body:
james-

> I think Erik's decision is misguided and wrong, as he would have
> realised if he followed the debate in detail. The problem arose when on
> person tried to insert a semi-literate POV rant against catholicism onto
> the page.

First, let me point out that I'm not very happy with the tone you are
using towards new users who make mistakes. You're right, of course, that
Nostrum's additions were highly biased, factually inaccurate and grossly
misplaced. I read them. But calling people semi-literate or vandals does
not exactly help in turning them into valuable contributors.

People come to Wikipedia and are amazed by being able to add information.
We encourage them to do so. Be bold!, we say. So they add what they
believe is right, at the best of their ability. If you check the edit
history, you'll note that Nostrum actually made attempts to follow NPOV. I
believe if he had been encouraged a bit more softly, nicely, the whole
thing would not have turned that ugly as fast. WikiLove is about giving
people the benefit of the doubt, and not attributing to malice what can be
explained with simple ignorance.

> The author outrageously also equated paedophilia with homosexuality.

He used the headline "Homosexual abuse in catholicism", which is certainly
misleading but not necessarily meant as an equation of pedophilia with
homosexuality. It is an unfortunate fact that the large majority of
pedophiles are interested in boys -- that's why these groups (well, not
the Catholics, really) call themselves "Boylover associations", have sites
like boylinks.net and so on. There are also "girllovers", but these are a
minority. I can cite studies on this if you are interested.

> I removed the nonsense he kept putting in the article and put a critique of
> it on the talk page. JHK, referring to the additions, commented 'BTW, I also
> find Nostrum's stuff unreadable and his posture amusing.' Harris7 in one
> revertion "Substantial excision of anti-catholic rant" and in another case
> 'The recent mods were highly POV and rather nonsensical '' Nostrum's
> justifications included ''added overbearing proof to people who would like
> to live in big holes under bridges, Say hi to sammy for me'' ''If you think
> there is POV in homosexual abuse in Catholocism then take it out, don't
> delete it, remember, fix, not censor, otherwise I will list you as a censor
> and you don't want to be on my bad side''

I saw these edit comments and this is what I am referring to when I use
the word "ugly". If the whole matter had been addressed calmly on the talk
page of the article and the user talk page, we might not have seen
Nostrum's "bad side" so quickly. I think he made some attempts to
understand and follow our guidelines, and I will certainly not label him a
vandal -- the vandalism label is for different types of actions.

> 172 commented: 'I know that I've been warned against this, but I'd be
> tempted to protect this page from that garbage.' -172

See, this is the problem. 172 was aware of the guidelines but chose to
violate them because he felt he was sufficiently backed up. And of course
he was right, to a degree -- with you by his side, what could go wrong?
But these guidelines are there for a reason. We do not give people sysop
status so that they can act as editors and choose which content is
appropriate and which isn't. Such editorial decisions are limited to
weeding out obvious junk, and much as I agree that these edits were
biased, inaccurate or flat out nonsensical, they do not meet the sysop
definition of junk, especially his later edits.

172 had already taken a strong position in the discussion, where others
did come out in Nostrum's support and tried to work with him. But unlike
these others, 172 enforced his position by protecting the page, knowing
that he would receive support for doing so from some participants. But it
doesn't matter if you do or don't support 172's decision -- what matters
is that sysops are not supposed to do these things, because this leads us
down a slippery slope where we end up with a cabal that makes decisions
for the unenlightened masses. I would think that people from a leftist
political perspective would be more sensitive to such issues of developing
power structures.

But I would not have revoked 172's sysop privileges if he had just agreed
to ask someone else who did not participate in the debate to protect the
page, as our guidelines recommend. He flat out refused doing so and
reprotected the page after I had unprotected it, without discussing the
matter first. He now says that he refuses to "apologize". I never asked
him to apologize, I asked him to follow our protected page guidelines. If
he doesn't want to do that, he should not be a sysop.

I will not reinstate Abe's sysop status until one of these two things
happens:
1) He agrees to follow our protected page guidelines and not to protect
pages in edit wars in which he is involved
2) Jimbo asks me to reinstate his sysop status.

Given that 1) is not likely to happen, the best course of action for 172
at this point is to talk to Jimbo.

> Furthermore Erik's decision to leave the page unprotected was clearly wrong.

I'm not so sure. Protecting pages has increasingly become questionable as
a remedy against edit wars now that we have a very large group of sysops.
This is dangerous, because it makes it easy for sysops to ignore the rules
and to just continue editing the protected page while normal users cannot.
Again, this blurs the sysop/editor distinction and leads us down a
slippery slope which we should avoid.

If a user cannot be worked with, the logical consequence should be to ban
that user. But until we do that, we should make all reasonable attempts to
be friendly and cooperative. I don't expect you to accept nonsense in
articles. I just ask you to be a little less aggressive. Wikipedia is not
Nupedia. Articles can be in a bad state for a couple of hours -- just work
things out calmly and explain what is wrong without resorting to words
like "semi-literate", "garbage", "outrageous", "laughing stock", "doesn't
know the most elementary facts", "hideously written", "gibberish" ..

Let's say you're a reasonably smart 19-year old atheist who thinks the
misdeeds of the Catholic church should really be exposed, and comes across
this free editable encyclopedia. You add a little stuff without
researching it, and immediately people tell you that you're worthless,
your edits are bullshit, crap, nonsense etc. Your heart starts racing:
these guys attacked you. Nobody should talk to you like that. So you write
a hasty response without even thinking about it. Then you come to your
senses and try to understand what these people are babbling about. Your
edits improve somewhat, but people are still in a frenzy. Now suddenly the
page is protected and you can't write anything at all. But hey- some
people still can. You're a second class user now. Aha: Wikipedia is not an
open project as it claims.

When dealing with people, you should give them a way out. A way to agree
with you without hurt feelings. We present a much better picture of
ourselves if we explain things reasonably, and we make it much easier for
others to join us and to follow our principles if we live them and don't
just use phrases like "WikiLove" as the occasional ironic reference.
Nobody is perfect. We can all fail to accomplish WikiLove. Sometimes
people just seem stupid, obnoxious and daft and you feel like you've had
quite enough. Just remember that you're part of a project that's evolving,
and that you don't have to solve all problems -- if you can't gather the
necessary calmness yourself, let others do it. The problem will eventually
get addressed. It's not like the Catholicism article is a shining example
of NPOV and historical research as it is.

I'm not saying we should embrace people like DW even after they give us
constant abuse. I'm saying we should be tolerant of newbies, tolerant of
young Wikipedians who don't have the knowledge we expect of them. We
should be teachers and models, not arrogant editors who chase away the
meddling kids. Wikipedia is and will continue to be used in schools.
Realistically we will have to put up with a certain level of ignorance. If
you can't do that, you should just wait until you cool down and restore
the edit to a reasonable state. Or get the Sifter project up and running
so that we can have a "stable" variant of Wikipedia that never includes
any nonsense.

But turning the nonsense into sense, that's part of the whole fun. Keeping
the good and throwing away the bad can be a rewarding experience for
everyone involved.

Regards,

Erik


list: wikipedia-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Rotem Dan

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Article about Wikipedia published on major Israeli newspaper

body:
I am glad to announce that Ynet, the online version of "Yediot Aharonot"
, which is one of the two most read newspapers in Israel, has published
an article about Wikipedia and its new Hebrew counterpart.

A couple of days ago, I was contacted by Gal Mor, one of the journalists
on Ynet's "Computers and technolgy" column, for a short interview
(mostly by e-mail and phone). I hope I gave a good impression of the
project, and I'm quite satisfied with the the resulting article. I was
actually quite surprised of the length and the amount of research and
detail given for it. :-)

For those of you that are able to read a bit of Hebrew, the news article
can be found here: http://www.ynet.co.il/articles/1,7340,L-2703158,00.html

Regards,
Rotem Dan

P.S: Hebrew wikiepdia's userbase jumped from 30 to 52 today. Article
count is currently at 115. I guess that's a good sign ;-)


list: wikien-l

from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [WikiEN-l] Catholicism

body:
Abe-
> *I had never edited the page prior to this edit war and I have never added
> content to the page. The article's history demonstrates that I only restored
> versions, which were to be protected, that did not contain the content
> responsible for the edit wars. Personally, I was the ideal person to
> stabilize the page, being of no faith and never having participated in
> topics pertaining to the sex-abuse scandal.

The problem is that you expressed a very strong POV before your actions.
You called the page contents gibberish, garbage, grotesque, rubbish,
trash. That may all be true, but it places you in a position where you can
no longer be an independent arbitrator. And that's what sysops who protect
pages in edit wars should be. I have not asked you for an apology -- I
have just asked you to accept and follow these rules: to only protect
pages in matters where you have not taken sides. Instead you ignored my
request and re-protected the page after I unprotected it. This, again,
goes against a spirit of mutual cooperation among sysops and against the
spirit of our policies as well.

I think you know that you overstepped the limits a little. I am willing to
do my part and say that the protected page guidelines could be clearer on
the point of when it is OK to protect and when it isn't. Can we then both
agree to follow the guidelines in the spirit outlined above?

Regards,

Erik


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Tomasz Wegrzanowski

subject: [Wikitech-l] Opera fullscreen css bug

body:
Opera uses media=projection for fullscreen. It's rather unfortunate choice,
but we have to live with it. Now Wikipedia doesn't display correctly
under Opera fullscreen.

I have commited to CVS patch that fixes this problem, by changing
media='screen' to media='screen,projection'. There's no need to do
any serious testing. Now how to upgrade all Wikipedias with this
new procedure ?


from_name: b schewek

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Wikis and uniformity

body:
Von: Karl Eichwalder

> [...]
> Perhaps.  Nevertheless, I'd like to give it a try; I'm seriously
> interested in a Wiki using the TEI DTD as its markup language.
> Unfortunately, my resources (time, knowlegde in hacking) are too
> limited to such a project come true on my own.
>

Maybe the 'textbook' would be interested?
They were/are discussing the 'print' business.

-- Schewek

--
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from_name: james duffy

subject: [WikiEN-l] Catholicism

body:
>Abe-
> > *I had never edited the page prior to this edit war and I have never
>added
> > content to the page. The article's history demonstrates that I only
>restored
> > versions, which were to be protected, that did not contain the content
> > responsible for the edit wars. Personally, I was the ideal person to
> > stabilize the page, being of no faith and never having participated in
> > topics pertaining to the sex-abuse scandal.

Erik replied
>The problem is that you expressed a very strong POV before your actions.
>You called the page contents gibberish, garbage, grotesque, rubbish,
>trash. That may all be true, but it places you in a position where you can
>no longer be an independent arbitrator. And that's what sysops who protect
>pages in edit wars should be. I have not asked you for an apology -- I
>have just asked you to accept and follow these rules: to only protect
>pages in matters where you have not taken sides. Instead you ignored my
>request and re-protected the page after I unprotected it. This, again,
>goes against a spirit of mutual cooperation among sysops and against the
>spirit of our policies as well.
>
>I think you know that you overstepped the limits a little. I am willing to
>do my part and say that the protected page guidelines could be clearer on
>the point of when it is OK to protect and when it isn't. Can we then both
>agree to follow the guidelines in the spirit outlined above?

Erik, /you/ way overstepped the mark. 172 acted to stop an edit war through
protecting a page, a page he had not contributed one word to but which one
user was attempting to put an incoherent POV anti-catholic ramble. It may
well have been inadvisable to for /him/ to do that, but he was dealing with
an impossible situation, where there were calls for someone /urgently/ to
act and where the user reponsible for the POV stuff had declared that he
would continue to reinsert the nonsense with the warning not to cross him.
He understood that he had Mav's support (something which Mav wrote appeared
to give the OK but it turns out that Mav's words gave a wrong impression and
that he was agreeing with something else, not Abe's offer to protect the
page). He then protected it, believing he was doing what was agreed to.

When are /you/ going to apologise for
1. treating a user who acted in good faith in an emergency circumstances as
if he was the guilty one when he believed he had the support of people like
Mav in his actions?

2. For continually ignoring his attempts to clarify the matter?

3. For /you/ then leaving a sensitive page on which there was an edit war,
wide open to more heavy POVing for someone who openly admits his
anti-catholic agenda, including making comments that maybe catholics want
their children abused?

If 172 deserves censure for in good faith for mishandling a crisis, so do
you. If he deserves to lose his sysop powers, for your mislandling of the
affair /you/ should lose your power to suspend sysops unilaterally. If
apologies are required they are required from you too. Your handling was
anything but adequate.

JT

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from_name: Lee Pilich

subject: [WikiEN-l] 172 protecting [[New Imperialism]]

body:
I don't really want to write about this, but feel I ought to as it hasn't
been mentioned on the list yet: before 172 protected [[Catholicism]] he had
protected [[New Imperialism]], a page he is very definitely involved with,
and also protected [[Talk:New Imperialism]]. I unprotected both as soon as
I became aware of this and told 172 that protecting pages one is involved
in is a Bad Thing, and that protecting talk pages is almost never right (I
acknowledge I may not have been a model of politeness in how I put this,
but I don't think I was actually rude - still, I should have been more
restrained, I admit). As far as I know, he then left them unprotected.

The reason for 172 protecting [[New Imperialism]], as far as I can tell
(and I hope he'll correct me if I'm wrong about any of this), was that
User:Pizza Puzzle had edited it. 172 suspects Pizza Puzzle is the banned
user formerly known as Lir, and protected both the article to stop him
editing it. The edits which Pizza Puzzle had made to the article were very
minor and not bad in any obvious way, certainly not the sort of thing that
would warrant protecting a page: adding a few links, moving a paragraph or
two, a little light rewriting. 172 expressed the opinion that Pizza
Puzzle's edits to the page would at first be legitimate, but would
gradually take over the page and turn it into an incoherent mess. My view
is that unless 172 has psychic abilities and can see in to the future, he
cannot know this will happen, and that preemptively protecting pages is in
any case a bad idea on the whole. His opinion on who Pizza Puzzle is seems
irrelevant to me (and Pizza Puzzle has in any case been quite a good
contributor of late, whoever he may be).

The reason for 172 protecting the talk page remains a mystery, at least to
me. I've asked him why he did it, but haven't received a reply.

Also (this a little off-topic, but possibly of interest) ,172 put a lot of
discussion on [[Talk:New Imperialism]] into an archive. The talk was all of
one day old, and concerned a matter still very much unresolved. The talk
page was not an unmanageable length and I saw no reason to archive it
(though plenty of reasons not to). I therefore moved the discussion back to
the main talk page. 172 archived it again. Somebody else unarchived it. 172
archived it again. And so on, resulting in possibly the most ridiculous
edit war I've yet witnessed.

On the whole I would favour being lenient on the question of whether to
revoke sysop rights, but in this case I don't disagree with 172's sysop
status being revoked (though I do think Erik should have brought the matter
to the list or to some other forum first). I just hope 172 will agree to be
more reluctant to use his sysop rights in future and his non-sysopness can
be temporary.

Sorry to go on at such length.

Lee (Camembert)
Wikikarma: lots of fiddles to [[Music]]

PS - I don't subscribe to the list any more (I read it on the web) - that's
why it's taken me a while to write about this.


from_name: Anthere

body:
--- Lee Pilich <pilich at btopenworld.com> wrote:
> I don't really want to write about this, but feel I
> ought to as it hasn't
> been mentioned on the list yet: before 172 protected
> [[Catholicism]] he had
> protected [[New Imperialism]], a page he is very
> definitely involved with,
> and also protected [[Talk:New Imperialism]]. I
> unprotected both as soon as
> I became aware of this and told 172 that protecting
> pages one is involved
> in is a Bad Thing, and that protecting talk pages is
> almost never right (I
> acknowledge I may not have been a model of
> politeness in how I put this,
> but I don't think I was actually rude - still, I
> should have been more
> restrained, I admit). As far as I know, he then left
> them unprotected.

Everything an editor can do, can be undone by another
editor.
There are some rules and guidelines an editor is
supposed to respect.
Most try to respect these guidelines (but some do not
respect them to the point).
Most do infringe them from time to time. Everyone has
once wrote something pov, been short of temper with
another editor, giving a bad title to an article,
whatever.
When an editor is wrong, he is corrected by other
editors, that is the wiki way, and no one thinks it is
bad to point out to mistakes, no one thinks it is bad
to correct mistakes for the one who diverted from the
"right" path.
When an editor is *repeatingly* wrong, s/he may
receive a warning, perhaps be listed in annoying
users, or even on the vandal list, and no one thinks
it is bad to do so
When the editor is really acting wrong, with facts
supporting the wrongness, s/he is denied editing,
Jimbo bans hir (I am learning). The ban is a stronger
warning.
When the editor is given another chance, because s/he
is thought a good editor nevertheless, who a couple of
times diverted from the righteous path, s/he may edit
again, but is carefully watched by other editors.
Other editors know s/he has an history of
reprenhensible acts, but they would be happy of a
reform. Hence, they put hir on a sort of a "watch
list".
Everything an editor can do, can be undone by another
editor, as long as another editor is taking care of
watching for bad step. That is just the wiki way.
Taking any relevant action to guide the foot (and
perhaps strongly grip the foot sometimes) is good.

Everything a sysop can do, can be undone by another
sysop.
There are some rules and guidelines a sysop is
supposed to respect.
Most try to respect these guidelines (but some do not
respect them to the point).
Some do infringe them from time to time. Everyone has
once protected a page while included in the edit war,
protected a talk page to prevent another editor to
explain moves, banned an ip a bit too quickly, deleted
an article for personal grunge against another editor,
undeleted an article upon a poor choice, made a bad
sql query which stop the server for a couple of hours,
whatever.
When a sysop is wrong, he is corrected by other sysop,
that is the wiki way, and who thinks it is bad to
point out to mistakes, no one thinks it is bad to
correct mistakes for the one who diverted from the
"right" path ?
When a sysop is *repeatingly* wrong, s/he may receive
a warning, perhaps have hir case discussed on the
mailing  list, be on some sysop "watch this guy" list.
Is it bad to do so ?
When the sysop is really acting wrong, with facts
supporting the wrongness, s/he is denied sysop
position, a developer remove the rights. The
unsysoping is a stronger warning.
When the sysop is given another chance, because s/he
is thought a good sysop nevertheless, who a couple of
times diverted from the righteous path, s/he may
protect/delete/ban again, but is carefully watched by
other editors. Other editors know s/he has an history
of reprenhensible acts, but they would be happy of a
reform. Hence, they put hir on a sort of a "watch
list".
Everything a sysop can do, can be undone by another
sysop, as long as another editor is taking care of
watching for bad step. Especially when a non-sysop is
involved. That is just the wiki way. Taking any
relevant action to guide the foot (and perhaps
strongly grip the foot sometimes) is good. Especially
when a non sysop is involved.

This was not necessary when there were only a couple
of sysops. But 100 sysops make a difference. One can
trust a sysop to be willing to do the best for the
encyclopedia, that does not necessarily imply one has
to agree the path chosen is the best. The more sysops
there will be, the more likely edit wars among sysops,
and the less relevant protection will be.

In any case, that is my personal feeling :-)

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subject: [WikiEN-l] 172 sysop status temporarily revoked

body:
Erik wrote
>You're right, of course, that
>Nostrum's additions were highly biased, factually inaccurate and grossly
>misplaced. I read them. But calling people semi-literate or vandals does
>not exactly help in turning them into valuable contributors.

This user had been complained to by a number of people who told him about
NPOV. He persisted constantly in adding in a POV diatribe over and over and
over again and implied that anyone who wouldn't let him put in his diatribe
was in denial or tolerant of paedophilia in the RC church.

>He used the headline "Homosexual abuse in catholicism", which is certainly
>misleading but not necessarily meant as an equation of pedophilia with
>homosexuality. It is an unfortunate fact that the large majority of
>pedophiles are interested in boys -- that's why these groups (well, not
>the Catholics, really) call themselves "Boylover associations", have sites
>like boylinks.net and so on. There are also "girllovers", but these are a
>minority. I can cite studies on this if you are interested.
>
Wrong.
1. He used the word 'homosexual' over a piece he wrote on paedophiles. He
never once mentioned homosexuals. But he categorised those doing the abuse
in catholicism as being homosexuals. In the population most paedophiles are
usually heterosexual, the parents or relatives of the child being abused.

2. Paedophiles are interested in children. Some are gender-specific. Many
many are not. The vast majority of priest paedophile cases I have studied
relate to individual paedophiles abusing /both/ sexes, who are simply turned
on by raping children, and they will rape whichever is the type they can get
their hands on at any one time, boys or girls. I mentioned the case of Fr.
Brendan Smyth in the article. He raped boys and girls in equal measure. So
did Fr. Jim Grennan (who raped children /on/ the altar). Another priest I
know of raped children (male and female) in a children's hospital.

>>Nostrum's justifications included ''added overbearing proof to people who
>>would like
> > to live in big holes under bridges, Say hi to sammy for me'' ''If you
>think
> > there is POV in homosexual abuse in Catholocism then take it out, don't
> > delete it, remember, fix, not censor, otherwise I will list you as a
>censor
> > and you don't want to be on my bad side''
>
>I saw these edit comments and this is what I am referring to when I use
>the word "ugly". If the whole matter had been addressed calmly on the talk
>page of the article and the user talk page, we might not have seen
>Nostrum's "bad side" so quickly.

So it is everyone /else's/ fault this user made comments such as saying that
maybe catholics want their children raped, is it? /He/ is responsible for
his own actions. No-one else is.

>172 was aware of the guidelines but chose to
>violate them because he felt he was sufficiently backed up.

That is a gross and insulting delberate mis-representation. He saw the case
as borderline as he was not someone who added one word to the article, he is
not religious and has written nothing to wiki on child abuse. He suggested a
course of action, understood it had support and /in good faith/ acted.

And of course
>he was right, to a degree -- with you by his side, what could go wrong?

I'll treat that comment with the contempt it deserves.

>172 enforced his position by protecting the page, knowing
>that he would receive support for doing so from some participants. But it
>doesn't matter if you do or don't support 172's decision -- what matters
>is that sysops are not supposed to do these things, because this leads us
>down a slippery slope where we end up with a cabal that makes decisions
>for the unenlightened masses. I would think that people from a leftist
>political perspective would be more sensitive to such issues of developing
>power structures.

Considering your own behaviour of changing dates to suit things the way you
wanted, and then trying to interpret a vote on the matter in a way that
suited you, I don't think you are in a position to criticise 172 for abuse
of power.
>
>But I would not have revoked 172's sysop privileges if he had just agreed
>to ask someone else who did not participate in the debate to protect the
>page, as our guidelines recommend.

He couldn't get someone to do it straight away and understood he had
agreement to act.

>He flat out refused doing so and
>reprotected the page after I had unprotected it,

If you had reprotected the page he wouldn't have had to. But you
irresponsbly left the page unprotected opening up the prospect of a nenewed
edit war. He re-protected it to stop that happening, while a solution was
worked out or someone else came along to do the protecting instead.

You seem to think that protecting pages is a bad idea. That is your POV. You
decided to enforce that POV on a page where a different solution was
supported, tried and worked.

JT

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subject: [Wikitech-l] BitTorrent for db dumps?

body:
On Wed, Jul 23, 2003 at 06:13:17PM -0700, Daniel Mayer wrote:
> Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
> >We have plenty of bandwidth on wikipedia.org,
>
> For now at least. But the various Wikimedia projects are together creating new
> pages at an exponential rate that are in turn being viewed by an
> exponentially increasing number of readers.
>
> We have been very fortunate to have a bandwidth sugar daddy (hi Jimbo!) so far
> but we should not assume that Bomis will be able to foot the bill when our
> popularity (measured in hits/bandwidth consumption) becomes comparable to
> websites like Slashdot.org or even Yahoo.com.
>
> At some point we are going to have to economize our bandwidth usage.
> BitTorrent is one of those possibilities (mirrors are another) and IMO it is
> better to start thinking about this now rather than when bandwidth gets more
> limited. I have, however, no opinion on this particular technology though.

While usage of bandwidth by Wikipedia may grow exponentially,
cost of gigabyte transfered keep falling exponentially, so you shouldn't
care that much. (http://xp.c2.com/YouArentGonnaNeedIt.html)

Anyway using BitTorrent makes completely no sense in this
context - it's for big static stuff that masses want, like RedHat .isos,
porn or DVD rips. Neither with articles (which are way too small) nor dumps
(which aren't static and too few people want them) we would benefit from
using BitTorrent.

If we change our database dumps every day, we should be providing some kind
of .diffs instead. On late phase 1 rsync was used and it reduced bandwidth
on both client and server by more than an order of magnitude (albeit at high CPU cost).
We should rather go in this direction.


subject: [Wikitech-l] Opera fullscreen css bug

body:
On Thu, Jul 24, 2003 at 01:42:26PM +1200, Richard Grevers wrote:
> Two alternatives are: 1) Don't declare any media type, so the stylesheet is
> used for all media for which there isn't a specific stylesheet declared
> (there might be a print stylesheet)

Damn Netscape 4, it's worse than MSIE.
OK, so I'm removing media declaration completely.


from_name: Fred Bauder

subject: [WikiEN-l] 172 sysop status restored

body:
I have never withdrawn my objection to sysop status for 172. I knew he would
abuse his status and he has repeatedly, you are just looking at the tip of
the iceberg; most instances result from his leftist POV urge to revise
history.

Fred Bauder

http://wwww.internet-encyclopedia.org

> From: erik_moeller at gmx.de (Erik Moeller)
> Reply-To: wikien-l at wikipedia.org
> Date: 24 Jul 2003 13:36:00 +0200
> To: wikien-l at wikipedia.org
> Subject: [WikiEN-l] 172 sysop status restored
>
> 172 has stated on my user talk page that he will act more cautiously in
> the future under similar circumstances, hat he would not again protect
> [[New Imperialism]] under the same conditions, and that he would try to be
> communicative instead of antagonistic in cases similar to the
> [[Catholicism]] one before protecting the page. That's good enough for me,
> so I have restored his sysop status. If there are any objections, please
> post.
>
> Regards,
>
> Erik
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l


from_name: Krzysztof P. Jasiutowicz

subject: [Wikitech-l] Enconding Problems with Webalizer

body:
On 24-07-2003, Thomas Corell wrote thusly :
> Hello Host-Admins,
> the de.wiki stats (webalizer) showing no German ???'s. Instead it shows
> some with space or whatever. I have running Webalizer at home and put a
> Page  online with ? to test it, and  my webalizer can handle ?'s properly.
>
> http://corell.dyndns.org/stats/usage_200307.html#HOURSTATS  (home)
>
> My possibilies run out, it's your task to take a look at our wikipedia host
> and fix the displaying of webalizer.
> Thanks.
> PS: This problem was presented by german wikipedia users to me.
The same problem with the Polish Wikipedia, and iso-8859-2 specific
characters.

Could you please fix it ? Thank you.

Regards,
Kpjas


from_name: Thomas Corell

body:
Hello Host-Admins,

the de.wiki stats (webalizer) showing no German ???'s. Instead it shows
some with space or whatever. I have running Webalizer at home and put a
Page  online with ? to test it, and  my webalizer can handle ?'s properly.

http://corell.dyndns.org/stats/usage_200307.html#HOURSTATS  (home)

My possibilies run out, it's your task to take a look at our wikipedia host
and fix the displaying of webalizer.

Thanks.

PS: This problem was presented by german wikipedia users to me.

--
Smurf

smurf at AdamAnt.mud.de
-------------------------  Anthill inside! ---------------------------


list: textbook-l

from_name: Toby Bartels

subject: [Textbook-l] legal counsel on copyright issues

body:
Mav wrote:

>Toby wrote:

>>If a textbook project that wants to use material
>>from Wikipedia, then it can make a decision that
>>it wants this material more than the mere
>>possibility of material under some other licence.

>And where exactly is the material from this other
>license at? That type of long term planning is also
>really bizarre in the wiki world - where are the
>crystal balls we should use in order to find out what
>license this magical text will be under? However, what
>we have /right now/ is a HUGE open content resource
>that will almost certainly be ENORMOUS in a couple
>years. This is a prediction we can bank on.

I think that you've got our positions backwards.
I'm not using any crystal ball -- you are.
Your crystal ball tells you (somehow):
* No textbook will ever want to use material
  that's free but incompatible with the GNU FDL; and
* No project using a licence that the GNU FDL is incompatible with
  will ever want to use material from a Wikimedia textbook.
True, I can't find any counterexamples for these claims.
But the burden of proof lies with /you/,
who insist on fixing everything in the GNU FDL to begin with.

Remember, if your textbook uses material from Wikipedia,
then with my plan it'll use just the GNU FDL, and with my blessings.
But you want to force all of the other textbooks to do the same,
without any evidence that the crystal ball predictions above are true.
You accuse me of "long term planning [...] in the wiki world",
implying that I'm inhibiting the quick editing practices of wiki.
That is simply false.  Any edit that you want to make can be made.
I only ask that you not make decisions that aren't yet needed.
I'm /refusing/ to plan ahead for a (possibly phantom) long term future
in which only GNU FDL (and freer) material will be wanted.

>>If you have a specific use in mind for a large
>>chunk of text, then this shouldn't be a very
>>difficult choice to make!

>Yep - use Wikipedia and public domain text as your
>primary resources (it is gotten us this far!).

It's gotten us how far?  We haven't written any textbooks!
If you meant that it's gotten us so far on /Wikipedia/ (with a "p"),
then I'm pretty sure that you don't want to use this analogy,
which suggests that it's safe for Wikibooks to use CC alone if we like.
(The fair analogy is between ?Wikipedia and PD got us more Wikipedia.?
and ?Wikibooks and PD will get us more Wikibooks.?.)

>I still
>would like to know of /any/ other body of open content
>text at all comparable to Wikipedia that we could use
>for textbooks.

And I'd like to know how you know that none will ever appear
(and that none will appear in the reverse direction).
/You/ want to impose the restriction, so the burden lies with /you/.

>Mixing and matching licenses will
>prevent the free exchange of text to and from
>Wikipedia and most madenly from between our textbooks!

???  Did you think this example through clearly?
No exchange can be hindered by a disjunctive licence,
because a GNU-only project can always borrow from a disjunctive one,
and a disjunctive project can become GNU-only
if it decides to borrow from a GNU-only project.
(And the same is true replacing GNU with CC above.)
Only your insistence on a single licence can hinder free exchange.

>It is best to work with what we have right now and
>continually work with the copyleft viral license
>makers to make their licenses compatible with each
>other.

Of course we agree that the licence makers should do this.
And if they do, then this discussion will become irrelevant.
But I don't want to pin all of my hopes on that.
Perhaps you have good reason to think that they will?
Personally, I doubt that the FSF would go along with such a scheme. '_`

>PLEASE let's not fork the project before it even
>starts.

A fork between Wikipedia and Wikibooks is hard to avoid;
even if the latter borrows from the former to start with,
their versions must diverge as they're edited for different purposes.
Now, if a single textbook forks into a GNU version and a CC version,
then these can never be reconciled (without licence changes),
but even so this is a better situation than under your plan,
which would simply delete the CC version from history entirely.
Still, I doubt that such a fork would ever happen;
it would require a choice to go (say) GNU first for some GNU material,
then to find enough good (say) CC material that you want to drop all that
(and all the changes made since then) and return to an earlier state.
And you doubt the very existence of such CC material,
so forks will indeed never happen if you're correct.

Let me ask you a question:
If there were no Wikipedia or any source like it,
would you still want to start Wikipedia on the GNU FDL alone?
Wouldn't you prefer to start it on a disjunctive licence now?
(So far, Wikipedia hasn't relied on importing FDL material,
so it would probably still be dijunctively licensed after 2? years;
certainly once it grew this big, that would be hard to change.)
Surely we can agree that disjunction is best in that case!
Imagine a world in which everything is released disjunctively;
there's no need for the licence makers to get their acts together
(which is to say, no problem if it turns out that they don't),
because the disjunction would itself be the one single free content licence.
Even better, if one person messed up and left a licence out,
then /some/ exchange would still be possible, albeit less;
whereas /no/ exchange is possible between WP and any CC SA material.
A disjunctively licensed WP can be used by more people,
so it is freer, so it is better.

In the real world, Wikipedia is using only the GNU FDL,
and it's hard to blame WP for this, since it was begun 2? years ago.
GNU FDL alone would still be reasonable for textbooks
(much as GNU GPL is quite reasonable for software)
if it were already the established copyleft of choice in that field.
But CC licences are more likely to be chosen by others, since:
* The CC licences are simpler than the GNU licences;
* CC SA is freer than GNU FDL (no Invariant Sections); and
* The CC documentation is easier to understand than the FSF stuff.
I wouldn't recommend the GNU FDL to anybody starting a new project
outside of territory where that licence is already established
(like manuals for free software), because it's overkill.
In 2001, Wikipedia didn't have much other choice.  Now we do.

To be sure, if you move recipes from Wikipedia to a Wikimedia cookbook
(the sort of thing that you and Erik agree should be in Wikibooks too),
then you're going to have to use the GNU FDL.  So use it, I agree.
But if I start a math textbook, then I won't want material from Wikipedia,
because the encyclopaedic writing style is inappropriate for a math text.
(Older versions of some articles are written more in a textbook style,
but older versions are untrustworthy anyway just over facts.)
So why do you want to saddle my project with the GNU licence,
when next year I may find a CC SA textbook to join forces with?
True, I have no reason to think that I'll ever find such a thing --
but if I don't, then I lose nothing with my disjunctive licence;
while if I do, then I lose it entirely with your single licence.
(And if my impression that I won't want to borrow from WP is wrong,
then I still lose nothing with my disjunctive licence.)

-- Toby


from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject: [WikiEN-l] Catholicism

body:
I can accept what Abe is saying here, no problem.  Someone please
restore Abe's sysop status.

We've gotten into an area here that hasn't much been explored, and so
I don't want this to turn into a blame Abe/blame Erik kind of thing in
any way.  But we probably do need to clarify one aspect of policy.

When should developers act to revoke sysop status?  I would say
"Almost never" although I'm willing to listen to counter-arguments.

I don't say "never" because we can always keep in mind that there
could be a real emergency.  We're trying to be very liberal with sysop
powers to keep them from being 'elite enforcers'.  We're *not* being
liberal with developer powers, because the whole reason we have the
separation is technical and there are dangers involved.

But since we're being very liberal with sysop powers, there's a chance
that we'll inadvertantly approve someone who turns out to be a real
problem, a nutcase.  If a sysop went bonkers and started deleting huge
numbers of pages, banning random ips, and the like, and if it was the
weekend or at night when I might not be around to assist, then it
would be appropriate for a developer to step in to protect the site.

But such emergencies are going to be extremely rare, I think.  After
all, sysops are people we know, people who have acted normally for a
period of time, and people like that don't normally just go nuts.

However, when there is no emergency, just an abuse of sysop powers,
then a developer should not step in directly and make a decision, even
temporarily.  In this case, there was minimal harm done even if Abe
was wrong to protect the page (and it's unclear now that he was wrong,
as his explanation is sensible enough to at least raise a reasonable
doubt).  A page would have been protected overnight until the issue
was raised with me, and Erik and Abe and the rest of us could have had
a clarifying discussion about when pages should be protected or not.

My point here is not to render a verdict on whether Abe should or
should not have protected the page.  My point is also not to render a
verdict on whether Erik should or should not have removed the sysop
status.  My point here is rather to say that _in the future_, it would
be best if developers only act to remove sysop status in a real
emergency.

What we want to guard against is an elite cabal with superior powers
acting to defend the site.  Well, I guess I'm protecting my own elite
position of 1.

But things like bans and removal of sysop powers are hurtful and
painful to the community, and I think the best way to handle them for
now is for me to don my best "neutral Jimbo" hat and for me to act
very slowly and carefully and under intense community supervision and
feedback.

Developer is a technical position, not a policy position.

--Jimbo


subject: [WikiEN-l] Unacceptable behaviour

body:
Christopher Mahan wrote:
>> It is acceptable for people to hold their own opinions and express
>> them -- but not in an inappropriate forum.  One of the cardinal
>> principles of Wikipedia is respect for others, even others with
>> whom we have significant political or other disagreements.

> Absolutely. Even more so, in my opinion, of long-time contributors.

In a sense, I suppose.  But once we're long-time contributors, we
are friends (to a degree), and we can probably take a little heat,
although it's best if it's kept private or avoided entirely when
we can.

If I had to choose between "act more respectuflly towards old-timers"
or "act more respectfually towards newcomers", I'd tend to favor the
latter.  But I don't think there's any "more so" needed.

I don't always follow my own advice here -- none of us always do, and
that's part of the human condition.  But courtesy and kindness is
powerful magic, and we should use it in all cases to our best
advantage.

> But I do want him to know that I think that the way he expresses
> himself in the heat of "righteous outrage" is a bit detrimental to
> his reputation as far as I am concerned.

Well, I'm sure he's listening with an open heart to what you are
saying.

--Jimbo


subject: [WikiEN-l] 172 sysop status restored

in_reply_to: <BB452661.3658%fredbaud@ctelco.net>; from fredbaud@ctelco.net on Thu, Jul 24, 2003 at 06:00:01AM -0600

body:
Fred Bauder wrote:
> I have never withdrawn my objection to sysop status for 172. I knew
> he would abuse his status and he has repeatedly, you are just
> looking at the tip of the iceberg; most instances result from his
> leftist POV urge to revise history.

I appreciate this concern, and I have it, too.  But whenever I've
looked into it, 172/Abe has worked reasonably well with others.

I'm a bit constrained here because I myself come from an extremely
strong libertarian POV, very different from Abe's, and so I have to be
very careful not to let my own political perspective inappropriately
enter into my analysis.

What matters here is a willingness to work well with others towards
NPOV, not where you come from personally.

--Jimbo


subject: [WikiEN-l] Catholicism

in_reply_to: <8qT3BG0xpVB@erik_moeller>; from erik_moeller@gmx.de on Thu, Jul 24, 2003 at 05:18:00PM +0200

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:
> I don't really care if I have less work, but my personal opinion on
> the matter is that protecting pages is one of the most radical
> things to do in a wiki. Nobody who does not belong to the trusted
> group of sysops will be able to make additions to the page during
> the period of protections, and this enforces a class distinction
> that I am not very comfortable with. I think it should be avoided.

I would agree with you completely that page protection should be
avoided whenever possible.  A better choice is for people to let the
other person win for a day or two, and come back and change it when
things have calmed down.  A still better choice is to try really hard
to accomodate their point of view while still fixing the problem (this
can be hard to do, of course, but it's the essence of the wiki
process).

And I would also tend to agree with you that making comments on the
talk page is best avoided, or at least highly limited with respect to
the debate.  However, I can see some benefit in a semi-disinterested
sysop coming in and making a stab at making peace on the talk page,
and then when that fails, taking another step.  It seems unwise to
have a hard-and-fast rule here.  Judgment will have to be used, and
analysis after the fact can help to guide us to a better path in the
future.

> You endorsed the previous similar actions in the case of User:Kils,
> so it seemed logical to enforce the policy as I interpreted it. If,
> however, you do not want me to do this and want to handle all
> complaints about sysop status yourself except in cases of major
> vandalism that requires immediate action, then I will gladly forward
> such complaints to you. I'm sure the 1 person bottleneck will bite
> us in the ass sooner or later, though.

Tragically, I don't remember the exact circumstances of User:Kils,
even though it was fairly recent.  :-(

But, yeah, I do acknowledge the bottleneck problem.

There's something of an irony or paradox here.  Should developers be
an elite cabal acting to prevent the formation of an elite cabal of
sysops?  :-) Probably that's overstating it, but it does sum up the
essence of the policy tensions here, I think.

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Wikis and uniformity

in_reply_to: <3F1FD45A.30131.105275@localhost>; from sgilbert@nbnet.nb.ca on Thu, Jul 24, 2003 at 12:43:06PM -0300

body:
sgilbert at nbnet.nb.ca wrote:
> I believe Nupedia (Wikipedia's parent encyclopedia project) used
> XML markup. That project had a division of labour between writers
> and editors: the former simply wrote the articles, while the latter did
> all the fancy markup.

And it worked well enough to generate 12 articles in 18 months, at an
exorbitant cost to me.  :-(

I'm not saying that XML is bad, though.  I *am* saying, since I've
been silent throughout this entire discussion, that I tend to side
with those who disfavor adding to or changing our markup much, despite
the fact that it isn't very powerful.

I'm very enamoured of the idea of meta-content markup.  Marking up
<date></date> or <person></person> and so on, wow, there are a lot of
cool possibilities.

But we should be reluctant to tamper much with a system that totally
works in an amazing way.

--Jimbo


subject: [WikiEN-l] 172 sysop status restored

body:
James D. Forrester wrote:
> Urgh. Quite apart from anything else, 'leftist' is a relativistic,
> and hence inherently-POV, word;

Sure, but he wasn't writing an encyclopedia article, he was
editorializing.  I am a strong libertarian, politically, and I should
hope that if I started going around turning various articles into
libertarian rants, people would complain about it.

>that you consider 'leftist' persons' examination of past events is
>"revis[ing] history", that you implicitly push the idea that such
>historical revisionism is bad, and that you generalise on this point,
>implying that the cause celebre of 'leftist'-ism is said historical
>revisionism and that all 'leftist' persons, also lend to a disregard
>for your opinion based on the way you have stated it, I would have
>thought.

Well, I don't know.  There is such a thing as a generally leftist POV,
as you've acknowledge.  And such a POV is not good for an encyclopedia
article, which should be neutral.

> Surely peoples' politics shouldn't affect what you think of them as
> responsible people?

Not usually, at least not in the Wikipedia context.  But I think his
claim was that 172 puts leftist pov into articles, which is a
legitimate complaint, if true.  (Whenever I've looked, 172's edits
aren't particular problematic.  We all come from a perspective, of
course, and he's no different.)

--Jimbo


subject: [Textbook-l] different open content licenses

body:
Mav wrote in large part:

>Wouter Vanden Hove wrote:

>>I also would like to point out the recent Debian
>>decision to consider the GFDL as a non-free license.

>Side note: They only consider GFDLd text to be
>"non-free" when "Invariant Sections", "Cover Texts",
>"Acknowledgements", and/or "Dedications" (all GFDL
>options) are used. We don't use any of those so our
>text is free content.

But anybody can add Invariant Sections.
So if GNU FDL with Invariant Sections is not free,
then GNU FDL without them is not copyleft.

>>I think it would be a confusing thing to create a
>>licensing difference between the Wikipedia
>>Encyclopedia and the Wikimedia Textbook Project
>>now.

>Amen to that!

Actually, I suspect that most contributors don't care.
I think that you and I, mav, are capable of understanding them. ^_^

>>The discussion between FSF and Creative Commons and
>>some other license authors can, and probably will, be
>>time consuming. I don't think the Textbook Project
>>needs to wait for a solution in order to advance.

>Yep - I completely agree.

I agree as well.

-- Toby


subject:
[Wikitech-l] We're confused.
 We're confused.
 We're confused. tryFileCache()
 - not cacheable

body:
Hello Everyone,

Thank you for the wonderfull work this community is doing. I recently
did an install of wikipedia and ran into an issue which is not addressed
in the archives of this list.

Certain pages (for example biology) turn out to be blank. An examination
of the logs reveal this rather cryptic message:

--
We're confused.
  tryFileCache() - not cacheable
--

I am using php 4.3.2 and i have changed the register_globals to on

I tried commenting out the caching functionality to no avail. Has anyone
run into this problem before?

thanx and best regards
Raditha Dissanayake
http://www.raditha.com


body:
Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:

>Daniel Mayer wrote:

>>Side note: They only consider GFDLd text to be
>>"non-free" when "Invariant Sections", "Cover Texts",
>>"Acknowledgements", and/or "Dedications" (all GFDL
>>options) are used. We don't use any of those so our
>>text is free content.

>That's right wrt Debian. Now that's a real shame that
>GFDL has such options at all - they're all plain non-free.

Similarly, the Open Document License has free options A and B.
Enabling them renders the licence non-free;
the fact that they may be enabled later renders it non-copyleft.

The Creative Commons SA licence, in contrast, has no such problems.
It is by any objective measure the superior licence;
however, we really should license Wikibooks disjunctively with the GNU FDL,
so that books can borrow the substantial material from Wikipedia if useful.

^_^

-- Toby


subject: [Textbook-l] No new wikis

body:
Erik Moeller wrote at last:

>Just the basics:
>1) Name of the project
>2) Types of content that are to be covered
>3) Key policies
>4) Timetable for setting things up
>5) Potential changes that need to be made to the software
>6) Templates
>7) Internationalization
>8) Participants

>Formalize these things, then have a vote on whether the project should in
>fact be started. Is that too much to ask?

Why hold a vote?
If some people want to do it and others don't,
then some people will do it while others won't.
To be sure, there must be coders in the group that wants to do it,
or it still won't get done! -- but if a group of coders wants us to vote
to decide what they will do and what they won't, then they can do so.

Otherwise, I agree, with the understanding
that some things may be incomplete before starting.
Templates are the best example of this.

-- Toby


from_name: tarquin

subject: [Wikitech-l] Mork work on the demo

body:
Rotem Dan wrote:

> I have made a number of changes to the demo. Most of them are "behind
> the scenes" regarding the use of tables, and browser compatibility.
>
> Version 1.1 of the demo:
> http://www22.brinkster.com/rotemdan/phase4-demo-v1-1.htm
>
> phase4-metallic.css (if you want to make a new skin or modify the
> current one): http://www22.brinkster.com/rotemdan/phase4-metallic.css

Nice.
But please use a serif font for body text.
It's a bit dark -- too much grey
I'm not sure the -media, -tionary, -textbook links are a good idea.
I don't see the point of appending the talk page


body:
Toby Bartels wrote:
> The Creative Commons SA licence, in contrast, has no such problems.
> It is by any objective measure the superior licence; however, we
> really should license Wikibooks disjunctively with the GNU FDL, so
> that books can borrow the substantial material from Wikipedia if
> useful.

I don't think disjunctive licensing solves the license incompatibility
issues.  We'll be taking content from Wikipedia (GNU FDL) and then
offering it under *either* GNU FDL or CC-SA.  Suppose someone tries to
re-use the content under CC-SA rather than GNU FDL, how does that not
violate the provisions of use for the solely-FDL content?

Maybe this will work, though, but we need to think hard about the
details.

If we were starting wikipedia from scratch today, I would prefer to
create a wikipedia license that says "You can redistribute this
content under GNU FDL, CC-SA, or additional free licenses that may be
specified from time to time on this page."

But isn't it too late for that?


subject: [WikiEN-l] Catholicism

body:
james-
> Erik, /you/ way overstepped the mark. 172 acted to stop an edit war through
> protecting a page, a page he had not contributed one word to but which one
> user was attempting to put an incoherent POV anti-catholic ramble.

I believe 172 acted in good faith. I never said that he did not. I also
think that because of the very strong POV he expressed prior to protecting
the page, he was not the right person to do so.

> It may
> well have been inadvisable to for /him/ to do that, but he was dealing with
> an impossible situation, where there were calls for someone /urgently/ to
> act

Oh, come on. It's not like something could have been permanently broken.
In fact, this wasn't even an edit war in the traditional sense -- edits
were changed from one revision to the other, instead of alternating
between two versions. Even if it was urgent (which it wasn't), 172 could
have asked another sysop to do it -- we have 100 administrators on the
English wiki.

> 1. treating a user who acted in good faith in an emergency circumstances as
> if he was the guilty one when he believed he had the support of people like
> Mav in his actions?

I don't remember having treated 172 as "guilty". The problem is that 172
did not acknowledge our policies after I asked him to do so, and did not
want to work within that framework. If he had said "OK, next time I'll ask
another sysop", I would not have said another peep on the matter.

> 2. For continually ignoring his attempts to clarify the matter?

How so?

> 3. For /you/ then leaving a sensitive page on which there was an edit war,
> wide open to more heavy POVing for someone who openly admits his
> anti-catholic agenda, including making comments that maybe catholics want
> their children abused?

I feel that Nostrum can be worked with instead of immediately isolating
him. You will be able to quote lots of silly things Nostrum said, but
these have to be viewed in context -- he was reacting in a situation where
he was literally showered with insults. I don't think he was treated
fairly in this whole affair.

Regards,

Erik


body:
james-

> This user had been complained to by a number of people who told him about
> NPOV.

Sure, but he also had suppporters. Michael Becker wrote:

"Why don't you ask the author for their source instead of acting stupid
and emotional and making assumptions?"
..
"Nostrum's most recent edits have been NPOV. They are statement of facts.
All you and Efghi did was remove information that had links to back it up
(on any other article those links would not be needed!)."

Mkmconn wrote:

"It may also have been written by a web-savvy child, trying to make sense
of things; in which case, milder instruction might be effective."

Voiceofreason wrote:

"Am heartened by Nostrum's attempt at NPOV and cooperation, which should
be commended."

This was all before 172 protected the page. Several people were quite
obviously willing to work with Nostrum.

> 1. He used the word 'homosexual' over a piece he wrote on paedophiles.

Indeed, but the word referred to "abuses", not to people. It is certainly
possible, albeit ambiguous, to refer to pederastic abuses as homosexual in
nature. Furthermore, he corrected this rather quickly instead of reverting
to it in a real edit war.

> He never once mentioned homosexuals. But he categorised those doing the
> abuse in catholicism as being homosexuals.

That is an interpretation based on a single headline.

> In the population most paedophiles are
> usually heterosexual, the parents or relatives of the child being abused.

Pedophilia is defined by the DSM a "over a period of at least 6 months,
recurrent, intense sexually arousing fantasies, sexual urges, or behaviors
involving sexual activity with a prepubescent child or children (generally
age 13 years or younger)." Pedophiles fantasize exclusively about
children, they justify their "love" of children by saying that the
children want to be with them, and believe that what they do is best for
the kids. Relationships between pedophiles and children often last several
years. Pedophiles typically see themselves as "saviors" and educators of
children. Pedo-websites include:

http://www.nambla1.de
http://www.ipce.info/ipceweb/
http://www.fpc.net/sites/jay_h/
http://www.fpc.net/sites/rvsh/
http://philia.ws/dd/
And of course the huge pedo/pederasm website directory boylinks.net.

If you check out websites like boylinks.net, you will find an obsession
with prepubescent boys, linking to TV movies, gay youth websites, erotic
fiction (not as problematic as real child pornography), etc. They post
long manifestos and diatribes and cite what they believe to be scientific
studies in support of their point of view that boys want to have sex with
them. The primary researchers of the pedophile movement, such as
Brongersma or Bernard, all cite statistics of a ca. 90/10 percent split
between "boylovers" and "girllovers", usually gathered by interviewing
people who identified themselves as pedophiles.

What you are referring to are not pedophiles, but *sexual abusers*. Not
every pedophile is a sexual abuser, and not every sexual abuser is a
pedophile. Your above definition is the mass media definition of pedohpile
as published by the tabloids, but it has nothing to do with reality. It is
correct that sexual abuse happens predominantly in families by parents or
relatives (usually not the parents, because the biological incest taboo
prevents this). Pedophiles are, however, defined by their recurrent and
long-lasting sexual preference for children, much as homosexuals are
characterized by their preference for other men, and heterosexuals by
their preference for women.

> The vast majority of priest paedophile cases I have studied
> relate to individual paedophiles abusing /both/ sexes,

First, we don't even know how many of these priests were actual
pedophiles, and how many used sexual abuse of children as compensation for
lack of a relationship with an adult man or woman (pedophiles don't *want*
that type of relationship -- they only want to be with children, and can
often not be sexually aroused in any other setting).

Second, many of the most high profile cases involved exclusively boys and
not girls, e.g.:

Abused altar boys sue Church for millions
The Catholic Church in the United States has been ordered to pay $120
million in damages to 10 former altar boys, and the parents of another,
who were sexually assaulted by a priest. Father Rudolph Kos abused boys
over an eleven year period. When they complained, the church covered it
up. Kos allegedly abused the boys on hundreds of occasions at three
different churches in Dallas.
..
17 more allege abuse by Geoghan, file suit
Boston Globe/October 4, 2002
By Michael Rezendes

Sixteen men and a teenage boy filed new lawsuits yesterday against
convicted pedophile John J. Geoghan and a roster of church officials who
supervised the former priest, signaling that the Boston Archdiocese may be
defending sexual abuse claims against Geoghan for years to come.
...
With yesterday's civil filings, the 67-year-old Geoghan has been accused
of sexually molesting children, mostly boys, at each of the six parishes
where he was formally assigned during his 36 years as an active priest.
Those parishes are located in Saugus, Concord, Hingham, and Weston, and in
the Boston neighborhoods of Forest Hills and Dorchester.

Priest says he, too, molested boys
By Sacha Pfeiffer and Steve Kurkjian, Globe Staff, 1/26/2002
...
And last night, the Rev. Ronald H. Paquin acknowledged to a Globe reporter
that he had molested boys in both communities until 1989. In the soft-
spoken voice of a man broken by events, he said he himself was raped by a
Catholic priest when he was growing up in Salem.
...
Lawsuit accuses transferred priest of molestation
He was convicted of sexual misconduct in
By Associated Press: Robert Jablon
LOS ANGELES -- A Milwaukee priest convicted of sexual misconduct with a
boy in 1973 was shipped to Orange County, where he molested an 8-year-old,
according to a lawsuit disclosed Tuesday.
...
Widera was relieved of his duties in 1985 amid allegations that he had
sexually abused boys, Schinderle said.

Priest to go on trial in sex-abuse case
Clark was convicted in 1988 of molesting 2 boys in Bullitt By ANDREW
WOLFSON
A Bullitt Circuit Court jury will be asked in a trial scheduled to begin
tomorrow to consider whether the Rev. Daniel C. Clark, a Roman Catholic
priest who was convicted in 1988 of sexually abusing two boys, molested
two boys between 1998 and May 2002.

---

And so on, and so forth. Of course there were priests who abused girls,
but I would be surprised if the statistics did not show a clear preference
for boys, which would very much be supported by everything we know about
pedophiles.

> So it is everyone /else's/ fault this user made comments such as saying that
> maybe catholics want their children raped, is it? /He/ is responsible for
> his own actions. No-one else is.

Of course he is. Looking at cause and effect is, however, often more
useful than trying to find someone to blame.

> Considering your own behaviour of changing dates to suit things the way you
> wanted, and then trying to interpret a vote on the matter in a way that
> suited you,

Unlike you, I changed dates in accordance with our existing MoS
recommendations, and did not try to interpret a vote on the matter in a
"way that suited me." In fact, the only reason that I did not set up a
replacement vote for the ill conceived original one (which, however, very
much supported my case as it stood) is that Tim Starling came up with a
working dynamic date converter, which is currently runing on
test.wikipedia.org.

Regards,

Erik


from_name: Ulrich Fuchs

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Wikis and uniformity

body:
> Or they write "See [[xxx]]" or "''See also:'' [[xxx]]", etc.  Providing
> appropriate "tags" like "<seealso>" can help for better uniformity.

But you will have to end that with an </seealso> tag, too, and that IS already
far too difficult for most of the people I consider to be very interesting
authors.

XML is *not* meant to be edited by tools, but not directly by humans unless
when absolutely needed.

Please leave the section markup as simple as possible. Some naming rules
(Always use ==Further Information==; ===See also===; ===Literature===, no
matter how ugly it looks right now in our skins!) will fully do. Everyone can
learn that easily, it's intuitive (<seealso></seealso> is not!), it's uniform
and it can be easily handled automatically to produce true XML when needed.

Uli


from_name: Daniel Mayer

body:
Toby wrote:
>But the burden of proof lies with /you/,
>who insist on fixing everything in the
>GNU FDL to begin with.

? No. All Wikimedia projects are under the GNU FDL and yet you want to make an
exception here. I fail to see how the burden of proof is on me.

>No exchange can be hindered by a disjunctive
>license, because a GNU-only project can always
>borrow from a disjunctive one, and a disjunctive
>project can become GNU-only if it decides to
>borrow from a GNU-only project.

What do you mean exactly by a "disjunctive project"? And your use of the word
"project" is very confusing here - Wikibooks is the project and the
individual books are more akin to WikiProjects. In one sense you use the term
"disjunctive" to mean that each book decides what license to use (GFDL or
CCSA) and then you state that a book in in one license can barrow from a book
under a disjunctive license.

Don't you mean to say "dual license" for the latter example? That still
doesn't really make sense because a dual licensed work has a net flow of text
copied out instead of copied in for this simple reason; all text that goes
into a dual licensed work /has/ to be dual licensed. So even though a book
may be under a GFDL/CCSA dual license it /cannot/ accept GFDL only or CCSA
only text. Why would such a project choose that license combination in the
first place?

>If there were no Wikipedia or any source like it,
>would you still want to start Wikipedia on the GNU
>FDL alone?

That's rather hypothetical but without thinking it through too much I would
have chosen an in-house license like Jimbo suggests (allowing our work to be
licensed under one of several of a short list of outside licenses). But that
would only solve the issue about our text being re-used elsewhere.

Once something gets placed under one of those licenses and mixed with other
text that is solely under that license, then we are faced with the very odd
situation where we cannot use the resulting work (unless the owner of the
derivative work agrees to license their GFDL only part of their work, for
example, under our in house license).

OK, I'm getting a headache - this is all very complicated and the more I think
about it the more I'm convinced that since that we should not change things -
we are stuck with the GNU FDL and should work with the big boys on getting
them to play nicely together.

>So why do you want to saddle my project with the
>GNU licence, when next year I may find a CC SA
>textbook to join forces with?

Vaporware. Come back when you actually find a textbook you want to use that is
under a GFDL incompatible license and then we can consider the situation.

And you could always ask the copyright holder about a change in license.
We have already been successful in getting many people to re-license external
/proprietary/ text under the GFDL.  So I wouldn't be surprised at all if a
person with a CCSA book would agree to license their work to us under the GNU
FDL. Furthermore we have already uncovered a great many GFDL books already on
the Internet. Again - where are these other resources?

What you propose to do is add a great deal of needless complexity to solve a
problem that does not exist. If and when we come across a huge CCSA (or
similar) resource then we can think about having a disjoint system (only our
efforts to ask the copyright holders about giving us a GFDL license of their
work fail). But for now all this is just a needless distraction.

--- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


body:
Toby wrote:
>But anybody can add Invariant Sections.
>So if GNU FDL with Invariant Sections is not free,
>then GNU FDL without them is not copyleft.

Well the Debian people want to consider the GNU FDL non-copyleft - that is
their right. But they do not own the term. Anyway...

The Invariant Sections issue is very troublesome to me and we really need to
work with the GNU people to remove this option from future versions of their
license (for the sake of free content we must do this because it is not
possible to change Wikipedia's license). I would furthermore /strongly/ argue
that we do not accept any GNU FDL text in any Wikimedia project that has
Invariant Sections. The last thing we need is to become infected with that
garbage.

>The Creative Commons SA licence, in contrast,
>has no such problems. It is by any objective measure
>the superior licence;

I tend to agree but in the real world the GNU FDL is the license used by the
great majority of free content (not just Wikipedia ; CC is a suite of
licenses, not a single license, but together they are gaining some ground).
So our strategy should be to go with the flow and try to change that license
instead of making things really complicated by having a bunch of different
licenses within one project.

I'm sure RMS will listen to our concerns since Wikipedia is by far the largest
GNU FDL project in the world and I'm sure RMS is also concerned about
Debian's decision. The whole point of the GNU FDL was to have a license for
software documentation and yet anybody who wants their documentation in
Debian won't use this license - hence the license needs to be overhauled.

But in the meantime it is already difficult enough to get people to understand
our one license - let's not add another and make it even more complicated.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


from_name: Axel Boldt

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

> We do not give people sysop
> status so that they can act as editors and choose which content is
> appropriate and which isn't.

True. We also don't give people developer status so that they can
unilaterally take away sysop rights, which you just did for the second
time. I do not recall that your desire to enforce sysop guidelines was
included in your application for developer status.

> I would think that people from a leftist
> political perspective would be more sensitive to such issues of
> developing power structures.

Yup.

Axel

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from_name: sgilbert at nbnet.nb.ca

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Wikis and uniformity

body:
Karl Eichwalder wrote:

> > I think that if Wikipedia ever puts out a "stable" version for
> > distribution, the articles should be structured with XML. That's a job
> > for dedicated editors with a good knowledge of document structure.
> > Forcing it on the live wiki would, in my unproven opinion, by harmful.
>
> Perhaps.  Nevertheless, I'd like to give it a try; I'm seriously
> interested in a Wiki using the TEI DTD as its markup language.
> Unfortunately, my resources (time, knowlegde in hacking) are too
> limited to such a project come true on my own.

That would be interesting... and a lot of work. You would want
some editing tools that go beyond what the typical wiki provides.

b schewek wrote:

> Maybe the 'textbook' would be interested?
> They were/are discussing the 'print' business.

I believe Nupedia (Wikipedia's parent encyclopedia project) used
XML markup. That project had a division of labour between writers
and editors: the former simply wrote the articles, while the latter did
all the fancy markup.

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


from_name: Vincent Ramos

subject: [Wikitech-l] Search function improvement

body:
[Sorry if this message came twice?: I'm not sure I've correctly configured
my account]

Hello,
 I was wondering if it would not be possible to update the search system
that any Wikipedia page uses by adding a dropdown list allowing to seek in
other Wikipedias; one could thus be able not only to search in the
Wikipedia he's reading, but also in other ones. For instance, the search
combo box, button and list would be like that :
 <form>
<input type=text name="search" size=19 value="">
Try also in another Wikipedia : <select name="interwiki">
<option>Deutsch</option>
<option>English</option>
<option>Fran?ais</option>
<option>Nihongo</option>
<option>Zhongwen</option>[etc.]
</select>
<input type=submit name="go" value="OK">
<input type=submit value="Search">
</form>
 For example, someone searching in the French Wikipedia could also try and
see what the German one has to offer with the same topic (granted that he
actually knows how to spell it in the target language) without having to
switch manually to the German Wikipedia. This way, including interwikipedia
links would also be easier for editors.
 Vincent


from_name: Dante Alighieri

body:
At 12:44 PM 7/24/2003, Erik wrote:
>You [Axel] did not object, so I fail to see why you emphasize "for the
>second
>time" above. If you think I was wrong the first time, why didn't you say
>so? In the latest case, several users also approved of my actions, and the
>only one to substantially object regarding the actual case at hand (the
>page protection/unprotection) was Jtdirl.

For the record, I think that it was unnecessary to suspend 172's sysop
status on the basis of the incident in question taken in isolation. This is
not to say that I think Erik overstepped his bounds, or should have
developer status taken away. I simply disagree with his decision. I also
support(ed) Erik's actions to suspend Kils' sysop status previously.

My objection to the suspension of 172's sysop status is mainly that I don't
think he overstepped the bounds of good conduct any more than various other
sysops do on a not infrequent basis. We all go a bit past the realm of
"good ideas" once in awhile, and I think that suspension of sysop status
should be reserved for more substantive (especially REPEATED) violations
than 172's single instance of "questionable" protected page behavior.

-----
Dante Alighieri
dalighieri at digitalgrapefruit.com

"The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their
neutrality in times of great moral crisis."
    -Dante Alighieri, 1265-1321


from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [WikiEN-l] 172 sysop status restored

body:
172 has stated on my user talk page that he will act more cautiously in
the future under similar circumstances, hat he would not again protect
[[New Imperialism]] under the same conditions, and that he would try to be
communicative instead of antagonistic in cases similar to the
[[Catholicism]] one before protecting the page. That's good enough for me,
so I have restored his sysop status. If there are any objections, please
post.

Regards,

Erik


from_name: Richard Grevers

subject: [Wikitech-l] Opera fullscreen css bug

body:
On Thu, 24 Jul 2003 01:18:59 +0200, Tomasz Wegrzanowski
<taw at users.sourceforge.net> gave utterance to the following:

> Opera uses media=projection for fullscreen. It's rather unfortunate
> choice,
> but we have to live with it. Now Wikipedia doesn't display correctly
> under Opera fullscreen.
>
> I have commited to CVS patch that fixes this problem, by changing
> media='screen' to media='screen,projection'. There's no need to do
> any serious testing. Now how to upgrade all Wikipedias with this
> new procedure ?
>
There is always a need to test with css: Making the change you suggest will
cause Netscape 4 to ignore the stylesheet (it ignores all sheets declared
with multiple media types).

Two alternatives are: 1) Don't declare any media type, so the stylesheet is
used for all media for which there isn't a specific stylesheet declared
(there might be a print stylesheet)
2) Use two separate link statements with screen and projection media types,
pointing to the same file. The browser should be smart enough not to
download it twice.

In the meantime, I continue to pester Opera to have two fullscreen modes,
one using projection and one screen.
--
Richard Grevers
If at first you don't succeed change the rules.


subject: [WikiEN-l] 172 sysop status restored

body:
Fred-
> I have never withdrawn my objection to sysop status for 172. I knew he would
> abuse his status and he has repeatedly, you are just looking at the tip of
> the iceberg; most instances result from his leftist POV urge to revise
> history.

I have not ignored your objection at the time, but it was overridden by
Jimbo Wales. If you feel that 172 has "repeatedly" abused his sysop
status, please document all instances of him doing so.

Regards,

Erik


subject: [Wikitech-l] Mork work on the demo

body:
On 24-07-2003, tarquin wrote thusly :
> Rotem Dan wrote:
>
> >I have made a number of changes to the demo. Most of them are "behind
> >the scenes" regarding the use of tables, and browser compatibility.
> >
> >Version 1.1 of the demo:
> >http://www22.brinkster.com/rotemdan/phase4-demo-v1-1.htm
> >
> >phase4-metallic.css (if you want to make a new skin or modify the
> >current one): http://www22.brinkster.com/rotemdan/phase4-metallic.css
>
> Nice.
> But please use a serif font for body text.
> It's a bit dark -- too much grey
> I'm not sure the -media, -tionary, -textbook links are a good idea.
> I don't see the point of appending the talk page
Nice, nice.

I would be even happier with more contrasting lettering - black on dark grey is
not. And "Wikipedia" under the logo should stand out more.

Regards,
Kpjas.


from_name: James D. Forrester

subject: [WikiEN-l] 172 sysop status restored

body:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

On 24 July 2003 13:00, wikien-l-admin at wikipedia.org <> wrote:

> I have never withdrawn my objection to sysop status for 172. I knew
> he would abuse his status and he has repeatedly, you are just looking
> at the tip of the iceberg; most instances result from his leftist POV
> urge to revise history.

Urgh. Quite apart from anything else, 'leftist' is a relativistic, and
hence inherently-POV, word; that you consider 'leftist' persons' examination
of past events is "revis[ing] history", that you implicitly push the idea
that such historical revisionism is bad, and that you generalise on this
point, implying that the cause celebre of 'leftist'-ism is said historical
revisionism and that all 'leftist' persons, also lend to a disregard for
your opinion based on the  way you have stated it, I would have thought.

Also, I have no idea what you mean by 'leftist'; perhaps the evil scum-
like Red Commies? Disgusting weak French Socialism? Easy-going overly-
amenable benevolents, like Stalin? [1]

Surely peoples' politics shouldn't affect what you think of them as
responsible people? I know many people more towards (what I would
consider) the 'left' and 'right' sides of the political spectrum than I
am, and I don't think (significantly)[3] less of them for their views,
even though I may disagree with them. Certainly, I don't think they are
less capable of rational argument, nor do I consider them more (or less)
likely to not want to 'play fair' and attempt to subvert social processes
they interact with.

[Snip]

[1] - Yes, these were all picked deliberately to initiate a commentary[2],
      and are exceptionally extreme both in my depiction and imagery, but
      as I have no particular concept of the political background you come
      from and what you would consider 'normal'. I don't agree with any of
      my characterisations, for the record.

[2] - Or 'start a fight', if you prefer ;-)

[3] - Obviously, being but an imperfect human, I cannot wholly remove my
      inherent disregard for the concepts and beliefs of others, but
      merely reduce them.

Yours,
- --
James D. Forrester
<mailto:jon at eh.org> | <mailto:csvla at dcs.warwick.ac.uk>
<mailto:jamesdforrester at hotmail.com> | <mailto:james at jdforrester.org>

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from_name: steve vertigo

subject: [WikiEN-l] Happy Day of Slack

body:
After some rather stupid offlist discussion, I feel I
should remind everyone (me included) to cut the other
guy a little slack.

And while your at it cut yourselves a little slack
too.

Happy SlackDay.
-S-

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from_name: Vicki Rosenzweig

subject: [WikiEN-l] 172 sysop status restored

references:
<BB452661.3658%fredbaud@ctelco.net>
 <8qT38EPxpVB@erik_moeller>
 <BB452661.3658%fredbaud@ctelco.net>

body:
At 08:07 AM 7/24/03 -0700, Jimmy wrote:
>Fred Bauder wrote:
> > I have never withdrawn my objection to sysop status for 172. I knew
> > he would abuse his status and he has repeatedly, you are just
> > looking at the tip of the iceberg; most instances result from his
> > leftist POV urge to revise history.
>
>I appreciate this concern, and I have it, too.  But whenever I've
>looked into it, 172/Abe has worked reasonably well with others.
>
>I'm a bit constrained here because I myself come from an extremely
>strong libertarian POV, very different from Abe's, and so I have to be
>very careful not to let my own political perspective inappropriately
>enter into my analysis.
>
>What matters here is a willingness to work well with others towards
>NPOV, not where you come from personally.

Indeed. I'm well to the left of Jimbo, but *that doesn't matter* because
we share the goal of building an encyclopedia.

And it does bother me when Fred assumes that his own views are
neutral, and mine, because leftist, are not. We *all* have points of
view, and thus we all have to be careful to be neutral *when writing
or editing Wikipedia articles.*

--
Vicki Rosenzweig
vr at redbird.org
http://www.redbird.org


subject: [Wikitech-l] Phase IV

body:
I think everybody was under the impression you were
going to become a PHP guy. The question you really
pose is "is the next WP incarnation going to be
written in Perl"   As a non-coder -- just gauging the
pulse over the last several months about difference
between the two, and of the general sense of things
-- Id say "heckles no."

-S-

__________________________________
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Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software
http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com


subject: [WikiEN-l] Catholicism

body:
Jimmy-
> When should developers act to revoke sysop status?  I would say
> "Almost never" although I'm willing to listen to counter-arguments.

I don't really care if I have less work, but my personal opinion on the
matter is that protecting pages is one of the most radical things to do in
a wiki. Nobody who does not belong to the trusted group of sysops will be
able to make additions to the page during the period of protections, and
this enforces a class distinction that I am not very comfortable with. I
think it should be avoided.

As I have also pointed out, I am not comfortable with the frequent
antagonism towards newbies who make mistakes, and this is even more
problematic if it is combined with sysop actions. In 172's case, the
policy could be interpreted both ways -- that you are not really involved
in an edit war if you just express a strong opinion on the talk page
before protecting the page, or that you are in fact involved by doing so.
My interpretation is a matter of record, and I have now edited the policy
to favor my interpretation -- this is of course open to discussion.

You endorsed the previous similar actions in the case of User:Kils, so it
seemed logical to enforce the policy as I interpreted it. If, however, you
do not want me to do this and want to handle all complaints about sysop
status yourself except in cases of major vandalism that requires immediate
action, then I will gladly forward such complaints to you. I'm sure the 1
person bottleneck will bite us in the ass sooner or later, though.

Regards,

Erik


subject: [WikiEN-l] Catholicism

body:
Jimmy-
> Tragically, I don't remember the exact circumstances of User:Kils,
> even though it was fairly recent.  :-(

Well, Kils deleted his own user talk page and did some strange stuff
regarding pages which he considered inappropriate. But there was no
immediate threat in that case either -- it could have gone through the
Jimbottleneck as well ;-).

> There's something of an irony or paradox here.  Should developers be
> an elite cabal acting to prevent the formation of an elite cabal of
> sysops?  :-) Probably that's overstating it, but it does sum up the
> essence of the policy tensions here, I think.

Anytime I try to get Brion interested in joining my cabal, he goes on
vacation. And the people I've hired to dispose of a certain benevolent
dictator say they won't accept my WikiMoney. Hopefully the cabal will be
in place soon, so we can hold the world hostage by refusing to release
access to the database until we get .. 1 MILLION DOLLARS.

Seriously, though, it's always the same question: who watches the
watchers? I think all in all our process is reasonably open, and even if
you yourself abused your privileges to an unreasonable degree, there would
always be the possibility of forking. We subject each other to constant
supervision, and if I compare Wikipedia with other projects like Slashdot,
H2G2 and Everything2, I think we're a long way from falling victim to this
kind of elitism.

Regards,

Erik


from_name: Karl Eichwalder

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Wikis and uniformity

references:
<MPG.19878a6953ead4c11e1a307@smtp.nbnet.nb.ca>
	<sh4r1d2li4.fsf@tux.gnu.franken.de>
	<200307241144.33442.mail@ulrich-fuchs.de>

body:
Ulrich Fuchs <mail at ulrich-fuchs.de> writes:

> But you will have to end that with an </seealso> tag, too,

No, not necessarily.  I'm alway wirting SGML/XML, using SGML with
minimization features enabled allows you to leave out end tags at many a
lot locations.

> and that IS already far too difficult for most of the people I
> consider to be very interesting authors.

I just think different.  But wikipedia is that slow, all these things
don't matter at all.  In the afternoon it often takes minutes until my
Watchlist we be displayed.

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


from_name: Lightning

subject: [Wikitech-l] Phase IV

body:
Timwi wrote:

>
> Hi,
>
> the past few days I've been experimenting a bit with Apache, mod_perl,
> MySQL and creating an entire own website. I've never done that before,
> and I think I've learnt a lot from this.
>
> Now, for some reason, against all of your advice, I have started to
> program a Wiki, and by now it's already become a suitable basis for a
> Phase-IV Wikipedia software, including a database schema.
>
> It really doesn't seem to be very difficult to re-program the current
> software in Perl, this time taking all the problems into account and
> designing everything right from the start (incl. single-login,
> multi-language watchlists, a better translation system and skin system
> (separated from the code), etc.) I've also made a lot of
> considerations and decisions with respect to database design and
> performance.
>
> Should I continue with this?

I wouldn't advise it. While making a simple wiki software is simple
enough, once it startrs getting abigger and more complicated there is a
lot more to be done. Plus, I think there was a reason behing programming
in php vs Perl, im not sure.. but a re-write in a different language
sounds a bit risky. Then add to that that you designed a new db schema
and that all data will have to be converted from one to the other and
you got yourself  another issue. I think this is one of those times
where "If it's not broken, don't fix it"  I currently see no problems
with the wiki software as it is. I mean sure we have a couple of issues
here and there, but I dont think that means we need to re-write all the
code. What I think would be more important is a clean-up of the code.
And hopefully making the current code use  a templating system. After
that we could slowly move towards universal logins through a simple
system I proposed earlier which would allow for a simple transition.
After that is done, we could start working on unifying watch lists. etc.
But at the moment I think its more important to keep the current
software running without interruptions and optimizing it so it can deal
with the high loads it has to handle.

Iwould however be very interested in seeing your DB schema and some info
about your ideas for then ew software before completely shooting down
the idea. just please don't post perl source full of perlisms like $/,
$_, $? @var, %var. etc that crap is obfuscated and hurts my eyes.. i
absolutely hate it.  Hell if it was up to me, everything would be
written in something in between c++ and php and there would be no such
thing as arrays, only vectors.

Lightning


from_name: Arwel Parry

subject: [Wikitech-l] Inter-language links

body:
Having started to put links between articles in different language
wikis, I wonder if it would be possible to create a process (a bot?) to
occasionally search through all the interlanguage links to make sure
that there is a reverse link back to the original wiki e.g.

If we have [[cy:Yr_Ariannin]] linking to [[en:Argentina]]
[[es:Argentina]] [[pt:Argentina]] [[pl:Argentyna]] and so on, the
process would check if there's a link in each of those wikis back to
[[cy:Yr_Ariannin]] and if not, automatically create a link. I think it
would help to tie the different wikis together into one overall
Wikipedia.

Anyone think this is a reasonable idea, or how to do it?

--
Arwel Parry
http://www.cartref.demon.co.uk/


from_name: Anthere

body:
--- Vincent Ramos <siva-nataraja+spam at alussinan.org>
wrote:
> [Sorry if this message came twice : I'm not sure
> I've correctly configured
> my account]
>
> Hello,
>  I was wondering if it would not be possible to
> update the search system
> that any Wikipedia page uses by adding a dropdown
> list allowing to seek in
> other Wikipedias; one could thus be able not only to
> search in the
> Wikipedia he's reading, but also in other ones. For
> instance, the search
> combo box, button and list would be like that :
>  <form>
> <input type=text name="search" size=19 value="">
> Try also in another Wikipedia : <select
> name="interwiki">
> <option>Deutsch</option>
> <option>English</option>
> <option>Fran?ais</option>
> <option>Nihongo</option>
> <option>Zhongwen</option>[etc.]
> </select>
> <input type=submit name="go" value="OK">
> <input type=submit value="Search">
> </form>
>  For example, someone searching in the French
> Wikipedia could also try and
> see what the German one has to offer with the same
> topic (granted that he
> actually knows how to spell it in the target
> language) without having to
> switch manually to the German Wikipedia. This way,
> including interwikipedia
> links would also be easier for editors.
>  Vincent

I am sure Brion will answer to this when he is back

R?ponse ?nerv?e, qui n'?tait pas celle que j'avais
pr?vue. Assume.

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software
http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com


subject: [Textbook-l] No new wikis

body:
Toby-
> Why hold a vote?
> If some people want to do it and others don't,
> then some people will do it while others won't.

Anyone is of course free to start their own project on their own servers,
but a Wikimedia brand project should have support from a substantial
number of, er, Wikimedians. We're not a wiki hosting provider.

Regards,

Erik


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Phase IV

body:
> * No need for "smarty" or similar SGML templates since strict
> XHTML/CSS does a nice job in separating content from formatting, see
> the link above.

I think you are missing the point of a templating system and how it
works..... it has nothing to do with SGML.... its just a way to separate
php code from html code.. just a simple information hand-off interface...

Lightning


from_name: Ralphem at aol.com

subject: [Wikipedia-l] PNG format???

body:
Eric,
There is a basic problem with your logo, logo contest, and use of art in
general -- a good number of us out here cannot see them! ALL of the art on your
pages discusssing the logo contest come up with a red X in place of the art. You
discuss the fact that you want all logo designs in PNG format, but this is a
format that not all systems (Mac) and not all browsers (AOL 5.0, the only
software available for older Power PC Macs) support -- so you are cutting out a
sizeable portion of potential viewership. I'm a graphic designer, but I've never
used, nor have I had to use, PNG format for any image. TIF, JPEG, GIF and EPS
are the standards for graphics, and JPEG AND GIF are the standards for use on
the web when people with non-graphic software or systems need to view them.
One of the guiding principles in the development of the web has been to honor
the common person, probably one using an older computer with unsophisticated
software, and not freeze them out by demanding they constantly download the
latest "fireworks" or whatever in order to just view a common page. Backward
compatibility is an important concept, and is worth keeping whenever possible. Most
of us are still using dialup 56K modems out in the world -- web entities that
load up their pages with sophisticated cutting-edge animations and hi-res
long-loading photos and art are virtually assured of loosing me and millions of
others as potential viewers. Same thing applies with your art -- coding your
artwork in PNG format closes out a lot of potential viewers -- put them JPEG and
your viewership and useability will increase. Take a look a Amazon.com or any
other highly successful web business -- their pages open just as pretty in my
Mac as they do in the latest Pentium blazer, and they don't use advanced
formats. Let's keep it low tech -- PNG is an unnecessary complication for the
project. Thanks for listening.
Ralph McGeehan
ralphem at aol.com


from_name: Magnus Manske

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Wikis and uniformity

body:
sgilbert at nbnet.nb.ca wrote:
> I believe Nupedia (Wikipedia's parent encyclopedia project) used
> XML markup. That project had a division of labour between writers
> and editors: the former simply wrote the articles, while the latter did
> all the fancy markup.

That's how it was supposed to be; and it was not really XML, just
HTMLwith some proprietary tags (I'd know; I rewrote that part of the
software;-)
But, we even had SVG support back those days! :-)

Magnus


from_name: Tomasz Wegrzanowski

body:
On Thu, Jul 24, 2003 at 12:07:45PM -0700, Daniel Mayer wrote:
> I tend to agree but in the real world the GNU FDL is the license used by the
> great majority of free content (not just Wikipedia ; CC is a suite of
> licenses, not a single license, but together they are gaining some ground).
> So our strategy should be to go with the flow and try to change that license
> instead of making things really complicated by having a bunch of different
> licenses within one project.
>
> I'm sure RMS will listen to our concerns since Wikipedia is by far the largest
> GNU FDL project in the world and I'm sure RMS is also concerned about
> Debian's decision. The whole point of the GNU FDL was to have a license for
> software documentation and yet anybody who wants their documentation in
> Debian won't use this license - hence the license needs to be overhauled.

RMS proved himself to be quite resistant to any criticism. Invariant sections
were widely criticized even before GFDL was officialy released. I doubt we
can make him care about it.