first day would
  be like a drug dealer warning a first time client about addiction. :-)
  That's not good for business.

  Ec

  _______________________________________________
  WikiEN-l mailing list
  WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org<mailto:WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org>
  http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l<http://mail.wikipediaorg/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l>
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from_name: millosh

body:
Timwi wrote:
> Does this mean you are explicitly excluding certain users from the vote?
>   Wouldn't that be unfair?
>
> I am a long-time contributor to the English Wikipedia, but have never
> used the Serbian one.  Will I be allowed to vote?  I think I should be,
> and my vote would be that Latin and Cyrillic script should coexist on
> the same Wiki.

I closed group of members which can vote to users which had opened account on sr: until 18th July (the initial day of voting). I did it as prevention of mass subscribing and voting... I think, if you opened an account until that day, you can vote...

There is one possibility: I see that there are some users (I think the most of them are stewards) on sr: which can vote... (But, don't ask people from former Yugoslavia to vote such as Romanm; it is not good idea.)

I don't know... I don't know a lot about what is usually on Wikipedia. I just translated voting for the question about case sensitivity from Meta. If you make good explanation about that (your identity is known and you are long-time contributor on en:), I think it would be OK.


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] Bugzilla

body:
I've started setting up a bugzilla at http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/
The MonoBook-style template was adapted by Timwi.

Please don't start puttings bugs in there _just_ yet, it needs some
further tweaks and isn't 100% set up.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Recent Changes Patrol

body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:

> --- Angela_ <beesley at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>If this is going to be implemented, it has to be made optional. Not
>>everyone will want people to  know which recent changes they have
>>looked at. Making it possible to check up on which pages a user is
>>reading has privacy implications that need to be taken into account if
>>this feature is written.
>
> Sorry, I wasn't clear. The white list would be of *users* not articles. Sharing
> your white list would be an obtion that could be de-selected, yes.

I think what Angela was referring to is that if we had such a white
list, then it would be possible to put a single user on it and then see
what changes they have looked at.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Recent Changes Patrol

body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:

> --- Timwi <timwi at gmx.net> wrote:
>
>>I've registered with the e-mail address timwi at gmx.net.  Is
>>that all the information you need to send me money?  :-)
>
> Yes - When the feature as described (what was coded so far plus my number set
> addition) gets committed to CVS and is installed on test, I'll send away. :)

Can you describe that addition in greater detail, so that I know exactly
what I need to do?   How exactly will people alter the number, and what
values should show up as what?

Timwi


subject: [Wikitech-l] Bughunt

body:
Well, it seems we've slipped -- we're actually up 2 open bugs from
yesterday.

Nonetheless, we *did* go down about 95 open bugs over a sustained
one-week period. That's pretty bad-ass for a few guys sitting in front
of their computer screens. ;)

1.3.0 final release should come in the next couple of days once we
square away the documentation and whatnot a little bit.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Jens Ropers

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Re: Nationalist POV-pushing on Wikpedia: what to do?	 (was
	Azerbaijan and Iran related articles)

body:
Dan Drake" <dd at dandrake.com> wrote:

> Message: 2
> Date: Mon, 9 Aug 2004 19:14:11 +0000 (UTC)
> From: "Dan Drake" <dd at dandrake.com>
> Subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Nationalist POV-pushing on Wikpedia: what to
> 	do?	(was Azerbaijan and Iran related articles)
> To: wikien-l at wikipedia.org
> Message-ID: <vhIsdqY67dTD-pn2-0ig5CprxYtIw at localhost>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
>
> On Sun, 8 Aug 2004 14:37:15 UTC, Jens Ropers
> <ropers at ropersonline.com> wrote:
>
>> IMHO nationalist POV has been a problem on Wikipedia for a LOOONG
>> time:
>> U.S. nationalist POV, that is.
>> ...[snip fine example of malicious idiocy from a US source]
>> ...
>> Really folks, I do rarely, in this day and age, ever see people whose
>> moral compasses and standards of truthfulness are so *seriously* out
>> of
>> whack as a certain group of U.S. "patriots".
>
> Really?  You don't follow the various Middle East discussions much, do
> you?

I do. And IMHO the Middle East would be one prime example of what I
said. I would have agreed with you a few years ago,
however.^W^W^W^W^W^W^W^W^W^W^W Must. Not. Get. Political. :-|

>> ...
>>
>> What I'm trying to say is that, _especially_ with the inherent
>> pro-U.S.
>> slant that's simply due to the large number of U.S. WP contributors,
>> it's IMPOSSIBLE for "the rest of us" to go it alone in trying to
>> balance things out. Given the said slant, I would like to appeal that
>> seriously minded U.S. NPOVers _help wherever they can_ and -- keeping
>> the above in mind -- always seek to apply _more_ restraint and a
>> _stricter_ standard whenever there is a possible U.S. side to an
>> issue.
>> It's probably the only way we're going to get a lid on U.S.
>> nationalist
>> POV.
>
> This, though, I have to consider a wee bit presumptuous.  This
> particular
> list is infested with Americans, and I'm not sure I can even exhaust
> the
> fingers of one hand in counting all those who are notably
> "conservative"
> in the US sense, let alone rabid right-wing nationalists. The first
> one I
> think of is no rabid nationalist, but a peace-maker.  As for the
> hot-headed American who dismissed the above posting as another
> anti-American rant: he contibuted, as apparently his most recent
> political
> posting, a reply to some rabid nationalist loony concerning Michael
> Moore.
> Perhaps what we really need is that all of us who reply to American
> loonies (which I admit I don't often do because my main WP interests
> are
> outside the polical-rants subjects) need to sign everything with "(US
> citizen)".  Would that help the perception problem?

I wouldn't have sent the above email to this list if I didn't actually
think it to be "infested" with numerous seriously minded NPOVers (as I
wrote).

Thanks and regards,
Jens Ropers

There are two types of IT techs: The ones who watch soap operas and the
ones who watch progress bars.
http://www.ropersonline.com/elmo/#108681741955837683

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body:
John Ky wrote:

> Timwi wrote:
>
>> Yes, simple rule, but one that would probably discriminate against
>> many languages.
>
> Sorry, to bother you, but could you enlighten me on how it would
> discriminate against some languages?  This is a chance for me to
> acquire some appreciation on how different some languages are.

I don't know that many languages myself; I'm only being as open-minded
as possible. There is no grounds upon which to base the assumption that
dashes must necessarily be surrounded by spaces in all languages. Even
in English, many people don't put spaces around m-dashes.

Timwi


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Recent Changes Patrol

body:
mav wrote:
> Sorry, I wasn't clear. The white list would be of *users* not articles. Sharing
> your white list would be an option that could be de-selected, yes.

Yes, but by having someone on your whitelist, you could see what they
had looked at.

If I was seriously looking for vandalism in recent changes, I might
not mind those pages being grayed out to people who have me on their
whitelist, but other times I might look at a page without really
bothering to check it properly. At those times, I don't want to be
grayed out as I don't want to take responsibility for looking at an
article which I haven't really made much of an attempt to check. The
person being watched should be able to turn the feature on and off as
they like.

Also, sometimes people might want to be reading Wikipedia but not be
visible. They might not want people to know they are around and
looking at recent changes. The whitelist could be used to tell exactly
when someone is online, which could be rather annoying if you are
trying to avoid that person who has you as the only person on their
whitelist.

Angela.


from_name: Roozbeh Pournader

subject: [WikiEN-l] Nationalist POV-pushing on Wikpedia: what to do?

body:
On Mon, 9 Aug 2004 05:54:21 -0700, Poor, Edmund W <edmund.w.poor at abc.com> wrote:
> The only thing we can do about it is what we've always done about it,
> and it's the best solution anyway:
>
> DESCRIBE EACH SIDE'S POV
>
> Say that according to _this_ group of nationalists, the situation is
> like this. Then say that according to _that_ group of nationalists, the
> situation is like that.

Already done. Won't work. They go and remove the other side's POVs, or
revert to the not-yet-NPOV-ed version.

See some of the articles' histories and you'll get what I mean. One
example is [[Azerbaijanis]]
(http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Azerbaijanis&action=history).
Look at what 198.81.26.80 is doing.

roozbeh


subject: [WikiEN-l] banned anons

body:
I was thinking about blocking of proxy IPs of anonymous editors, which
may sacrifice another possilble contributor who shares the IP, but may
be necessary to get rid of the very annoying vandals. I came to an
idea.

Why don't we put a cookie on the anon users browsers, so they could be
tracked with something more than the IP (say, an ID)? Of course it can
be circumvented by legitimate anons who care about their privacy, or
by serious vandals who know enough about how cookies work, but we may
be able to get rid of the insisting newbie vandals (who are the guys
who create the most problems for likes of me).

The idea can be extended to things like putting a cookie trap, which
an admin can turn on for a certain article, which then assigns IDs to
each anon contributor that edits the page, and then only block the
<IP, ID> pair instead of the IP.

I know it may be hard codewise, of course.

roozbeh


body:
On Mon, 9 Aug 2004 16:03:33 -0700 (PDT), Christopher Mahan
<chris_mahan at yahoo.com> wrote:
> pull in some admins,

already done. that's the reason I sent the original email.

> call for mediation,

won't work since the guys won't talk, let alone participate in mediation.

> and keep yourself cool (a
> walk outside works wonders)

already done. works for me, but not for wikipedia. ;-)

roozbeh


from_name: Poor, Edmund W

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Toning down the personal remarks (was: Nationalist
	POV-pushing on Wikpedia: what to do?)

body:
Let's try to avoid personal remarks about other Wikipedians. It
distracts from the flow of the thread, which ideally should be about
ways to craft better articles:

* This particular list is infested with Americans

Excuse me? I'm not a bug! (I put bugs in the software I write, though
;-)

* hot-headed American

If I wear a hat outside, my scalp doesn't heat up so much; usually, I
stay inside and enjoy the air-conditioning.

* some rabid nationalist loony
* American loonies

Now, now. That's getting personal!

Uncle Ed


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Recent Changes Patrol

body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:

> --- Timwi <timwi at gmx.net> wrote:
>
>>Can you describe that addition in greater detail, so that I know exactly
>>what I need to do?   How exactly will people alter the number, and what
>>values should show up as what?
>
> Nothing elaborate or hard at this point. Setting a sitewide value, as I
> suggested (admin only for en.wiki and 2 admins to make things happen), would be
> fine for now.

I have thought of another problem.  Do they have to be different admins?
  Currently I am not keeping track of who did the approving, so it is
perfectly possible for the same admin to raise the value twice (and this
can happen inadvertently very easily: just accidentally hit the link twice).

> When viewing diffs, admins could be presented with a "checked for vandalism"
> box they could click.

Well, this already exists, except it's not a box, but a link, and it
doesn't say "checked for vandalism", but "mark as patrolled".  :-)

> Then as soon as two admins have selected that option,
> then that page edit would be grayed out on RC and newpages

The way I have done it now, the edits are not greyed out, but instead
unchecked edits are highlighted with a yellow background colour, and
checked ones display as they do now.  I thought of greying things out
first, but it looked really rubbish when most of Recent Changes was
marked as patrolled.

> (watchlists would be
> nice, if that is easy to code, otherwise forget it for now).

Unfortunately, this is not easy, because for some reason the Watchlist
was made to use the 'cur' table rather than the 'recentchanges' table.
I was told that the main reason is that recentchanges only goes back one
week, while people might want to have a Watchlist that goes back
further.  In return, the Watchlist displays only the most recent edit
for each page on your Watchlist.

Timwi


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Recent Changes Patrol

body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:

> --- Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>>When viewing diffs,
>
> Make that, "When viewing cur diffs"

Actually, it does it not only for cur diffs, but all diffs you see by
following a link on Recent Changes.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Recent Changes Patrol

body:
mav wrote:
> Nowhere have I seen that this would happen automatically just be looking at an
> article. That would be silly as you rightly noted.

Oh, ok. I misread Timwi's initial post about this. I thought the
marking was triggered automatically whenever someone followed a link
from recent changes. It would be easier than having to follow an
additional link, but I suppose having it this way does prevent the
issues of looking at changes without wanting to approve them. Maybe
that could be an extra option in preferences - "approve every page I
access from recent changes".

It would be really helpful if checked edits would influence my
watchlist rather than just recent changes.

Angela.


from_name: Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales

body:
Dietrich von Hase wrote:
> It would be interesting to know whether Wikimedia ever really had to
> deal with a copyright violation legal case regarding pictures published
> or individuals publishing images in Wikipedia under fair use. If it is
> really more a theoretical then a practical question to deal with today -
> then it may be better to wait until  a real case happens.The potential
> financial damage could not be overwhelming if its only one picture which
> is under discussion.

No, we have never had to deal with any sort of legal case, copyright
or otherwise.

We have also never gotten a proper DMCA takedown notice, but of course
our strict anti-plagiarism policy means that we act promptly on any
sort of complaint, whether it complies with DMCA or not.

My own view on fair use/fair dealing is as follows:

1.  Fair use/fair dealing is a morally proper doctrine under any sane
system of copyright.  We should not hesitate to make proper use of it,
in all media.

2.  At the same time, we need not "push the boundaries of law" on this
-- we can and should be conservative about our own legal exposure.

3.  We also need to be sensitive to the needs of reusers in multiple
jurisdictions.  This also suggests that we should be conservative for
their benefit.  At a bare minimum, this means we need to have good
tagging and source documentation -- something that we do very poorly
at the moment.

4.  We should be careful that laziness does not lead us to rely on "fair
use" when a freely licensed (self-produce, for example) alternative is
readily available.  This applies to many ordinary photographs of many
famous objects, and even some famous people.

5.  There are some pictures which are absolutely of historical and
scientific value which there is simply no practical alternative to
fair use/fair dealing, *and* for which fair use/fair dealing are
perfectly appropriate.  We should be glad to use such materials.

--Jimbo


subject:
[WikiEN-l] Here's what to do (was: Nationalist POV-pushing on
	Wikpedia)

body:
Roozbeh lamented, "Look at what 198.81.26.80 is doing."

And he also replied to my earlier comments:

> > Say that according to _this_ group of nationalists, the
> situation is
> > like this. Then say that according to _that_ group of nationalists,
> > the situation is like that.
>
> Already done. Won't work. They go and remove the other side's
> POVs, or revert to the not-yet-NPOV-ed version.
>
> See some of the articles' histories and you'll get what I
> mean. One example is [[Azerbaijanis]]
> (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Azerbaijanis&actio
n=history).

It wasn't all POV-pushing. A lot of it was also newbie friction.

I left an encouraging note on the talk page, and did a lot
of clean-up on the article. I hope collaborative work will
proceed more smoothly now.

Ed Poor


subject:
[WikiEN-l] Schemes for Version Marking (was: Markiing a version
	with a status flag)

body:
Timwi and Maveric have come up with two excellent ideas for marking
article versions:

1. Status flags

* For example, "RC Patrolled" by a particular contributor (possible in a
whitelist)

2. Status voting

* For example, one click on "I have read this" increments the LookedAt
counter by 1.
* Or, clicking on "RC Patrolled" increments the Patrolled counter by 1.

Idea #2 is easier for developers to write, because it's a very simple
database query, something like:

UPDATE article SET Patrolled = Patrolled + 1
WHERE article.version = 35498

(Please don't write me back, telling me I got the table and column names
wrong. I'm making a point about how easy it is, not telling anyone how
to do it!)

Idea #1 may prove to be just as useful, or even more so, especially if
Maveric's idea about a "web of trust" can be developed along these
lines.

Should we cross-post this thread to WikiTech?

Ed Poor


from_name: prasad gadgil

subject: [Wikitech-l] machine translaton of the articles...

body:
hi,

Thanks ivan/jimmy for responding...

Jimmy wrote:
> all, for
> many many topics, en.wikipedia.org is the most convenient and best
> reference,
> and the content is available for free.  But it is more generally the
> case in
> fr, de, ja, it, etc. that the articles are independent constructions
> from
> scratch.

I think, there will be 2 types of articles, ones translated from EN
wikipedia, and the regional language secific stuff that's contributed.
Until there is certain point, most of the content will only be
translations.

> At the same time, I absolutely think that if you can find a way to
> get
> access (is there some way that I can help, for example by writing a
> letter to some authorities, or giving you a signature on an
> application, or even paying money, if it is not too much?) for
> wikipedia contributors to this state-funded agency's tool, then if it
> helps a small number of contributors to work faster, then I am all
> for
> it.

Thanks, I believe, as the tool was developed under state funding, it
should be available for citizens, at least for non-commercial causes. I
have initiated communication with the concerned professor. It's great
to know, that the project can back efforts to get the resources. I will
definately come back to you ppl if I need to convince the authorities
for the software access.

>
> What I would envision is that you would have to do a machine
> translation and then immediately edit it to correct grammar and
> meaning mistakes.  Whether that would be faster or slower than either
> writing the article from scratch or doing a human-translation
> yourself, I do not know.
>

Yeh, sort of the auto translated docs checked by human editors before
publishing.

Thanks & regards,
Prasad gadgil.

___________________________________________________________ALL-NEW Yahoo! Messenger - all new features - even more fun!  http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com


subject: [WikiEN-l] Current validation scheme: ya gotta see this!

body:
Hey, everybody, in the excitement of the recent discussion over Mav &
Timwi & Angela's idea of version marking, we seem to have overlooked
something!

Magnus Manke has quietly developed a full-fledged scheme of his own, and
you can see a Working Demo of this at:

http://test.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Validate&mode=list_p
age

I just read and evaluated two articles!!

C'mon, let's give credit where credit is due!

Ed Poor
Developer Emeritus


from_name: Mathias Schindler

subject: [Wikipedia-l] 1M articles in 30-50 days.

body:
Hi,

according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wikistats/DE/TablesWikipediaZZ.htm,
we should have 900.000 articles in all the wikipedia languages.
According to the average groth, we will have 1.000.000 articles in
September.

Wouldn't it be nice to have that during the Linz Ars Electronica Festival?

Mathias


from_name: Magnus Manske

subject: [Wikitech-l] Help please with el wpedia

body:
Force a reload (Ctrl-R in Mozilla, Ctrl-F5 in IE, if I remember
correctly). The problem will go away.

Magnus

Andreas Kasenides wrote:

> Could please a kind soul take a look at the el wikipedia.
> Since about 3-4 days ago every article (including the main page)
> come out with a strange notice at the bottom effective saying that
> the article was recovered from the same article that is being viewed.
> For example the main page comes out saying:
>
> ?????????? ???
> "http://el.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CE%9A%CF%8D%CF%81%CE%B9%CE%B1_%CE%A3%CE%B5%CE%BB%CE%AF%CE%B4%CE%B1"
>
> Thanks for all the help.
> Andreas
> --
>
> Andreas Kasenides
> e-mail: Andreas.Kasenides_at_cs.ucy.ac.cy
> <mailto:Andreas.Kasenides%20at%20cs.ucy.ac.cy>
> (replace the _at_ above with @)
>
>------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>_______________________________________________
>Wikitech-l mailing list
>Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>


body:
http://test.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Main_Page&action=validate&timestamp=20040810005530

Logged-in users only. Can be easily extended with yes/no-options (or
just "yes", and "no opinion"). Has been waiting in the wings for - what
- weeks?

Magnus

Poor, Edmund W wrote:

>One idea that came out of the Boston meeting was very similar to what
>Maveric asked for: a way of reducing duplicate effort on RC patrol.
>
>The idea is very simple conceptually, and ought to be fairly easy for
>our noble, selfless team of hard-working developers to implement.
>
>Every user can "flag" a particular version of an article with a status
>code, such as:
>
>* RC Cleared: I have glanced at the diff and certify that this latest
>edit was NOT "simple vandalism" (i.e, graffiti like "Jerry has big ones"
>or "Toby loves Christine").
>
>* Unfair revert: Looks like someone is ignoring everyone else's
>contributions and trying to make the article endorse their own POV.
>
>If Mav or someone else I've come to trust has flagged a particular
>version of an article as "RC Cleared" (or whatever we end up calling
>it), then:
>
>1. I don't have to bother re-doing his work: I can go on and check the
>next edit in the Recent Changes queue.
>
>2. I might not even want to see that version in my custom RC list. That
>is, I'd like an option that says to show me all Recent Changes that
>HAVEN'T GOT an "RC Cleared" flag attached to them
>
>We might even fine-tune option #2, if it's not too hard for the
>developers: let each user specify a short list of "trusted users". Then
>the option would be to show all Recent Changes that DON'T HAVE an "RC
>Cleared" flag from anyone in my "trusted users" set.
>
>(The SQL code for this is trivial, by the way.)
>
>With a flag like "Unfair revert", we could sort articles by:
>
>* Current version has more than 2 "Unfair revert" flags; or,
>
>* More than a total of 5 "Unfair revert" flags have been placed on all
>versions of this article in the last 3 days.
>
>(Each user could specify parameters like "more than 3 flags" on current
>version, or "more than 12 total in the last 5 hours".)
>
>The questions are:
>
>A. Does anyone else want this?
>B. Will it slow down the server?
>C. Is it valuable enough to justify trying it out?
>
>Ed Poor
>Developer Emeritus
>_______________________________________________
>WikiEN-l mailing list
>WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>
>


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Bugzilla

body:
Thomas R. Koll wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 10, 2004 at 01:33:48PM +0100, Timwi wrote:
>>Brion Vibber wrote:
>>>I've started setting up a bugzilla at http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/
>>>The MonoBook-style template was adapted by Timwi.
>>
>>Hm. It doesn't seem to work. I get the same thing as I do on
>>www.wikimedia.org: Links to the four main wiki projects.
>
>
> it's not m but p!

Both should work, but DNS may not have updated.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Andreas Kasenides

subject: [Wikitech-l] Help please with el wpedia

body:
Could please a kind soul take a look at the el wikipedia.
Since about 3-4 days ago every article (including the main page)
come out with a strange notice at the bottom effective saying that
the article was recovered from the same article that is being viewed.
For example the main page comes out saying:

?????????? ???
"http://el.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CE%9A%CF%8D%CF%81%CE%B9%CE%B1_%CE%A3%CE%B5%CE%BB%CE%AF%CE%B4%CE%B1"

Thanks for all the help.
Andreas
--

Andreas Kasenides
e-mail: Andreas.Kasenides_at_cs.ucy.ac.cy
<mailto:Andreas.Kasenides%20at%20cs.ucy.ac.cy>
(replace the _at_ above with @)

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from_name: Henry H. Tan-Tenn

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Press inquiry: South China Morning Post (scmp.com)

body:
Timwi wrote:

> David Wilson wrote:
>
>> Could you say what it offers that Encarta and Britannica don't please?
>
> The ability to correct all the annoying errors? :)

That, too.  IMO, languages, lots of languages.  But I suppose this fact
is inevitably followed by "...even Klingon", so that may be a good
reason to suppress it :)


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Bughunt

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:

> Nonetheless, we *did* go down about 95 open bugs over a sustained
> one-week period. That's pretty bad-ass for a few guys sitting in front
> of their computer screens. ;)

That is fairly impressive.  (This coming from one who, in his ignorance,
contributed a duplicate bug that was, as testimony of the devs'
diligence, marked as such within *seconds*.)