body:
Not to minimize what you're saying, but this problem
extends beyond non-native English speakers. Before I
joined Wikipedia as anonymous56789, I had a different
username (which I now can't remember. After that, I
quit wikipedia for a year and then rejoined). Anyway,
I didn't know as much about grammar and spelling back
then, and I was rudely told I didn't know English well
enough (or something like that) to contribute to an
encyclopedia like this. This may have happened to more
kids than me, too.

If you find the subtlties of English daunting (not
that you are unintelligent in any way), you could help
with the simple english wikipedia. It attempts to use
only the 1000 most common words in English to create
an encyclopedia. It still uses the UseMod software,
though.

By the way, why haven't all of the wikis been upgraded
yet?

--- Anthere <anthere6 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> --- Stevertigo <stevertigo at attbi.com> wrote:
> > Robert
> > > Pseudo-academic, pseudo-egalitarian nonsense.
> > That's the
> > > same kind of talk that has damaged the education
> > of much of
> > > the inner-city youth in America.
> >
> > Robert, if noone else will say it - I will. Youre
> so
> > full of crap.
> > Thank you very much for listening.
> >
> > > Frankly, it is also racist in effect. This kind
> of
> > attitude
> > > has created two generations of poorly educated
> > Hispanic and
> > > Black youth in American cities. I couldn't think
> > of a
> > > better plan for the KKK  to promote if they want
> > to keep
> > > racism alive forever.
> >
> > God, what horrible garbage.
> >
> > > And frankly, many of our articles are being
> > damaged by
> > > people with good intentions, but who have poor
> > English
> > > reading or writing skills (or both.)
> >
> > Oh, God, what a crapload.
> >
> > > In Stevertigo's bizarre universe, it is
> > egalitarian to
> > > encourage this illiteracy, which in the end
> would
> > produce
> > > unreadable articles.  In our universe, we are
> > trying to
> > > ecudate an English speaking audience.
> >
> > Well, cutting through all of Robert's crap - the
> one
> > VALID point he makes
> > (underneath all the crap, acrimony, etc...) is
> that
> > a common language
> > should'nt go willy nilly in different directions.
> > But it's fucking elitist
> > as tea-sipping lessons to dictate what is "proper"
> > in most contexts -
> > because you personally dont own it - whether it be
> a
> > religion or a language.
> >
> > Americans and Englishmen are a minority of English
> > speakers. Toby(I think)
> > made a valid point that there is already a page
> > calling attention to pages
> > in need of a rewrite - the problem is that people
> do
> > what they are
> > interested in.
> > (And most pages are in need of a "rewrite" -
> whether
> > its a complete hack
> > job - or a little comma is missing somewhere.)
> >
> > If people with little teeny tiny sphincters want
> to
> > take it upon themselves
> > to focus like a lynch mob on poor, unsuspecting
> > Bengalis, fine. But dont
> > bitch when I pull the hoods off your heads. Wanna
> > correct the bad English? -
> > DO IT. But dont come here talking about
> instituting
> > ideologies that are
> > fundamentally elitist.
> >
> > WikiLove be upon you, Kaiser
> >
> > - Steven MacGrieves
>
>
> I would like to add a couple more words to the
> subject
>
> The word "english-speaking" is misleading. Wikipedia
> is for english-speaking clearly, but here,
> english-speaking does mean any person able to
> understand english, not native english-speaking
> person. In that sense, english wikipedia is for
> english people is true, if it encompass any person
> able to read english. It should not limit itself to
> native english only. You guys should be proud. So
> many
> of us are using your language now. Even when no
> native-english is around, if that is the best for us
> to communicate.
> I agree wikipedia should be properly written. I just
> don't know along which standards, I always failed to
> find a grammar book for your language, as French
> language has. But in any case, the language escaped
> you. English language is not only the language of
> native english. It is also ours. Maybe, is it an
> international english.
>
> I know quite well I am part of this terminology gap.
>
> I am fully aware of my limitations. Which is why I
> never participate in writing meta pages on en (which
> I
> do a lot on fr), as I know people are very keen in
> having those very properly written.
> Which is also why I very rarely refactor other
> people
> prose; I add, I sometimes remove, I create mostly.
> This way, I try to avoid people from accusing me of
> "damaging" their work and letting an article in
> poorer
> shape than it was before my input. I basically only
> create because I think "not very good" is better
> than
> "no article" at all.
>
> I also several times asked other people to review my
> work, and usually people did so very kindly. I must
> say I don't really appreciate that some mention in
> the
> comment box that "obviously this has been written by
> an non-english and needs much work" and then leave
> without doing more than correcting a typo.
> If someone is willing to go through all my major
> contributions to clean up after me, it is all listed
> on my page and old contributions page.
>
> I know quite well Robert is including me in these
> people who should be elsewhere than here, as he
> suggested a couple of times that I should quit
> wikipedia if not being able to read and express
> myself
> properly in english.
>
> That is one of the reasons why, I quit trying to do
> anythink on the knowledge article, being aware it
> would risk again being considered vandalism as he
> said
> I was guilty on the gaia articles.
>
> Now, I have some doubts. I see that he is doing the
> same with the next contributor he is sharing an
> article with. Similarly, while in disagreement with
> him,
>
> see
>
http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Talk:Knowledge&diff=1017714&oldid=1016720
>
> He is using the supposed "inability to understand
> and
> speak english" to bully people he does not agree
> with.
>
> This is so embarassing
>
>
> __________________________________
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> Yahoo! Calendar - Free online calendar with sync to
> Outlook(TM).
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> _______________________________________________
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> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

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list: wikien-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [WikiEN-l] More colonialist ravings

body:
Stevertigo wrote:

>>Listen: I will make it simple.  When you have an
>>intellectual disagreement with someone, don't descend to
>>racial or ethnic stereotypes or slurs.  We don't want bigots
>>here. Is this so outrageous?
>>
>
>This is agreeable. The problem is Robert that - for a great many
>reasons -its not clear to us that your *not a bigot, Robert.  Here, in fact,
>what your attempting is - as Toby (I think) alluded to - is to provoke
>Godwin's Law. Youre by far the quickest to call people the name "bigot" -
>etc... (Which reminds us of another law - "He who smelt it - dealt it.")
>
Just because someone occasionally uses a streotype or even a slur
doesn't make them bigots.  What may seem like a slur to one reader may
have had a perfectly innocent intent in the hands of the writer.  Unless
somebody is persistently and clearly showing bad intent he should be
given the benefit of the doubt.  When someone is too quick to shout
"anti-semitism" the first victim of that is often the shouter's credibility.

>>Further, if someone is unable to clearly express what they
>>mean in English, then what they are writing here is almost
>>useless.
>>
>
>This is wrong - even a broken, unintellegible stub can be transformed. Your
>wanting to oust people for not writing English well is at the very least,
>elitist - and smacks of the same kind of bigotry you espouse countering.
>
>At least your tone seems more reasonable. I dont want you to leave - youre a
>valuable point of view. You simply need to tone down the acrimony. Others
>have told you this - I'm sure your Mother probably has too - at one point or
>another. I know mine has.
>
I tend to cut a lot more slack to non-native speakers.  Some very
innocent statements in one language can easily have outrageous false
friends in another.
Ec


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [WikiEN-l] This is the English Wikipedia

body:
On Tue, 10 Jun 2003, Daniel Ehrenberg wrote:
> By the way, why haven't all of the wikis been upgraded
> yet?

I believe this message to wikipedia-l sums it up:
http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2003-June/010482.html

(OT: I notice that earlier in this thread you expressed some interest in
English spelling reform. If you haven't already, you might check out the
Shaw alphabet -- http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shavian_alphabet . A dead
end, perhaps, but an interesting story in its right.)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Axel Boldt

subject: [WikiEN-l] Identity games by Florentin Smarandache

body:
--- Tim Starling <ts4294967296 at hotmail.com> wrote:
> What I know is this: Smarandache has a history of inventing multiple
> personalities. I have three confirmed fake names, invented by him.
> The three
> personalities are Carol Harlestle, Charles T. Le and George Gregory.

Wonderful detective work! Charles T. Le actually managed to get an
article which praises Smarandache into a peer reviewed math journal,
and in addition he generates about 130 Google hits, every last one of
them about Smarandache. No institutional affiliation discernable.
Gregory shows up as an editor of some of Smarandache's publications.
This will make for a great addition to [[Florentin Smarandache]] :-)

Axel

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subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Filtering, etc.

body:
I have two technical points regarding filtering, and a more fundamental
one.

Jimbo, once you have checked all the categories to exclude from your
mom's Wikipedia experience, what is actually going to happen? I suppose
searches for those topics will return nothing. Links on RecentChanges
to these topics will be suppressed. How about links on non-blocked
pages to blocked ones? Will the hyperlinks simply turn into regular
text?
  "Why Jimbo my dear, have you ever heard about this, 'felching'?"
      :-)

Now, to prevent an explosion of categories, all slightly different and
designed for different constituencies, turning the system into a
useless mess, you'll have to limit the available categories somewhat.
There
will then very likely emerge one category which most well-meaning sons,
school administrators and parents are going to block; say it's "sexual
content". Can you imagine the ensuing fights about which articles to
label as "sexual content"? Admittedly, (now that we all know what it
is,) [[felching]] won't cause a problem. But how about
[[contraception]], [[AIDS]], [[breast]], [[homosexuality]],
[[homophobia]], [[menstrual cycle]], [[puberty]], [[pregnancy]]?

Now my real point. "Young people are constantly exposed to half-truths
about sexuality by smirking older boys in the schoolyard, by the media,
by internet porn sites. In Wikipedia, we cover those topics in a
respectful, truthful and neutral way. Take it or leave it."

Axel

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list: wikitech-l

from_name: Kurt Jansson

subject: [Wikitech-l] edit conflicts in preview mode

body:
Brion Vibber schrieb:
> On Tue, 2003-06-10 at 06:12, Kurt Jansson wrote:
>
>>I didn't have any edit conflicts in preview mode in the last months. I
>>only get them after hitting the save button. But I'm quite sure the
>>software used to check for edit conflicts also wenn hitting on "preview".
>>
>>Was this a necessairy change, or is it just a bug?
>
> I don't think it ever did that....?

Okay, my memory might be playing tricks on me again, then.

Kurt


from_name: Stevertigo

body:
> All I was suggested was that we apply
> basic professional standards to this project. Semi-literature articles, no
> matter how much quality information they contain, do no justice to the
> people who contribute them and the work they put into them, and risks
> turning a supposed professional encyclop?dia into a laughing stock. I made
> my suggestion based on the professional needs of a professional
encylop?dia,
> and resent having my motivation twisted and misrepresented in the manner
> done by Stevertigo.
>
> JT

Well, I already twice made mention that I had misunderstood you - so you
dont need to spike the ball on that. Secondly - this is not a professional
encyclopedia.

The assumption that there are standards beyond what reasonable people could
produce is fine for an lofty pie-in-the-sky ideology - but what counts is
what gets done. I'd also point out that you *might want to visit the Nupedia
for an hour and read all of their articles. The whole idea there was the
imposition of "academic standards" - and look where its got them.... Nuf
Said. :)

-SM


from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [WikiEN-l] Micheal again

body:
Micheal is back again as user:Punk.

I'm not reverting him yet because that would be a
waste of time due to his inability to take a hint. I
will revert all his edits as soon as he leaves.

For the sake of sanity I suggest everyone else do the
same.

http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Contributions&target=Punk

BTW, has anyone ever drafted a complaint letter to an
ISP complaining about a user? It would be nice to have
a draft of such a letter placed on
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Boilerplate_text

That way we can at least easily complain to the ISP's
of our persistent vandals.

I imagine that they would do something if they got a
constant stream of complaints about one of their
users.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

__________________________________
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http://search.yahoo.com


from_name: Toby Bartels

body:
JTDirl wrote:

>>Stevertigo wrote:

>>- Jay's announcement framed essentially "Im in an Edit war with a Chinese
>>guy who cant write English."

>Now hold on a minute. That is a complete and utter lie and fabrication, Sv.

I don't know the particulars of the page in question
(I can't find its name!), but I agree that this isn't what you said.

>But that had /nothing/ to do with my letter on this list. That came about
>because six times in the last eight weeks I came across articles on wiki
>that were unreadable because of poor english. When I mentioned this to
>others, other wiki users contacted me on AIM and ICQ (on which I have been
>on a lot lately) to tell me 'wait until you see this one!', they producing
>other articles, one in particular a blurred mix of Swedish and English that
>users of neither language could make neither head nor tail of.

Ah! this explains why you made a bigger deal out of this
than a lot of respondents (including me) seemed to think was warranted. ^_^

But in any case, we all seem to agree that improving the English is good
(whether or not that amounts to merely standardising the dialect).
Have you created a [[Wikipedia:]] page yet
to report pages whose English needs to improve?
(You haven't been using [[Wikipedia:Votes for rewrite]],
but perhaps this isn't exactly what you want.)
If you do please let us know, because even if you and Steve
(and RK, and I, and LittleDan ...) continue to disagree
about the theoretical value of unusual dialects and ESL
(and misunderstanding each other as we do so) ...
meanwhile people can start making corrections!

>>As "lets make a point of singling out foreigners who cant write English like
>>the Queen does." A very hasty and unthought response - that was perhaps
>>better expressed as a question of intent. Apo.... to James, and even Robert.

>That is /not/ what I was doing.

In the interests of peace, let me point out that you misunderstood SV.
Just before this was something like ?I interpreted JTDirl as ...?.
As he says above, this was hasty and unthought of him,
so he's giving you an "apo...." -- which seems to be as much of "apology"
as Steve is capable of writing. ^_^

>It is a /professional/ encyclop?dia that is intended to be taken seriously,

To be pedantic, it's /not/ professional, but as I don't take "professional"
to be a compliment anyway, I'll interpret this as you intended.
As a serious encyclop?dia, and in English, it needs to use language
that will be understood by a wide variety of English users,
and thus needs to stick to fairly standard usages.
There still isn't anybody that's disagreed with that,
so despite any other misinterpretations,
what we actually do on Wikipedia should be in accord.

-- Toby


body:
On Tue, 2003-06-10 at 19:06, Oliver Pereira wrote:
> And while we're on the subject of IP addresses, how come these days the
> Wikipedia only tells me that I'm "Not logged in", instead of showing my IP
> address, as it used to do...?

See http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:New_server_madness

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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list: wikipedia-l

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: [Wikitech-l] Re: Fair use

body:
--- Erik Moeller <erik_moeller at gmx.de> wrote:

> The wiki-author doesn't add a picture, he adds a reference to a
> picture.

...with the intent and expectation that the image and the text be
combined into a whole by the user's browser. It's a technical detail
that this combining is done by the browser rather than by the server -
had we used PDF rather than HTML as our distribution medium, then the
combining would take place on the server.

> > So yes, fair use quotes are technically violations of GFDL, but
> > completely harmless.
>
> Many copyright holders see things differently. Author Dan van der
> Vat, for example, was asked to pay 25 British pounds for quoting two
> sentences from
> Churchill's History of the Second World War in his book "The Atlantic
> Campaign". Sure: The legality is questionable.

In other words: this would be laughed out of court.

> But don't kid yourself
> into believing that nobody would ever consider quotes infringing.
> Treating fair use of quotes and images entirely differently is
> hypocritical and wrong.

It is neither, since short textual quotes are quite different from
images in at least two respects relevant to fair use.

1) Quotes are typically a tiny fraction of the whole work, while images
are typically 100% of the whole work.

2) There is no functioning market for the rights in short quotes, but
there is a functioning market for the rights in images.

Now, I don't think Wikipedia is at any risk whatsoever: if somebody
complains about an image, we simply take it down. We don't have money,
so we won't get sued. The downstream users of our materials however may
not share these luxuries, and in addition may have commercial interests
which weakens their fair use defense considerably. In effect our fair
use images shut out large classes of potential users of the
encyclopedia.

Axel

__________________________________
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Yahoo! Calendar - Free online calendar with sync to Outlook(TM).
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subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Fair use


from_name: root

body:
While I find that banning him may be a bit far, I don't think it is
right for him to insert operate this way.  It gives his edits an
un-honest air to them.  I can only speculate 2 possible reasons for his
actions.  1.  He is testing the wikipedia's peer review system.  2.  He
is doing this for personal gain.  In either case, I would support a soft
ban of him (and any aliases.  It occurs to me, that if we make
significant changes to his contributions, he will not be able to stop
the urge to make changes to these articles (if he decides to go against
the ban and make edits anyhow).  So it shouldn't be too hard to single
out his new aliases.  While I am hesitant to jump into anything, I we
need to discuss options, and then figure out what we are going to do.

--
Michael Becker

-----Original Message-----
From: wikien-l-admin at wikipedia.org [mailto:wikien-l-admin at wikipedia.org]
On Behalf Of Tim Starling
Sent: Sunday, June 08, 2003 7.33
To: wikien-l at wikipedia.org
Subject: [WikiEN-l] Identity games by Florentin Smarandache

Florentin Smarandache appears to be creating a large number of user
accounts, and using them to support the inclusion of articles related to
his
idiosyncratic theories. The case for this is rather thin, but I hope a
developer will see this message and check the IP addresses of the
various
users.

What I know is this: Smarandache has a history of inventing multiple
personalities. I have three confirmed fake names, invented by him. The
three
personalities are Carol Harlestle, Charles T. Le and George Gregory.

FS = 64.106.24.52 (static line at Gallup)
http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Talk:Neutrosophy&diff=996825
&oldid=989864

CTL = 64.106.24.52
http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Wikipedia:Votes_for_deletion
&diff=989777&oldid=989735

CTL=CH
http://groups.google.com/groups?q=carol+smarandache&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&o
e=utf-8&selm=8rglbo%2413q%241%40nnrp1.deja.com&rnum=2

GG = 64.106.24.52
http://216.239.33.100/search?q=cache:gzDvOQpAK30J:www-gap.dcs.st-and.ac.
uk/~history/Comments/comments.html+%2264.106.24.52%22&hl=en&ie=UTF-8
(google cache of
http://www-gap.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Comments/comments.html)

Additionally, AxelBoldt has made a case that FS is Dr. Minh Perez, on
[[Florentin Smarandache]].

The user accounts which have been created in the past few days and have
been
used to support Smarandache include johnkamla, Lit-sci, Bigtexas,
Arizonaval. I don't know if that's all of them. There have also been
suspicious anonymous edits under the Gallup IP addresses 64.106.24.51
and
64.106.24.53 -- could be different computers in the same lab.

If my theory turns out to be correct, I suggest we threaten FS with
banning.
Identity games like this should not be allowed.

-- Tim Starling.

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from_name: Michael Becker


from_name: Thomas Corell

body:
Kurt Jansson wrote:
> Brion Vibber schrieb:
>
>> On Tue, 2003-06-10 at 06:12, Kurt Jansson wrote:
>>
>>> I didn't have any edit conflicts in preview mode in the last months.
>>> I only get them after hitting the save button. But I'm quite sure the
>>> software used to check for edit conflicts also wenn hitting on
>>> "preview".
>>>
>>> Was this a necessairy change, or is it just a bug?
>> I don't think it ever did that....?
> Okay, my memory might be playing tricks on me again, then.

 From http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%3ATechnical_FAQ:

What happens if two or more people are editing the same page?
[...] The wiki will also check for a conflict if you are editing and do a
preview of the edit.[...]

If the editor once tested this what he wrote, it should have worked. As far
as I understood it properly. Ok, nothing easier as ajusting the FAQ ;)

--
Smurf
And what would humans be without love? -- RARE! (T.P.)
smurf at AdamAnt.mud.de
-------------------------  Anthill inside! ---------------------------


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Baltic, Central European, Russian fonts in	Wikipedia

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:

> ARRRRRGGGGGHHHH

*Sending a copy of a nice book with the large friendly letters on the cover*

--
Smurf
And what would humans be without love? -- RARE! (T.P.)
smurf at AdamAnt.mud.de
-------------------------  Anthill inside! ---------------------------


from_name: james duffy

body:
>Stevertigo wrote
>- Jay's announcement framed essentially "Im in an Edit war with a Chinese
>guy who
>cant write English."

Now hold on a minute. That is a complete and utter lie and fabrication, Sv.
I am not in an edit war with a Chinese guy who can't write english. In the
last couple of days, on request, and having then contacted other
contributors to a page and sought their advice, I reverted that page that
had been rewritten by someone whose ethnic origin I am unaware of because
there was 100% agreement that

1) the version he wrote was seriously inaccurate;
2) his translations of words from chinese to english were universally
regarded as seriously flawed (eg, translating 'emperor' as 'lord');
3) the user had constantly removed contributions from others.

/All/ the contributors to that page argued that the particular user's
english language difficulties contributed to the utter mess the page was in,
but the problem was not just the linguistic mess but also the inaccurate
translation and especially the systematic editing out of everyone else's
contribution, and his revertion of a community edited text pulled together
by Mav to his own unique and inaccurate one. I played no part in the
discussion of the detail of the page, merely acted as an outsider who after
consultation and with universal agreement reverted back to the Mav text,
with the suggestion that everyone start again from there, along with a
suggestion to that user on his talk page that he listen to other
contributors on the page in question and stop deleting everyone else's
contribution.

But that had /nothing/ to do with my letter on this list. That came about
because six times in the last eight weeks I came across articles on wiki
that were unreadable because of poor english. When I mentioned this to
others, other wiki users contacted me on AIM and ICQ (on which I have been
on a lot lately) to tell me 'wait until you see this one!', they producing
other articles, one in particular a blurred mix of Swedish and English that
users of neither language could make neither head nor tail of.

>As "lets make a point of singling out foreigners who cant write English
>like
>the Queen does." A very hasty and unthought response - that was perhaps
>better expressed as a question of intent. Apo.... to James, and even
>Robert.
>
That is /not/ what I was doing. I was making a concrete suggestion as to how
we could /help/ users who know a lot of interesting information but who
because of poor english linguistic skills could not express it. Some of the
articles had been there for weeks unnoticed; one three months. Neither I nor
the other people who contacted me had the time to fix all the articles. My
suggestion, and I repeat it, was to create a special page to which articles
in need of linguistic and grammatical proofing could be placed. It was to
/help/ users with language problems, not to single out people for mockery.

BTW this is an /encyclop?dia/, which means its articles /have/ to achieve
minimum standards of accuracy, not just in content but in expression. This
is not some sort of amateur scribble-box where any old rubbish will do. It
is a /professional/ encyclop?dia that is intended to be taken seriously, not
as some semi-literate joke. A professional /english/ encyclop?dia requires
basic standards in terms of english. All I was suggested was that we apply
basic professional standards to this project. Semi-literature articles, no
matter how much quality information they contain, do no justice to the
people who contribute them and the work they put into them, and risks
turning a supposed professional encyclop?dia into a laughing stock. I made
my suggestion based on the professional needs of a professional encylop?dia,
and resent having my motivation twisted and misrepresented in the manner
done by Stevertigo.

JT

_________________________________________________________________
STOP MORE SPAM with the new MSN 8 and get 2 months FREE*
http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail


from_name: JFrost8401 at aol.com

subject: [WikiEN-l] bird names etc.

body:
I promised myself that I wouldn't get involved again in this, but I've
weakened.
Hi all

I raised the point previously as to how this will be decided, with has more
relevance now that Mav seems to be retreating from his previous position. If it
is a straight numerical thing, the American view is bound to prevail, despite
the fact that the proponents of lower case contribute so little to actually
writing the wildlife articles.

Are we also going to insist on standardising names, so that the lead article
has to be Common Loon, rather than as at present, Great Northen Diver (with a
redirect).. and as for spelling! ( incidently, the group article is Loon - I
wouldn't want to be chauvinist about this).

The problems with using scientific names for the article titles have I think
been adequately dealt with, but in any case wouldn't help in the text. You
can't really write about Anas platyrhychos instead of Mallard.

yours in deep gloom

Jim

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subject: [WikiEN-l] bird names etc.

body:
Jim wrote:
>I raised the point previously as to how this will be
>decided, with has more relevance now that Mav seems
>to be retreating from his previous position. If it
>is a straight numerical thing, the American view is
>bound to prevail, despite the fact that the
>proponents of lower case contribute so little to
>actually writing the wildlife articles.

It has been proven very clearly that this is not an
"American" thing. Trying to paint things in that light
is disingenuous and smacks of Anti-Americanism (since
your premise seems to be that if Americans are trying
to impose something then it must be bad).

Oh and using your logic I should have near dictatorial
powers over WikiEN just because I've made /far/ more
edits than anyone else across nearly every subject.
And guess which area I've made a good majority of
those edits? In copyediting and fixing things like
capitalization. So according to your line of reasoning
everyone else should just shut up and let me do what I
want.

But I don't try to use my editing numbers as a wedge
in an argument because that is irrelevant. The only
thing that is relevant is what is the best thing for
us to do; the articles and their capitalization does
not belong to the people who write them. This is a
community matter - esp since it involves how articles
link to each other.

Also, this is a wiki Jim, so if you don't like other
people editing your articles then this isn't the right
place for you.

>Are we also going to insist on standardising names,
>so that the lead article has to be Common Loon,
>rather than as at present, Great Northen Diver (with
> a redirect).. and as for spelling! ( incidently,
> the group article is Loon - I wouldn't want to be
> chauvinist about this).

Why are you beating that straw man? The argument about
what to do with the birds has been won by the
capitalizers since each species has been given a very
specific name by an international body and their
convention is to capitalize those given names. I'm
content with that so long as lower-cased redirects are
provided (since there is a strong standard English
convention to write bald eagle not Bald Eagle).

The issue we have before us is whether or not to
extend capitalization beyond the birds where there
does not seem to be international standards committees
handing out official names which have a one-to-one
relationship with particular organisms (let alone any
policies on capitalization).

Do you have /any/ arguments to support capitalization
beyond the birds?

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Calendar - Free online calendar with sync to Outlook(TM).
http://calendar.yahoo.com


from_name: Oliver Pereira

body:
On Tue, 10 Jun 2003, Axel Boldt wrote:

> --- Tim Starling <ts4294967296 at hotmail.com> wrote:
> > What I know is this: Smarandache has a history of inventing multiple
> > personalities. I have three confirmed fake names, invented by him. The
> > three personalities are Carol Harlestle, Charles T. Le and George
> > Gregory.
>
> Wonderful detective work! Charles T. Le actually managed to get an
> article which praises Smarandache into a peer reviewed math journal, and
> in addition he generates about 130 Google hits, every last one of them
> about Smarandache. No institutional affiliation discernable. Gregory
> shows up as an editor of some of Smarandache's publications. This will
> make for a great addition to [[Florentin Smarandache]] :-)

Identity of IP addresses is not proof of identity of people. As has been
mentioned before (in the context of the GNU FDL and its requirement of
listing authors), IP addresses only identify the computers people are
working on, or possibly not even that. If people work in the same subject
area, they might meet up and work on the same network, quite possibly
resulting in the same IP addresses showing up. Not that I'm saying I
necessarily believe this applies in this case, but the identities cannot
be said to be proven.

By the way, is there a Wikipedia policy on the matter of lying about one's
identity? Hiding one's identity is clearly an accepted practice around
here, but is actively lying about it a different matter?

And while we're on the subject of IP addresses, how come these days the
Wikipedia only tells me that I'm "Not logged in", instead of showing my IP
address, as it used to do...?

Oliver

+-------------------------------------------+
| Oliver Pereira                            |
| Dept. of Electronics and Computer Science |
| University of Southampton                 |
| omp199 at ecs.soton.ac.uk                    |
+-------------------------------------------+


subject: [WikiEN-l] Micheal again

body:
Mav wrote in small part:

>Micheal is back again as user:Punk.

Cute.  He's using our "reverted to last edit by ..."
edit summary template to baldly lie (and mock).

>That way we can at least easily complain to the ISP's
>of our persistent vandals.
>I imagine that they would do something if they got a
>constant stream of complaints about one of their
>users.

Even AOL?  (Not that we shouldn't try!)

-- Toby


from_name: Karl Eichwalder

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Baltic, Central European, Russian fonts in Wikipedia

in_reply_to:
<002001c32f3c$fa83c9f0$a6d6b6d5@reinis1r8penz7> (wikipedia@inbox.lv's
 message of "Tue, 10 Jun 2003 13:42:23 +0300")

body:
"Wikipedia at inbox.lv" <wikipedia at inbox.lv> writes:

> Hi! Can anyone tell me, please, what to do with characters (Baltic
> fonts) which do not appear correctly in lv.wikipedia.com? I can see,
> Czechs have solved similar problem. Typing ā and ņ is quite
> silly, doesn't it? Especially because every third character in Latvian
> looks like this.:) Please, help me! I am starting Latvian Wikipedia,
> and it cannot develop until the problem is solved.

Some German texts are also affected (e.g., articles on Polonian, Czech,
Hungarian, etc. cities or persons).

I'm editing outside of the browser using Emacs from CVS trunk in an
UTF-8 environment; I feed Emacs via cut-and-paste.  These functions seem
to du the trick for me:

(defun to-wiki ()
  (interactive)
  (let ((buf (buffer-name)))
    (with-temp-buffer
      (let ((tbuf (buffer-name)))
	(save-excursion
	  (set-buffer buf)
	  (shell-command-on-region (point-min) (point-max)
				   "recode -d ..h2,h2.." tbuf))
	(kill-ring-save (point-min) (point-max))))))

(defun from-wiki ()
  (interactive)
  (save-excursion
    (shell-command-on-region (point-min) (point-max)
			     "recode -d ..html|recode html.." nil t)))

--
                                                         |      ,__o
http://www.gnu.franken.de/ke/                            |    _-\_<,
ke at suse.de (work) / keichwa at gmx.net (home)               |   (*)/'(*)


from_name: Fred Bauder

body:
When they start citing Wikipedia...

Fred

> From: sgilbert at nbnet.nb.ca
> Reply-To: wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
> Date: Wed, 11 Jun 2003 07:41:50 -0300
> To: wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
> Subject: [Wikipedia-l] Other encyclopedias taking notice?
>
> Maybe it's just my imagination, but it seems that some of the
> traditional encyclopedias are taking notice of Wikipedia. For
> example, Encyclopedia.com (which uses the Columbia Concise
> Encyclopedia) now has a "Today in History" front page. Births,
> deaths and events listed with links to appropriate articles. They
> also list "Top Searches", which wasn't there before.
>
> The Encyclopaedia Brittanica has as its HTML title: "the online
> encyclopedia you can trust." Is that a reference to that nasty wiki
> encyclopedia where anyone can add content?
>
> As Wikipedia becomes more well known in the mainstream, the
> established players may stop ignoring us and go on a direct
> offensive. That should be interesting.
>
> - Stephen Gilbert
> -------
> Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia
> http://www.wikipedia.org
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
> http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Fair use

body:
[Replies should go only to <wikipedia-l>.]

Axel Boldt wrote in part:

>Erik Moeller wrote:

>>The wiki-author doesn't add a picture, he adds a reference to a
>>picture.

>...with the intent and expectation that the image and the text be
>combined into a whole by the user's browser. It's a technical detail
>that this combining is done by the browser rather than by the server -
>had we used PDF rather than HTML as our distribution medium, then the
>combining would take place on the server.

I've decided that this is not at all a technical detail.
It's part of the point of both our design and HTML's design
that the same image can be dynamically combined
with several different pieces of text.
Indeed, if we used PDF and had to combine things on our server,
*then* we might have an argument that this was merely a technical detail,
in an attempt to wriggle out of the GFDL's restrictions.
But with HTML, the technology is following the authors' intent precisely.

>>Author Dan van der Vat, for example, was asked to pay
>>25 British pounds for quoting two sentences from
>>Churchill's History of the Second World War in his book
>>"The Atlantic Campaign". Sure: The legality is questionable.

>In other words: this would be laughed out of court.

Was it?

>>But don't kid yourself
>>into believing that nobody would ever consider quotes infringing.
>>Treating fair use of quotes and images entirely differently is
>>hypocritical and wrong.

>It is neither, since short textual quotes are quite different from
>images in at least two respects relevant to fair use.

>1) Quotes are typically a tiny fraction of the whole work, while images
>are typically 100% of the whole work.

This, I think, is an important point.
It came up long before in discussion of album covers.
It seems doubtful that our usage of these images
is truly "fair use" in the first place
(a separate issue from whether it violates the GFDL).
After all, the portion of *our* work that it constitutes is irrelevant
(and that's still 100%, since the image is the entire work for us too);
it's the portion of *their* work, and that's obviously 100%.

>2) There is no functioning market for the rights in short quotes, but
>there is a functioning market for the rights in images.

Yes, this also affects "fair use" law in the US.

>Now, I don't think Wikipedia is at any risk whatsoever: if somebody
>complains about an image, we simply take it down. We don't have money,
>so we won't get sued. The downstream users of our materials however may
>not share these luxuries, and in addition may have commercial interests
>which weakens their fair use defense considerably. In effect our fair
>use images shut out large classes of potential users of the
>encyclopedia.

It shuts out hardly any users, relatively speaking,
since it doesn't shut out any readers or writers.
What it shuts out is forkers, and others that would reproduce Wikipedia.
This is why it's important that we not claim that all image files
are covered under the GFDL, since many are no such thing.
IOW, it's the separation of the free images from the proprietary ones
that we need to be working on.

-- Toby


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Fair use


subject: [Wikitech-l] New username validation

body:
Eclecticology wrote:

>Far? seems to be confounding the
>two ideas, and he currently has the link from [[en:Libetarianism]]
>pointing to [[fr:lib?ralisme]] as though the two were equivalent.

You seem to be assuming the [[fr:lib?ralisme]]
is equivalent to [[en:Liberalism]].
My understanding is that it's actually
closer in meaning to [[en:Libertarianism]],
though [[en:Classical liberalism]] might be even better.

But I'm not sure either. ^_^

-- Toby


subject: [WikiEN-l] Communist Government

body:
To revisit the issue of spelling out the full extent of Communist artocities
in Wikipedia articles see:

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/11/books/11MCFA.html?th

Fred


subject: [WikiEN-l] bird names etc.

body:
mav

The only recent mammal book I've bought is "Whales, Dolphins and Porpoises",
which capitalises, which is the practice I've used in the cetacean articles.

I know there is no ownership of articles, but you must see that it is to say
the least irritating when you put hours of work into articles when people
whose make no contributions to these articles beyond copyedits (yes know that's
vauable too) make sweeping changes to what appears to be standard practice
elsewhere.

I've conscientiously stuck to what appeared to be the agreed policy, only to
find that it isn't agreed anymore. I've deliberately avoided fauna other than
birds and mammals because I don't know what the convention is for fish and
reptiles.

I can't really win on this-I've got too much real work on to spend a lot of
time on this debate for the umpteenth time, but failure to maintain an active
participation is only likely to weaken my position.

For mammals and birds, I can't see what's wrong with the current postion.
Somebody searching for blue whale or Blue Whale will find it. Under the proposed
lower case regime, a little knowledge will be a dangerous thing. I would
search for capitalised mammals, eg Gray Whale, and presumably not find them ( I
don't think it's wikien policy to provide capitalised redirects to all articles.)

Perhaps it's simpler only to do single word mammals, and make sure the name
is always at the start of a sentence, then nobody gets upset (sorry, being
facetious).

I just can't spare the time on this debate any longer. I'll stick to bird
articles, where at least there still appears to be a degree of tolerance, and
plenty to do on European, African and Asian species about 4,000 I should  guess.

Jim

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from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Fair use

body:
Jason Richey wrote:
> But how does that "enourmous amount of work" compare to the legal
> situation that everyone (or maybe half of everyone) seems to think we
> are in now.

Well, I don't think we're in any particular legal situation.  The
license is confusing and confining, but not terribly so.


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Fair use

body:
Axel Boldt wrote:
> Now, I don't think Wikipedia is at any risk whatsoever: if somebody
> complains about an image, we simply take it down. We don't have money,
> so we won't get sued. The downstream users of our materials however may
> not share these luxuries, and in addition may have commercial interests
> which weakens their fair use defense considerably. In effect our fair
> use images shut out large classes of potential users of the
> encyclopedia.

I agree with this assessment.  I would add to this a general concern
that our use of images under "fair use" prevents the rise of a
stronger demand for really free sources of images.


from_name: Erik Moeller

body:
Axel-
>> The wiki-author doesn't add a picture, he adds a reference to a
>> picture.

> ....with the intent and expectation that the image and the text be
> combined into a whole by the user's browser.

What matters in law is the text of the FDL, because that's what we're
dealing with. The FDL states that aggregation with "separate and
independent" works is acceptable. The wiki-author creates a combined work
of the previous work and the image reference -- with the expectation that
they will be *aggregated* on *some* users' systems. Texts and images are
separate works, stored separately, sometimes transferred together,
sometimes not. They do not constitute a single, individual work only
because some browsers display them together. This case is explicitly
treated in the FDL. Do you accept that there is a distinction between
aggregation and combination? Then where does combination end and
aggregation begin?

The classical example for aggregation is a CD-ROM of several works. But
just like a Wikipedia text with an image, the individual works are almost
certainly tied together via references and identifiers. Would a CD-ROM
that displays dynamically copyrighted, keyword-associated pictures when an
article is shown infringe the FDL? Hardly.

>> Many copyright holders see things differently. Author Dan van der
>> Vat, for example, was asked to pay 25 British pounds for quoting two
>> sentences from
>> Churchill's History of the Second World War in his book "The Atlantic
>> Campaign". Sure: The legality is questionable.

> In other words: this would be laughed out of court.

Maybe so, but would Wikipedia go to court?

> It is neither, since short textual quotes are quite different from
> images in at least two respects relevant to fair use.

> 1) Quotes are typically a tiny fraction of the whole work, while images
> are typically 100% of the whole work.

Even when they are "combined" with Wikipedia articles? ;-) At least now
you are interpreting the term "work" reasonably. The next step is to do so
not only when it suits your argument ..

> 2) There is no functioning market for the rights in short quotes, but
> there is a functioning market for the rights in images.

Mostly true, and we should be very careful in dealing with images that are
part of this market. This is the essence of a reasonable fair use doctrine
for Wikipedia: Try to figure out if someone may be interested in stopping
distribution of picture X, and if so, do not include it (possibly with
some rare exceptions of high political/historical significance).

> Now, I don't think Wikipedia is at any risk whatsoever: if somebody
> complains about an image, we simply take it down. We don't have money,
> so we won't get sued. The downstream users of our materials however may
> not share these luxuries,

That's why we will provide the flags in the image table.

> and in addition may have commercial interests
> which weakens their fair use defense considerably.

People who want to make money with Wikipedia can be expected to do some
manual work.

> In effect our fair
> use images shut out large classes of potential users of the
> encyclopedia.

So does the FDL. But we can make fair use optional.

Regards,

Erik


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Fair use


from_name: sgilbert at nbnet.nb.ca

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Other encyclopedias taking notice?

body:
Maybe it's just my imagination, but it seems that some of the
traditional encyclopedias are taking notice of Wikipedia. For
example, Encyclopedia.com (which uses the Columbia Concise
Encyclopedia) now has a "Today in History" front page. Births,
deaths and events listed with links to appropriate articles. They
also list "Top Searches", which wasn't there before.

The Encyclopaedia Brittanica has as its HTML title: "the online
encyclopedia you can trust." Is that a reference to that nasty wiki
encyclopedia where anyone can add content?

As Wikipedia becomes more well known in the mainstream, the
established players may stop ignoring us and go on a direct
offensive. That should be interesting.

- Stephen Gilbert
-------
Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia
http://www.wikipedia.org


from_name: Peter Gervai

body:
On Wed, Jun 11, 2003 at 04:19:04AM +0200, Karl Eichwalder wrote:
> "Wikipedia at inbox.lv" <wikipedia at inbox.lv> writes:
>
> > Hi! Can anyone tell me, please, what to do with characters (Baltic
> > fonts) which do not appear correctly in lv.wikipedia.com? I can see,
> > Czechs have solved similar problem. Typing ā and ņ is quite
> > silly, doesn't it? Especially because every third character in Latvian
> > looks like this.:) Please, help me! I am starting Latvian Wikipedia,
> > and it cannot develop until the problem is solved.
>
> Some German texts are also affected (e.g., articles on Polonian, Czech,
> Hungarian, etc. cities or persons).

Well, I type simply Hungarian (my input is UTF-8 I presume) and
everything works; some chars stay as they are (8859-1 for sure does) and
others convert "themselves" to ų and like. No problem so far. Probably
requires a fair browser utf-8 implementation though.

Peter


from_name: Geoffrey Burling

subject: [WikiEN-l] Please edit [[Wikipedia:Book sources]]

body:
On Wed, 11 Jun 2003, Erik Moeller wrote:

> It may have escaped public attention that we now have
>
>         [[Wikipedia:Book sources]],
>
> the text of which is fetched whenever a user clicks an ISBN number in an
> article (instead of the previous, hardcoded list of sellers). The text
> "MAGICNUMBER" on that page is replaced with the ISBN number the user is
> searching for when it is displayed, so you can add "magic" search links to
> any bookseller you like.
>
> Hopefully, this will allow us to address concerns regarding specific
> booksellers. I have started by adding links to all the listed sellers, so
> that you can conveniently read the article about Amazon.com before buying
> anything from them. We should also have library catalogs listed here, and
> maybe a note on the general problem of using ISBNs to locate books.
>
Actually, Erik, I discovered this feature last weekend, I like it an awful
lot. (I used it to add links to a couple of books at [[Constantine XI]].)

Out of curiousity, is there a criteria for which booksellers we include?
My favorite online bookseller -- Advanced Book Exchange
(http://www.abebooks.com) -- is not listed, & if appropriate I think this
webiste should be included.

Geoff
should be added.


from_name: Jason Richey

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Fair use

body:
This discussion is making my head spin...  Let me see if I can get the
basics in order for myself (please, let me know if I don't have it
right):

* Everyone basically agrees that the text (not including quotes, which
  I don't intend to discuss here) of Wikipedia is okay, even if the
  text refers to an image that is fair use.

* Everyone agrees that The en Wikipedia has some images that we are
  legally allowed to use (on the website) under fair use assuming that
  we don't claim they are GFDL.

* Most everyone agrees that there is little chance that we can get the
  copyright holders of every image to switch to a GFDL license.  This
  said, some people say that we can't distribute the images with the
  GFDL products, as it would violate the license.

* Most everyone has decided what they think, and will argue his/her
  opinion until the cows come home (and then some).

If I understand correctly, the problem is most evident when we
consider printed formats (like grandma's encyclopedia).  I don't think
that anyone has argued that we can distribute fair use images if we go
to a printed (combined) work.  So, fair use images should not be in a
printed version.

This said, it seems reasonable to say that articles that *NEED* an
image should have GFDL images only.  Articles that benefit from images
should use GFDL images or shouldn't talk about the images (don't say
"image below" or the like) as fair use images will not appear in a
printed version.

As I understand it, there are people who would argue that this is
unacceptable, and that some articles *NEED* an image where no GFDL
images is available.  I'd love to hear of 1 or 2 possibilities where
an article is unacceptable without an image, and where a GFDL picture
or drawing would not suffice.

--
"Jason C. Richey" <jasonr at bomis.com>


from_name: Christopher Mahan

subject: [WikiEN-l] capitalisation

body:
--- JFrost8401 at aol.com wrote:
> Another much less controversial difference seems to be the
> different use  of
> the full stop/period in abbreviations. US tends to retain the
> period in say
> St. Mary , or J. R. R. Tolkien, whereas many non-US users would
> drop the dot.
>
> Jim
>

the lord of the rings
the Lord of the Rings
The Lord Of The Rings
THE LORD OF THE RINGS

by
By

jrr tolkien
JRR Tolkien
J.R.R. Tolkien
j.r.r. tolkien

Silly/silly Huh/huh?

I say: let it be. (or was it Let It Be?)

=====
Christopher Mahan
chris_mahan at yahoo.com
818.943.1850 cell
http://www.christophermahan.com/

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Calendar - Free online calendar with sync to Outlook(TM).
http://calendar.yahoo.com


from_name: Ray Saintonge

body:
sgilbert at nbnet.nb.ca wrote:

>Maybe it's just my imagination, but it seems that some of the
>traditional encyclopedias are taking notice of Wikipedia. For
>example, Encyclopedia.com (which uses the Columbia Concise
>Encyclopedia) now has a "Today in History" front page. Births,
>deaths and events listed with links to appropriate articles. They
>also list "Top Searches", which wasn't there before.
>
>The Encyclopaedia Brittanica has as its HTML title: "the online
>encyclopedia you can trust." Is that a reference to that nasty wiki
>encyclopedia where anyone can add content?
>
>As Wikipedia becomes more well known in the mainstream, the
>established players may stop ignoring us and go on a direct
>offensive. That should be interesting.
>
Yeah, especially when it comes to protecting copyrights :-)

Ec


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Fair use

body:
Hmm...  I hadn't considerred webserving as distribution...  This may
explain why I have been so confused by the discussion as a whole.

Jason

Marco Krohn wrote:

> > * Everyone agrees that The en Wikipedia has some images that we are
> >   legally allowed to use (on the website) under fair use assuming that
> >   we don't claim they are GFDL.
>
> legally to use wrt "fair use": yes.
> But illegal to use because we are mixing GFDL and non-free content which is
> forbidden by GFDL. Note: Erik does not agree with this interpretation of
> GFDL.
> --
> Marco Krohn
> Theoretical Physics
> University of Hannover
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikipedia.org
> http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

--
"Jason C. Richey" <jasonr at bomis.com>


subject: [WikiEN-l] Just to throw this out there...

body:
Toby Bartels wrote:
> >Here's a set of flags that I think would work well enough for the
> >felching article:
>
> >sexuality
> >mature content
> >slang
>
> >I don't see how those are very controversial.
>
> "mature content" will definitely cause problems.
> You imply in the rest of what you write (not only in this post)
> ?what some would consider to be appropriate only for the mature?,
> but not only does "mature content" not say this literally,
> but also (as somebody else pointed out) that's extremely broad,
> and includes [[Christianity]].  So it won't be of much use.

Well, I don't agree.  The standards for what we mean by mature content
can be spelled out in sufficient detail and in an NPOV way so that
controversy is minimized.

But I'm not invested in that particular phrase.  Perhaps we could use
'explicit sexual content' to distinguish it from 'sexuality'.

> If I were writing the Wikipedia code, I wouldn't spend my time
> on writing support for these flags; that's better done (if at all)
> by another project that operates on top of Wikipedia

But this is important for Wikipedia the website, not just for
others.

Some people in this debate have taken a very POV position, i.e. that
wikipedia should shove this stuff down people's throats, and if
they're too prudish to deal with it, too bad ha ha.  I don't agree.

--Jimbo


subject: [WikiEN-l] capitalisation

body:
JFrost8401 at aol.com wrote:

> Another much less controversial difference seems to be the different
> use  of the full stop/period in abbreviations. US tends to retain the
> period in say St. Mary , or J. R. R. Tolkien, whereas many non-US
> users would drop the dot.
>
> Jim

Aarrggh!  This is a whole different issue.  I hope we can keep it
separate from capitalization..

I would add that Canadian usage is trending toward St-Mary (with a
hyphen) in response to developing a common usage for French and English.
 What you say about Tolkien is not accurate.  Fowler distinguishes
between abbreviations and contractions, and retains the full stop in
abbreviations.  In the acknowledgements for the third edition there is a
long list of names, many with initials instead of given names thus with
the punctuation as it appears there:  "Mr F. R. le P. Warner, Professor
Emer. Hugh E. Wilkinson"

Ec


from_name: Stevertigo

subject: [WikiEN-l] capitalisation

body:
> JT: The best solution is not to enforce AE capitalisation rules but simply
to
> recognise that different english users worldwide use different rules on
this
> issue and to leave it to users, depending on their linguistic culture, to
> decide on capitalisation just as they decide on spelling in American
> English, British English or the various subsets of the latter (Hiberno
> English, Australian English, etc.)
>

This is completely sensible and logical - though long winded. :) The way my
mind works is this - and I arrived at the same conclusion.

Someone says: "theres a problem with standardization."
(We all agree there is a problem.)
S: "The solution will involve a task"
P: "whats the task?"
S: "To henceforth make irrelevant all other styles of writing except the
*proper
one - and to purge and scour every entry in a 130,000 article document for
consistency."
P: "Oh."
Someone asks: "Any volunteers?"

"Any volunteers?"

"Anyone?"

"Hello?"

-SM


from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [WikiEN-l] bird names etc.

body:
Jim wrote:
>....make sweeping changes to what appears to be
>standard practice elsewhere.
>...

That begs the question since it has not been proven at
all that capitalization of any organisms outside of
the birds is standard. Many, many citations were given
to support the down-style, however.

>I would search for capitalised mammals, eg Gray
>Whale, and presumably not find them.
>...

Our search is case-insensitive so Blue Whale and blue
whale both return results for our article on blue
whales (whatever the current capitalization).

Capitalization of this animal's common name is simply
wrong since, as I have stated before, there is no
international standards committee that has made
special rules for naming mammals. Therefore we fall
back to standard rules of English grammer and
well-respected style guides for English. The great
majority of these, as has already been proven, support
the downstyle for the common names of organisms.

I do have to admit that I am intrigued by the
proposition of distinguishing species names with
capitals. But by own interest in doing so cannot
ignore standard rules of grammar and the fact that
outside of the birds common names are common nouns and
therefore capitalization is spurious.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

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subject: [WikiEN-l] capitalisation

body:
In a message dated 11/06/03 18:10:17 GMT Daylight Time, jtdirl at hotmail.com
writes:

>
> I had an interesting conversation today with a publisher and an academic on
> the issue of capitalisation. They made the following observations:
>
> 1. Capitalisation rules seem to differ between American English and British
> English (or rather American English and all forms of english other than AE).
>
> Whereas the former seems nowadays to be following a 'minimal use of caps'
> policy, non-AE english uses caps far more often.
>
> 2. This issue has caused considerable problems with American students who
> come to Europe for summer courses. Europeans see the non-use of caps as
> 'semi-literate' and regularly dock students marks for it. Americans see non
> AE use of caps as 'ludicrous' and over the top. (I know from personal
> experience that the few caps english of AE users has caused bitter anger in
> my university, where lecturers 'hit the roof' at AE users' insistence of
> lower-casing names of organisations, electoral processes, governmental
> offices, etc.)
>
> 3. Within many academic areas, a major battle has been waged on this issue.
> To the resentment of non-AE users, AE capitalisation rules increasingly tend
>
> to be followed. The reason is purely economic. Publishers see the US as
> their biggest market, and so publish books in AE or in non-AE but following
> some of the characteristics of AE in areas like capitalisation. (This has
> infuriated many non AE-using authors. Last week, one British English author
> threatened to sue her publisher for 'rewriting' her textbook in AE when it
> was aimed at a UK market. She accused them of 'dumbing down english to suit
> Americans'. Some authors, according to the publisher I was talking to, have
> insisted in their contracts that their books /not/ be rewritten in AE, even
> when an edition is launched in the US. (American authors may well equally
> have insisted that their books not be turned into non-AE. As the publisher I
>
> was speaking to is British she has no knowledge of such contracts if they
> exist in the US).
>
> If this is the case (and both the publisher and academic said so, while both
>
> expressing their dislike of AE capitalisation trends and what the latter
> called the 'wholescale manging of non-AE to suit publishers' profits by
> trampling over the language use of everyone who isn't American') that does
> explain the rows over capitalisation on wiki, and how it is AE users like
> Ec, Mav and Zoe who are so 'anti' capitalisation while it is users of other
> forms of english other than AE (Tannin, myself, etc) who want it. For if
> Mav, Ec etc were taught one set of rules on capitalisation usage, we were
> taught a different one and are infuriated by what, going by what we were
> taught, seems to be wiki's insistence on wrong use of capitals and non-use
> of capitals where they should be used.
>
> In the circumstances, we should apply to the same policy as we apply in
> general to American english versus British english, ie, respect difference
> and allow users to set the policy in an individual article, based on /their/
>
> usage of capitals in /their/ version of english. As most of the capitals
> issue involves AE users changing capitalisation applied by non AE users like
>
> Tannin in articles the non AE users have written (like on birds), it
> suggests that that process should stop and the rules on capitalisation
> should be amended accordingly. The issue is already causing enough rows
> outside wiki, with the increasing application of AE rules by publishing
> houses and style books causing major anger (the publisher said one author
> called it 'American linguistic imperialism', with AE rules being applied
> even though they conflict with all the grammar books used outside the US.)
> The best solution is not to enforce AE capitalisation rules but simply to
> recognise that different english users worldwide use different rules on this
>
> issue and to leave it to users, depending on their linguistic culture, to
> decide on capitalisation just as they decide on spelling in American
> English, British English or the various subsets of the latter (Hiberno
> English, Australian English, etc.)
>
> JT
>

Interesting; although I'd spotted some odd ( to a non-American) "missed"
capitals, in articles, it never occurred to me that there was a genuine cultural
difference.

It also explains why from the Europe/Oz viewpoint this debate looked a bit
like US v the rest, although I must admit that paranoia might also have been a
factor.

I think JT's email helps to explain how this controversy has arisen , and why
it has been so difficult to resolve.

Jim

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subject: [WikiEN-l] capitalisation

body:
Another much less controversial difference seems to be the different use  of
the full stop/period in abbreviations. US tends to retain the period in say
St. Mary , or J. R. R. Tolkien, whereas many non-US users would drop the dot.

Jim
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from_name: Toby Bartels

subject: [WikiEN-l] capitalisation

body:
Christopher Mahan wrote in part:

>jrr tolkien
>JRR Tolkien
>J.R.R. Tolkien
>j.r.r. tolkien

You forgot:
J. R. R. Tolkien

-- Toby
   An American against the dot! ^_^


from_name: Axel Boldt

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Fair use

body:
--- Erik Moeller <erik_moeller at gmx.de> wrote:
> Axel-
> >> The wiki-author doesn't add a picture, he adds a reference to a
> >> picture.
>
> > ....with the intent and expectation that the image and the text be
> > combined into a whole by the user's browser.
>
> What matters in law is the text of the FDL, because that's what we're
> dealing with.

Actually, what matters is the meaning of "derivative work", which is
defined in copyright law. If illustrating an article with a picture
creates a derivative work, GFDL applies automatically to the whole.

> This is the essence of a reasonable fair use
> doctrine for Wikipedia: Try to figure out if someone may be
> interested in stopping distribution of picture X, and if so, do not
> include it (possibly with some rare exceptions of high
> political/historical significance).

That does not make good policy: Wikipedia contributors have zero
incentive to do this research. They want to illustrate an article, and
quick. Finding the copyright holder and sending an email to ask whether
there is a functioning market for digital reproduction of this picture
would be way to much hassle. Should all fair-use pictures without this
proof be deleted?

> > and in addition may have commercial interests
> > which weakens their fair use defense considerably.
>
> People who want to make money with Wikipedia can be expected to do
> some manual work.

"The free encyclopedia", as in "freely modifiable and redistributable",
not "free for non-commercial use".

Axel

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body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:

>Toby Bartels wrote:

>>"mature content" will definitely cause problems.
>>You imply in the rest of what you write (not only in this post)
>>?what some would consider to be appropriate only for the mature?,
>>but not only does "mature content" not say this literally,
>>but also (as somebody else pointed out) that's extremely broad,
>>and includes [[Christianity]].  So it won't be of much use.

>Well, I don't agree.  The standards for what we mean by mature content
>can be spelled out in sufficient detail and in an NPOV way so that
>controversy is minimized.

If you spell it out in such a way that it includes explicity sexual content
but not explicit religious content, then how is this NPOV,
given an earlier poster (Ec?) that considers the latter harmful to kids.
(And if Ec is joking, I have a friend that seriously believes that
about Christianity in particular.)

>But I'm not invested in that particular phrase.  Perhaps we could use
>'explicit sexual content' to distinguish it from 'sexuality'.

If ?explicit sexual content? is what you meant all along by "mature content",
then let's say "explicit sexual content".

>>If I were writing the Wikipedia code, I wouldn't spend my time
>>on writing support for these flags; that's better done (if at all)
>>by another project that operates on top of Wikipedia

>But this is important for Wikipedia the website, not just for
>others.

Is it?  If we have an Edupedia website built on a Sifter model,
then schools can block Wikipedia as long as they don't block Edupedia.
And the Sifter model allows readers of Edupedia to edit Wikipedia
(potentially seemlessly).

>Some people in this debate have taken a very POV position, i.e. that
>wikipedia should shove this stuff down people's throats, and if
>they're too prudish to deal with it, too bad ha ha.  I don't agree.

Although Stevertigo's rhetoric can go (IMO) over the top,
I don't think that anybody actually advocates this position.
We should put explicit material on pages with titles
like [[Felching]], [[Nigger]], and [[Transubstantiation]] (^_^),
but what else would you expect on such a page?
As with any article, the first sentence
should briefly provide a general context,
so even if you go in not knowing what "felching" means,
you see "'''Felching''' is a [[sexual practice]] in which ...",
and you're warned -- nothing is shoved down your throat.
([[Felching]] actually doesn't begin that way right now,
so let me fix it right up ....)

-- Toby


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Fair use

body:
--- Jason Richey <jasonr at bomis.com> wrote:

> This said, it seems reasonable to say that articles that *NEED* an
> image should have GFDL images only.  Articles that benefit from
> images
> should use GFDL images or shouldn't talk about the images (don't say
> "image below" or the like) as fair use images will not appear in a
> printed version.

I don't think any article *NEEDS* a picture; any such article should be
rewritten to be usable by blind users and other text-mode browsers. Of
course, many articles *BENEFIT* immensely from a picture. In the few
cases where no suitable GFDL or public domain picture can be located,
linking to a site containing a non-free picture seems to be sufficient.

Axel

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body:
--- Toby Bartels <toby+wikipedia at math.ucr.edu> wrote:
> Axel Boldt wrote in part:
>
> >Erik Moeller wrote:
>
> >>The wiki-author doesn't add a picture, he adds a reference to a
> >>picture.
>
> >...with the intent and expectation that the image and the text be
> >combined into a whole by the user's browser. It's a technical detail
> >that this combining is done by the browser rather than by the server
> >- had we used PDF rather than HTML as our distribution medium, then
> >the combining would take place on the server.
>
> I've decided that this is not at all a technical detail.
> It's part of the point of both our design and HTML's design
> that the same image can be dynamically combined
> with several different pieces of text.
> Indeed, if we used PDF and had to combine things on our server,
> *then* we might have an argument that this was merely a technical
> detail,
> in an attempt to wriggle out of the GFDL's restrictions.
> But with HTML, the technology is following the authors' intent
> precisely.

I guess that's what it all comes down to. Here's how I would try to
convince a non-technical judge of my interpretation: "Assuming Mr. Toby
is correct, the New York Times could freely take one of Wikipedia's
GFDL images taken by Mr. Mav and use it to illustrate a front page
article of its web version, without any license problems or negative
repercussions. But if they were to include the image into their paper
version, they'd have to license the whole article (newspaper?) under
GFDL. Your honor, isn't that obviously bollocks, isn't the distribution
medium a mere technical detail, since anybody can simply print out the
web version?"
  -- "Yes of course, oh eloquent attorney."

Axel

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body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:

>Toby Bartels wrote:
>
>>>Here's a set of flags that I think would work well enough for the
>>>felching article:
>>>
>>>sexuality
>>>mature content
>>>slang
>>>
>>>I don't see how those are very controversial.
>>>
>>"mature content" will definitely cause problems.
>>You imply in the rest of what you write (not only in this post)
>>?what some would consider to be appropriate only for the mature?,
>>but not only does "mature content" not say this literally,
>>but also (as somebody else pointed out) that's extremely broad,
>>and includes [[Christianity]].  So it won't be of much use.
>>
>
>Well, I don't agree.  The standards for what we mean by mature content
>can be spelled out in sufficient detail and in an NPOV way so that
>controversy is minimized.
>
>But I'm not invested in that particular phrase.  Perhaps we could use
>'explicit sexual content' to distinguish it from 'sexuality'.
>
>>If I were writing the Wikipedia code, I wouldn't spend my time
>>on writing support for these flags; that's better done (if at all)
>>by another project that operates on top of Wikipedia
>>
>
>But this is important for Wikipedia the website, not just for
>others.
>
>Some people in this debate have taken a very POV position, i.e. that
>wikipedia should shove this stuff down people's throats, and if
>they're too prudish to deal with it, too bad ha ha.  I don't agree.
>
To be effective any kind of flagging system must avoid subjective
determinations.  Words like "explicit" and "mature" can lead to some
serious disagreements that can't easily be resolved.  The following
spectrum can be more objectively determined for photographs.
    1. Contains images of sex acts
    2. Contains close-up images of genitals
    3. Contains whole-body nudity
    4. Contains partial nudity
    5. Shows people in underclothes
    6. Shows suggestive photos of fully clad people

There is a gradation here, and that gives a greater opportunity to
choose how much is acceptable.  Putting these in some coding system
would allow these to be presented with only a few alpha-numeric characters.

Ec


from_name: koyaanis qatsi

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: filtering, etc.

body:
>The standards for what we mean by mature content
>can be spelled out in sufficient detail and in an
>NPOV way so that controversy is minimized.

I don't believe this is possible without context for
each specific article.  Look at all the controversy
around why to include people on certain lists--it
*begs for,* no, *demands* justification.  Without
justification it will look POV and arbitrary.

>Some people in this debate have taken a very POV
>position, i.e. that wikipedia should shove this
>stuff down people's throats, and if they're too
>prudish to deal with it, too bad ha ha.  I don't
>agree.

Some people in this debate have taken the illogical
and provably false position that ideas of what is
"explicit" are absolute, and that people disagreeing
aren't being logical, but are being POV, ha ha.  These
same people also seem to believe that labeling
articles with controversial metadata will somehow
itself be immune from controversy.  Again this is an
assertion that is arguable at best and provably false
at worst.  I do not believe that Jimmy doesn't
understand what I and others are saying, but that,
rather, that he has decided category schemes are A
Good Thing, and that filtering is A Good Thing, and
that filtering wikipedia's content in violation of
NPOV will be A Good Thing, in spite of violating the
understood social contract that whatever we write
about, if it's verifiable and from a NPOV, will be
left in plain view.

Nonetheless, for the sake of argument, let's assume
that applying categories to our articles for the sake
of filtering them from the innocent eyes of children
can be handled without controversy, in spite of the
general controversy already stirred up on the mailing
list.  Let us assume also that it can be done without
running afoul of NPOV, and that this wikipedia decree
of what is and is not Safe and Good and Morally Just
for children to know will be accepted and endorsed by
wikipedians in general.  So, let's set about
categorizing articles.

Given that a category scheme with, say, 3million
categories would be worse than useless for the purpose
of filtering content, we'll set a few categories.  One
of them, as Jimbo has indicated, will be Crime.  What
articles are relevant to crime?  Koyanis Qatsi
nominates [[George W. Bush]] for his cocaine habit,
but Powaqqatsi says "wait, wait, that's hearsay; we
can't include that."  Ok, a fair point.  Two paths
diverged in a POV debate, and which does wikipedia
take?  Let's say wikipedia decides that the metadata
crime can be added to any article with a mention of a
crime, whether it's been proven or not.  So mav writes
an article on the well-known layabout gadfly KQ,
because he has it on good faith from a friend that KQ
has once been convicted of jaywalking; and then he
adds the metadata:crime to the article.  KQ
"retaliates" and adds crime to the articles on Bromide
and Arsenic, because they've been used in some crimes
he knows about, and children shouldn't have such
notions of poisoning put into their heads.  Well,
AxelBoldt worked 812 hours apiece on those articles,
and he won't have his work censored, so he adds
metadata:crime to [[Sid Davis]] because, hell, it does
mention molestation.  Oh, this is going great.
Anthere adds metadata:crime to [[O.J. Simpson]]; Bryan
Derksen removes it because he was found innocent in
criminal court; Brion Vibber restores it because he
was found guilty in civil court.  [[24]] steps in and
says "why should crime in the U.S. be the deciding
factor?  What about crime in the U.K., or Bhutan, or
the Apache nation?"  So Henry Kissinger gets
metadata:Crime because Chile wants him extradited to
stand trial for war crimes.  Jimbo steps in and adds
crime to the Clintons for their -gate and for Bill's
tendency to keep his zipper down, and Ed Poor adds the
metadata to the articles on lead pipes, knives,
swords, Sherman tanks, and letter openers (a mystery
crime favorite).

It's a ridiculous situation.  Wikipedia comes to its
senses and says "wait, the only articles that will get
the metadata:crime will be articles on *people* who
have been tried for and convicted of a crime."  A
better path.  (though, I might add, still one that is
provably illogical, given that courts reviewing the
same evidence as other courts often overturn verdicts,
and so even facts of a crime are open to
interpretation).  Anyway, so metadata:crime is
inserted into articles on [[Randal Dale Adams]], later
tried again and proven innocent, and [[Jesus
Christ]]--no appeal for him--and [[Nelson Mandela]],
that agitator and limerock miner.  Nice look, the
squint.  Pizza Puzzle adds it to [[Adolf Hitler]] but
Notheruser says "wait, wait, he was never tried and
convicted; he committed suicide and didn't have a
chance to defend himself."  So the label is removed,
and is removed from [[Richard Nixon]] and [[Lee Harvey
Oswald]], and [[Jack the Ripper]].  Hey, this works
great.

A New York Times writer has been lurking about the
'pedia after writing the article on it awhile back,
and notes the hubbub, but perceives it as the POV
ravings of a seriously deranged professional body, and
has his big story: WIKIPEDIA: MANDELA A CRIMINAL,
HITLER NOT.  Meanwhile all of us on wikien here the
pattering of feet down a hall, which is the sound of
Jimbo running for a PR agent.  And what have we
proven?  Children shouldn't know about most of the
U.S. presidents--it's not safe--and also not Mandela,
because why?  Um, I guess knowing about a crime is
instrumental in becoming a criminal.  We have to warn
the judges.  The public is in danger.  Secret courts!
We need secret courts!  Ashcroft, hurry up with it!

Now: another point.  Jimmy, you said you wouldn't
change wikipedia's content for China's government.
Fair enough. But, China is home to *a lot* of people.
If you're not willing to make concessions for them,
why make concessions for the middle-class
middle-of-the-road segment of any other country,
especially one that's home to far fewer people?
Especially since it can't be done in a logical and
impartial way, not to mention one that won't violate
NPOV and stir up useless, counterproductive
controversy.  You're poking a hornet's nest.

sarcastically, bitterly, but still with a point.

kq

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from_name: alvaro

subject: [Wikitech-l] New username validation

body:
Toby Bartels wrote:

>Eclecticology wrote:
>
>
>
>>Far? seems to be confounding the
>>two ideas, and he currently has the link from [[en:Libetarianism]]
>>pointing to [[fr:lib?ralisme]] as though the two were equivalent.
>>
>>
>
>You seem to be assuming the [[fr:lib?ralisme]]
>is equivalent to [[en:Liberalism]].
>My understanding is that it's actually
>closer in meaning to [[en:Libertarianism]],
>though [[en:Classical liberalism]] might be even better.
>
>But I'm not sure either. ^_^
>
>
>-- Toby
>_______________________________________________
>Wikitech-l mailing list
>Wikitech-l at wikipedia.org
>http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>
 From here, in continental Europe, it seems (to me ! I'm not even 93%
sure) that [[fr:lib?ralisme]] is somewhere between [[en:liberalism]] and
[[en:classical liberalism]]. So I moved the link on [[fr:lib?ralism]]
from [[en:libertarianism]] to [[en:classical liberalism]].  Far? did not
react (for the moment), I conclude that he agrees. Maybe because he also
contributed to [[en:classical liberalism]]  ;-)   ?

I am afraid that we went away a lot from the initial subject "New
username validation".

Merci for your advices.

Alvaro


from_name: Tim Starling

body:
Can a developer please check the IP addresses for the users listed on
[[User:Smarandache fan]]? The situation has developed somewhat, and this
user's behaviour may now be considered bannable, even ignoring the multiple
personalities. Please consider this request urgent.

I'll refer to this user as "SF".

SF accused AxelBoldt of anti-semitism and anti-americanism, on
[[Talk:Florentin Smarandache]], on the basis of a misreprentation of Axel's
personal web page.

I said the journal "multiple valued logic, an international journal" is
defunct, and I was immediately labelled a "liar" by SF. The journal was
renamed a few years ago, and changed web sites, with no indication that
anything had changed on the original website.

We've all been referred to as hating neutrosophy and Smarandache, and there
are implications that we're part of some sort of evil conspiracy to
undermine it. For example:

"Ooo, you don't play a fear game, you try to undermine by any means these
neutrosophics. You have preconceptions... And I estimated young people as
being honest, correct... user:arizonaval "

Interestingly, a similar situation has developed on Talk:Cartographic
Congress, not that I mean to imply any direct relationship between the two
groups: SF the one hand and Harry Potter, Qqq and Luther Blisset on the
other. I'm not angling for support or banning on this one, I just thought
it's an interesting story. Another honest mistake earned me this, from Qqq:

"Dear tim, i have just read your comment on VfD: LARC is not the same as the
Limehouse Town Hall. why not come here and find out instead of speculating
and writing bare faced lies!!?? Please stop interfering with stuff u do not
understand or know about! by your own admission u know little about art, and
are pretty ill qualified to make encyclopaediac comments on the subject/s.
it is as if i were to start denounceing quantum physics as an attempt by
certain scientists top place themselves into the conceptual field vacated by
god and thus ensure never ending government or military funding for whatever
nonsensical strand of research crosses their drug-crazed minds!! UserQqq"

I'm "ill qualified" due to my stated lack of knowledge in art. However, I
consider myself capable of spotting pataphysical BS, much to the chagrin of
the pataphysicians.

-- Tim Starling.

_________________________________________________________________
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subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Fair use

body:
Jimmy-
> I agree with this assessment.  I would add to this a general concern
> that our use of images under "fair use" prevents the rise of a
> stronger demand for really free sources of images.

I believe this argument is fallacious, since most of our instances of fair
use are in cases where it isn't realistically possible to get a "really
free" source. We're not going to put up an image of a famous building as
fair use, because we can get a Wikipedian to make a photograph. But we
can't make free photographs of deceased celebrities in any appealing
state.

Of course, we can try to get permissions (and we can, and should, try to
do so with all of our fair use images), but our main problem with doing so
is that we effectively require the copyright holders to relicense their
works under the FDL or to put them in the public domain. Most people
aren't going to do either.

Regards,

Erik


from_name: Daniel Ehrenberg

subject: [WikiEN-l] bird names etc.

body:
Birds should equally be common nouns. Just because the bird community has come upon a different consensus than everyone else doesn't mean we should follow it for birds and, confusingly, not other animals. We need to choose one standard and stick to it, but it doesn't really matter which one to me. Or, we actually don't even need a standard. Just make the appropriate redirects.
--LittleDan

Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com> wrote:
Jim wrote:
>....make sweeping changes to what appears to be
>standard practice elsewhere.
>...

That begs the question since it has not been proven at
all that capitalization of any organisms outside of
the birds is standard. Many, many citations were given
to support the down-style, however.

>I would search for capitalised mammals, eg Gray
>Whale, and presumably not find them.
>...

Our search is case-insensitive so Blue Whale and blue
whale both return results for our article on blue
whales (whatever the current capitalization).

Capitalization of this animal's common name is simply
wrong since, as I have stated before, there is no
international standards committee that has made
special rules for naming mammals. Therefore we fall
back to standard rules of English grammer and
well-respected style guides for English. The great
majority of these, as has already been proven, support
the downstyle for the common names of organisms.

I do have to admit that I am intrigued by the
proposition of distinguishing species names with
capitals. But by own interest in doing so cannot
ignore standard rules of grammar and the fact that
outside of the birds common names are common nouns and
therefore capitalization is spurious.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

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body:
It may have escaped public attention that we now have

        [[Wikipedia:Book sources]],

the text of which is fetched whenever a user clicks an ISBN number in an
article (instead of the previous, hardcoded list of sellers). The text
"MAGICNUMBER" on that page is replaced with the ISBN number the user is
searching for when it is displayed, so you can add "magic" search links to
any bookseller you like.

Hopefully, this will allow us to address concerns regarding specific
booksellers. I have started by adding links to all the listed sellers, so
that you can conveniently read the article about Amazon.com before buying
anything from them. We should also have library catalogs listed here, and
maybe a note on the general problem of using ISBNs to locate books.

Regards,

Erik


subject: [WikiEN-l] capitalisation

body:
In my opinion, making a gigantic number of redirects to whatever page the article is currently at is the simplest proposed solution because it wouldn't involve any actual editing. Many of these redirects already exist

Stevertigo <stevertigo at attbi.com> wrote:> JT: The best solution is not to enforce AE capitalisation rules but simply
to
> recognise that different english users worldwide use different rules on
this
> issue and to leave it to users, depending on their linguistic culture, to
> decide on capitalisation just as they decide on spelling in American
> English, British English or the various subsets of the latter (Hiberno
> English, Australian English, etc.)
>

This is completely sensible and logical - though long winded. :) The way my
mind works is this - and I arrived at the same conclusion.

Someone says: "theres a problem with standardization."
(We all agree there is a problem.)
S: "The solution will involve a task"
P: "whats the task?"
S: "To henceforth make irrelevant all other styles of writing except the
*proper
one - and to purge and scour every entry in a 130,000 article document for
consistency."
P: "Oh."
Someone asks: "Any volunteers?"

"Any volunteers?"

"Anyone?"

"Hello?"

-SM

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body:
Jimmy Wales <jwales at bomis.com> wrote: Toby Bartels wrote:
> >Here's a set of flags that I think would work well enough for the
> >felching article:
>
> >sexuality
> >mature content
> >slang
>
> >I don't see how those are very controversial.
>
> "mature content" will definitely cause problems.
> You imply in the rest of what you write (not only in this post)
> ?what some would consider to be appropriate only for the mature?,
> but not only does "mature content" not say this literally,
> but also (as somebody else pointed out) that's extremely broad,
> and includes [[Christianity]]. So it won't be of much use.

Well, I don't agree. The standards for what we mean by mature content
can be spelled out in sufficient detail and in an NPOV way so that
controversy is minimized.

But I'm not invested in that particular phrase. Perhaps we could use
'explicit sexual content' to distinguish it from 'sexuality'.
Some think that any type of 'sexuality' content should be equally be censored. Maybe that should have a seperate flag.> If I were writing the Wikipedia code, I wouldn't spend my time
> on writing support for these flags; that's better done (if at all)
> by another project that operates on top of Wikipedia

But this is important for Wikipedia the website, not just for
others.

Some people in this debate have taken a very POV position, i.e. that
wikipedia should shove this stuff down people's throats, and if
they're too prudish to deal with it, too bad ha ha. I don't agree.

--Jimbo
That creates a paradox. Any one scheme for censorship (or even flagging) is POV, while a lack of one is also POV. We're stuck. So let's choose the choice which will broaden our audience the most: flagging built into the software.

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subject: [WikiEN-l] capitalisation

body:
--- Toby Bartels <toby+wikipedia at math.ucr.edu> wrote:
> Christopher Mahan wrote in part:
>
> >jrr tolkien
> >JRR Tolkien
> >J.R.R. Tolkien
> >j.r.r. tolkien
>
> You forgot:
> J. R. R. Tolkien
>
>
> -- Toby

Well, now that's whitespace, isn't it?

ARRRGGGGHHH!!!

=====
Christopher Mahan
chris_mahan at yahoo.com
818.943.1850 cell
http://www.christophermahan.com/

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subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: filtering, etc.

body:
Sounds like KQ has blown his cover.  Now we all know he's a scriptwriter
for "Saturday Night Live". :-)
Ec

koyaanis qatsi wrote:

>Nonetheless, for the sake of argument, let's assume
>that applying categories to our articles for the sake
>of filtering them from the innocent eyes of children
>can be handled without controversy, in spite of the
>general controversy already stirred up on the mailing
>list.  Let us assume also that it can be done without
>running afoul of NPOV, and that this wikipedia decree
>of what is and is not Safe and Good and Morally Just
>for children to know will be accepted and endorsed by
>wikipedians in general.  So, let's set about
>categorizing articles.
>
>Given that a category scheme with, say, 3million
>categories would be worse than useless for the purpose
>of filtering content, we'll set a few categories.  One
>of them, as Jimbo has indicated, will be Crime.  What
>articles are relevant to crime?  Koyanis Qatsi
>nominates [[George W. Bush]] for his cocaine habit,
>but Powaqqatsi says "wait, wait, that's hearsay; we
>can't include that."  Ok, a fair point.  Two paths
>diverged in a POV debate, and which does wikipedia
>take?  Let's say wikipedia decides that the metadata
>crime can be added to any article with a mention of a
>crime, whether it's been proven or not.  So mav writes
>an article on the well-known layabout gadfly KQ,
>because he has it on good faith from a friend that KQ
>has once been convicted of jaywalking; and then he
>adds the metadata:crime to the article.  KQ
>"retaliates" and adds crime to the articles on Bromide
>and Arsenic, because they've been used in some crimes
>he knows about, and children shouldn't have such
>notions of poisoning put into their heads.  Well,
>AxelBoldt worked 812 hours apiece on those articles,
>and he won't have his work censored, so he adds
>metadata:crime to [[Sid Davis]] because, hell, it does
>mention molestation.  Oh, this is going great.
>Anthere adds metadata:crime to [[O.J. Simpson]]; Bryan
>Derksen removes it because he was found innocent in
>criminal court; Brion Vibber restores it because he
>was found guilty in civil court.  [[24]] steps in and
>says "why should crime in the U.S. be the deciding
>factor?  What about crime in the U.K., or Bhutan, or
>the Apache nation?"  So Henry Kissinger gets
>metadata:Crime because Chile wants him extradited to
>stand trial for war crimes.  Jimbo steps in and adds
>crime to the Clintons for their -gate and for Bill's
>tendency to keep his zipper down, and Ed Poor adds the
>metadata to the articles on lead pipes, knives,
>swords, Sherman tanks, and letter openers (a mystery
>crime favorite).
>
>It's a ridiculous situation.  Wikipedia comes to its
>senses and says "wait, the only articles that will get
>the metadata:crime will be articles on *people* who
>have been tried for and convicted of a crime."  A
>better path.  (though, I might add, still one that is
>provably illogical, given that courts reviewing the
>same evidence as other courts often overturn verdicts,
>and so even facts of a crime are open to
>interpretation).  Anyway, so metadata:crime is
>inserted into articles on [[Randal Dale Adams]], later
>tried again and proven innocent, and [[Jesus
>Christ]]--no appeal for him--and [[Nelson Mandela]],
>that agitator and limerock miner.  Nice look, the
>squint.  Pizza Puzzle adds it to [[Adolf Hitler]] but
>Notheruser says "wait, wait, he was never tried and
>convicted; he committed suicide and didn't have a
>chance to defend himself."  So the label is removed,
>and is removed from [[Richard Nixon]] and [[Lee Harvey
>Oswald]], and [[Jack the Ripper]].  Hey, this works
>great.
>
>sarcastically, bitterly, but still with a point.
>