from_name: Stan Shebs

body:
For instance, "[[Hubble Space Telescope]] initial fuzziness was due to
contractor incompetence and corruption, and covered up by NASA officials
and Congressman Diestel, who took bribes from both contractors and
researchers at the University of Maryland". The creative writer can
get actionable libels into any article - in fact, if we pinch down on
bios and do nothing elsewhere, enterprising libellers will simply
move their scene of operations.

Stan

Steve Bennett wrote:

>Ah, good example - I tried to think of counterexamples, but didn't think
>of that one. Is it possible to slander a product?  Hmm...perhaps also if
>you had a page claiming Elvis Presley to be gay or something you would
>have his estate on your back claiming you were depriving them of
>livelihood by denigrating his name. Or something.
>
>Steve
>
>
>>-----Original Message-----
>>From: wikien-l-bounces at Wikipedia.org
>>[mailto:wikien-l-bounces at Wikipedia.org] On Behalf Of charles matthews
>>Sent: Monday, 19th December 2005 11:11 PM
>>To: English Wikipedia
>>Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Re: Proposed policy on biographies:
>>input sought
>>
>>
>>"Steve Bennett" wrote
>>
>>
>>>Attempts at NPOV will never cause more than heated
>>>
>>arguments at worst
>>
>>>for any topic in WP except for one area - biographies of living
>>>people.
>>>
>>I don't believe this.  Do you really not think that a
>>consumer product scare
>>might not involve WP with corporate lawyers?
>>
>>Charles
>>
>>
>>_______________________________________________
>>WikiEN-l mailing list
>>WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
>>To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
>>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wik> ien-l
>>
>>
>
>_______________________________________________
>WikiEN-l mailing list
>WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
>To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>
>


list: wikien-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: David Gerard

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Proposed policy on biographies: input sought

body:
>OTOH, if it's the section further down commenced by [[en:user:Stevage]],
>then I take your point: ".placating potentially injured parties, even if
>that involves a minor violation of NPOV" is a slippery slope we should not
>be allowing anywhere near us.

That was it. Initiatives like this seem to think NPOV is optional
rather than, say,  the Number One Policy On The Site. And clearly, the
creators can say "no no we mean keep within NPOV", but it's obvious
that people were going to take it as an opt-out on it.

- d.


list: wikitech-l

from_name: ABCD

subject: [Wikitech-l] {{if}} is dead on en:

body:
On 12/19/05, Tels wrote:
> I _still_ haven't seen the page you wanted me to read - even though I
> wanted and tried quite a while. Even if Konqueror/Wikipedia showed me
> some article I couldn't be sure if it is the one you actually wanted me
> to read....
>

The page in question is at <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WT:AUM>

ABCD


from_name: Justin Cormack

subject: [WikiEN-l] Digital Universe

body:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/12/19/sanger_onlinepedia_with_experts/

Anyone know any more about this?

No mention of licensing terms I see on www.digitaluniverse.net

Justinc


list: foundation-l

subject: [Foundation-l] Donations: anonymous. vs. real name

body:
Is there a way to make a donation, under my Wikipedia user name?  Using
Paypal, it only gives the option of making an anonymous donation or using my
real name.  I would like to make a donation, but definitely not under my
real name.  I rather make an anonymous donation then nothing.  But, would
greatly prefer to attribute my donation to my wikipedia name,
Kmf164<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Kmf164>.
Is it feasible to add this third option for donations through Paypal?

Aside from my personal preference, I think donations to Wikimedia would
increase if they were noted somewhere, along with users' edit histories and
contributions.  Wikipedia, (as with open source software, in general), is
based on a "gift economy" (in both time and treasure).  People give of their
time and knowledge; in exchange they get credit in their edit history and
elsewhere associated with their username.  Monetary contributions are yet
another way for people to support the project, who might not have as much
time to contribute.

I think it is important for Wikipedia to also tie financial donations to
usernames, so that Wikipedians are recognized for those contributions, as
well as those of time and knowledge.

Thanks,
Kmf164


list: wikimedia-l


from_name: Stephen Bain

subject: [WikiEN-l] Improper block redux

body:
On 12/19/05, Mark Gallagher <m.g.gallagher at student.canberra.edu.au> wrote:
>
> G'day Stephen,
>
> > On 12/19/05, Kurt Maxwell Weber <kmw at armory.com> wrote:
> >
> >> karmafist has now re-blocked me, this time indefinitely.  He and
> >> David Gerard both base their actions on totally baseless
> >> assumptions about my psychology, motives, and intentions.
> >
> > <snip all the ranting>
> >
> > You don't seem to have been blocked indefinitely:
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ALog&type=block&user=&page=User%3AKmweber
> >
> > Unless your IP was blocked for trying to circumvent a block. If you
> > want to dispute the block then take it to the proper channels, don't
> > try to get around it.
>
> Difficult as it is to defend Kurt, I was under the impression that this
> *was* one of the proper channels.
>
> Don't we tell people, if you can't get a different admin to unblock you
> probably deserve to be blocked?  Seems a bit unfair to then say to a
> blocked user that he shouldn't have come to a list he knows
> admins-other-than-the-blocker read and ask to be unblocked.

It is indeed a proper channel; it appears that I've been fooled by a
lowercase k:
It seems Karmafist blocked User:kmweber (with lowercase k), whereas I
had only checked the logs for User:Kmweber (with uppercase K). You
can't even check the logs for lowercase k, it puts it to uppercase for
you. I don't even know if blocks still work when the capitalisation is
wrong.

Anyway, since User:Kmweber was not blocked indefinitely, I presumed
that Kurt must have had his IP autoblocked for trying to get around a
block. That would have meant that he was trying to do something he
shouldn't have been doing (evading a block) rather than engaging in
constructive conversation.

--
Stephen Bain
stephen.bain at gmail.com


body:
Brion,

Thanks.  The comment field would work.  I realize that any changes or new
ideas for the donation system wouldn't make it into this fundraising
campaign, anyway.

As for "people going around saying "I donated a bajillion dollars, therefore
my version of this article should be kept instead of yours". - you're right
and no way should anyone ever equate monetary donations with added
credentials for editing (these need to be earned through contributions of
time and knowledge).  But, it would be nice in my opinion, to nonetheless
make note of donations by users.  I think doing so would play into the idea
of the "gift economy" and help Wikimedia.

-Kmf164

On 12/19/05, Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:
>
> kmf164 wrote:
> > Is there a way to make a donation, under my Wikipedia user name?  Using
> > Paypal, it only gives the option of making an anonymous donation or
> using my
> > real name.  I would like to make a donation, but definitely not under my
> > real name.  I rather make an anonymous donation then nothing.  But,
> would
> > greatly prefer to attribute my donation to my wikipedia name,
> > Kmf164<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Kmf164>.
> > Is it feasible to add this third option for donations through Paypal?
>
> There is a comment field, which is public; they're listed at the daily
> fundraising progress reports at http://fundraising.wikimedia.org/2005q4/
>
> If you like you could put your username in there and mark it as anonymous
> to
> hide your real name from the public lists.
>
> > Aside from my personal preference, I think donations to Wikimedia would
> > increase if they were noted somewhere, along with users' edit histories
> and
> > contributions.  Wikipedia, (as with open source software, in general),
> is
> > based on a "gift economy" (in both time and treasure).  People give of
> their
> > time and knowledge; in exchange they get credit in their edit history
> and
> > elsewhere associated with their username.  Monetary contributions are
> yet
> > another way for people to support the project, who might not have as
> much
> > time to contribute.
> >
> > I think it is important for Wikipedia to also tie financial donations to
> > usernames, so that Wikipedians are recognized for those contributions,
> as
> > well as those of time and knowledge.
>
> On the other hand we really don't want to have people going around saying
> "I
> donated a bajillion dollars, therefore my version of this article should
> be kept
> instead of yours". :)
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>
>
>
>


from_name: geni

body:
On 12/19/05, Steve Bennett <stevage at gmail.com> wrote:
> > That was it. Initiatives like this seem to think NPOV is
> > optional rather than, say,  the Number One Policy On The
> > Site. And clearly, the creators can say "no no we mean keep
> > within NPOV", but it's obvious that people were going to take
> > it as an opt-out on it.
>
> Attempts at NPOV will never cause more than heated arguments at worst
> for any topic in WP except for one area - biographies of living people.
> Therefore it seems to me that the statement "we do NPOV everywhere
> without exception" may warrant re-examination.  You could have pretty
> much any policy in place (even "every article must begin with the words,
> <subject> is a paedophile") and you wouldn't get sued, and you wouldn't
> cause any major harm (except possibly to students doing last minute
> revision for an exam on Queen Victoria) - except for biographies of
> living people.
>
> What I'm getting at is that saying "NPOV works everywhere else, it must
> work here" is not self evident.  We must be really, really sure that
> both the ideal of NPOV and its actual implementation in wikipedia by
> real-life, fallible editors, actually work for living bios, now that
> wikipedia is becoming big enough and famous enough to actually matter to
> the Seigenthalers of the world.
>
> Steve

NPOV is hard policy.

--
geni


from_name: Steve Bennett

subject: [WikiEN-l] Proposed policy on biographies: input sought

body:
>And I see someone on the talk page already thinks this is a cue to
abandon NPOV.

Me - but not quite. See talk page.

Steve


from_name: Sam Korn

subject:
[WikiEN-l] I just did another interview - Dublin NewsRadio 106,
	2:20pm.

body:
On 12/19/05, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> As opposed, of course, to our many lunar editors.

We have lunar editors?  That's just out of this world!

--
Sam


body:
Hi,

>be allowing anywhere near us. If it's been published in a newspaper,
then
>the facts themselves are fair game, even if the subject is not: I would
have
>thought that a biography stating "X was the subject of a malicious
>allegation of misbehaviour in Y newspaper which turned out to be
fabricatory
>cobblers" might actually be doing the subject a favour...neutrally of
course

And how would the subject feel from the time the article reads "X is
alleged to have molested children [1]" with a footnote to the newspaper
article until the time sometime after the retraction in the paper that
the entry is amended to read as above?

In any case, we need some very clear definitions of libel and
defamation, with reference to jurisdictions etc, to know exactly what we
can and can't say and in what circumstances.  I suspect our assumptions
of good faith and commonsense being sufficient are unfounded.

Steve


from_name: Tels

subject: [Wikitech-l] {{if}} is dead on en:

body:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----

Moin,

On Sunday 18 December 2005 22:50, David Gerard wrote:
> David Gerard wrote:
> > If you see the end of [[WT:AUM]], you will see User:Adrian crowing
> > about the possibilities of DOS attacks. Jamesday pointed out to him
> > this was somewhat unseemly.
>
> Sorry, sorry - [[:en:User:Adrian_Buehlmann]].

For people reading this in an email program, could you embed real
http-links? Converting [[]] manually to http://something is quite a
pain  :)

Best wishes,

Tels

- --
 Signed on Mon Dec 19 18:49:30 2005 with key 0x93B84C15.
 Visit my photo gallery at http://bloodgate.com/photos/
 PGP key on http://bloodgate.com/tels.asc or per email.

 "One man in a thousand is a leader of men, the other 999 follow women"
 -- Groucho Marx

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subject: [Wikitech-l] text mining and automatic linking

body:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----

Moin,

On Monday 19 December 2005 01:35, Lars Aronsson wrote:
> For Google-style page ranking, it is supposedly important to have
> links from one page to another.  If the word "Colombia" is
> mentioned in the article about "Bogota" but not linked, this
> relationship will be missed in the ranking.  One way to avoid such
> misses would be for a robot to take the list of article titles and
> search for their occurance in the text body of all articles, and
> insert brackets where they are missing.
>
> No, I don't suggest that such a robot should be used in Wikipedia.
> For one thing, we do have articles about many common words and for
> every year in history, but it would not make sense to make a link
> for every mentioning of a year or such common words.
>
> What I would like to ask is whether this kind of text mining is
> common and has a name?  So this is more of a general question
> about information retrieval (IR) in large text corpuses than about
> Wikipedia.  Are there arithmetic rules for when such links should
> be avoided?
>
> One place where such automatic linking could be interesting is a
> scanned paper encyclopedia, where no links exist beforehand, e.g.
> http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_New_Student%27s_Reference_Work

I used a technique for that for

	http://search.cpan.org/~tels/Convert-Wiki-0.05/

which can be used to convert READMEs into wikitext. There are a frew rules
like "dont link to the same article twice in a paragraph", and you can
supply a list of terms you want it to link. However, it is a hack, so any
insight into formal rules or techniques would be of interest to me.

Best wishes,

Tels

- --
 Signed on Mon Dec 19 18:51:35 2005 with key 0x93B84C15.
 Visit my photo gallery at http://bloodgate.com/photos/
 PGP key on http://bloodgate.com/tels.asc or per email.

 "Retsina?" - "Ja, Papa?" - "Rasenm?hen." - "Is gut, Papa."

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from_name: Rowan Collins

subject: [Wikitech-l] {{if}} is dead on en:

body:
On 19/12/05, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
> Given the obscure notation I do not even have a clue where I am to find
> a [[WT:AUM]] I do not have the foggiest what this would be about..

1) Go to en.wikipedia.org (as "en:" is mentionned in the subject line)
2) Type "WT:AUM" in the search box and click "Go" (since the [[...]]
is clearly link syntax, making that a page title).

You will be redirected to a page called "Wikipedia talk:Avoid using
meta-templates", since "WT:" and "WP:" are used on en.wp as
abbreviated "pseudo-namespaces" for redirecting to "Wikipedia:" and
"Wikipedia talk:" pages, respectively. I wouldn't expect a
non-(English-Wikipedia)n to know that, but you didn't really need to
to find the referenced page - though perhaps explicitly using
"[[en:WT:AUM]]" (or even "[[w:en:WT:AUM]]") would have been clearer.

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


body:
> That was it. Initiatives like this seem to think NPOV is
> optional rather than, say,  the Number One Policy On The
> Site. And clearly, the creators can say "no no we mean keep
> within NPOV", but it's obvious that people were going to take
> it as an opt-out on it.

Attempts at NPOV will never cause more than heated arguments at worst
for any topic in WP except for one area - biographies of living people.
Therefore it seems to me that the statement "we do NPOV everywhere
without exception" may warrant re-examination.  You could have pretty
much any policy in place (even "every article must begin with the words,
<subject> is a paedophile") and you wouldn't get sued, and you wouldn't
cause any major harm (except possibly to students doing last minute
revision for an exam on Queen Victoria) - except for biographies of
living people.

What I'm getting at is that saying "NPOV works everywhere else, it must
work here" is not self evident.  We must be really, really sure that
both the ideal of NPOV and its actual implementation in wikipedia by
real-life, fallible editors, actually work for living bios, now that
wikipedia is becoming big enough and famous enough to actually matter to
the Seigenthalers of the world.

Steve


from_name: Geoff Burling

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Defamatory Biographies - another problem looming
	forWikipedia?

body:
On Tue, 20 Dec 2005, Andrew Gray wrote:

> There's a lot of articles that
> are obviously biographies - I happen to be looking at [[Reginald of
> Durham]] just now - but which aren't categorised by birth/death simply
> because they're not known. However, it's equally obvious that he is,
> in fact, dead...
>
> Hmm. Moving back to a more general theme...
>
> [[Category:Living people]]
> [[Category:Dead people]]
> [[Category:People not known to be dead]] (might do with a better title)
> [[Category:Fictional people]]
>
> Assume for a second we have the manpower to go and slap one of these
> on every biography we can find - so anything with death or life cats,
> anything categorised "as a person", anything with a stub notice that
> makes it look like an individual. Great.
>
> 1) Will the category system fall over horribly? Two of those cats will
> certainly have tens of thousands of entries, and no subcategorisation.

I'm sometimes amazed at how much work various people are willing to expend
on categorizing & recategorizing stubs. I can't help think that the effort
expended on moving an article labelled {{bio-stub}} to (say)
{{German-bio-stub}}, then {{German-scientist-bio-stub}}, then suplimented
with tags like {{biologist-stub}} & {{European-woman-stub}}. Having a
project like this for these kinds of people to expend their need for
organization would be A Good Thing.

(And for the record, when I find an article with more than one stub tag
attached, I always reduce the number to one. Don't like it? Then turn
the stub into an article, & we'll both be happy.)
>
> 2) What would this achieve? We've got some good basic metadata, but...
> among other things, it doesn't address the problem of someone
> inserting violently libellous material *elsewhere*, which can be just
> as bad - say, in an article on that person's company, or political
> party, or hometown, or whatever. Or tangential libel in *another*
> biographical article, where someone may not notice it as dubious if
> parsed as a reference to someone else...

I would assume that insisting that people provide sources for allegations
that would be considered derogatory by a prudent person would solve
much of this kind of trouble. Even if it's "common knowledge" that a
given person is a criminal, unless one can provide clear proof of the
allegations the subject may sue just to dissuade the next person. (A guy
by the name of L. Ron Hubbard was notoriously successful with this tactic.)
>
> 3) But coming back to the start... how about Seigenthaler articles? No
> categorisation, no stub tag, not visible as a bio by anything short of
> a human reader stumbling across the damn thing and checking it. Are we
> going to have eyeballs check every article, in case they're a missed
> biography? The man-hours are really mounting up...
>
When I used to do New Article Patrol on a regular basis, I found myself
wikifying new articles, rather than tagging them for deletion. (Despite
the kill-happy reputation of AfD, I found it far easier to subject these
articles to a scrubbing than listing them.) Then I saw David Gerard's
comment about 90% of new articles were dreck, & started to suspect my own
judgement. So I lost interest in that chore.*

Then again, I've added an article or two which one could make a plausible
case they should have been deleted on sight. I haven't noticed anyone
pulling the trigger on them yet.

Geoff

[*] This is not to blame David. I admit that sometimes I am likely to
hear criticism where none is meant; yet sometimes Wikipedia is a far
more critical environment than it is a supportive one.


subject: [Wikitech-l] {{if}} is dead on en:

body:
On 19/12/05, Tels <nospam-abuse at bloodgate.com> wrote:
> For people reading this in an email program, could you embed real
> http-links? Converting [[]] manually to http://something is quite a
> pain  :)

Although I do agree with you in general, here's a tip of the day: if
using Mozilla, Firefox, and possibly others, you can set up a bookmark
with a destination of "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%s" and a keyword
(I use "wg" for "Wikipedia Go"), and then type/copy&paste, for
example, "wg WT:AUM" or "wg m:User:AzaToth/Logic". I think this will
work with anything except "w:" as the interwiki prefix (including
"en:").

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


from_name: Uwe Brauer

subject: [Wikitech-l] which html constructs are evil

body:
Hello

Some articles bear the label: this page needs to be wikified, also it
looks not much different to a standard wikipedia page.
My question is which html constructions are considered as evil?

Thanks

Uwe Brauer


from_name: Cormac Lawler

subject: [Foundation-l] Media in Africa conference

body:
Dear all, I'm passing along details of a conference in London next
March on "The media and social change in Africa" (details below).

I wonder if any Wikimedian(s) would like to participate in this
conference. I haven't followed many African projects but a quick flick
through Swahili (:sw) and Bambara (:bm) Wikipedias' Recent Changes
show some activity.

Cormac

>CAMRI Africa Media Series: 2006
>The Media and Social Change in Africa Conference,
>25th March 2006, 9am-5pm, University of Westminster, London, UK
>
>This is a 1st Call for Papers for a one-day CAMRI Africa Media Conference
>on 'The Media and Social Change in Africa'. In what ways are the media
>changing Africa? What role do the media have in a changing Africa? In
>countries from Egypt to South Africa, Kenya to Zimbabwe, Cameroon to
>Nigeria, Rwanda to Morocco, the 'media', defined as widely as possible,
>mediate old and new African social realities. Processes of mediation
>elicit reactions and patterns of change in Africa and, more importantly,
>in the media sectors. The shift from pre-colonial, colonial to
>post-colonial social formations has been reflected and affected by changes
>in media and communication. The media have been harbingers of African
>social change and are strongly implicated in the change processes taking
>place in Africa. Traditional and modern communication patterns are
>increasingly overlapping with mass mediation. Africa now has different
>kinds of media serving many kinds of purposes. Individual papers may,
>amongst other topics, focus on the:
>
>?                     Media's Role in Pre-Colonial, Colonial and
>Post-Colonial Africa
>?                     Media and Modernisation in Africa
>?                     Changing Media Institutions and Production cultures
>?                     Social Cultural Changes, Continuity and the Mass Media
>?                     Media and Changing Individual, Local and National
>Contexts
>?                     Changing Media and Changing African Lifestyles
>
>Papers are invited on Media and Change in Africa. The deadline for
>abstracts is 15th February 2006. Those whose papers are accepted will be
>notified by 28th February 2006. Completed papers (not more than 6000
>words) must be e-mailed to us not later than 15th March 2006. Send
>200-word abstracts to Winston Mano at:
><mailto:manow at wmin.ac.uk>manow at wmin.ac.uk
>
>Fees:
>Unwaged/Students:                 ?10
>Non-Students:                         ?20
>Fees cover registration, conference pack, lunch, coffee and tea.
>
>Contact Persons:
>Dr Winston Mano
>Africa Media Series
>Communication and Media Research Center (CAMRI)
>University of Westminster, Harrow Campus
>Watford Road, HA1 3TP, UK
>Phone: 0044 (0) 2079115000 Ext. 4427
>Email: manow at wmin.ac.uk
>___________________________________


from_name: Chris Owen

subject: [WikiEN-l] Improve quality by reviewing all new articles

body:
David Gerard wrote:

> Jimmy Wales wrote:

>(re: [[John Seigenthaler Sr.]])

>> Any good editor _with enough time_ who looks at an
article
>> about a living person which makes claims as
transparently
>> outlandish as these will know to remove those
claims and
>> insist on a source.  It would have taken 15 seconds
of
>> googling to see that the claims were in no way
supported by
>> any obvious source.

>Newpages patrol typically doesn't take or have the
time to do
>that. It's a firehose of slush-pile quality
information. It's
>about a first cull.

It shouldn't be. Jimbo's point about the "failure
mode" is absolutely right - at the moment we're
letting in "a firehose of slush-pile quality
information" which doesn't even meet basic standards
(I'll come back to this point). Our "failure mode"
right now is to let everything in and hope that
someone improves the "slush-pile". What happens if
they don't? We simply don't have enough time to make
this happen.

>> The Seigenthaler article didn't pass _any_ basic
quality standards.

>It passed *basic* ones, which is how it survived
Newpages
>patrol. Basic quality standards for Newpages means
more or less
>that's it's shaped enough like something that might
be a
>Wikipedia article not to shoot on sight.

I don't know how you can argue that it met *any*
standards other than that it was written in English.
Let's consider what was wrong with it. It was an
orphan article, with no wikilinks, no references, no
formatting and hopelessly (actually maliciously)
incorrect information. What was right with it?
Ummm....

Note that in my original proposal I said that
including references should be part of the basic
criteria. I expressly didn't say that the article
should be accurate in every regard.

There's an important point here - it's simply not
feasible to fact-check everything that goes into
Wikipedia and nobody should fool themselves that this
can be done. But the point about inaccurate
information is that much of the time, it's something
that someone has misremembered, it may be speculative
or, as in the Siegenthaler case, it may simply have
been made up.

If the Siegenthaler article submitter had been
required to reference his allegations about his
subject, the article would probably never have been
accepted into the main namespace in the first place.
Insisting on referenced sources is the first and best
line of defence against bad information.

>What it would need is something like what someone
else mooted, a
>biography patrol. Which is a damn fine idea, I think.

It might help with existing biographies, but it won't
solve the problem for newly created ones and it won't
do anything at all for all the new non-biographical
articles (which is most of them). Your idea of a
"prefilled" article template is a good one, and I
think it should be implemented. But it won't make much
difference if people are still free to create junk
articles and we still rely on those articles being
caught.

You said earlier in your post that "Newpages patrol
typically doesn't take or have the time to [check
articles]." This is true - we have too few patrollers
and too little time. Our method of checking new pages
is effectively equivalent to random sampling; we're
dipping into the firehose to see if what's coming
through it is any good. This might work for an
automated production line, but it's fundamentally the
wrong model for a setup where each and every one of
the products is "hand-made". You have to do quality
control on each article, not on a representative
sample.

I think we have three variables here: the number of
new articles, the number of patrollers and the time
required to review each new article. We might be able
to reduce the number of new articles a bit by
requiring users to log in before creating them, but it
doesn't seem to have made a great deal of difference
so far. The number of patrollers is something we don't
have any control over and it's never likely to keep
pace with the demand anyway.

The only variable we *can* really change substantially
is the time we have in which to review articles.
That's where the change in "failure mode" comes in.
Right now, we have literally no time at all to review
articles, because as soon as they're published they're
in the namespace, and they scroll off the Newpages
list within minutes or hours. Putting them in a review
queue would give us all the time we needed to review
them.

It would also greatly reduce the attractiveness of
submitting Siegenthaler-style hoaxes and "look
Ma!"-type junk because such articles would have a very
high chance of never getting into the public website
in the first place. Right now we're getting a huge
amount of similar junk because the submitters know
that it'll be visible immediately. Take that away, and
you take away a lot of the rationale for
hoaxing/vandalising in the first place.

One other point. People are understandably getting
jittery about biographies because that's a point of
legal vulnerability. But that's missing the point: we
just don't have a problem with bad biographies, we
have a problem with a broken process that lets in all
kinds of bad information, not just biographies.
Jimbo's experiment in stopping anonymous editors from
creating new articles won't stop that, any more than
your proposal of patrolling biographies. The
underlying process needs to be fixed, not just a
particular category of user privileges or content.

- ChrisO

___________________________________________________________
NEW Yahoo! Cars - sell your car and browse thousands of new and used cars online! http://uk.cars.yahoo.com/


from_name: Gerard Meijssen

subject: [Wikitech-l] {{if}} is dead on en:

body:
Hoi,
Given the obscure notation I do not even have a clue where I am to find
a [[WT:AUM]] I do not have the foggiest what this would be about.. It is
therefore a sure way of not communicating.
Thanks,
   GerardM

Tels wrote:
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
>
> Moin,
>
> On Sunday 18 December 2005 22:50, David Gerard wrote:
>
>> David Gerard wrote:
>>
>>> If you see the end of [[WT:AUM]], you will see User:Adrian crowing
>>> about the possibilities of DOS attacks. Jamesday pointed out to him
>>> this was somewhat unseemly.
>>>
>> Sorry, sorry - [[:en:User:Adrian_Buehlmann]].
>>
>
> For people reading this in an email program, could you embed real
> http-links? Converting [[]] manually to http://something is quite a
> pain  :)
>
> Best wishes,
>
> Tels
>
> - --
>  Signed on Mon Dec 19 18:49:30 2005 with key 0x93B84C15.
>  Visit my photo gallery at http://bloodgate.com/photos/
>  PGP key on http://bloodgate.com/tels.asc or per email.
>
>  "One man in a thousand is a leader of men, the other 999 follow women"
>  -- Groucho Marx
>
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
> Version: GnuPG v1.2.4 (GNU/Linux)
>
> iQEVAwUBQ6by6ncLPEOTuEwVAQE/lgf+Pu7yQnRo9pBiTJ6Q7ZfVwJlIEAwlEArF
> bWTG+rNh8sZlkZBp6lBUVB4eUDslznKAmg4tTY1tY5uGUOY53z9tccGrn88Ui+cA
> Pj4JQvhal/mliOC6udUWQQcCLvVYkv+Q8pYhtzwZXshDAWE6PyOoPKm0qpCOGrB9
> t04xf9uh3Js11n7kyp/aHrxXTDrJJIzlMTepq6odo0pGCjmVfp7xOY9CIuhr1ldR
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> =KqDA
> -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>
>


subject:
[Wikitech-l] Cannot change content of navigation bar because
	$wgUseDatabaseMessages=false

body:
On 19/12/05, Jan Vanoverpelt <jan.vanoverpelt at gmail.com> wrote:
> After installation of the Mediawiki-software, I changed the default
> "English" language into Dutch by changing $wgLanguageCode in
> localsettings.php AND by setting $wgUseDatabaseMessages=false in
> defaultsettings.php (the latter had to be done in order to see the changes,
> like is indicated in the Mediawiki-FAQ).

Hm, you're the second person recently to misunderstand / not fully
appreciate the effect of $wgUseDatabaseMessages, perhaps some
documentation needs clarifying somewhere... By setting this option,
you have switched off the "MediaWiki:" namespace, so that interface
messages will be taken straight from the (in your case) LanguageNl.php
file.

> neither can I change the content of the navigation bar.

This is where the misunderstanding comes in - you can change whatever
you like, _by changing the LanguageNl.php file_. It's not as easy as
using the wiki-based way, obviously, but you just need to find and
change the "'sidebar' =>" line in that file. You'll also have to be
careful not to overwrite your changes when upgrading, but as a
compromise this seems workable.

> to run the script rebuildMessages.php in the maintenance-folder.

If you could manage to do this, you would be able to switch
$wgDatabaseMessages back to true (in fact, you may need to do so
first), but whether executing with your FTP program will work, I don't
know. I think that script requires some command-line arguments (view
the source for what), and you'll also need to create an
"AdminSettings.php" file (see "AdminSettings.sample").

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


from_name: Magnus Manske

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Namespace changes ready for code review

body:
Jonathan Leybovich wrote:
> Erik Moeller wrote:
> [snip]
>>
>> == Future features ==
>>
>> Some ideas for things that could be implemented:
>>
>
> Also, perhaps add a 'Review' flag for namespaces so that pages within
> it are reviewable or not using Magnus's page review feature.  I think
> right now it is hard-coded to only operate on the main ('0') namespace.
It is, but that can just as well be fixed by other means.

What I didn't see in the list (just skimming through) was putting all
this info into the XML export...

Magnus


body:
On 19/12/05, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
> AfD ??

"Articles for Deletion" - the over-worked discussion page for
proposing page deletions on en.wikipedia. [Formerly known as "VfD",
"Votes for Deletion", and constantly proposed for replacement or,
ahem, deletion]

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


body:
Uwe Brauer wrote:
>
> Hello
>
> Some articles bear the label: this page needs to be wikified, also it
> looks not much different to a standard wikipedia page.
> My question is which html constructions are considered as evil?
>
All of them, according to wikimarkup purists.

"Wikification" means adding of [external] and [[internal|links]], have a
'''bold''' title, use of
* wiki-style
# lists and
:indentations
== and headings ==

Categories and interwiki links are popular as well.
Don't forget to add a AfD template once you're done ;-) [runs and hides]

Magnus


from_name: Austin Hair

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Skins for deletion: Amethyst

body:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Main_Page&useskin=amethyst

-- Austin


from_name: Jimmy Wales

body:
NPOV is non-negotiable everywhere, of course, but relevant questions
which I think this policy tries to address are related to verifiability,
notability, liklihood of hatchet jobs, etc.  Of course the details of
the policy need to be worked on seriously and carefully, but I do think
it is abundantly clear that it is a good idea if we recognize in a more
formal way what we already all know: biographies of living persons,
especially those who are barely notable, pose particular challenges.

> What I'm getting at is that saying "NPOV works everywhere else, it must
> work here" is not self evident.  We must be really, really sure that
> both the ideal of NPOV and its actual implementation in wikipedia by
> real-life, fallible editors, actually work for living bios, now that
> wikipedia is becoming big enough and famous enough to actually matter to
> the Seigenthalers of the world.

I agree with what I think you're saying *in substance* but I don't think
it will be as persuasive to put it that way.  It is not a violation of
neutrality to note that there are special problems and concerns when we
are talking about biographies of living persons.

Neutrality does not imply that we should try to become a permanent and
extensive record of all pleasant and unpleasant facts or allegations
about living persons who are not particularly notable.

--Jimbo


body:
slimvirgin at gmail.com wrote:
> Based on examples like this, I argue that, although NPOV and NOR are
> inseparable, when push comes to shove, NOR is actually prioritized. Or
> perhaps more accurately, NPOV is interpreted in a way that prioritizes
> NOR.

I like the second formulation.  It is impossible for us to be NPOV if we
are rushing willy-nilly into original research.


subject: [WikiEN-l] [[Wikipedia:Biographies of living persons]]

body:
As is usual, David speaks good sense.  The title was a nice introduction
to the topic, and is certainly true, but may send people down the wrong
path.  David's point #2 is absolutely right on target and would deal
with most or possibly even all of the issues in this area quite well.

David Gerard wrote:
> I think my main objection to this is the current title:
> "Wikipedia:Biographies of living persons deserve special sensitivity".
> The very title pushes Sympathetic Point Of View, whatever the guideline
> content.
>
> I've suggested on the talk page:
>
> 1. Change title to [[Wikipedia:Biographies of living persons]]
>
> 2. Start with "Be very hardarsed with references in living persons'
> bios" and go from there.
>
> That is: the title should be what the guideline *concerns*. And the
> start should be the guideline itself in a sentence.
>
> Then we can work from there. NPOV, NOR, V. Past examples of why we need
> this. Don't fall into Sympathetic Point Of View. Etc.
>
> Does this sound workable?

To me it does.


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Michael Bimmler

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] What's the IP address of Wikipedia's Amsterdam
	Server?

body:
cf. http://wikitech.leuksman.com/view/IP_addresses
Pathping/Tracert for www.knams.wikimedia.org gives me
pascal.knams.wikimedia.org (145.97.39.130)
Whether you can use it I don't know either...
Regards
Michael

2005/12/19, Jiaming Xu <john.xu.1982 at gmail.com>:
>
> I'm in China and my traffic seems to be routed to Wiki's Korea server
> which
> is blocked. So I'm wondering what's the ip address of the amsterdam server
> and whether i could use it to bypass the block.
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>

--
An eternity is very, very long, especially towards the end


from_name: Gregory Maxwell

subject: [Wikitech-l] How's image undeletability going?

body:
On 12/19/05, David Gerard <fun at thingy.apana.org.au> wrote:
> That's nice, dear. Now, as for the actual question ...

I gave you a perfectly good solution, which doesn't require new
development on old code which just needs to be replaced and whos
replacement is a lower priority than the thousand and one other
features which are awaiting attention and can't be just worked around.

Again, quit being a jerk and perhaps people will be willing to work on it.


body:
Magnus Manske wrote:
> Uwe Brauer wrote:
>
>> Hello
>>
>> Some articles bear the label: this page needs to be wikified, also it
>> looks not much different to a standard wikipedia page.
>> My question is which html constructions are considered as evil?
>>
>>
> All of them, according to wikimarkup purists.
>
> "Wikification" means adding of [external] and [[internal|links]], have a
> '''bold''' title, use of
> * wiki-style
> # lists and
> :indentations
> == and headings ==
>
> Categories and interwiki links are popular as well.
> Don't forget to add a AfD template once you're done ;-) [runs and hides]
>
> Magnus
AfD ??


from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [Foundation-l] Day 4 Fund Drive Report

body:
Copied from:
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Fund_drives/2005/Q4/Day_4
-------------------------------------------------------------

The equivalent of $12,735.50 USD was donated through PayPal on '''Day 4''' (Monday 19 December),
making it the second most successful day so far in this drive! A total of 628 individual donations
(the second highest) were made yielding an average donation of $20.28 (lowest average thus far).

Here is the PayPal breakdown for Day 4:
 AUD    429.03    (321.99 USD)
 CAD 	823.33 	  (677.53 USD)
 EUR 	2,297.97  (2,791.32 USD)
 GBP 	578.73 	  (1,037.84 USD)
 JPY 	17,274.00 (156.07 USD)
 USD 	7,750.76
 Total 	12,735.50 USD

Copied from: http://fundraising.wikimedia.org/2005q4/index.php/2005-12-19/report/

==Selected donor comments==
Let's all thank everybody who donated on this day by reading their comments.

:From: http://fundraising.wikimedia.org/2005q4/index.php/2005-12-19/detail/

Here are some examples that caught my eye:
*"De plus en plus utile! Merci!" by Etienne Boucher
*"Protect Our Free Speach" by anonymous
*"Thank you for all the information (and fun) I've had from you" by Steve Czyrko
*"Thank you so much for such a fantastic resource!" by Emily Gillis
*"Wikipedia is the culmination of all that is good about the information age." by anonymous
*"Wikipedia is one of the pillars of the egalitarian Internet" by Christian Cotichini
*"Very happy to support this excellent project - User:Ianblair23" by IAN S BLAIR
*"Wikipedia is the single greatest asset to knowledge on the Internet." by Adam Greenfield
*"A small price compared to the priceless knowledge gained." by anonymous
*"What a lovely place to get information." by anonymous
*"Your site has become a treasure-trove of information for me. Please take this as a small token
of my esteeem" by James Kamakahi
*"I am proud to support the greatest learning resource on the web." by Simon Smith
*"Human knowledge should not be subject to intimidation" by anonymous
*"Was gut ist mu? gut bleiben." by Ulf Kuessner
*"Thank you for using the Internet for good." by anonymous
*"Borg Lojasiewicz : Thank You to everyone who contributed to the expansion of my prosthetic
mind." by wanda lojasiewicz
*"Wikipedia has helped me many times in the past and I hope it will help me many times in the
future." by Henrique Rodrigues
*"This is truly a great resource that deserves community support. Let's keep it free for all who
may seek knowledge and information." by John Woody
*"The finest resource on the web." by Tvrtko Crnkovic-Dodig
*"A buck a week! Well worth it." by John Hahn

My personal favorites:
*"For the future" by Samuel Borgman
*"Drop by drop the sea rises..." by Rene Rex
*"It is a far better thing we do..." by Ian Yorston
*"the light of truth can be hidden but not stopped" by Timothy Bates
*"You make me look smart." by anonymous
*"Merry Festivus!" by Chai Trakulthai

-- Daniel Mayer

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


subject: [Foundation-l] Day 4 Fund Drive Report


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Day 4 Fund Drive Report


from_name: Michael Keppler

body:
Lars Aronsson schrieb:
> No, I don't suggest that such a robot should be used in Wikipedia.
> For one thing, we do have articles about many common words and for
> every year in history, but it would not make sense to make a link
> for every mentioning of a year or such common words.

A year ago I have developed a web based "wikifyer" for the German
Wikipedia at
http://217.160.138.71/development/wikipedia/wikify/index.php (German
only), which calculates a list of all article titles which exist in the
German Wikipedia and also occur in his selected article, but are not yet
linked from this article. The user can then select a set of subjects to
be linked automatically and can afterwards copy&paste the resulting
article text. So the decision about the linking is still the decision of
the user, but he is better supported in knowing what he can link to and
to do that fast.

I didn't work on that tool since a year for reasons of low spare time,
but I still have the idea to rewrite that tool from scratch and to put
it onto the Wikimedia tool server to be able to use a recent copy of the
Wikipedia for the list of article titles. Does that sound like a useful
thing to you?

Ciao, Michael.


subject: [Wikitech-l] {{if}} is dead on en:

body:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----

Moin,

On Monday 19 December 2005 20:08, Rowan Collins wrote:
> On 19/12/05, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Given the obscure notation I do not even have a clue where I am to
> > find a [[WT:AUM]] I do not have the foggiest what this would be
> > about..
>
> 1) Go to en.wikipedia.org (as "en:" is mentionned in the subject line)
> 2) Type "WT:AUM" in the search box and click "Go" (since the [[...]]
> is clearly link syntax, making that a page title).
>
> You will be redirected to a page called "Wikipedia talk:Avoid using
> meta-templates", since "WT:" and "WP:" are used on en.wp as
> abbreviated "pseudo-namespaces" for redirecting to "Wikipedia:" and
> "Wikipedia talk:" pages, respectively. I wouldn't expect a
> non-(English-Wikipedia)n to know that, but you didn't really need to
> to find the referenced page - though perhaps explicitly using
> "[[en:WT:AUM]]" (or even "[[w:en:WT:AUM]]") would have been clearer.

WT:AUM sounds like an abbreviation to me and I would never have guessed to
use the search on that.... apart from all the manual steps involved just
to open the page. See my other replay for why I will not do that.

Best wishes,

Tels

- --
 Signed on Mon Dec 19 21:17:31 2005 with key 0x93B84C15.
 Visit my photo gallery at http://bloodgate.com/photos/
 PGP key on http://bloodgate.com/tels.asc or per email.

 Ich bin mit der Gesamtsituation unzufrieden!

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from_name: Brian

subject: [Foundation-l] Yet another reason to have a "stable article" system

body:
The article on Christmas is set to be on the Main Page on December 25th.

It used to be Featured quality. That was a year ago. Since then, it has
had 600 major edits, 500 other edits, and is nearly unreadable.

Compare the originally Featured version to the current version:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Christmas&diff=32012542&oldid=8777491

Now, it is up for FARC:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_article_removal_candidates/Christmas

To prevent stagnated articles from being presented as "top quality" on
the Main Page, there seems to be two solutions: set a time limit for
Featured Articles, which requires them to be renominated on FAC if they
become too different from their original Featured versions; or,
implement the "stable article" option that Tim Starling has talked
about, which would allow admins to set a "last good version" to be
presented to the public at all times, while the real version is somehow
edited "behind the scenes". As productive edits pile up, admins can set
a newer version as the "last good version".  While this can still result
in an article being drastically-changed, it is much more likely to be
changed for the better in the long run.

brian0918


subject: [Wikitech-l] Yet another reason to have a "stable article" system


subject: [Wikitech-l] {{if}} is dead on en:

body:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----

Moin,

On Monday 19 December 2005 20:15, Rowan Collins wrote:
> On 19/12/05, Tels <nospam-abuse at bloodgate.com> wrote:
> > For people reading this in an email program, could you embed real
> > http-links? Converting [[]] manually to http://something is quite a
> > pain  :)
>
> Although I do agree with you in general, here's a tip of the day: if
> using Mozilla, Firefox, and possibly others, you can set up a bookmark
> with a destination of "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%s" and a keyword
> (I use "wg" for "Wikipedia Go"), and then type/copy&paste, for
> example, "wg WT:AUM" or "wg m:User:AzaToth/Logic". I think this will
> work with anything except "w:" as the interwiki prefix (including
> "en:").

Yeah, but I am not reading the email in my browser, I am reading it in my
_email_ client.

I still consider it bad manners that you save yourself doing the
copy&paste of the URL, but expect every reader to repeat that action for
you - probably installing software, adding bookmarks etc along the way.

While your method outlined above makes it easier for me (if I set it up
correctly and remember all the steps), but it is still _much_ more
complicated than just clicking a link. Why not use URL like the rest of
the net has been doing for years and save every reader the copy&paste
orgy?

Best wishes,

Tels

- --
 Signed on Mon Dec 19 21:18:21 2005 with key 0x93B84C15.
 Visit my photo gallery at http://bloodgate.com/photos/
 PGP key on http://bloodgate.com/tels.asc or per email.

 "I intend to live forever, or die trying." -- Groucho Marx

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from_name: Steve Bennett

body:
Hello,
How about making it so that new page patrollers stamp any
biographical-looking page with an {{unchecked bio}} template? Then that
becomes another round of article checking that can be done by whoever it
is that carries out these repetitive tasks.  By making the template
sufficiently spammy and legalese ("This article has not been fact
checked and may contain serious inaccuracies and even defamatory
statements. The Wikimedia foundation explicitly disclaims all
responsibility...") you could even kill two birds with one stone.

Steve

Chris Owen wrote (amongst others)
> The only variable we *can* really change substantially
> is the time we have in which to review articles.
> That's where the change in "failure mode" comes in.
> Right now, we have literally no time at all to review
> articles, because as soon as they're published they're
> in the namespace, and they scroll off the Newpages
> list within minutes or hours. Putting them in a review
> queue would give us all the time we needed to review
> them.

> One other point. People are understandably getting
> jittery about biographies because that's a point of
> legal vulnerability. But that's missing the point: we
> just don't have a problem with bad biographies, we
> have a problem with a broken process that lets in all
> kinds of bad information, not just biographies.
> Jimbo's experiment in stopping anonymous editors from
> creating new articles won't stop that, any more than
> your proposal of patrolling biographies. The
> underlying process needs to be fixed, not just a
> particular category of user privileges or content.


from_name: Abigail Brady

body:
On 19/12/05, Steve Bennett <stevage at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello,
> How about making it so that new page patrollers stamp any
> biographical-looking page with an {{unchecked bio}} template? Then that
> becomes another round of article checking that can be done by whoever it
> is that carries out these repetitive tasks.  By making the template
> sufficiently spammy and legalese ("This article has not been fact
> checked and may contain serious inaccuracies and even defamatory
> statements. The Wikimedia foundation explicitly disclaims all
> responsibility...") you could even kill two birds with one stone.

And if we have a {{not a biography}} tag of some sort we can grab a
list of things that don't have {{biography}} and {{unchecked biography}}
and sort!  And then we end up with a useful list of people, too.  Anyone?

--
Abi


from_name: Adrenalin

body:
Jiaming Xu, you also can try http://wikipedia.com.nyud.net:8090/ (but
it seem to be very slow) or some anonymizer example
http://anon.free.anonymizer.com/http://wikipedia.org
More anonymizer links http://www.infosyssec.net/infosyssec/security/anon1.htm

Oh, hm.. Try also proxify.com, it supports https(encrypted ssl http)
and the url seem to be obfuscated. If this site is not already
blocked, it must work quite sure.
https://proxify.com/p/011010A1000110/687474703a2f2f7777772e77696b6970656469612e6f72672f

Is bypass legal there ? Hope do not make any troubles to you..

On 12/19/05, Michael Bimmler <mbimmler at gmail.com> wrote:
> cf. http://wikitech.leuksman.com/view/IP_addresses
> Pathping/Tracert for www.knams.wikimedia.org gives me
> pascal.knams.wikimedia.org (145.97.39.130)
> Whether you can use it I don't know either...
> Regards
> Michael
>
> 2005/12/19, Jiaming Xu <john.xu.1982 at gmail.com>:
> >
> > I'm in China and my traffic seems to be routed to Wiki's Korea server
> > which
> > is blocked. So I'm wondering what's the ip address of the amsterdam server
> > and whether i could use it to bypass the block.
> > _______________________________________________
> > Wikipedia-l mailing list
> > Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
> >
>
>
>
> --
> An eternity is very, very long, especially towards the end
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


from_name: Tels

subject: [Wikitech-l] {{if}} is dead on en:

body:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----

Moin,

On Monday 19 December 2005 21:23, Tels wrote:
> Moin,
>
> On Monday 19 December 2005 20:15, Rowan Collins wrote:
> > On 19/12/05, Tels <nospam-abuse at bloodgate.com> wrote:
> > > For people reading this in an email program, could you embed real
> > > http-links? Converting [[]] manually to http://something is quite a
> > > pain  :)
> >
> > Although I do agree with you in general, here's a tip of the day: if
> > using Mozilla, Firefox, and possibly others, you can set up a
> > bookmark with a destination of "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%s" and
> > a keyword (I use "wg" for "Wikipedia Go"), and then type/copy&paste,
> > for example, "wg WT:AUM" or "wg m:User:AzaToth/Logic". I think this
> > will work with anything except "w:" as the interwiki prefix
> > (including "en:").
>
> Yeah, but I am not reading the email in my browser, I am reading it in
> my _email_ client.
>
> I still consider it bad manners that you save yourself doing the
> copy&paste of the URL, but expect every reader to repeat that action
> for you - probably installing software, adding bookmarks etc along the
> way.
>
> While your method outlined above makes it easier for me (if I set it up
> correctly and remember all the steps), but it is still _much_ more
> complicated than just clicking a link. Why not use URL like the rest of
> the net has been doing for years and save every reader the copy&paste
> orgy?

Case in point:

Konqueror already has a build-in shortcut, called wp. So I only have to:

	* press ALT-F2
	* move the mouse to the center to get focus in that window
	* type wp WT:AUM
	* wait for konqueror to load (I use FF normally)
	* see that it tries to open "WT%3AAUM" in wikipedia, which does not exist
	* correct that to "WT:AUM",
	* get "could not find this search query" from WP back again
	* throw hands up in the air, bang head against keyboard,
	* give up

I _still_ haven't seen the page you wanted me to read - even though I
wanted and tried quite a while. Even if Konqueror/Wikipedia showed me
some article I couldn't be sure if it is the one you actually wanted me
to read....

So, please just include an URL next time - you make my life much easier.

Thanx in advance,

Tels

- --
 Signed on Mon Dec 19 21:50:53 2005 with key 0x93B84C15.
 Visit my photo gallery at http://bloodgate.com/photos/
 PGP key on http://bloodgate.com/tels.asc or per email.

 "In 1988, Jack Thompson ran against Janet Reno for DA of Dade County:
 Thompson's unique campaign message was that Reno was unfit for the job
 because, as a closeted lesbian with a drinking problem, she was great
 candidate for blackmail by the criminal element. Jack never explained
 why this remained a threat even after he exposed her 'secret'. Reno
 cruised at the polls."

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.2.4 (GNU/Linux)

iQEVAwUBQ6cePXcLPEOTuEwVAQEhuAf7BF9BC2evyUXV44M2Nzneh4DmHOhFoK/M
OW2bH9gBfETe60zXQO55xkMA19RTRHg/fnUq2V7X7gDSEKBBuHTbgtidRp8afKVE
Su0t5YObzGXO43eGA9JOlCTArdtEfMnoz6pC9Pp3M/sKRJVY4V25ORmfCdcpznG6
PtK8aGbZtb+jMjqziprFWMOyfyShvYHAg03EjJyrjVyHsTud8NG7omwvsWpSGyrn
/q6v/7pzqDVJiwH0Z5yB3IFRdjv6wm8iwMWlqJtcbFV2NgpvabgwRUbvMEcvelEd
k6rNWSBDY5AUXyGuVuYuTesOA7PGoBJom/xRP/qmlFO6LhiJfzzwIw==
=kXyO
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----


from_name: charles matthews

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Proposed policy on biographies: input sought

body:
<slimvirgin at gmail.com> wrote

>It may be a form of NPOV, but it's poor writing and a violation of
NOR, because it's putting together a synthesis of published material
in a novel way in order to build a case.

But NPOV is _not_ a doctrine about 'balance', which is what your example of
a frantic search to find a 'critical dimension' suggests.  And in any case
using the 'rules' as discrete things is the explanation for novices -
newbies have to be told things one at a time.  WP experience tends to
develop a writing style that is well within the parameters.

Charles


body:
"Steve Bennett" wrote

> Attempts at NPOV will never cause more than heated arguments at worst
> for any topic in WP except for one area - biographies of living people.

I don't believe this.  Do you really not think that a consumer product scare
might not involve WP with corporate lawyers?

Charles


body:
Am Montag, den 19.12.2005, 21:27 +0100 schrieb Steve Bennett:
> Hello,
> How about making it so that new page patrollers stamp any
> biographical-looking page with an {{unchecked bio}} template? Then that
> becomes another round of article checking that can be done by whoever it
> is that carries out these repetitive tasks.  By making the template
> sufficiently spammy and legalese ("This article has not been fact
> checked and may contain serious inaccuracies and even defamatory
> statements. The Wikimedia foundation explicitly disclaims all
> responsibility...") you could even kill two birds with one stone.

*cough* Tasks extension *cough*

Magnus (hopefully not getting the flu:-)


body:
> *cough* Tasks extension *cough*
>
> Magnus (hopefully not getting the flu:-)

Heh. I think I forgot to add that I was very deliberately proposing a
change with the easiest possible implementation. No change required to
software.

Steve


from_name: Daniel R. Tobias

subject: [WikiEN-l] Digital Universe

body:
> On 12/19/05, Justin Cormack <justin at specialbusservice.com> wrote:
> >
> > http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/12/19/sanger_onlinepedia_with_experts/
> >
> > Anyone know any more about this?

This seems to be connected with the ManyOne project, which appears to
be the combination of some sort of ISP services, a multimedia
reference site to come, and a Web browser that is adapted from
Mozilla.  The browser is downloadable from their site now, but in a
brief trial of it I didn't observe any obvious features setting it
apart from the Mozilla suite it's adapted from.  Its web site is hype-
laden, reminiscent of the dot-com insanity of around 2000, with more
enthusiasm than solid facts.  Supposedly, their site will be more
multimedia-enhanced than other reference sites, and their browser
will be ideal for viewing it (somehow), but as of now there doesn't
seem to be anything but promotional videos.

--
== Dan ==
Dan's Mail Format Site: http://mailformat.dan.info/
Dan's Web Tips: http://webtips.dan.info/
Dan's Domain Site: http://domains.dan.info/


from_name: Justin Cormack

subject: [WikiEN-l] Digital Universe

body:
On 19 Dec 2005, at 18:22, Anthony DiPierro wrote:

> First heard about it at
> http://news.com.com/Wikipedia+alternative+aims+to+be+PBS+of+the+Web/
> 2100-1038_3-5999200.html
>
> Looks like it's going to be a collection of lots of works with varying
> licenses, a good alternative to a collection of information from a
> bunch of people who have no business writing an encyclopedia.

Pity. If they had a compatible license, $10m of investment using free
content could get
somewhere useful. And producing free content.

It was less than 20 years ago when I was employed working on
encyclopaedias with
lower standards than wikipedia.

Anyway, in the interests of the 2006 quality drive, I deleted 1500
pages from my
watchlist - quality by selectivity.

Justinc


from_name: David Gerard

subject: [WikiEN-l] Parascience subst. pseudoscience

body:
Mark Gallagher wrote:

> Someone, I think it was David Gerard, said recently that we won't get
> into trouble if we lean too far towards what Jack Lynch calls "SPOV":
> 'tis better to be thought of as scientifically accurate than to be
> considered a haven of confused POV-pushing liars.  If it was him, he's
> exactly right.

It wasn't me, but it's still exactly right ;-)

This proposal to purge the word "pseudoscience" smacks of Sympathetic
Point Of View. We don't do that here.

- d.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Day 1 Fund Drive report

body:
Anthere wrote:
> Daniel Mayer wrote:

>> And my personal favorite: "I call you my husband's mistress because
>> you get his attention much of the time..." by anonymous
>> "^_^" by anonymous

> Also my husband's favorite...
> He is actually thinking of a "speech" at next wikimania, focusing on the
> sociological impact of Wikipedia on families and in particular on spouse...

Definitely!

- d.


body:
Gregory Maxwell wrote:
> On 12/19/05, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:

>>    http://mail.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2005-December/035512.html

>>In the rabid frenzy to cleanse the image database, mistakes are made.
>>How are we going on some way to recover from them?

> Your language shows the sort of disrespect common from those who are
> unconcerned about the legal status of our project.  There is no rabid
> frenzy to delete the image, rather, the deletions are going
> unacceptably slowly.

That's nice, dear. Now, as for the actual question ...

- d.


from_name: the wub

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Digital Universe

body:
Justin Cormack wrote:
> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/12/19/sanger_onlinepedia_with_experts/
>
> Anyone know any more about this?
>
> No mention of licensing terms I see on www.digitaluniverse.net
>
> Justinc
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

 From http://www.digitaluniverse.net/experience/portals/ it appears they
currently have 3 portals ready: The Arctic, Energy and Texas. Not much
of a digital "Universe" is it?

What's worrying is the number and calibre of the experts they seem to
have attracted -
http://www.manyone.net/about/directors/
http://www.manyone.net/about/advisors/
http://www.manyone.net/about/foundation/

the wub


from_name: Ashar Voultoiz

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:
> If there's no objection, I'm going to remove the Amethyst skin from the default
> set. It's very buggy, and also, um, kinda ugly IMHO. :)
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

What's wrong with my colors ? :o)  Feel free to delete it, I was hoping
some people would use it and send bugfixes.

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


subject: [WikiEN-l] Digital Universe

body:
Justin Cormack wrote:

> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/12/19/sanger_onlinepedia_with_experts/
> Anyone know any more about this?
> No mention of licensing terms I see on www.digitaluniverse.net

Larry gets points for putting his money (metaphorically) where his mouth
is. Be interesting to see if he can achieve his happy medium between
Nupedia and Wikipedia.

- d.


subject:
[WikiEN-l] I just did another interview - Dublin NewsRadio 106,
	2:20pm.

body:
Sam Korn wrote:
> On 12/19/05, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:

>>As opposed, of course, to our many lunar editors.

> We have lunar editors?  That's just out of this world!

Or Martian. Certainly not of *this* earth.

- d.


body:
I think my main objection to this is the current title:
"Wikipedia:Biographies of living persons deserve special sensitivity".
The very title pushes Sympathetic Point Of View, whatever the guideline
content.

I've suggested on the talk page:

1. Change title to [[Wikipedia:Biographies of living persons]]

2. Start with "Be very hardarsed with references in living persons'
bios" and go from there.

That is: the title should be what the guideline *concerns*. And the
start should be the guideline itself in a sentence.

Then we can work from there. NPOV, NOR, V. Past examples of why we need
this. Don't fall into Sympathetic Point Of View. Etc.

Does this sound workable?

- d.


body:
David Gerard wrote:

> I've suggested on the talk page:
> 1. Change title to [[Wikipedia:Biographies of living persons]]

And SlimVirgin did this shortly after I suggested it :-)

- d.


from_name: Anthere

subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Media in Africa conference

body:
I would have loved to, but mid-march will be too early for me for
moving. Thanks for keeping us informed.

Ant

Cormac Lawler wrote:
> Dear all, I'm passing along details of a conference in London next
> March on "The media and social change in Africa" (details below).
>
> I wonder if any Wikimedian(s) would like to participate in this
> conference. I haven't followed many African projects but a quick flick
> through Swahili (:sw) and Bambara (:bm) Wikipedias' Recent Changes
> show some activity.
>
> Cormac
>
>
>
>>CAMRI Africa Media Series: 2006
>>The Media and Social Change in Africa Conference,
>>25th March 2006, 9am-5pm, University of Westminster, London, UK
>>
>>This is a 1st Call for Papers for a one-day CAMRI Africa Media Conference
>>on 'The Media and Social Change in Africa'. In what ways are the media
>>changing Africa? What role do the media have in a changing Africa? In
>>countries from Egypt to South Africa, Kenya to Zimbabwe, Cameroon to
>>Nigeria, Rwanda to Morocco, the 'media', defined as widely as possible,
>>mediate old and new African social realities. Processes of mediation
>>elicit reactions and patterns of change in Africa and, more importantly,
>>in the media sectors. The shift from pre-colonial, colonial to
>>post-colonial social formations has been reflected and affected by changes
>>in media and communication. The media have been harbingers of African
>>social change and are strongly implicated in the change processes taking
>>place in Africa. Traditional and modern communication patterns are
>>increasingly overlapping with mass mediation. Africa now has different
>>kinds of media serving many kinds of purposes. Individual papers may,
>>amongst other topics, focus on the:
>>
>>?                     Media's Role in Pre-Colonial, Colonial and
>>Post-Colonial Africa
>>?                     Media and Modernisation in Africa
>>?                     Changing Media Institutions and Production cultures
>>?                     Social Cultural Changes, Continuity and the Mass Media
>>?                     Media and Changing Individual, Local and National
>>Contexts
>>?                     Changing Media and Changing African Lifestyles
>>
>>Papers are invited on Media and Change in Africa. The deadline for
>>abstracts is 15th February 2006. Those whose papers are accepted will be
>>notified by 28th February 2006. Completed papers (not more than 6000
>>words) must be e-mailed to us not later than 15th March 2006. Send
>>200-word abstracts to Winston Mano at:
>><mailto:manow at wmin.ac.uk>manow at wmin.ac.uk
>>
>>Fees:
>>Unwaged/Students:                 ?10
>>Non-Students:                         ?20
>>Fees cover registration, conference pack, lunch, coffee and tea.
>>
>>Contact Persons:
>>Dr Winston Mano
>>Africa Media Series
>>Communication and Media Research Center (CAMRI)
>>University of Westminster, Harrow Campus
>>Watford Road, HA1 3TP, UK
>>Phone: 0044 (0) 2079115000 Ext. 4427
>>Email: manow at wmin.ac.uk
>>___________________________________


from_name: SJ

subject: [WikiEN-l] A newbie on article prefill templating

body:
I'm not a huge fan of prefilled templates, but this is a great use for them.

So... for users who aren't logged in, provide such a template, perhaps
with extra introductory comments -- everyone else gets a user
preference (off by default) that they can toggle to get the same (with
fewer introductory comments)?

SJ

On 12/19/05, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> me: "I have put forward the idea of a prefilled article template for
> new articles, instead of an empty edit box - show newbies what we
> expect from an article. Thoughts?"
>
> Malkin: "Actually, I think that's a great idea. It took a lot of work
> to figure out what needed to be there - jumping around to figure out
> how to add categories and sources, and that's with a fair amount of
> familiarity with what it should look like in the first place. A
> template would've been much easier to start from than an empty box."
>
> Look at User:Malkin's edits and you'll see how she slowly constructed
> the article. Prefill would have been just the thing to lead this
> newbie the right way. She did OK anyway, but it would have helped
> greatly and made the blank edit box a lot less intimidating.
>
>
> - d.


from_name: Karl A. Krueger

subject: [WikiEN-l] SPOV threatens NPOV

body:
On Sun, Dec 18, 2005 at 11:55:29AM +0000, Sam Korn wrote:
> The problem is that "pseudoscience" is a subjective term.  Whether a
> topic is pseudoscience is not a black-and-white thing.

When someone says "it's not a black-and-white thing", they are usually
correct that there exist *some* "gray" or undecided cases ... but there
usually are also many cases that are definitely "black" or "white".

The existence of vague boundaries doesn't rule out that some things are
definitely on one side and others definitely on the other.

> Who determines whether the scientific method has been followed?  Not
> us!

Who's talking about "the scientific method" here?  There isn't *one*
scientific method, and nobody here is claiming that there is.  What's at
issue are fields that don't do anything even remotely resembling
scientific work, yet the practitioners call their ideas "scientific".

We're not talking about string theory or cold fusion.  We're not even
talking about zero-point energy or acupuncture or orgonomy.

We're talking about "scientific astrology", "creation science", and
other fields that do nothing resembling scientific work, and yet call
themselves "science".

> The proponents of these theories will never be of the opinion that
> they are pseudoscience, and that they fail to conform to the
> scientific method!

Of course not.  But many people likewise reject unflattering facts
about them.  Scientologists would prefer we don't talk about Xenu.  That
a person who falsely claims "science" doesn't like it talked about that
they have not done any experiments or observations, simply doesn't enter
into the issue.  There exists a fact of the matter, and we are bound to
report it as such.

If someone comes up with a new conjecture -- call it the Moo Principle
-- and claims that it is "scientific", then we are correct to seek out
the citations for scientific research on the subject.  If there actually
is not any research -- they simply chose to call it "scientific" because
"religious" wouldn't get their Moo Principle into the public schools --
then calling their work "para-science" or "alternate science" would be
simply false.  "Pseudoscience" is simply the correct term.

> Wikipedia often has the problem of falling into pushing a relativist
> point of view.  This is one of those occasions.

It sounds to me like you are simultaneously decrying and advocating
"relativism".  Can you clarify?

--
Karl A. Krueger <kkrueger at whoi.edu>


body:
Ah, good example - I tried to think of counterexamples, but didn't think
of that one. Is it possible to slander a product?  Hmm...perhaps also if
you had a page claiming Elvis Presley to be gay or something you would
have his estate on your back claiming you were depriving them of
livelihood by denigrating his name. Or something.

Steve

> -----Original Message-----
> From: wikien-l-bounces at Wikipedia.org
> [mailto:wikien-l-bounces at Wikipedia.org] On Behalf Of charles matthews
> Sent: Monday, 19th December 2005 11:11 PM
> To: English Wikipedia
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Re: Proposed policy on biographies:
> input sought
>
>
> "Steve Bennett" wrote
>
> > Attempts at NPOV will never cause more than heated
> arguments at worst
> > for any topic in WP except for one area - biographies of living
> > people.
>
> I don't believe this.  Do you really not think that a
> consumer product scare
> might not involve WP with corporate lawyers?
>
> Charles
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wik> ien-l
>


body:
I notice SPOV seems to be being used to mean "scientific point of view"
and "sympathetic point of view". Should these possibly be disambiguated
to SciPOV and SymPOV?

Steve

> -----Original Message-----
> From: wikien-l-bounces at Wikipedia.org
> [mailto:wikien-l-bounces at Wikipedia.org] On Behalf Of David Gerard
> Sent: Tuesday, 20th December 2005 12:26 AM
> To: m.g.gallagher at student.canberra.edu.au; English Wikipedia
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Parascience subst. pseudoscience
>
>
> Mark Gallagher wrote:
>
> > Someone, I think it was David Gerard, said recently that we
> won't get
> > into trouble if we lean too far towards what Jack Lynch
> calls "SPOV":
> > 'tis better to be thought of as scientifically accurate than to be
> > considered a haven of confused POV-pushing liars.  If it
> was him, he's
> > exactly right.
>
>
> It wasn't me, but it's still exactly right ;-)
>
> This proposal to purge the word "pseudoscience" smacks of
> Sympathetic Point Of View. We don't do that here.
>
>
> - d.
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wik> ien-l
>


body:
> That is: the title should be what the guideline *concerns*.
> And the start should be the guideline itself in a sentence.

If every guideline can be stated in a sentence, then presumably a page
can be greated with every guideline listed in that form. Does such a
thing exist? No one reads *all* the guidelines - but it would not be
unreasonable to ask people to read one page with one-line summaries of
twenty-odd guidelines.

Steve


body:
Steve Bennett wrote:

>>That is: the title should be what the guideline *concerns*.
>>And the start should be the guideline itself in a sentence.

> If every guideline can be stated in a sentence, then presumably a page
> can be greated with every guideline listed in that form. Does such a
> thing exist? No one reads *all* the guidelines - but it would not be
> unreasonable to ask people to read one page with one-line summaries of
> twenty-odd guidelines.

That could be a useful idea! Though I'm pretty sure it's a lot more than
twenty ... There's categories for these things, so the list should be
easy to compile.

(I'm fairly sure when we see the list all in one place a lot of people
will go "WTF?" and half will die in short order ;-)

- d.


body:
Steve Bennett wrote:

> Ah, good example - I tried to think of counterexamples, but didn't think
> of that one. Is it possible to slander a product?  Hmm...perhaps also if
> you had a page claiming Elvis Presley to be gay or something you would
> have his estate on your back claiming you were depriving them of
> livelihood by denigrating his name. Or something.

Pop stars are a horrible case, actually. Half our articles on pop stars
*already* read like [[hagiography]].

- d.


body:
Steve Bennett wrote:

> I notice SPOV seems to be being used to mean "scientific point of view"
> and "sympathetic point of view". Should these possibly be disambiguated
> to SciPOV and SymPOV?

SPOV already means Sympathetic Point Of View (it is the policy on
wikinfo, as i understand it), so SciPOV will do :-)

- d.


from_name: Andrew Gray

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Defamatory Biographies - another problem looming
	forWikipedia?

body:
On 18/12/05, MacGyverMagic/Mgm <macgyvermagic at gmail.com> wrote:
> Maybe we can have User:Humanbot programmed to cycle biographies and
> have people read them as a check?

Excellent use for this sort of thing. There's a lot of articles that
are obviously biographies - I happen to be looking at [[Reginald of
Durham]] just now - but which aren't categorised by birth/death simply
because they're not known. However, it's equally obvious that he is,
in fact, dead...

Hmm. Moving back to a more general theme...

[[Category:Living people]]
[[Category:Dead people]]
[[Category:People not known to be dead]] (might do with a better title)
[[Category:Fictional people]]

Assume for a second we have the manpower to go and slap one of these
on every biography we can find - so anything with death or life cats,
anything categorised "as a person", anything with a stub notice that
makes it look like an individual. Great.

1) Will the category system fall over horribly? Two of those cats will
certainly have tens of thousands of entries, and no subcategorisation.

2) What would this achieve? We've got some good basic metadata, but...
among other things, it doesn't address the problem of someone
inserting violently libellous material *elsewhere*, which can be just
as bad - say, in an article on that person's company, or political
party, or hometown, or whatever. Or tangential libel in *another*
biographical article, where someone may not notice it as dubious if
parsed as a reference to someone else...

3) But coming back to the start... how about Seigenthaler articles? No
categorisation, no stub tag, not visible as a bio by anything short of
a human reader stumbling across the damn thing and checking it. Are we
going to have eyeballs check every article, in case they're a missed
biography? The man-hours are really mounting up...

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


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [Foundation-l] Wikiversity - courses

body:
Cormac Lawler wrote:

>On 12/17/05, xkernigh at netscape.net <xkernigh at netscape.net> wrote:
>
>
>>Cormac Lawler wrote:
>>
>>
>>>The 'safe' proposal until now has been to make wikiversity a
>>>repository of learning materials. This, I presume, would include
>>>lesson plans/curricula as well as actual resources like
>>>reading/listening comprehension exercises, flash cards, discursive
>>>questions on particular advertisements, etc.
>>>...
>>>* http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikiversity_%28overview%29
>>>*
>>>
>>>
>>http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikiversity/Modified_project_proposal
>>
>>This proposal is not 'safe'. Look at the Wikiversity (overview) page
>>linked here, then follow any of the six links from "Cell Biology" to
>>"Media literacy". They all read like textbooks or introductions to
>>textbooks. The C programming course contains "lectures" and "quizzes",
>>which together function as a textbook. The pages also contain lists of
>>students (instead of authors), but in short, most of the current
>>Wikiversity consists of textbooks which must stay at Wikibooks, and not
>>become a separate wiki.
>>
>>
>I would argue that the reason so much of Wikiversity looks like stuff
>that should be on Wikibooks is because it has been developed (and
>still resides) on Wikibooks! I wrote the outline on the media literacy
>course (which I repeat is a mere outline) and I certainly don't
>envision this to be a book-like resource/course.
>
If all that Wikversity ends up doing is producing textbooks, course
outlines and other tangible materials it might as well stay where it is.

>>In fact, there is currently no consensus for what Wikiversity means.
>>
>>http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Moving_Wikiversity_forward wrote:
>>
>>
>>>Wikiversity currently means different things to different people.
>>>
>>>
>>See for example
>>http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Moving_Wikiversity_forward#living_boo
>>ks where a user actually proposes that Wikiversity should develop
>>textbooks!
>>
>>
>That misrepresents what John was saying. Nobody is proposing that
>Wikiversity is for developing textbooks for itself - though it could
>and should be about developing resources in all Wikimedia projects.
>There may be some overlap between the projects but Wikiversity doesn't
>really fully belong on any one project (eg Wikibooks) and thus
>deserves its own. How it delineates itself from other projects remains
>to be seen, but I would argue that it should focus on those three
>things 1) developing multilingual learning materials; 2) growing
>learning communities attached to specific tasks (ie finding sources);
>and 3) prompting and hosting research (including but not limited to
>Wikimedia projects). This final "object" would already give it a clear
>distinction from all other Wikimedia projects. After this, the main
>outstanding issue is whether the project should be called
>"Wikiversity", given the general consensus (from what I see) that
>materials should be available for all learner levels/ages.
>
I think that the key thing that would distinguish Wikiversity from the
other projects is that it is about process while the others are about
product.

In considering your suggested three foci I thinkl that as long as we
can't get past the first one Wikiversity is just as well in Wikibooks.
The third is very far ahead of where we are.  It would be absolutely
forbidden in Wikipedia under the No Original Research  rule.  Making
that a part of Wikiversity before Wikiversity is ready for it could be
an invitation to all kinds of nutcase research that defies peer review.
Peer reviewers would need to be in place before original research could
take place.

Your second focus is key to Wikiversity.but I would leave it simply at
"growing learning communities" without reference to specific tasks.
Getting tangled up in specific tasks and courses  leaves too much room
for Wikiversity to repeat the educational model established by
traditional universities.  The top down development of a course by a
"teacher" imposes a range of requirements on what's being done.  It does
nothing about revolutionizing the entire learning process.  "Courses"
are about the teacher rather than the learner.

The name "Wikiversity" is just fine *because* it is about all learners
at all levels and all ages.  That's what universality is all about.
It's about life-long learning from kindergarten to post-graduate.  It's
about those who know a little bit more helping (not teaching) those who
know a little bit less.  I think that it's very encouraging that kids
can go into seniors' homes to teach about computers.  A book that I
recently acquired "What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and
Literacy" by James Paul Gee.  He analyzes video game playing in terms of
36 "Learning principles".  The first of these is the "Active, Critical
Learning Principle" - "All aspects of the learning environment
(including the ways in which the semiotic domain is designed and
presented) are set up to encourage active and critical, not passive,
learning."

Perhaps the first "course" to be offered in the Wikiversity should be
about learning, and how it happens.  If it is to have any such thing as
a core curriculum maybe that should be on it.

Ec


subject: [Foundation-l] Wikiversity - courses


from_name: Jean-Christophe Chazalette

subject: [Foundation-l] Steward elections 2006

body:
For 15 days, stewards election for 2006 are running at :
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Stewards/elections_2006

villy ~~JC


subject: [Foundation-l] Steward elections 2006


subject: [WikiEN-l] And yet more fallout

body:
Ben Emmel wrote:

>On 12/18/05, Steve Bennett <stevage at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>>Is there a standard reply to such things now? Do you recommend that the
>>aggrieved parties edit the pages themselves, or is it always "we'll get
>>someone onto it straight away"?
>>
>>
>I don't think that we should point them to the article, and tell them to
>"get to it." To many , that would be akin to going back and fixing the food
>you just sent back to the kitchen. Instead, just fix the birthdate, or
>whatever. Even better, post the incorrect info somewhere, and give us the
>chance to fix it. Unfortunately, that would probably just give us yet
>another backlog, and a serious one at that.
>
On the surface it would seem easier to ask these people to fix it
themselves, but giving them an opportunity to participate in an edit war
may not be what we want.  Asking them politely for the correct
information, and fixing it accordingly (after verification) may be a
more effective.

Ec


from_name: John Lee

body:
slimvirgin at gmail.com wrote:

> <snip>
>
>Because lots of editors focus on the centrality of NPOV, they feel
>they have to include a criticism from somewhere, anywhere, and you end
>up with an article that reads like this: "Jane Doe (born 1938) was a
>Roman Catholic nun and aid worker, described by the New York Times as
>'the embodiment of Christ on earth.' The Roman Catholic church has
>been heavily criticized for the willingness of its followers to
>interfere in the affairs of the developing world, according to
>Militant Magazine."
><snip>
>
>Sarah
>
>
But if there is no published criticism of the nun, it certainly would
not be POV to exclude the (obviously unsourced) criticism, no? NPOV is
about representing all the different POVs about a subject without
favouring any of them. If it so happens that there is only one
(published) POV of a subject, then representing only that POV would be
neutral, no? :-{

John Lee
([[User:Johnleemk]])


from_name: Jiaming Xu

subject: [Wikipedia-l] What's the IP address of Wikipedia's Amsterdam Server?

body:
I'm in China and my traffic seems to be routed to Wiki's Korea server which
is blocked. So I'm wondering what's the ip address of the amsterdam server
and whether i could use it to bypass the block.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Esquire article has been published

body:
Oskar Sigvardsson wrote:

>Dammit! We missed one fact (the # of Britannica articles that is)!
>Well, I don't know about you, but I'll be kicking myself all day that
>I can't use the "If this article had been published on wikinews..."
>argument in good conscience again.
>
>Other than that, it's a fun read :D
>
>Oskar
>
>On 12/17/05, David Gerard <fun at thingy.apana.org.au> wrote:
>
>
>>http://www.smartmoney.com/esquire/index.cfm?Story=20051215wikipedia
>>
>>Presumably the print version is available soon or now.
>>
>>
There's another interesting short article in the Jan/Feb 2006 issue of
"Utne" as "To Wikifinity and Beyond, Pushing the "free culture"
frontier.  Refers to Jimbe as the "leading evangelist for the burgeoning
'free culture' movement".

Ec


body:
No, I can't. But thank you still.

On 12/20/05, Michael Bimmler <mbimmler at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> cf. http://wikitech.leuksman.com/view/IP_addresses
> Pathping/Tracert for www.knams.wikimedia.org gives me
> pascal.knams.wikimedia.org (145.97.39.130)
> Whether you can use it I don't know either...
> Regards
> Michael
>
> 2005/12/19, Jiaming Xu <john.xu.1982 at gmail.com>:
> >
> > I'm in China and my traffic seems to be routed to Wiki's Korea server
> > which
> > is blocked. So I'm wondering what's the ip address of the amsterdam
> server
> > and whether i could use it to bypass the block.
> > _______________________________________________
> > Wikipedia-l mailing list
> > Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
> >
>
>
>
> --
> An eternity is very, very long, especially towards the end
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


body:
Thank you!! Adrenalin. This Anonymizer thing works! And it seems using an
anonymizer proxy could just bypass the block.
This URL: http://wikipedia.com.nyud.net:8090/ is indeed slow and after the
home page, it gives again normal URL for other links which will be blocked.
And proxify.com is a paid service. Maybe they changed the scheme.

Anyway, thank you for all your help. Love you.

On 12/20/05, Adrenalin <adrenalinup at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Jiaming Xu, you also can try http://wikipedia.com.nyud.net:8090/ (but
> it seem to be very slow) or some anonymizer example
> http://anon.free.anonymizer.com/http://wikipedia.org
> More anonymizer links
> http://www.infosyssec.net/infosyssec/security/anon1.htm
>
> Oh, hm.. Try also proxify.com, it supports https(encrypted ssl http)
> and the url seem to be obfuscated. If this site is not already
> blocked, it must work quite sure.
>
> https://proxify.com/p/011010A1000110/687474703a2f2f7777772e77696b6970656469612e6f72672f
>
> Is bypass legal there ? Hope do not make any troubles to you..
>
> On 12/19/05, Michael Bimmler <mbimmler at gmail.com> wrote:
> > cf. http://wikitech.leuksman.com/view/IP_addresses
> > Pathping/Tracert for www.knams.wikimedia.org gives me
> > pascal.knams.wikimedia.org (145.97.39.130)
> > Whether you can use it I don't know either...
> > Regards
> > Michael
> >
> > 2005/12/19, Jiaming Xu <john.xu.1982 at gmail.com>:
> > >
> > > I'm in China and my traffic seems to be routed to Wiki's Korea server
> > > which
> > > is blocked. So I'm wondering what's the ip address of the amsterdam
> server
> > > and whether i could use it to bypass the block.
> > > _______________________________________________
> > > Wikipedia-l mailing list
> > > Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> > > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
> > >
> >
> >
> >
> > --
> > An eternity is very, very long, especially towards the end
> > _______________________________________________
> > Wikipedia-l mailing list
> > Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
> >
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


from_name: Steve Bennett

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Defamatory Biographies - another problem
	loomingforWikipedia?

body:
Hi,

> [[Category:Living people]]
> [[Category:Dead people]]
> [[Category:People not known to be dead]] (might do with a
> better title)

[[Category:Schr?dinger people]] ? Kind of appropriate when you're
talking about...

> death or life cats...

:)

> 1) Will the category system fall over horribly? Two of those
> cats will certainly have tens of thousands of entries, and no
> subcategorisation.

They would be better as "flags", except that flags don't exist. Better
because no one would necessarily want to browse that whole category...

>
> 2) What would this achieve? We've got some good basic
> metadata, but... among other things, it doesn't address the
> problem of someone inserting violently libellous material
> *elsewhere*, which can be just as bad - say, in an article on
> that person's company, or political party, or hometown, or
> whatever. Or tangential libel in *another* biographical
> article, where someone may not notice it as dubious if parsed
> as a reference to someone else...

It is marginally better because it directly addresses the "Oh my god
what happened to Seigenthaler is awful I'm going to go and check my
entry right now- EEK! EEK! where's my lawyer?" situation.

> 3) But coming back to the start... how about Seigenthaler
> articles? No categorisation, no stub tag, not visible as a
> bio by anything short of a human reader stumbling across the
> damn thing and checking it. Are we going to have eyeballs
> check every article, in case they're a missed biography? The
> man-hours are really mounting up...

Also very few incoming links.  Could we perhaps automatically label
these pages (as I suggested somewhere) and have a "report libel" button?
That way the few users who do end up on the page can be used to give it
a quick "this looks contentious" review. We're not asking them to fact
check it, but just to report to us the possibility that it's libellous.
That could work, by reducing the burden on the anon user, while
filtering down immensely the number of pages to only the few that are
reported.

Steve


body:
> SPOV already means Sympathetic Point Of View (it is the
> policy on wikinfo, as i understand it), so SciPOV will do :-)

Heh, not at [[WP:SPOV]] it doesn't. :p

Steve


from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Stable versions policy

body:
--- "Wikipedia Romania (Ronline)" <rowikipedia at gmail.com> wrote:
>

> I think the proponents of these policies hide behind the fact that they are
> only "minor changes", but I think that all of the new proposals - from
> banning anons from creating articles, to semi-protection to stable versions,
> are all slippery-slope attempts to somehow make Wikipedia more restricted to
> combat vandalism. Combating vandalism is a worthy cause, but freedom comes
> first. We're the free encyclopedia, after all.

Wikipedia is free in the sense that its content can be distributed freely. Being free to edit is a
means to an end to create the encyclopedia. It is not the point of it. That said, this is my
understanding of the two features that will hopefully be implemented in January.

1) Delayed editing: Something that has been talked about and wanted for years. This would give
admins to the ability to soft-protect pages that are frequent targets of vandalism (such as
[[George W. Bush]] on the English Wikipedia). Ideally this feature would automatically delay edits
by anons and new users and post them, again automatically, after an amount of time that was set by
an admin for that page (similar to setting IP/user name block time periods). This would give RC
patrolers time to cancel vandalistic edits before they are posted for all to see. But last I heard
this feature (so far) would require a great deal of manual effort by admins; one would need to set
versions manually and I do not think the feature distinguishes between anons, new users or old
users. I personally think that this feature should not go live until it is fully functional (esp
since it is way too similar, as is, to the below feature). The point of this feature is to help
avoid displaying vandalism.

2) Approved versioning: A new user class would be created that would be charged with approving
certain article versions. Accuracy, bias, completeness and readability would be checked (by reader
article validation and the approving user). If an article version is good enough (sic: does not
need to be feature article quality; just good enough) in those regards, then an approved version
would be set. A prominent link to this version would then automatically be placed on top of the
article. Users would have the choice to set their preferences so they see these approved versions
by default. But, and this is important, the live version would be displayed by default. But all
live versions would be clearly labeled as such (even those w/o approved versions) so readers know
what they are getting. So Wikipedia would not fundamentally change as a result. The point of this
feature is to give readers some assurance, however small, that what they are reading is more
likely true and reasonably good than not.

-- mav

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


from_name: taib

body:
DEAR

PLEASE CANCELL MY INSCRIPTION AT WIKITECH

THANK YOU

TAIB TILOUINE

----- Original Message -----
From: "Jan Vanoverpelt" <jan.vanoverpelt at gmail.com>
To: <wikitech-l at wikimedia.org>
Sent: Monday, December 19, 2005 9:35 AM
Subject: [Wikitech-l] Cannot change content of navigation bar
because$wgUseDatabaseMessages=false

Dear,

After installation of the Mediawiki-software, I changed the default
"English" language into Dutch by changing $wgLanguageCode in
localsettings.php AND by setting $wgUseDatabaseMessages=false in
defaultsettings.php (the latter had to be done in order to see the changes,
like is indicated in the Mediawiki-FAQ).

My problem is that because $wgUseDatabaseMessages=false, I cannot display
the page "special:allmessages" anymore, neither can I change the content of
the navigation bar. As a solution for this problem, the FAQ-answer proposes
to run the script rebuildMessages.php in the maintenance-folder. I did this
by running an FTP-program, selecting the remote file and pressing "execute"
but without any results.

Does anyone know how I can fix this problem so I am allowed to see the page
special:allmessages and change the content of the navigation bar while I
still have my wiki-site in the Dutch language?

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


from_name: Matt Brown

body:
On 12/20/05, David Gerard <fun at thingy.apana.org.au> wrote:
> Same template, *on* by default. This is for newbies. Note this was a
> logged-in editor.

Since only logged in editors can currently create articles anyway ...

-Matt