subject: [WikiEN-l] WTF Have I Missed?

body:
At 01:42 -0400 28/8/06, Delirium wrote:

>[...]
>
>I have the same opinion.  Most of the improvements to Wikipedia that
>have been ongoing, like requiring citations, improve the average quality
>of articles.  At any given second, though, the quality can always be
>quite abysmal.  A system like this one essentially smooths out the
>presented version, so the average reader sees something more like the
>average recent state of the article, rather than its instantaneous
>state.  That doesn't magically make articles good, but it reduces the
>number of times people see really bad articles.
>
>-Mark
>

I have another reason to speak against this. As an editor, I
sometimes create an article that is very small, a few words. At the
point, I discover a few pages that link to this article and so I know
that article has some importance.

Also, stubs are great for attracting attention(!). Sometimes, stubs
attract a request for deletion, but in fact the article will grow a
reasonable state (see reference below). If deleted, nobody will see
it. If hidden from general view, then it will only be seen by the
upper class of editors, who may not be aware of the (potential)
significance of the article.

Gordo,

Drifting on the B Ark.

References:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Palumbo%2C_Baron_Palumbo

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Peter_Palumbo%2C_Baron_Palumbo

--
"Think Feynman"/////////
http://pobox.com/~gordo/
gordon.joly at pobox.com///


list: foundation-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: effe iets anders

subject: [Foundation-l] How I should consider GFDL in shared content?

body:
Ask the community to request the import-function. That function allows
you to import an article from another wiki with keeping the history
intact.

Lodewijk

2006/8/28, James Hare <messedrocker at gmail.com>:
> Yes, but that won't work out if the Wikipedia version gets deleted, as
> dicdefs tend to do.
>
> On 8/28/06, Tomasz Ganicz <polimerek at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > 2006/8/28, James Hare <messedrocker at gmail.com>:
> > > Don't worry about it -- articles as transwikied from Wikipedia to
> > Wiktionary
> > > all the time.
> > >
> > > To successfuly transwiki an article, you copy and paste the article to
> > > Wiktionary, then copy the edit history from Wikipedia to the talk page
> > of
> > > the new page you made at Wiktionary. Then you list the transwiki at the
> > > Transwiki Log on Wikipedia, then the fate of the Wikipedia version will
> > be
> > > decided.
> > >
> > > Excuse me if I made it sound confusing -- feel free to ask for
> > > clarification.
> > >
> > > On 8/28/06, valdelli at bluemail.ch <valdelli at bluemail.ch> wrote:
> > > >
> > > > I have a doubt. GFDL used by Wikipedia said that the content is free
> > > > but "providing that its authors are attributed".
> > > >
> > > > In this case the history is strictly connected to the content. I
> > > > could use content but I should have the related history.
> > > >
> > > > If I transfer an article from a project to another (i.e. from
> > > > Wikipedia to Wikitionary) how I could respect this rule? The history
> > > > is in the old article, I don't know a way to transfer also the
> > > > history. The presence of a link in the new article linked to the old
> > > > could be a good choice?
> > > >
> > > > If I transfer the content and I delete the article in the old
> > > > position, what I could do in this case?
> > > >
> > > > Regards
> > > >
> > > > Ilario
> >
> > Or you can just add info at the bottom of the article about its source
> > and link to the source artilce's history.
> >
> > --
> > Tomek "Polimerek" Ganicz
> > http://www.ceti.pl/kganicz/poli/kontakt.html
> > _______________________________________________
> > foundation-l mailing list
> > foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
> >
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>


list: wikimedia-l


list: wikien-l

from_name: Kelly Martin

subject: [WikiEN-l] WTF Have I Missed?

body:
On 8/28/06, Garion96 <garion96 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 8/28/06, Kelly Martin <kelly.lynn.martin at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > so we can not waste time discussing
> > in a vacuum.
>
>
> That's ruining our fun. :)
>
> I am curious to see how it works on the german wikipedia. How long will this
> expiriment last btw?

That'll be up to the members of the German community.  This is their
show, and we're just watching, and hopefully learning.

Kelly


from_name: Gordon Joly

subject: [WikiEN-l] WTF Have I Missed?

body:
At 01:42 -0400 28/8/06, Delirium wrote:

>[...]
>
>I have the same opinion.  Most of the improvements to Wikipedia that
>have been ongoing, like requiring citations, improve the average quality
>of articles.  At any given second, though, the quality can always be
>quite abysmal.  A system like this one essentially smooths out the
>presented version, so the average reader sees something more like the
>average recent state of the article, rather than its instantaneous
>state.  That doesn't magically make articles good, but it reduces the
>number of times people see really bad articles.
>
>-Mark
>

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Votes_for_deletion/Peter_Palumbo

Gordo

--
"Think Feynman"/////////
http://pobox.com/~gordo/
gordon.joly at pobox.com///


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Nick Jenkins

subject: [Wikitech-l] Teaser trailer

body:
> > On Sun, Aug 27, 2006 at 04:03:29AM +0100, Rob Church wrote:
> > > Allow me, ladies, gentlemen and those in between, to shove a
> > > screenshot under your noses.
>
> Unfortunately, many people can't accept that "maybe" is a perfectly
> viable conditional.

It looks good. You won't get any arguments against auto-saving of drafts from me (it's on my list of "software features that I would
like to see become standard").

Some random thoughts on the idea:
* Could it maybe discard the current auto-saved draft if the user clicks the "Cancel" link under the edit textarea? Generally if I
click this, I've decided what I was about to say wasn't worth saying, in which case the draft probably isn't worth keeping either.
* Is it worth storing a diff, rather than the whole page? Say you're on a busy page, your browser crashes or there's a power cut,
you reconnect, and reload the saved draft - however other people have modified the page, and now you have to merge your changes with
their changes. However, maybe this is taking a decent idea and making it just too damn complicated - in which case please disregard
this - I'd rather see a slightly simpler version that might happen, than an over-complex version which won't happen ;-)

All the best,
Nick.


from_name: dmehkeri at swi.com

subject: [WikiEN-l] WTF Have I Missed?

body:
> But I think that discussion should mainly wait until (a) an implementation
> exists (right now, it's not ready for prime time; Brion has some more work to
> do on it) and (b) we have some data from the Germans on what does and
> doesn't work in their community, so we can not waste time discussing in a
> vacuum.

Then I wonder what pressure and temperature the Germans are in? Surely at this
point they aren't in any less of a vacuum than we are, but it sounds like they
saw fit to discuss it.

This post was sent under a delay-to-live timer to Wikipedia, the free
encyclopedia that anyone can

[...time passes...]

edit.

Cheers,
Dan


subject: [WikiEN-l] WTF Have I Missed?

body:
At 10:01 +0930 28/8/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) wrote:
>Content-Type: multipart/signed; micalg=pgp-sha256;
>	protocol="application/pgp-signature";
>	boundary="------------enig9154D8908F4E4A5B0799924A"
>
>Gordon Joly wrote:
>>  At 13:45 -0400 27/8/06, Gregory Maxwell wrote:
>>>  On 8/27/06, Kelly Martin <kelly.lynn.martin at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>  [snip]
>>>>   Anonymous readers of an article will be displayed the most recent
>>>>   revision of that article which has been marked by a trusted user as
>>>   > being free of vandalism.
>>>  [snip]
>>>
>>>  Of course, 'Trusted user' is a complicated issue in and of itself.
>>>
>>
>>
>>  Web of trust is the basis of PGP, surely?
>>
>>
>  > http://www.rubin.ch/pgp/weboftrust.en.html
>>
>>  http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/F.AbdulRahman/docs/pgptrust.html
>>
>  > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_of_trust
>>
>>  Good enough then?
>>
>
>Someone will shoot me for suggesting it, but there's an
>"attack-resistant" trust metric available (primarily used by Advogato).
>We have an article at
><http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attack_resistant_trust_metric>.
>
>--
>Alphax - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax
>Contributor to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia
>"We make the internet not suck" - Jimbo Wales
>Public key: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax/OpenPGP
>

Had a look at the system, and found it was based on this observation:

<quot>
Levien observed that Google's PageRank algorithm can be understood to
be an attack resistant trust metric rather similar to that behind
Advogato.
</quot>

I then recalled Tim Ireland's work on Google Bombs.

http://www.bloggerheads.com/archives/2005/03/googlebombs_and.asp

And then I wondered how resistant to attack Google PageRank really was.

Any ideas?

Gordo

--
"Think Feynman"/////////
http://pobox.com/~gordo/
gordon.joly at pobox.com///


from_name: Jay R. Ashworth

subject: [Wikitech-l] Teaser trailer

body:
On Mon, Aug 28, 2006 at 09:27:20AM +0200, Steve Bennett wrote:
> On 8/28/06, Nick Jenkins <nickpj at gmail.com> wrote: > Some random
> thoughts on the idea: > * Could it maybe discard the current
> auto-saved draft if the user clicks the "Cancel" link under the edit
> textarea? Generally if I > click this, I've decided what I was about
> to say wasn't worth saying, in which case the draft probably isn't
> worth keeping either.
>
> Come to think of it, if it behaved exactly like Gmail, that wouldn't
> be a bad thing. Rough summary:

> * Every few seconds while typing an email, it's saved as a draft

Does the JS/DOM implementation premit optimizing that to

  * Every time, while typing in the edit box, that you pause for more
  than N milliseconds, save the draft

?  (Default; I think, 5 seconds; watch the load and tune as necessary)

Cheers,
-- jra
--
Jay R. Ashworth                                                jra at baylink.com
Designer                          Baylink                             RFC 2100
Ashworth & Associates        The Things I Think                        '87 e24
St Petersburg FL USA      http://baylink.pitas.com             +1 727 647 1274

	The Internet: We paved paradise, and put up a snarking lot.


subject: [Wikitech-l] flexbisonparse

body:
On Mon, Aug 28, 2006 at 02:21:46PM +0200, Magnus Manske wrote:
> Timwi schrieb:
> > Jay R. Ashworth wrote:
> >
> >>> 3- the list of alternative parsers (
> >>> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Alternative_parsers ) does not
> >>> mention wikitext2docbook, and says that flexbisonparse is "Intended
> >>> as an eventual replacement to the parsing code inside MediaWiki
> >>> itself", which is rather promising!
> >>>
> >> I don't know that that is what Magnus is calling it, but
> >>
> >
> > Where and why did this misconception arise that flexbisonparse was
> > written by Magnus? Quite honestly, it is driving me nuts...
> >
> Official clarification: flexbisonparse was written by Timwi, and Timwi
> alone :-)

And I wan't suggesting otherwise.

> I had a look at it once, and didn't find my way through the flex jungle,
> so I gave up quickly. I did, however, base the XML of wiki2xml on the
> flexbisonparse output; they're not identical, however.

wiki2xml: that's what you call it.

Yeah: that.

Cheers,
-- jra
--
Jay R. Ashworth                                                jra at baylink.com
Designer                          Baylink                             RFC 2100
Ashworth & Associates        The Things I Think                        '87 e24
St Petersburg FL USA      http://baylink.pitas.com             +1 727 647 1274

	The Internet: We paved paradise, and put up a snarking lot.


subject: [Wikitech-l] flexbisonparse

body:
On Mon, Aug 28, 2006 at 04:21:41PM +0100, Buttay cyril wrote:
> At the moment, I think I'll carry on with flexbisonparse, adding some
> python patches to correct the output. Maybe later I'll switch to
> wiki2xml instead (although it is a bit slower than flexbisonparse to say
> the less). This shouldn't be to difficult as they both use some dialect
> of XML.

Well, if we end up with a standalone parser that gives output that can
be transliterated to DocBook, I'll be happy, no matter who wrote it.  :-)

> Concerning docbook, I'll also have to give it a try, but one of my
> concerns is that (as far as I know) there is no way to give specific
> formatting instructions, which, IMO is mandatory for a nice print
> output. I have nothing against semantic description, but sometimes you
> have to fine-tune some specific part (figure position, alignment
> tolerance...). I'm sure those who use LaTeX intensively will understand...

Yeah, it's called a stylesheet, and it's the responsibility of the
person who needs a specific kind of final output.  Wiring it into the
parser/converter would be A Bad Design.  Been dealing with them since
Ventura Publisher 3.1...

Cheers,
-- jra
--
Jay R. Ashworth                                                jra at baylink.com
Designer                          Baylink                             RFC 2100
Ashworth & Associates        The Things I Think                        '87 e24
St Petersburg FL USA      http://baylink.pitas.com             +1 727 647 1274

	The Internet: We paved paradise, and put up a snarking lot.


subject: [Wikitech-l] References - ugh

body:
On Mon, Aug 28, 2006 at 01:24:36PM +0100, Timwi wrote:
> Carlos wrote:
> > Steve Bennett wrote:
> >
> >>I know I've done this once before, but this one's worse:
> >>
> > [...]
> >
> > It would be nice if the extension allowed for references to be declared
> > after the paragraph that uses them.
>
> Remind me what was wrong with my suggestion to allow users to declare
> the reference anywhere, but move it to the "References" section upon save?

The fact that lifting a graf with references and copying it to another
article becomes a major hassle.

The problem as *I* see it is that the whitespace necessary to make the
wikitext readable screws with the article vspace.

Cheers,
-- jra
--
Jay R. Ashworth                                                jra at baylink.com
Designer                          Baylink                             RFC 2100
Ashworth & Associates        The Things I Think                        '87 e24
St Petersburg FL USA      http://baylink.pitas.com             +1 727 647 1274

	The Internet: We paved paradise, and put up a snarking lot.


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Francis Tyers

subject: [Wikipedia-l] New language proposal: Wikipedia...

body:
Cool :)

We're always looking for more languages, a caveat, there is no Unicode
support at the moment, but we're working on it, and it should be
finished in a few months time.

If any of them have any questions, feel free to direct them towards me,
or another member of the team.

Fran

PS. If your group is involved with localisation, I can imagine this
software could greatly speed up the process! :)

On Mon, 2006-08-28 at 14:40 +0530, Frederick "FN" Noronha wrote:
> Thanks Fran, this is going to be helpful. Maybe a technical fix could
> help reduce some of the misunderstanding that creeps in due to script
> and dialectical differences. The problem is that most literary people
> aren't too tech-oriented, and vice-versa. I belong to neither camps,
> being a journalists writing on technology :-) FN
> PS: Your link is useful, I'll post it to our local GNU/Linux users'
> group and see how people respond. We have people use or knowing
> different scripts there.
>
> On 28/08/06, Francis Tyers <spectre at ivixor.net> wrote:
> > If there are only small dialect differences, it might be worth looking
> > at Apertium (http://apertium.sourceforge.net). Free software machine
> > translation for closely related languages. I think having just different
> > scripts is about as closely related as you get :)
> >
> > Fran
> >
> > On Sun, 2006-08-27 at 15:06 +0530, Frederick "FN" Noronha wrote:
> > > That doesn't seem possible at this point of time. Each script tends to
> > > have some small but significant dialectal variations. So, simply using
> > > some form of mechanical transalation/transiteration might render the
> > > output quite unreadable.
> > >
> > > It would be preferable to have human-created pages.
> > >
> > > Even if done in different scripts, I don't think this would cause any
> > > problems as such. Teams would work at differing paces, as per their
> > > own abilities and convenience. And work by one team might spur on
> > > others to catch up too.
> > >
> > > The issue we're shifting to is a much wider question, which has been
> > > causing worry for those keen about the Konkani language. As far as
> > > Wikipedia goes, what do you see as the suitable solution?
> > >
> > > We have two options -- a common Konkani Wikipedia, or separate ones
> > > (set up according to interest shown and activity levels initiated). FN
> > >
> > > PS: Have just been working on a portal for Goa at
> > > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Goa  You can see some Konkani
> > > descriptions (in English there). Since I'm not a techie, have been
> > > struggling a bit to control the templates and code!
> > >
> > > On 27/08/06, Berto <albertoserra at ukr.net> wrote:
> > > > Hi!
> > > >
> > > > >a script-neutral Wikipedia, or multi Wikipedias to deal
> > > > > with the diverse scripts of Konkani (even if with differening levels
> > > > > of activity).
> > > >
> > > > Is there any way to make an automatic coverter among the 5 scripts? It would
> > > > save you a lot of trouble.
> > > >
> > > > B?rto
> > > >
> > > > _______________________________________________
> > > > 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: Jeff V. Merkey

subject: [Foundation-l] African Languages Wikipedia Bashing on Slashdot

body:
Martin Benjamin wrote:

>Regarding Jeffrey Merkey's earlier post, with all respect, the issue of
>machine translation is not one that can be addressed in a few weeks with
>a couple of native speakers.  This isn't the forum to discuss the
>nitty-gritty of machine translation issues, however, other than to say
>that the quality of Wikipedia entries is much more important than the
>quantity, and the only real path to quality Wikipedia entries in African
>languages is through real human labor.
>
>
I completely agree that human beings need to review most of it. I
disagree you will get there
anytime soon without doing it. There's a lot of "save the children"
programs for Africa and most
of them are thin vaneer scams to dupe the ignorant American public into
giving funds which
only a small percentage end up in the hands of the needy for the actual
program. Any program
done here needs to steer clear of being viewed or labeled as such.

I am personally involved in dealing with exactly these issues here in
our own American backyard
so I apologize in advance for not blindly accepting everything you say
here at face value. I deal with
these issues every day with our own people most of whom speak our native
languages at an 8th grade level
since they were force fed english in public schools most of their lives
and our native languages were relegated
to being used in ceremonies at at home (and even that very limited).

People use machine assisted translation every day on Wikipedia -- they
use COMPUTERS to edit articles and
daemons run all the time for internlanguage links, link disambiguation,
and artificial linking. The whole concept
of Wikipedia is a machine assisted collaboration project. If only human
efforts were used, we would be using
pencil and paper and the mail system to collaborate, so machine
translation or machine assisted translation
is the next logical step.

I can see where folks who are intereted in harnessing a large group of
people would be adverse to using it,
but the fact is, you can do both and leverage a machine assisted
translation to form a large base of materials
which would require a lot less work.

Jeff


from_name: George Herbert

subject: [Foundation-l] Resignation as CFO

body:
On 8/27/06, Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> In July 2004 I was appointed to the official position of Chief Financial
> Officer of the Wikimedia
> Foundation. The expectation, backed up by repeated calls from myself, was
> that I would be replaced
> by a relevantly trained paid professional when the needs of the foundation
> became greater than
> what I, as a part time volunteer, could provide.
>
> During my tenure, I have helped with bookkeeping, budgeting, financial
> reporting, and with
> fundraising. I am most proud of my work coordinating several fundraisers
> that together brought in
> nearly a million dollars for the foundation. I am least proud of the last
> nine months, a time when
> the board repeatedly failed to meet to discuss proposed budgets I
> submitted to them or to give me
> direction on what we could or could not publish to the community in
> regards to spending.
>
> Last week, the board informed me that a selection process has been
> initiated to hire a paid
> professional to help run the foundation's finances from the Wikimedia
> office in Saint Petersburg,
> Florida, USA. At the same time, the board informed me that they approved
> the membership of a
> fundraising committee. I will be serving on that committee.
>
> I therefore resign as Chief Financial Officer of the Wikimedia Foundation
> but will continue to
> help where needed during the transition process.
>
> It truly amazes me how long we, as an organization that runs one of the
> top sites on the Internet,
> can go on volunteer time alone. So it is both a sad and happy day for me
> as I prepare to hand the
> baton to a paid professional.
>
> Yours in the wikiway,
>
> Daniel Mayer,
> Wikipedian
>
> __________________________________________________
> Do You Yahoo!?
> Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
> http://mail.yahoo.com
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>

Thank you for all of your efforts and contributions.

--
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com


subject: [Foundation-l] Resignation as CFO


from_name: Gregory Maxwell

subject: [WikiEN-l] WTF Have I Missed?

references:
<mailman.5067.1156752796.5877.wikien-l@Wikipedia.org>
	<1156774608.44f2fad05edfc@webmail.swi.com>
	<b8ceeef70608280829l4ed8ede7m4923f16afa60e4c8@mail.gmail.com>

body:
On 8/28/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
> Perhaps the time-to-publish could be a dynamic figure based on the age
> of the editor making the change (anons have age 0, old editors go live
> faster), the frequency of changes of the page (more frequently edited
> pages go live faster) and the frequency of page views (less frequently
> viewed pages go live faster).
>
> The idea being that an anon editing a rarely-edited page should go
> live slower, to give other editors a chance to see the edit. Maybe 24
> hours or more...

Again, I must emphasize that the discussion is premature...

However, even if the software it's set up to liven pages after a
certain time and required flagging from a user, we could still do the
smart thing and keep the policy out of mediawiki:  If we really wanted
to go down that path we use a bot to do it without anything other than
the basic flagging feature.

We have several bots that read all changes anyways (for vandalism
reverting)... and it would be good to keep the policy out of mediawiki
so we don't need to bug Brion and Tim to change it.   Mechanism not
policy... mechanism not policy.

The cool thing is that a bot could apply dynamic heuristics based on
not only the user, but the article and the edit as well.  So if an
anon that makes a very trivial edit to an article which was previously
marked non-vandalized, the bot could simply move the pointer. If the
anon adds a new image, however... perhaps it waits for a human to do
the job. The bot could also watch for pages with edits which have been
needs-human-approval for a long time, check the history (and related
pages) for past contributors who are currently active, and could leave
them notes. "Hey, this article has 5 anon/newuser edits waiting for a
week.. you might want to mark them as okay or revert them. Sorry for
nagging, I'll leave you alone for a few weeks, or forever if you ask.
If you like doing this sort of work, click here and ..."


from_name: Stephen Streater

subject: [WikiEN-l] WTF Have I Missed?

body:
On 28 Aug 2006, at 10:58, Gordon Joly wrote:

> At 10:01 +0930 28/8/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) wrote:
>> Content-Type: multipart/signed; micalg=pgp-sha256;
>> 	protocol="application/pgp-signature";
>> 	boundary="------------enig9154D8908F4E4A5B0799924A"
>>
>> Gordon Joly wrote:
>>>  At 13:45 -0400 27/8/06, Gregory Maxwell wrote:
>>>>  On 8/27/06, Kelly Martin <kelly.lynn.martin at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>  [snip]
>>>>>   Anonymous readers of an article will be displayed the most
>>>>> recent
>>>>>   revision of that article which has been marked by a trusted
>>>>> user as
>>>>> being free of vandalism.
>>>>  [snip]
>>>>
>>>>  Of course, 'Trusted user' is a complicated issue in and of itself.
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>  Web of trust is the basis of PGP, surely?
>>>
>>>
>>>  http://www.rubin.ch/pgp/weboftrust.en.html
>>>
>>>  http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/F.AbdulRahman/docs/pgptrust.html
>>>
>>>  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_of_trust
>>>
>>>  Good enough then?
>>>
>>
>> Someone will shoot me for suggesting it, but there's an
>> "attack-resistant" trust metric available (primarily used by
>> Advogato).
>> We have an article at
>> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attack_resistant_trust_metric>.
>>
>> --
>> Alphax - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax
>> Contributor to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia
>> "We make the internet not suck" - Jimbo Wales
>> Public key: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax/OpenPGP
>>
>
>
> "Advogato performs certification to three different levels:
> Apprentice, Journeyer, and Master."
>
> So, this system is classfull rather than classless.

The current system is already classful:
some people don't have computers,
some people are blocked etc.

It's also gaining considerable sclerosis.
My discussions (and experiments) on
ways to encourage the creation and
viewing of free video content have come
against considerable inertia (with the
enthusiastic side only slightly ahead).


subject: [WikiEN-l] FW: Ferry systems fighting it out in en.wikipedia pages?

body:
Came across the following, describing an apparent real-world
inter-Ferry-system conflict which may have spilled over into
Wikipedia...

Note: I have not had a chance to research the articles in depth yet,
so I take no responsibility for the accuracy of any of the claims
about WP made in the Slashdot article or linked articles...

http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/08/28/181223

--
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com


from_name: James D. Forrester

subject: [Wikitech-l] #time

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:

> Domas Mituzas wrote:
>> Just professional curiosity, how would you define when daylight
>> saving time is enabled/disabled? There're different rules for
>> different countries. And some countries don't have it at all :-(
>
> Presumably the same way the computer does it; provide a location such as
> 'Europe/Berlin' or 'America/Los_Angeles' and let the C library look in its big
> list of locales.

Oh, goody, more things for you devs to keep in sync when a country
arbitrarilty decides to massively redefine the period over which Summer
Time is set. Not that any country would ever do that. :-)

Yours sincerely,
--
James D. Forrester
Wikimedia : [[W:en:User:Jdforrester|James F.]]
E-Mail    : james at jdforrester.org
IM (MSN)  : jamesdforrester at hotmail.com


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] #time

references:
<ecrho0$vvl$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<ect2h9$t8g$1@sea.gmane.org>	<7c2a12e20608271435l11ae2ae2l6e9f0cace2405466@mail.gmail.com>	<ect46r$20t$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<8EE8DB45-04D1-4644-AB12-56F7C20168A7@gmail.com>

body:
Domas Mituzas wrote:
>> Depending on the month of the year, you may be +1 or +2 from the
>> UTC...
>> (it's the difference between CET & CEST)
>
> Just professional curiosity, how would you define when daylight
> saving time is enabled/disabled? There're different rules for
> different countries. And some countries don't have it at all :-(

Presumably the same way the computer does it; provide a location such as
'Europe/Berlin' or 'America/Los_Angeles' and let the C library look in its big
list of locales.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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from_name: Anthony

subject: [WikiEN-l] on new article creation

body:
On 8/28/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 8/28/06, Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen at shaw.ca> wrote:
> > I try to assume good faith, but the long lack of information about this
> > started to make me strongly suspicious that no experiment was intended,
> > Jimbo wasn't interested in the actual impact on editing and just wanted
> > to make an appearance of "doing something" so press releases could be
> > issued to counter the bad PR of the Siegenthaler matter. While
> > countering bad PR is certainly a good and worthy goal, I would rather
> > not have random tempests-in-teapots spawn restrictions on Wikipedia
> > editing with no plan or options for ever repealing them if they turn out
> > to be counterproductive.
>
> Well, Jimbo could be evil. Alternatively, he thought "here's an idea
> for how to fix the problems we've been having, let's see how it goes".
> 6 months or whatever later, it seems to have been going fairly well,
> and the only outcry is over the lack of formal experimentation, rather
> than the result itself.

Back in June Jimbo posted this:

On 6/20/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> Guy Chapman aka JzG wrote:
> > On Tue, 20 Jun 2006 17:37:21 -0400, "The Cunctator"
> > <cunctator at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >> Sorry. This is mainly a reference to the whole "Today, as an experiment, we
> >> will be turning off new pages creation for anonymous users in the English
> >> Wikipedia." I still think you were being a bit disingenuous (if
> >> unintentially) about the experimentality of that decision.
> >
> > It worked, though.
>
> It is not clear to me that it did.  I would love for us to have some
> serious analysis of that.

I don't think anyone is claiming that Jimbo is evil.  But to call this
an "experiment" is terribly inaccurate considering that months later
the main proponent doesn't have any clue whether or not it worked and
is asking for others to do the analysis.

Assume good faith.  In other words, assume incompetence.  In any case,
I'd say it's time to correct the mistake.  Gregory says "that we
shouldn't act without evidence when evidence is so easy to obtain".
To that I'd respond that the "experiment" was conducted so poorly that
good evidence is impossible to obtain.  There are far too many other
changes that have been made between the start of the "experiment" and
today.

Anthony


body:
Martin Benjamin wrote:

And here are my responses to your specific questions:

>    * Can some of Africa's entrenched economic difficulties relate to
>      the fact that many of her people do not have access to literacy in
>      the languages they speak and use on a daily basis?
>
>
No, they are related to civil wars, food shortages, health and public
sanitation issues, and contitent
wide governmental corruption and resource exploitation, combined with
backwards racial
conflcits which perist into modern times, including religious conflicts
due to the influences
and battles between Islam and Christianity.

>    * How much of the lack of literacy in many languages is related to
>      the lack of a systematic effort to produce written materials in
>      those languages?
>
>
If a people have no written language and rely on oral tradition, it's
like trying
to ice skate uphill. You will also find (as I have here with several
tribes) many groups have
religous taboos on writing down their languages.

>    * If a critical mass of written materials were produced for a given
>      language, would it create the necessary foundation for widespread
>      literacy in that language among speakers of that language?
>
>
No. You need education programs in each area and immersion schools setup to
provide children from early ages access to materials. Adults won't learn
it, they are too busy
involved in the struggle to just survive day to dat realities.

>    * If speakers of a given language were to develop literacy in that
>      language, rather than having to learn an entirely different
>      language (such as English or Arabic) in order to engage in written
>      communications (send emails, write blogs, read newspapers, get
>      commodity market and weather reports relevant to the crops they
>      grow, apply for jobs, evaluate the truth claims of politicians,
>      etc), might that literacy be a key to overcoming the continent's
>      persistent economic difficulties?
>
>

Most of these folks will have already been exposed to English. You would
need to identify English
bilingual speakers with one foot in each world to even be able to
communicate WHY this is important.

>    * Given the certified failure of print publishers and government
>      agencies (colonial and post-colonial) to produce literacy
>      materials in most African languages during the past 150 years, and
>      the rapid success of the Wikipedia model in producing vast amounts
>      of knowledge material quickly, might the resources of the
>      Wikipedia world be a way to address the issues of creating
>      literacy materials for those languages?
>
>
Machine assisted translations. Wikipedia has succeeded largely in part
due to the young who have little or
no need to go to work every day using their time to contribute and build
it. Wikipedia is a phenomena of
the industrialized western yuppie culture (and very young folks) most of
whom have not yet flown the
nest.

>    * If One Laptop Per Child is indeed a foreseeable reality, and if
>      Wikipedia is going to come prebundled, and if having literacy
>      materials in the language a child speaks is a key to the ultimate
>      success and usefulness of OLPC, isn't creating a good Wikipedia in
>      that child's language an issue of somewhat immediate concern?
>
>
One laptop per child won't address areas where people worry more about
getting
food to eat or dying of AIDS or some other disease than learning to read
and write.

>    * If any or all of the above, but also given the slow pace of
>      African language Wikipedias to date, what have the barriers been
>      thus far, and how can those barriers be overcome in a timely and
>      systematic way?
>
>
literacy, access to MACHINE ASSISTED EDITING TECHNOLOGY.

Jeff

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


from_name: valdelli at bluemail.ch

subject: [Foundation-l] Which policy do you use in your Wikipedia?

body:
Which policy do you use in your Wikipedia about recent events?

Do you establish a fixed time (i.e 30 days) to accept new articles
for them? Or do you analyze every single case?

I ask for this rule because some articles are written in
journalistic style and could be not acceptable for Wikipedia and I'm
investigating in which way other Wikipedias solve this problem.

Regards

Ilario


from_name: Martin Benjamin

body:
Regarding Jeffrey Merkey's earlier post, with all respect, the issue of
machine translation is not one that can be addressed in a few weeks with
a couple of native speakers.  This isn't the forum to discuss the
nitty-gritty of machine translation issues, however, other than to say
that the quality of Wikipedia entries is much more important than the
quantity, and the only real path to quality Wikipedia entries in African
languages is through real human labor.

The Slashdot discussion is interesting, mostly in what it reveals about
the state of knowledge (or lack thereof) in the tech world about most
things African.  Many  /.ers write with the attitude that, because
African languages don't matter to them, they don't matter. These are my
comments following on the Slashdot riffs on the article.

The recurring theme of the /. conversation is, why should people waste
their time creating African language Wikipedias if the languages have
low literacy and few computer users? However, the original NYT article
was written about a discussion that has moved well beyond that level.
The questions that the people working on African language Wikipedias
(who have a new discussion list,
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/afrophonewikis ) are asking are more like
these:

    * Can some of Africa's entrenched economic difficulties relate to
      the fact that many of her people do not have access to literacy in
      the languages they speak and use on a daily basis?
    * How much of the lack of literacy in many languages is related to
      the lack of a systematic effort to produce written materials in
      those languages?
    * If a critical mass of written materials were produced for a given
      language, would it create the necessary foundation for widespread
      literacy in that language among speakers of that language?
    * If speakers of a given language were to develop literacy in that
      language, rather than having to learn an entirely different
      language (such as English or Arabic) in order to engage in written
      communications (send emails, write blogs, read newspapers, get
      commodity market and weather reports relevant to the crops they
      grow, apply for jobs, evaluate the truth claims of politicians,
      etc), might that literacy be a key to overcoming the continent's
      persistent economic difficulties?
    * Given the certified failure of print publishers and government
      agencies (colonial and post-colonial) to produce literacy
      materials in most African languages during the past 150 years, and
      the rapid success of the Wikipedia model in producing vast amounts
      of knowledge material quickly, might the resources of the
      Wikipedia world be a way to address the issues of creating
      literacy materials for those languages?
    * If One Laptop Per Child is indeed a foreseeable reality, and if
      Wikipedia is going to come prebundled, and if having literacy
      materials in the language a child speaks is a key to the ultimate
      success and usefulness of OLPC, isn't creating a good Wikipedia in
      that child's language an issue of somewhat immediate concern?
    * If any or all of the above, but also given the slow pace of
      African language Wikipedias to date, what have the barriers been
      thus far, and how can those barriers be overcome in a timely and
      systematic way?


from_name: Mohammad Rastgaar

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Questions about Gileki;
	a new language that has been proposed

body:
Hi,

  We have proposed Gileki language. And so far We have received good amount of supportive comments. I have some questions regarding this matter though

  1-How many supporters are enough to proceed to the next steps?
  2-Do we need to request a wikitionary too? or this project will be available when the domain of Gileki wikipedia is ready?
  3- There are two dialects that are slightly different. But the native speakers can recognize which one is what they are listening to and the other is strange( sometimes funny!!) for them,but of course they understand it. What is the best solution to this issue? I am sure there have been many similar cases before. I would be gratefull to learn from other folks experiences.

  Thanks a lot in advance
  _Rastgaar

---------------------------------
Yahoo! Messenger with Voice. Make PC-to-Phone Calls to the US (and 30+ countries) for 2?/min or less.


body:
salaam,
  in emaili hast ke man be wikipedia zadam:

  cheers
  Mohammad

  Hi,

  We have proposed Gileki language. And so far We have received good amount of supportive comments. I have some questions regarding this matter though

  1-How many supporters are enough to proceed to the next steps?
  2-Do we need to request a wikitionary too? or this project will be available when the domain of Gileki wikipedia is ready?
  3- There are two dialects that are slightly different. But the native speakers can recognize which one is what they are listening to and the other is strange( sometimes funny!!) for them,but of course they understand it. What is the best solution to this issue? I am sure there have been many similar cases before. I would be gratefull to learn from other folks experiences.

  Thanks a lot in advance
  _Rastgaar

---------------------------------
Want to be your own boss? Learn how on  Yahoo! Small Business.


subject: [Wikitech-l] New SVN committer

body:
I've added a Subversion account for Jason Richey (jasonr). Jason's now at Wikia
and works on various extensions and things from time to time.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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from_name: Timwi

subject: [Wikitech-l] Want to collaborate on writing a feature?

body:
Nick Jenkins wrote:
>>But to get us started, someone needs to make
>>that UI mockup.
>
> Very draft mock-up of a possible UI, from what I think you're describing:
> http://files.nickj.org/MediaWiki/ui-draft-mockup.png

If you're going to display the summary line, don't you think it is
obviously going to be used by some people to deliberately put
inflammatory/aggressive/offensive/provocative text in there, just to
annoy other editors?

Timwi


body:
On 8/28/06, Robert Scott Horning <robert_horning at netzero.net> wrote:
[snip]
> I will have to agree with the parent poster that this is one aspect of
> the GFDL that is often strongly ignored, and that citation of
> authors/contributors needs to significantly improve over what is
> currently being done on most Wikimedia projects.
>
> I'll refrain from rehashing further points on this issue I've made in
> the past, but it is a problem.

It's also worth noting that most articles have been edited by a very
small number of users... and it is also true that many edits are not
significant enough to gain a copyright interest.... and it's also true
that a lot of users have little to no interest in attribution (claim
supported by the number of anon edits made).

So the end result is that we have these history pages which are often
short, but sometimes very long,  filled with people who are not
authors, and whom often have no interested in attribution.

With the new dynamic namespace support expected to be completed fairly
soon, it should be possible to have multiple associated namespaces ...
for example multiple article talk namespaces.

Perhaps it's time we consider adding an article credits namespace...
If you wrote a significant portion of an article, and desire
attribution, you must add yourself to the credits page.  Standard
wiki-based review would keep people honest.

This would greatly ease license conformance, and it would give us a
place to put historical attribution data (such as histories from
merged pages, and attribution for text sourced from other free
sources) which is currently handled in a number of failure prone ways.


subject: [WikiEN-l] WTF Have I Missed?

body:
At 11:45 +0100 28/8/06, Stephen Streater wrote:
>On 28 Aug 2006, at 10:58, Gordon Joly wrote:

[...]

>  >
>>  "Advogato performs certification to three different levels:
>>  Apprentice, Journeyer, and Master."
>>
>>  So, this system is classfull rather than classless.
>
>The current system is already classful:
>some people don't have computers,
>some people are blocked etc.

Some people don't have computers? I agree, and I am glad you are
concerned about social exclusion......

We should not assume too much. I recall homeless people in the
Doonesbury cartoon strip had good access to computers.

>It's also gaining considerable sclerosis.

Hmmm.... "sclerosis" is not O word I have heard in this context
before, so please explain.

>My discussions (and experiments) on
>ways to encourage the creation and
>viewing of free video content have come
>against considerable inertia (with the
>enthusiastic side only slightly ahead).

Care to expand on that? Who blocked you?

Gordo

--
"Think Feynman"/////////
http://pobox.com/~gordo/
gordon.joly at pobox.com///


subject: [WikiEN-l] WTF Have I Missed?

body:
At 07:51 -0400 28/8/06, Kirill Lokshin wrote:
>On 8/28/06, Gordon Joly <gordon.joly at pobox.com> wrote:
>>  I have another reason to speak against this. As an editor, I
>>  sometimes create an article that is very small, a few words. At the
>>  point, I discover a few pages that link to this article and so I know
>>  that article has some importance.
>>
>>  Also, stubs are great for attracting attention(!). Sometimes, stubs
>>  attract a request for deletion, but in fact the article will grow a
>>  reasonable state (see reference below). If deleted, nobody will see
>>  it. If hidden from general view, then it will only be seen by the
>>  upper class of editors, who may not be aware of the (potential)
>>  significance of the article.
>
>This seems to be entirely a question of implementation.  Consider, for
>example, this approach:
>
>When a non-logged-in reader requests a page:
>
>A. If a revision in the article's history has a "not-vandalism" flag
>set, show that revision as the default (with an option to see the
>current revision)
>
>B. Otherwise, show the current revision.
>
>In this variation, stubs/new articles/obscure articles that a few
>people read each year all get shown at the latest version, because
>nobody will have bothered to mark a particular revision with the flag;
>it's only on higher-traffic pages -- which, for the most part, would
>be the ones where vandalism is more prevalent -- that the use of the
>flag would come into play.
>
>(This quite aside from the fact that de: hasn't yet decided how the
>ability to set this flag would be assigned; but one of the options
>Kurt mentioned at Wikimania would be something like the current
>semi-protection limit on the account's age.  The vast majority of
>active contributors would, in such a scenario, be able to simply set
>the flag -- perhaps automatically -- on any article they work on.)
>
>--
>Kirill Lokshin

Automatically set the flag? OK. I can see that.

Gordo

--
"Think Feynman"/////////
http://pobox.com/~gordo/
gordon.joly at pobox.com///


subject: [Wikitech-l] Teaser trailer

body:
> I won't store diffs, but it might be nice to see if, when loading a
> draft, the changes from the draft could be merged into the current
> edit window, rather than replacing it.

That sounds good.

And another possibility whilst we're kicking around ideas would be to have a "my drafts" link at the top of the page, which when you
clicked on it would show a Special page with the list of outstanding drafts, which would make it easy to take up where you left off.
Think of "my watchlist" being kind of like an email inbox, and "my drafts" being kind of like a draft emails folder. Oh, and it also
it should allow drafts to be deleted, so that you can keep them under control. And it should show the edit summary description, like
an email subject line, which would also have the side-benefit of encouraging people to enter useful edit descriptions early because
that'd be what would show up in their "my drafts" page. In fact, to make it easier to visualize, here's mock-up screenshot of what I
was thinking: http://files.nickj.org/MediaWiki/my-drafts-mockup.png   (it's possible to expand this with various sort options - e.g.
sort by most recent draft, sort by oldest draft, sort by article name, etc - but you get the idea).

All the best,
Nick.


subject: [WikiEN-l] WTF Have I Missed?

body:
At 20:46 -0400 27/8/06, maru dubshinki wrote:
>On 8/27/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>>  On 27/08/06, Gordon Joly <gordon.joly at pobox.com> wrote:
>>
>>  >
>>http://news.com.com/Can+German+engineering+fix+Wikipedia/2100-1038_3-6108495.html
>>  > A related source.... not the BBC.
>>  > "We want to let anybody edit," Wales said, "but we don't want to show
>>  > vandalized versions."
>>
>>
>>  Yeah. When did Jimbo first ask for this, early 2005? People pretty
>>  much concurred it was a fantastic idea (logged-in editors get the live
>>  version, anon readers get the last-non-vandal-edit version), but it
>>  was considered technically rather painful indeed in the then-current
>>  structure of Mediawiki.
>>
>>  If it looks workable now, that's fantastic, and should help make it a
>>  better no. 17 website in the world *and* a good perpetual working
>>  draft.
>>
>>
>>  - d.
>
>As I recall, we were happy when the proposed mechanism had a
>ten-minute or so time out mechanism, so it didn't turn into a ''de
>facto'' anon-edits-must-be-approved rather than an anti-vandalism
>mechanism, and to assure the anon that yes, the edit would show up
>soon. The de system seems to differ from the one we discussed.
>
>~maru

Indeed. The German Wikipedia can set their own rules, and anybody who
happens to read the German Wikipedia will enjoy that set of rules.

Will this fragment Wikipedia? Will there be different rules for
Japanese, French, Polish, Dutch.... and the rest?

And what about Commons? The Featured Picture status leads to the sort
of issues that bug me, such as the removal of Featured Picture status.

Gordo

--
"Think Feynman"/////////
http://pobox.com/~gordo/
gordon.joly at pobox.com///


subject: [WikiEN-l] WTF Have I Missed?

body:
At 13:50 +0800 28/8/06, Jimmy Wales wrote:
>Joe Anderson wrote:
>  > This article (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/5286458.stm) got my
>>  concern. Editorial control on the Wikipedia? What exactly have I missed?
>
>The journalist is typical of bad journalists.  Running with only the
>slimmest of understanding, he pukes out his biases about how the world
>works with little concern for underlying facts.
>
>Fortunately for us all, there are also good journalists.
>
>--Jimbo
>

Jimbo,

That is an "ad hominem" attack.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem

Have you read the article? Which parts are you unhappy with?

Gordo

--
"Think Feynman"/////////
http://pobox.com/~gordo/
gordon.joly at pobox.com///


subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Approved new language wikipedias: what's
	the	situation?

body:
novial wrote:
> Hi,
>
> The setting up of a wikipedia in the Novial language was approved in mid
> May:

At this time there's no official process for adding new language editions, so
requests on some meta page may or may not get paid attention to by the server
operations team at any given time.

I would like us to get this sorted out soon, though. :)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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subject: [Wikitech-l] flexbisonparse

body:
Jay R. Ashworth wrote:
>
>> 3- the list of alternative parsers (
>> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Alternative_parsers ) does not
>> mention wikitext2docbook, and says that flexbisonparse is "Intended
>> as an eventual replacement to the parsing code inside MediaWiki
>> itself", which is rather promising!
>
> I don't know that that is what Magnus is calling it, but

Where and why did this misconception arise that flexbisonparse was
written by Magnus? Quite honestly, it is driving me nuts...

Timwi


subject: [Wikitech-l] flexbisonparse

body:
Hi,

> At the moment, things work fine, except for 2 things with flexbisonparse:

You really think these two problems you have listed are the only ones?
:-) I assure you there are heaps of other problems with it.

> However, I'm not (at all) an expert in flex and bison, and
> have the biggest difficulties understanding the code of flexbisonparse.

I find this quite amazing.  I am not, and have never been, an "expert"
in flex and bison either, and I do agree that the code is not easy, but
is it really that much harder than MediaWiki itself?

> Is there a developer of this parser around? Do you think the
> modifications are feasible?

Yes, the modifications are feasible, but in order to implement them, you
need to find someone who has the motivation to do that.  I am currently
not very motivated myself.

Timwi


from_name: Simetrical

subject: [Wikitech-l] Teaser trailer

references:
<e92136380608271708l6788a60aoefb19818e53a606d@mail.gmail.com>
	<NABBJGECPILFNLFEAPIKCEEFIMAA.nickpj@gmail.com>
	<f1c3529e0608280027q1d3745f6wc5d3cef2822668c0@mail.gmail.com>
	<20060828152801.GO19173@cgi.jachomes.com>

body:
On 8/28/06, Jay R. Ashworth <jra at baylink.com> wrote:
> > * Every few seconds while typing an email, it's saved as a draft
>
> Does the JS/DOM implementation premit optimizing that to
>
>   * Every time, while typing in the edit box, that you pause for more
>   than N milliseconds, save the draft
>
> ?

Yes, because that's what Gmail actually does.  Or, at least, I think
it does.  It may be rather more involved.  I notice it hasn't saved
this, despite my patiently waiting . . . ah, there it goes.  I think
it's kind of complicated how it decides (maybe it doesn't bother if
you've only typed a certain amount?).  Anyway, other stuff Gmail does
with drafts:

* It has a Save Now button, right between Save and Discard.  When the
current text is saved, the button grays out and changes to read
"Saved".
* If you have a reply entered and try leaving the page, it shows a
popup dialog asking if you want to discard changes (if not, it cancels
the page-leave, but doesn't save the draft, I think).


subject: [Wikitech-l] References - ugh

body:
On Mon, Aug 28, 2006 at 05:56:42PM +0200, Steve Bennett wrote:
> On 8/28/06, Jay R. Ashworth <jra at baylink.com> wrote:
> > The fact that lifting a graf with references and copying it to another
> > article becomes a major hassle.
> >
> > The problem as *I* see it is that the whitespace necessary to make the
> > wikitext readable screws with the article vspace.
>
> That's part of the problem, but not all of it.
>
> You know, what would really be ideal (in dreamland) would be a column
> of references next to the edit box. You would type <ref name="foo" />
> and the instant you'd closed the >, you'd have a new entry in the list
> to the right, just begging you to give it some details. The list would
> probably be stored at the bottom of the article, but you wouldn't even
> care. You'd always edit it directly in that list. And you could do
> neat things like collapsing two references together, highlighting any
> references which were no longer referred to in the text etc...

This just keeps converging on Christiaan(?)'s XML in the DBMS approach
-- once the backend is tractable, editors in front can be as smart as
they like.

It occurs to me that diffing XML wouldn't be pretty.

Cheers,
-- jra
--
Jay R. Ashworth                                                jra at baylink.com
Designer                          Baylink                             RFC 2100
Ashworth & Associates        The Things I Think                        '87 e24
St Petersburg FL USA      http://baylink.pitas.com             +1 727 647 1274

	The Internet: We paved paradise, and put up a snarking lot.


subject: [Wikitech-l] References - ugh

body:
Carlos wrote:
> Steve Bennett wrote:
>
>>I know I've done this once before, but this one's worse:
>>
> [...]
>
> It would be nice if the extension allowed for references to be declared
> after the paragraph that uses them.

Remind me what was wrong with my suggestion to allow users to declare
the reference anywhere, but move it to the "References" section upon save?

Timwi


from_name: Frederick "FN" Noronha

body:
I've started on something small at http://incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wp/kok

Maybe, as Jimmy Wales told us in Delhi last week, the real test is to
get others interested in the project and build interest.

There would some difficulty in navigating between scripts -- because
the vocabulary used by different scripts, and dialectal differences
can sometimes be marked between two scripts. That is, the script
differences tally with dialectical variations (because of geographical
and other factors).

But I guess we can cross the bridge when we reach it. If there's an
upsurge of interest, then we're anyway not fighting over limited space
here. The projects can be expanded in any direction. And if there's a
lack of interest, then it's no debate anyway!

But I'm keen to try to get *something* going. FN

On 28/08/06, Mark Williamson <node.ue at gmail.com> wrote:
> It's not the script that has dialectal variations, it would be the
> language it's transcribing.
>
> FWIW, all Indic abugidas have neat 1-to-1 correspondences, with a few
> exceptions, and some letters missing (for example Oriya has both WA
> and VA, all others do not differentiate and use a single character for
> both), so it should be quite simple to convert between Konknni in
> Kannada script, Konknni in Devanagri script, and Konknni in Malayalam
> script.
>
> Roman and Nastalegh would pose additional issues though.
>
> Mark
>
> On 27/08/06, Frederick FN Noronha <fredericknoronha at gmail.com> wrote:
> > That doesn't seem possible at this point of time. Each script tends to
> > have some small but significant dialectal variations. So, simply using
> > some form of mechanical transalation/transiteration might render the
> > output quite unreadable.
> >
> > It would be preferable to have human-created pages.
> >
> > Even if done in different scripts, I don't think this would cause any
> > problems as such. Teams would work at differing paces, as per their
> > own abilities and convenience. And work by one team might spur on
> > others to catch up too.
> >
> > The issue we're shifting to is a much wider question, which has been
> > causing worry for those keen about the Konkani language. As far as
> > Wikipedia goes, what do you see as the suitable solution?
> >
> > We have two options -- a common Konkani Wikipedia, or separate ones
> > (set up according to interest shown and activity levels initiated). FN
> >
> > PS: Have just been working on a portal for Goa at
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Goa  You can see some Konkani
> > descriptions (in English there). Since I'm not a techie, have been
> > struggling a bit to control the templates and code!
> >
> > On 27/08/06, Berto <albertoserra at ukr.net> wrote:
> > > Hi!
> > >
> > > >a script-neutral Wikipedia, or multi Wikipedias to deal
> > > > with the diverse scripts of Konkani (even if with differening levels
> > > > of activity).
> > >
> > > Is there any way to make an automatic coverter among the 5 scripts? It would
> > > save you a lot of trouble.
> > >
> > > B?rto
> > >
> > > _______________________________________________
> > > Wikipedia-l mailing list
> > > Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> > > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
> > >
> >
> >
> > --
> > -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> > Frederick Noronha http://fn.goa-india.org  9822122436 +91-832-240-9490
> > http://fredericknoronha.wordpress.com fredericknoronha at gmail.com
> > _______________________________________________
> > Wikipedia-l mailing list
> > Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
> >
>
>
> --
> Refije dirije lanm? yo paske nou posede pw?p bato.
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>

--
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Frederick Noronha http://fn.goa-india.org  9822122436 +91-832-240-9490
http://fredericknoronha.wordpress.com fredericknoronha at gmail.com


from_name: Nick Jenkins

body:
> On 8/26/06, Ligulem <ligulem at pobox.com> wrote:
> > While you guys are at it: could you make the edit summary field larger?
> > I mean extending it to right edge of the window. I always do have a
> > strong key hole viewing feeling when looking at this edit page.
>
> One-line stylesheet change: input#wpSummary { width: 80%; }.  I've had
> it in my personal CSS for a while now, and it's much better.

That is so much better. Wouldn't it be nicer to make this the default?

I've filed a lowest-priority enhancement bug at http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=7139 requesting this.

All the best,
Nick.


subject: [Wikitech-l] Teaser trailer

body:
On Mon, Aug 28, 2006 at 01:20:29PM -0400, Simetrical wrote:
> On 8/28/06, Jay R. Ashworth <jra at baylink.com> wrote:
> > > * Every few seconds while typing an email, it's saved as a draft
> >
> > Does the JS/DOM implementation premit optimizing that to
> >
> >   * Every time, while typing in the edit box, that you pause for more
> >   than N milliseconds, save the draft
> >
> > ?
>
> Yes, because that's what Gmail actually does.  Or, at least, I think
> it does.  It may be rather more involved.  I notice it hasn't saved
> this, despite my patiently waiting . . . ah, there it goes.  I think
> it's kind of complicated how it decides (maybe it doesn't bother if
> you've only typed a certain amount?).  Anyway, other stuff Gmail does
> with drafts:
>
> * It has a Save Now button, right between Save and Discard.

I like this.

>                                                               When the
> current text is saved, the button grays out and changes to read
> "Saved".

I don't like this.  Browsers aren't smart enough for that. Hell, *apps*
aren't smart enough for that.  When I say save, *save* damnit.

> * If you have a reply entered and try leaving the page, it shows a
> popup dialog asking if you want to discard changes (if not, it cancels
> the page-leave, but doesn't save the draft, I think).

Yeah; I've seen that on-leave idea a couple of places.  I like it quite
a bit,  though permitting a browser to do it can have.. consequences.

Cheers,
-- jra
--
Jay R. Ashworth                                                jra at baylink.com
Designer                          Baylink                             RFC 2100
Ashworth & Associates        The Things I Think                        '87 e24
St Petersburg FL USA      http://baylink.pitas.com             +1 727 647 1274

	The Internet: We paved paradise, and put up a snarking lot.


from_name: Eric Astor

subject: [Wikitech-l]  Wikitext parsing (was RE:  flexbisonparse)

body:
Neil Harris wrote:
> Yes! I also believe that PEGs and [[packrat parser]]s are the
> way to go with parsing wikitext, because of the very ad-hoc
> definition of wikitext.

Absolutely agreed. I only wish PEGs could support backreference matches, as
it would clean up list, allowed HTML, and extension handling. In fact, I'm
not quite sure how to handle lists without backreferences.

> You can achieve considerable speedups by:
>
> 1 using the grammar to generate code, and compiling and
> executing that instead of interpreting the grammar by hand

Definitely - come to think of it, I bet this could be done VERY nicely with
Python. Or most other sufficiently self-exposed languages... Hm.

> 2 allowing the grammar to contain both PEG expressions and
> regexps for low-level lexical matching: regexps will be at
> least an order of magnitude faster than even compiled PEGs
> for matching low-level lexical tokens like numbers and names,
> without removing the ability of PEGs to blur the distinction
> between lexical and syntactic analysis, which is important
> for parsing strange things like wikitext.

This sounds like a great idea for extended PEGs anyway... I'll remember that
if I end up building an mxTextTools frontend for PEGs, since mxTextTools can
easily hook into arbitrary matching functions (including regex).

> I've implemented packrat parsing in both Python and Scheme:
> Scheme was faster, and ultimately more natural.

That's quite possible - the problem would be that I don't know Scheme, and I
am going to be extremely busy for the foreseeable future at school. I'd
rather not have to write a packrat parser myself, anyway... However simple
they may be, they improve drastically with optimizations, and I don't
anticipate having the time to implement a proper system.

Unless a good Python-accessible packrat parser already exists, I'm most
likely to just build a solid PEG frontend for mxTextTools. It's a very
powerful text parser, and tends to be fast (the module's mostly written in
C). I think it could easily support all PEG features. Actually, I think
SimpleParse (another mxTextTools frontend) already supports at least 90% of
PEG features, so maybe the best idea is simply to rework SimpleParse to use
standard PEG syntax instead of its extremely extended BNF variant.

> I'm not sure about the best way to implement an API: have you
> considered just using the parser to convert from wikitext to
> somthing like PYX, which is a very simple-to-parse and
> Python-friendly representation of an XML data structure...

Something like that would probably be ideal, although I'd tend to prefer a
more abstract data structure that's programmatically accessible - maybe an
mxTextTools tag list (its normal output format) is closer to what I mean.

- Eric Astor

mxTextTools: http://www.egenix.com/files/python/mxTextTools.html
SimpleParse: http://simpleparse.sourceforge.net/simpleparse_grammars.html

--
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Checked by AVG Free Edition.
Version: 7.1.405 / Virus Database: 268.11.6/428 - Release Date: 8/25/2006


from_name: geni

subject: [WikiEN-l] WTF Have I Missed?

body:
On 8/28/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> Bryan Derksen wrote:
> > Seriously, though, I'm still looking for a response on my request for
> > details when you said "analysis has been done, results will be
> > published" regarding the initial disabling of anon page creation. Who
> > did the analysis? Or did you answer in a different thread that I haven't
> > been reading? I know I'm being a hardass about this, but so far this has
> > been the only lead I'm aware of indicating that any such analysis might
> > actually be taking place.
>
> I second the request if there has been a serious analysis.  Anecdotally,
> I can say that I think that the experiment with disabling page creation
> for anons has not been particularly useful and that we should turn page
> creation back on for anons at some point fairly soon.
>
> --Jimbo
>

Should be noting that are avtive admin to article ratio is geting
worse which means things may not go back to the way they were before.

--
geni


from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject:
[Foundation-l] Fwd: NYTimes.com: African Languages Grow as a
 Wikipedia Pr...

body:
daniwo59 at aol.com wrote:
> I have a lot of sympathy and fondness for African languages. However, I
> think the attitude we are taking is paternalistic.

Who is?  I have not seen this.

> The same problems exist for
> languages in many other corners of the world. Identifying this issue as uniquely
>  "African" is paternalistic and, quite frankly, a tad racist. Why do we not
> make the same efforts for Khmer (the official language of Cambodia, 66
> articles), Burmese (the official language of Myanmar, with 32 million speakers,  and
> just 66 articles), or Assamese (an official language of India with 20
> million speakers and only 6 articles)?

I think we absolutely ARE taking efforts in ALL parts of the world,
simultaneously.  I had a meeting in Delhi with someone who is interested
in pursuing a joint project to develop African languages.

I have no idea who you have in mind who thinks anything racist or
paternalistic about African languages, but if they do, then they do not
represent the attitudes of the broad community or me.

--Jimbo


subject: [WikiEN-l] WTF Have I Missed?

body:
Joe Anderson wrote:
> This article (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/5286458.stm) got my
> concern. Editorial control on the Wikipedia? What exactly have I missed?

The journalist is typical of bad journalists.  Running with only the
slimmest of understanding, he pukes out his biases about how the world
works with little concern for underlying facts.

Fortunately for us all, there are also good journalists.

--Jimbo


from_name: David Gerard

subject: [WikiEN-l] WTF Have I Missed?

body:
On 28/08/06, Kirill Lokshin <kirill.lokshin at gmail.com> wrote:

> (This quite aside from the fact that de: hasn't yet decided how the
> ability to set this flag would be assigned; but one of the options
> Kurt mentioned at Wikimania would be something like the current
> semi-protection limit on the account's age.  The vast majority of
> active contributors would, in such a scenario, be able to simply set
> the flag -- perhaps automatically -- on any article they work on.)

That strikes me as the only way to make such a thing neither sclerotic
nor (complex enough to be) gameable.

- d.


subject: [WikiEN-l] WTF Have I Missed?

body:
Bryan Derksen wrote:
> Seriously, though, I'm still looking for a response on my request for
> details when you said "analysis has been done, results will be
> published" regarding the initial disabling of anon page creation. Who
> did the analysis? Or did you answer in a different thread that I haven't
> been reading? I know I'm being a hardass about this, but so far this has
> been the only lead I'm aware of indicating that any such analysis might
> actually be taking place.

I second the request if there has been a serious analysis.  Anecdotally,
I can say that I think that the experiment with disabling page creation
for anons has not been particularly useful and that we should turn page
creation back on for anons at some point fairly soon.

--Jimbo


subject: [WikiEN-l] WTF Have I Missed?

body:
On 28/08/06, Gordon Joly <gordon.joly at pobox.com> wrote:
> At 13:50 +0800 28/8/06, Jimmy Wales wrote:

> >The journalist is typical of bad journalists.  Running with only the
> >slimmest of understanding, he pukes out his biases about how the world
> >works with little concern for underlying facts.
> >Fortunately for us all, there are also good journalists.

> That is an "ad hominem" attack.
> Have you read the article? Which parts are you unhappy with?

I'd have called it an expression of long exasperation with Bill
Thompson, myself. The best thing you can say about Bill Thompson's
writing is that he isn't malicious.

- d.


from_name: Josep M. Gessé Solé

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Approved new language wikipedias: what's the
	situation?

body:
Hi,
I wish to make the annobonese language wikipedia ("fa d'Amb?"  code: fab) .
It's the language of the Annobon island (Equatorial Guinea). It's spoken by
about 9,000 people around World.

How may I procedeed?

Thanks.

2006/8/28, Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com>:
>
> novial wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > The setting up of a wikipedia in the Novial language was approved in mid
> > May:
>
> At this time there's no official process for adding new language editions,
> so
> requests on some meta page may or may not get paid attention to by the
> server
> operations team at any given time.
>
> I would like us to get this sorted out soon, though. :)
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>
>
>
>


from_name: Sarah

subject: [WikiEN-l] [[User:Jon_Awbrey]] and [[Wikipedia:Wikilawyering]]

body:
On 8/28/06, Daniel R. Tobias <dan at tobias.name> wrote:
> [User:Jon_Awbrey]] has moved [[Wikipedia:Wikilawyering]] to
> [[Wikipedia:WikiCaviling]], on the grounds that he claims the
> original title is defamatory to lawyers.
>
Jon Awbrey has been making a nuisance of himself on several policy and
guideline pages recently, engaging heavily in wikilawyering (hence his
undoubted interest in it) and generally driving people nuts. I've been
contemplating an RfC, but a speedier remedy might be in order.

Sarah


body:
Tim Starling wrote:
> Thanks for that. Can we have the HTML source for it?

The image was based on image-editing a modified screenshot, but the green status table that was added is just a wiki table, which
can be got from here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Nickj/sandbox&oldid=72279462

> > For the messages between client JavaScript and the PHP on the server, sounds like maybe there are 3 types of messages:
> > 1) A status update when someone starts editing something, or a periodic update as they make changes.
> > 2) A method for querying what the current status is of ongoing edits it.
> > 3) A response from the server as to what the status of current edits is.

Self-correction: messages 1) and 2) can probably be combined (send your status + request global status) into one get request, for
example something like:

GET
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/index.php?title=PageName&action=statusUpdate&section=SectionName&lastChange=34&charsChanged=235&editSum
mary=Typo+fixes&revision=20060823110052

> The client-side timeout would be a maximum idle period, it would
> turn off the periodic updates to prevent excessive resource usage when the
> user leaves the computer with an edit window open. The server-side timeout
> would cancel the editing status when the client stops sending messages for
> whatever reason.

Ok, but suppose a user opens an edit window, makes some changes, then the work day ends, then go home but they leave their computer
on overnight, and then the following morning (18 hours later) when things get quiet they finish their changes, and hit save. Isn't
that qualitatively different from someone who clicks edit, then immediately changes their mind and hits the back button? Shouldn't
the 18-hour edit still appear in the status window? Should there perhaps be some kind of back-off mechanism, whereby a status update
is sent more regularly at first, and then progressively slower (until a maximum of once per hour is reached, say, at which point
there would still be hourly status updates sent to the server). That way you still get updates, but they're not excessive.

Also, the status message could include an indicator of how long the client expects it to be until the next status message (e.g. 5
minutes), assuming the user doesn't type anything (i.e. this figure would be a maximum). That way, the server would not have to work
this out [it could just take: min(1 hour, client's figure) + 5 minutes ... the 5 minutes is to allow a bit of leeway ], and store
this as a date value in a timeout field, and that way it could have a small timeout for someone that has just started editing a
page, and 1 hour 5 minutes timeout for someone who has the window open overnight (i.e. variable timeout windows, instead of a fixed
window size).

And here's a different scenario/question: Suppose user-A clicks edit, and makes no changes. Then user-B clicks edit on the same
article, makes their changes, and clicks save. Should user-A's edit window reload with the updated wiki source (provided they really
have made no changes)? This could be achieved by sending the current revision timestamp with the status messages, and reloading the
source if we used to have the latest version (and now don't), and haven't modified the text in the textarea.

And for amusement, if we start sending the current revision timestamp, then there is the potential to create some "interesting"
user-interfaces. Suppose you're editing something, and then someone else starts to edit: it could play a sound (like the "uh-oh"
sound from ICQ, followed by David Bowie's "Under Pressure") to warn you of an impending potential edit conflict ... and then if they
save first, it could play a sound like when Pac-Man gets eaten ("Wah-wah-waa") and display a message in red in the status area like:
"You snooze, you lose! Remember: Save first, ask questions later." ... I am joking about this paragraph, of course ;-)

Jay R. Ashworth wrote:
> Given the functionality extension of the edit summary, I think perhaps
> the entire box should be moved up above the textedit window...

Well the downside of putting it above the text area is that as other people start or stop editing the page, the number of rows in
the status table will increase or decrease. Now, if the table is above the textarea, this will have the effect of making the whole
textarea box jump up or down the page in a potentially quite annoying way :-)

> "Hide that I'm editing", and default it to off.  The negative connotation
> will change the default amongst people who don't care in a fashion that
> will make the feature more useful, while not keeping people who care
> from switching it.

That's good psychology, I like it.

It should also be possible to set a default in the User Preferences though I think, as per the two other boxes, for which you can
currently set a default preference.

> > Maybe the name of the other user should be shown, and maybe it shouldn't.
>
> I like the summary the way you have it.

Yeah, it just feels more personal & community-orientated to have a name, rather than "some other unidentifiable person is doing
something".

> > Maybe the user's own changes should be shown in the list, maybe they shouldn't.
>
> Perhaps they should; to reinforce to people whether they're visible or
> not...

Good point.

> > You probably also need a timeout mechanism (e.g. if haven't received
> > a status report from a client in 5 mins, then drop the user from the
> > list), and maybe also a message to inform the server if the user
> > aborts the edit (although they can just click the "back" button,
> > rather than clicking "cancel", in which case you probably won't get
> > the message).
>
> I think you can trap pageexit, though I'm not positive.

I'm not sure either, although this page http://www.4guysfromrolla.com/demos/OnBeforeUnloadDemo3.htm seems to be able to trap the
events that indicate navigating away from the page (could also be useful to Rob Church's for his draft-saving possibility), using
window.onbeforeunload (works for me in IE and Firefox), so perhaps we can use that?

All the best,
Nick.


subject: [Foundation-l] Celebrity pictures

body:
On 8/28/06, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> Has anybody so much as investigated industry standards about the use of
> album covers or the publicity shots of celebrities?  The entertainment
> industry if infamous for protecting what it believes to be its
> copyrights.  Have there been any cases regarding this kind of material?
> What can we do to free this borderline material?
>
I don't know of any such study.  But if one is done it should look at
both sides.  Has anyone lost a case over it is one question.  But
another is whether there are companies in jurisdictions which don't
have fair use that are using publicity shots without permission in the
first place.

As a tangentially related case, the John Dillinger Museum in Hammond,
Indiana lost a lawsuit over the "right of publicity", "which restrict
the use of someone's image or name for commercial purposes".  It seems
John Dillinger's family doesn't want the museum portraying him as a
murderer.  http://www.artsjournal.com/artfulmanager/main/008254.php

Anthony


subject: [Foundation-l] Celebrity pictures


from_name: Magnus Manske

subject: [Wikitech-l] flexbisonparse

body:
Timwi schrieb:
> Jay R. Ashworth wrote:
>
>>> 3- the list of alternative parsers (
>>> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Alternative_parsers ) does not
>>> mention wikitext2docbook, and says that flexbisonparse is "Intended
>>> as an eventual replacement to the parsing code inside MediaWiki
>>> itself", which is rather promising!
>>>
>> I don't know that that is what Magnus is calling it, but
>>
>
> Where and why did this misconception arise that flexbisonparse was
> written by Magnus? Quite honestly, it is driving me nuts...
>
Official clarification: flexbisonparse was written by Timwi, and Timwi
alone :-)

I had a look at it once, and didn't find my way through the flex jungle,
so I gave up quickly. I did, however, base the XML of wiki2xml on the
flexbisonparse output; they're not identical, however.

Magnus

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from_name: Mak

subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia - entering the collective consciousness

body:
"Mathematics is supposed to be a Wikipedia-like undertaking," from
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/27/weekinreview/27johnson.html

It is funny to me that Wikipedia is showing up more and more in these
contexts.

[[User:Makemi]]


subject: [Wikitech-l] [Wikipedia-l] WikiCharts

body:
> > http://tools.wikimedia.de/~leon/stats/wikicharts/?wiki=enwikiversity
> >
> > Awesome. Can we have this on en Wikipedia?
>
> Okay, done. http://tools.wikimedia.de/~leon/stats/wikicharts/?wiki=enwiki
>
> --Leon

Maybe wikicharts already has this (if it does, I apologize), and maybe it doesn't, but I occasionally enjoy glancing at Google's
Zeitgeist page ( http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist.html ) to get a sense of what other people are clicking (i.e. rather than an
absolute number of views, it shows what's topical, presumably based on a formula that combines of number of page views together with
a percentage increase, to see filter for things that are both topical and of general interest). Would something like this maybe be
possible for wikicharts, so as to get a weekly "Wikipedia Zeitgeist" to see what's hot?

All the best,
Nick.


body:
Thanks Fran, this is going to be helpful. Maybe a technical fix could
help reduce some of the misunderstanding that creeps in due to script
and dialectical differences. The problem is that most literary people
aren't too tech-oriented, and vice-versa. I belong to neither camps,
being a journalists writing on technology :-) FN
PS: Your link is useful, I'll post it to our local GNU/Linux users'
group and see how people respond. We have people use or knowing
different scripts there.

On 28/08/06, Francis Tyers <spectre at ivixor.net> wrote:
> If there are only small dialect differences, it might be worth looking
> at Apertium (http://apertium.sourceforge.net). Free software machine
> translation for closely related languages. I think having just different
> scripts is about as closely related as you get :)
>
> Fran
>
> On Sun, 2006-08-27 at 15:06 +0530, Frederick "FN" Noronha wrote:
> > That doesn't seem possible at this point of time. Each script tends to
> > have some small but significant dialectal variations. So, simply using
> > some form of mechanical transalation/transiteration might render the
> > output quite unreadable.
> >
> > It would be preferable to have human-created pages.
> >
> > Even if done in different scripts, I don't think this would cause any
> > problems as such. Teams would work at differing paces, as per their
> > own abilities and convenience. And work by one team might spur on
> > others to catch up too.
> >
> > The issue we're shifting to is a much wider question, which has been
> > causing worry for those keen about the Konkani language. As far as
> > Wikipedia goes, what do you see as the suitable solution?
> >
> > We have two options -- a common Konkani Wikipedia, or separate ones
> > (set up according to interest shown and activity levels initiated). FN
> >
> > PS: Have just been working on a portal for Goa at
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Goa  You can see some Konkani
> > descriptions (in English there). Since I'm not a techie, have been
> > struggling a bit to control the templates and code!
> >
> > On 27/08/06, Berto <albertoserra at ukr.net> wrote:
> > > Hi!
> > >
> > > >a script-neutral Wikipedia, or multi Wikipedias to deal
> > > > with the diverse scripts of Konkani (even if with differening levels
> > > > of activity).
> > >
> > > Is there any way to make an automatic coverter among the 5 scripts? It would
> > > save you a lot of trouble.
> > >
> > > B?rto
> > >
> > > _______________________________________________
> > > 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
>

--
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Frederick Noronha http://fn.goa-india.org  9822122436 +91-832-240-9490
http://fredericknoronha.wordpress.com fredericknoronha at gmail.com


subject: [Wikitech-l] Categories problem

body:
Hi Julien,

> I was wondering if there is projects to help *detect* categories and
> then to help editors by *suggesting* categories ?

I think it's a good idea.

The closest thing I can see is at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Auto-categorization  (although I'm not 100% clear on what
that project was doing with categories, so maybe it's not as related as it sounds, but I thought it best to mention it).

> Once you have the clusters, you
> need to try labelling them with a category :
>  - give to the user the role of identifying the category name
>  - use the words space to find the better words that describe this set
> of articles
>  - ...
> Then you can run this algorithm on a category to try to split it in sub
> categories.

How are you going to apply the categories? E.g. leave a message on the talk page / automatically apply them with a bot / an external
web page where people can see possible categories / or something integrated into MediaWiki?

If it's something interactive, you can maybe produce a checkbox list of the top 10 possible categories, have the user tick all the
categories that apply. Then for the categories that apply, you could maybe expand those and show the subcategories, and have the
user tick the ones that apply, and keep on expanding the subcategories that apply until the user has gotten as specific as they can.

> The second idea is really more simple and easier to implement : When you
> edit an article, you can suggest categories of linked articles (can be
> replaced by an other graph-exploration algorithm).

Can it maybe also suggest which stubs to use? I can never remember what the right stub to use is (so I just use the standard
"{{stub}}"), but there has got to be a better way than having to remember the full list of stub types.

All the best,
Nick.


from_name: Daniel R. Tobias

body:
[User:Jon_Awbrey]] has moved [[Wikipedia:Wikilawyering]] to
[[Wikipedia:WikiCaviling]], on the grounds that he claims the
original title is defamatory to lawyers.  However, politically-
incorrect or not, "Wikilawyering" is the actual terminology that has
been in use on Wikipedia's discussion areas; "WikiCaviling" is an
ugly neologism with no support that I know of.  Page titles should
reflect actual usage instead of attempting to impose political
correctness.

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


from_name: Tomasz Ganicz

body:
2006/8/28, valdelli at bluemail.ch <valdelli at bluemail.ch>:
> Which policy do you use in your Wikipedia about recent events?
>
> Do you establish a fixed time (i.e 30 days) to accept new articles
> for them? Or do you analyze every single case?
>
> I ask for this rule because some articles are written in
> journalistic style and could be not acceptable for Wikipedia and I'm
> investigating in which way other Wikipedias solve this problem.
>
> Regards
>
> Ilario

In Polish there is no such rule at all. People usally write articles
imediatly after media broadcasts of the events. Some put the info even
"ahead" of time. For example they change the name of prime minister of
Poland, when it is obvious that he/she will be voted in Parliament
before voting, so we have to revert them :-) We have even a special
template saying that the article is about current event. Usally,
several days after the event this template is removed and the article
is cleaned up from "journalistic style".

--
Tomek "Polimerek" Ganicz
http://www.ceti.pl/kganicz/poli/kontakt.html


from_name: Rob

subject: [WikiEN-l] on new article creation

body:
Sometimes when people say "experiment", they mean "let's measure the
reliability of a hypothesis using months worth of carefully worked out
calculations and data measurements".  Sometimes when people say
"experiment", they mean "let's try this new thing and see how well it works
out".  It astonishes me that people are attributing a nakedly cynical motive
to a different connotation of a commonly used word.


from_name: Rob Church

subject: [Wikitech-l] Teaser trailer

body:
On 28/08/06, Nick Jenkins <nickpj at gmail.com> wrote:
> And another possibility whilst we're kicking around ideas would be to have a "my drafts" link at the top of the page, which when you
> clicked on it would show a Special page with the list of outstanding drafts, which would make it easy to take up where you left off.

Yes, that also makes sense. :)

Rob Church


references:
<ecmt43$qgt$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<NABBJGECPILFNLFEAPIKGEBPIMAA.nickpj@gmail.com>
	<ecuksf$sd1$1@sea.gmane.org>

body:
On 28/08/06, Timwi <timwi at gmx.net> wrote:
> If you're going to display the summary line, don't you think it is
> obviously going to be used by some people to deliberately put
> inflammatory/aggressive/offensive/provocative text in there, just to
> annoy other editors?

That happens with existing edit summaries and even entire pages now.
No reason to suppress useful functionality just because the Internet
is full of dickheads.

Rob Church


from_name: Gregory Maxwell

subject: [WikiEN-l] on new article creation

body:
On 8/28/06, Rob <gamaliel8 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Sometimes when people say "experiment", they mean "let's measure the
> reliability of a hypothesis using months worth of carefully worked out
> calculations and data measurements".  Sometimes when people say
> "experiment", they mean "let's try this new thing and see how well it works
> out".  It astonishes me that people are attributing a nakedly cynical motive
> to a different connotation of a commonly used word.

And no one has proposed how we could have measured the effects without
going ahead and doing it... there are just too many variables.   We
could have carefully quantified how much crap is created by anons vs
non-anons, but we couldn't have quantified how many of the crapmakers
would have simply made accounts.

Wikipedia won't be finished in a day...and some times we need to just
try things out if we are to find good solutions.


from_name: Jay R. Ashworth

subject: [Wikitech-l] Teaser trailer

body:
On Mon, Aug 28, 2006 at 08:11:45PM +0200, Steve Bennett wrote:
> On 8/28/06, Jay R. Ashworth <jra at baylink.com> wrote:
> > > current text is saved, the button grays out and changes to read
> > > "Saved".
> >
> > I don't like this.  Browsers aren't smart enough for that. Hell, *apps*
> > aren't smart enough for that.  When I say save, *save* damnit.
>
> Fwiw, it works well. If you really desperately want to save again for
> some paranoid reason, you can always add and remove a few spaces and
> press 'save' then.

I've seen editors smart enough that whitespace that doesn't affect
formatting is ignored.  I still don't like it.

Example:

MySpace: click "Log In" button.  Button changes to "Logging In" and
greys out.  Page submit times out (as it does all too frequently).  Now
you can't re-click it, you have to reload the page first.  Novice user
gets frustrated.

The only common reason given for this that's *almost* acceptable is "I
don't want them to submit their credit card sale twice...  though the
*proper* answer for that one is "send a random cookie as a hidden field
on the form, pass it all the way to the SQL insert statement; if the
Unique trigger fires, complain."

> > > * If you have a reply entered and try leaving the page, it shows a
> > > popup dialog asking if you want to discard changes (if not, it cancels
> > > the page-leave, but doesn't save the draft, I think).
> >
> > Yeah; I've seen that on-leave idea a couple of places.  I like it quite
> > a bit,  though permitting a browser to do it can have.. consequences.
>
> It works well here.

Oh; I'm just saying that leaving that feature on in your browser can
enable... Bad Guys.

Cheers,
-- jra
--
Jay R. Ashworth                                                jra at baylink.com
Designer                          Baylink                             RFC 2100
Ashworth & Associates        The Things I Think                        '87 e24
St Petersburg FL USA      http://baylink.pitas.com             +1 727 647 1274

	The Internet: We paved paradise, and put up a snarking lot.


subject: [Wikitech-l] #time

body:
On 28/08/06, Steve Summit <scs at eskimo.com> wrote:
> This is worth highlighting.  Anyone writing code which has to
> handle summer time changes (or indeed anything timezone-related),
> and who implements this by re-coding the algorithms and having a
> private database of the various locale-specific rules, is making
> a Big Mistake.  This is a hard problem that cries out to be solved
> in one central place, and in fact it has been for years now.

GMT for the win!

Rob Church


from_name: Jeff V. Merkey

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:

>Robert Scott Horning wrote:
>
>
>>I've been using the page import feature with Wikiversity, and it makes
>>the transwiki process work out so successfully that I really wonder why
>>this isn't allowed with other projects?  Is this mainly a CPU bandwidth
>>issue, or is this still just an experimental feature?
>>
>>There are a few bugs with the page import, but those few bugs can be
>>usually compensated for by compitent administrators.
>>
>>
>
>Please report these bugs... :)
>
>-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
>
>
>
>------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>_______________________________________________
>foundation-l mailing list
>foundation-l at wikimedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>
>
importDump is busted in 1.7.1 (fails on NULL revision history).  I
already reported it over on mediawiki.  Have not seen any fix for it yet.

Jeff


from_name: Brad Patrick

subject: [Foundation-l] Professional bookkeeping in the office

body:
I write to advise the community that we have successfully brought a
bookkeeper in to work with Michael Davis on a part-time basis, Tricia
Hoffman. Trish was referred to us by our audit firm and has more than
ten years of complicated full-cycle accounting experience.  During an
initial transition phase, Michael will be working with Trish to learn
the accounts and work with our internal processes.  Following the
certification and publication of our audited financial statements, we
will resume publication of our financials, on what I anticipate will be
a monthly basis.  Trish has agreed to provide professional support for
our accounting functions on a contract basis.  After we have worked
together for a while, we will reassess based on the amount of time that
is appropriate for the tasks required.

mav has had an extraordinary influence on WMF and is to be heartily
congratulated for his willingness to jump in and work hard, especially
in the earliest days of the projects.  As I have come to appreciate the
work that must be done to keep things going in the office, mav's energy
and initiative become all the more apparent.  I'm sure he will continue
to contribute in multiple ways going forward.

Thanks, mav!

-Brad


from_name: Andre Engels

body:
2006/8/28, valdelli at bluemail.ch <valdelli at bluemail.ch>:
> Which policy do you use in your Wikipedia about recent events?
>
> Do you establish a fixed time (i.e 30 days) to accept new articles
> for them? Or do you analyze every single case?
>
> I ask for this rule because some articles are written in
> journalistic style and could be not acceptable for Wikipedia and I'm
> investigating in which way other Wikipedias solve this problem.

There's no specific rules about them, as far as I know. When an
article is too journalistic in style, it gets edited to a more
acceptable one in time, or it gets nominated for deletion. However,
that has nothing to do with being about a recent event. If someone
does the same with an event from 1930s, it will be treated the same
way.

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


from_name: Steve Bennett

subject: [Wikitech-l] References - ugh

body:
On 8/28/06, Timwi <timwi at gmx.net> wrote:
> Remind me what was wrong with my suggestion to allow users to declare
> the reference anywhere, but move it to the "References" section upon save?

My only concern is that it's slightly disconcerting when stuff moves
after save. It would certainly be better than the current situation
though, and I'd support seeing that change implemented until an even
better solution comes along (if ever).

Steve