from_name: Kate Turner

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: phase3/includes DefaultSettings.php,1.257,1.258

body:
Magnus Manske wrote in gmane.org.wikimedia.mediawiki.cvs:

> ! $wgDebugLogFile         = '';
> --- 432,436 ----
> ! $wgDebugLogFile         = 'deb.txt';

please don't commit changes like this to defaultsettings.  the debug log in
particular should definitely not be enabled by default.

kate.


list: wikitech-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Rowan Collins

subject: [Wikitech-l] many-wiki spam solution

body:
On Fri, 18 Mar 2005 15:20:34 -0500, Evan Prodromou <evan at bad.dynu.ca> wrote:
> It's probably worth noting that there's already an excellent shared
> regexp list here:
>
> http://www.emacswiki.org/cw/BannedContent

For the record, Wikimedia also has a blacklist (which only matches
inside URLs) at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Spam_blacklist

Perhaps this too could be combined with others using an auto-update +
whitelist, as described at CommunityWiki (an ingenious system, I must
say). Although, I note that cw's list is quite large, and there seems
to be some legitimate concern at over-general entries (e.g. is
*everything* under .uk.net *really* going to be spam?), so it might
need heavy weeding before going "live" for something as large as {the
Wikimedia group of sites}

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: daniwo59 at aol.com

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Congratulations are in order (an overlooked milestone)

body:
With all the hype about English hitting 500k, I just want to point out
another milestone that is being overlooked.

A while back, Amikeco and some others began pressing for an Ossetian
Wikipedia. It took a while, but they finally got it, and in a very short time,  they
passed the 100 article mark. This is especially impressive for a language
that few people have heard of. Great work for a small group of committed
editors.

I just want to congratulate them on this achievement, and hope that it
inspires some of the other small Wikis to pick up speed and grow.

Good work.

Danny


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] MediaWiki 1.5 work and general notes

body:
Just a reminder of work in progress and general background, for those
who might be commenting without being aware of present work...

First, in MediaWiki 1.5 we've made a major schema change, intended to
reduce the number of changes to data rows that have to be made and to
slim down the amount of data that has to be pulled per-row when scanning
non-bulk-text metadata.

Specifically, the 'cur' and 'old' tables are being split into 'page',
'revision', and 'text'. Lists of pages won't be trudging through large
page text fields, and operations like renames of heavily-edited pages
won't have to touch 15000 records. This will also give us the potential
to move the bulk text to a separate replicated object store to keep the
core metadata DBs relatively small and limber (and cacheable).

Talk to icee in #mediawiki if interested in the object store; he's
working on a prototype for us, to use for image uploads and potentially
bulk text storage.

Second, remember that each wiki's database is independent. It's very
likely that at some point we'll want to split out some of the larger
wikis to separate master servers; aside from localizing disk and cache
utilization, this could provide some fault isolation in that a failure
in one master would not affect the wikis running off the other master.

Third, we're expecting to have at least two new additional data centers
soon in Europe and the US. Initially these are probably going to be
squid proxies since that's easy for us to do (we have a small offsite
squid farm in France currently in addition to the squids in the main
cluster in Florida) but local web server boxen pulling from local slaved
databases at least for read-only requests is something we're likely to
see, to move more of the load off of the central location.

Finally, people constantly bring up the 'PostgreSQL cures cancer'
bugaboo. 1.4 has experimental PostgreSQL support, which I'd like to see
as a first-class supported configuration for the 1.5 release. This is
only going to happen, though, if people pitch in to help in testing, bug
fixing, and of course make some benchmarks and failure mode tests
compared to MySQL! If you ever want Wikimedia to consider switching, the
software needs to be available to make it work and it needs to be
demonstrated as a legitimate improvement with a feasible conversion.

Domas is the PostgreSQL partisan on our team and wrote the existing
PostgreSQL support. If you'd like to help you should probably track him
down; in #mediawiki you'll usually find him as 'dammit'.

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

from_name: Yann Forget

subject:
[Foundation-l] Re: [Wiktionary-l] Translations of Wikipedia,
	Wikimedia and Wiktionary

body:
Le Friday 18 March 2005 19:21, Ray Saintonge a ?crit :
> Sabine Cretella wrote:
> > Hi Yann,
> >
> > I added Sicilian for Wikipedia and Wiktionary - but I have a problem
> > with Wikimedia ... shouldn't this remain the same for all languages
> > since it is the name of the foundation?
>
> This is a good point for legal reasons.

No, that's not the point.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coca_cola

Look for the titles of the article in Japanese, Chinese, Hindi and Russian.
There ARE in the local script, even if Coca Cola is a trademark.
This is the same for every article of every language which is not written with
the Latin alphabet.?BTW, there is also an article in Hebrew about Coca-Cola,
but no link from en.wikipedia.org.

> Ec

Regards,
Yann
--
http://www.non-violence.org/ | Site collaboratif sur la non-violence
http://www.forget-me.net/ | Alternatives sur le Net
http://fr.wikipedia.org/ | Encyclop?die libre
http://www.forget-me.net/pro/ | Formations et services Linux


list: wikimedia-l


list: wiktionary-l

subject: [Wiktionary-l] Translations of Wikipedia, Wikimedia and Wiktionary


from_name: Neil Harris

subject:
[Wikitech-l] You have lots of money to spend ;	time to get to
	it! :-)

body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:

>Not sure if this has been discussed yet, but we have US$95,000 budgeted for
>hardware this quarter ($20,000 of which for Extra hardware/dev projects ;
>meaning hardware and/or paying for critical software development). This does
>not include whatever has been bought already (Jamesday ; how much have we spent
>since the January order? I don't have the bank records for that yet.).
>
>http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Budget/2005
>
>I?d really like to have a general idea on what we want to buy soon and if that
>can be bought before the end of the quarter in 2 weeks, then that?d make
>accounting a bit easier for me :).
>
>Note: About $20,000 of the money generated is in the Wikimedia Deutschland bank
>account. The easiest way I can see to use that money is to buy equipment that
>would be used in a German-based datacenter. I?ve been told that there are many
>different offers for free/subsidized hosting in Germany.
>http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Fund_drives/2005/Q1
>
>So, what do we want to buy?
>
>Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
>
>
>
>
You asked for some opinions: well, here are my ramblings on the matter.
I hope they are reasonably on-topic.

Don't buy cheap anything: at this scale of operations, it costs more
than it saves. I wouldn't buy any more boxes from your previous
suppliers: the failure rates (for whatever reasons) have been
disastrous. Even buying Dell rack-mount boxes would be better: they're
(fairly) reliable, (fairly) well-built, and you can buy them anywhere in
the world, which is good for standardization. If not Dell, consider some
other global supplier. Accept that stuff will break, and break all the
time; a good supplier will come to your colo, take the old server away,
and fit a new one in your rack. You'll never see the old one again: no
waiting for return to factory, or the vendor wanting you to test it
yourself. _This_ sort of service is what you pay the big suppliers for,
and it's worth it, when you are running a serious 24/7 system. Also, if
you are considering a big order to a single supplier, they might be
willing to give you a large discount in return for being put on the
Wikipedia Foundation's list of sponsors.

Regardless of supplier, I'd try not to buy lots of custom-tailored boxes
for squids or apaches: just spec one generic box to handle either role,
as well as generic glue computing (routing, load balancing, etc., etc.)
. Put as much memory in them as you can afford, and big fat NICs. The
money you appear to waste now, you'll save it in the future by having as
big a pool of similar machines as possible, reducing inventory and
spares problems. This way, you can also build standard install images,
or netinstall images, for machines, and deploy them in a "cookie cutter"
way when you need to clone more squids or apaches. If you configure the
install images / packages right, you should also be able to run them as
virtual machines during testing.

Order 64-bit capable machines, of course, for their security advantages,
and speed advantages when running 64-bit software. Move to 64-bit
software as soon as reasonably possible.

Consider having two of everything: two NFS servers, two mail servers,
etc. I know, you are already part way towards this). If necessary,
consolidate numerous low-throughput services onto a single server, then
have a second server as a complete backup for the first. N services on a
single server with a backup is muxh more reliable than N services on N
servers. If you need two servers to handle the throughput, buy three.

Remember that your tightest constraint is admin skills and time; having
a highly standardized system for deployment will save you _vast_ amounts
of scarce time, and any deployment automation you can use will make for
vastly more reliable systems deployment. Consider Debian as both an
operating system and a deployment system: at the moment, different
machines run different operating system flavours, making sysadminning
harder.

Note that the software packaging approach for deployment also makes it
easier to deploy in remote sites: even on hardware other than your own.

Databases are a different issue: you can't apply the same commodity
thinking: however, try to order DB machines in identical multiples, too,
for the same reasons. Clearly the DB machines will need to be
hand-crafted. I don't know much about databases on this sort of scale...
but I imagine the Wikipedia developers do.

Consider investing in some simple environmental monitoring: power drain,
temperature, humidity, in various places. You can get rack-mount units
for this. Overheating, or excess dryness or wetness, is seriously bad
for your servers, and hence your data and syadmin sanity. An ounce of
prevention is again worth a pound of cure.

Finaly, you might consider buying a cheap radio clock on a per-site
basis, if your colo does not already provide you with a local stratum-1
NTP feed. Keeping your distributed clusters around the world in time
sync, even when connectivity is lost, is a good thing when you have a
widely distributed system that wants to keep global consistency.

-- Neil


list: wikien-l

subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia hits the big time

body:
The Cunctator wrote:

>On 3/16/05 10:04 AM, "Poor, Edmund W" <Edmund.W.Poor at abc.com> wrote:
>
>
>>I was approached by the director of a foundation (with a multi-million
>>dollar budget) to create a fork of Wikipedia leading to a print edition
>>to be published no later than 2008. If I do this, maybe it will get me
>>out of your hair? (The Cunctator wrote, "Rinse, wash, repeat.") But I
>>worry whether a fork is the best approach, or even necessary at all.
>>
>>
>
>My comment was as much about the enabling behavior of the Wikipedia
>community was it was about Ed's.
>
>That aside: one of the obvious baby steps that should be taken in regards to
>questions of reliability, tagging versions, etc., is to give people a
>permanent link to the current version of an article. Ideally in a relatively
>succinct format.
>
>This does not exist--you can link without fear of change to historical
>revisions, but not to the most recent revision.
>
>Not only should this functionality exist, it should be relatively obvious.
>
>That would eliminate a *lot* of worries from the academic world--yes, the
>reliability of the information would still be questionable, but at least
>they'd know that the reference they make now will be identical at any time
>in the future.
>
>And yes, I know this is difficult in the current code, but it's an important
>need.
>
>
As I understand it, this is in the process of being fixed (or at least
being made trivial to implement) in 1.5.
-- Neil


from_name: Rick

subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia map of British Columbia

body:
--- "James D. Forrester" <james at jdforrester.org>
wrote:
> On Friday, March 18, 2005 7:56 PM, Rick
> <giantsrick13 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> > How can a red dot on an otherwise blank map of
> British
> > Columbia with the county lines listed, possibly be
> > copyrighted?
>
> One imagines that the contention is that the source
> blank map is in fact
> held in copyright.

How is a blank map with the outlines of the counties
copyrighted?  Any more than a list of counties would
be copyrightable.

RickK

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


body:
Alex J. Avriette wrote:

>>Order 64-bit capable machines, of course, for their security advantages,
>>and speed advantages when running 64-bit software. Move to 64-bit
>>software as soon as reasonably possible.
>>
>>
>
>Want to voice 100% approval of this. Nobody wants to hear that
>Postgres compiles natively in 64-bit and makes use of it (I measured
>40% increase in row-insert performance on UltraSPARC, among other
>things), but it bears mentioning. I don't know whether MySQL is
>n64'able. I can help building a 32/64 or a 64-bit gcc if anyone would
>like help. Opteron, Opteron, Opteron. I don't think we need 64-bit
>Xeon's or Itanium/Itanium2's.
>
>
>
However, consider the global supplier situation for Opterons. Alas, Dell
don't do them. Who would be the right supplier for this?

>>vastly more reliable systems deployment. Consider Debian as both an
>>operating system and a deployment system: at the moment, different
>>machines run different operating system flavours, making sysadminning
>>harder.
>>
>>
>
>RedHat, of course, has its own products for these purposes. But I'm
>pretty OS agnostic.
>
>
>
>>Databases are a different issue: you can't apply the same commodity
>>thinking: however, try to order DB machines in identical multiples, too,
>>
>>
>
>Anyone know what an 8-way 848 Opteron costs these days?
>
>
>
>>for the same reasons. Clearly the DB machines will need to be
>>hand-crafted. I don't know much about databases on this sort of scale...
>>but I imagine the Wikipedia developers do.
>>
>>
>
>First, multiplicity. Second, fast disk. Hardware raid controllers and
>tablespaces which allow you to put your indices on the really fast
>disk and your "big data" on the slower, cheaper, bigger disk. Is SAN
>attachment an option or are we sticking with NFS? SAN over 1gbit ether
>(which is where we're at) is not so bad. I mean, it could be worse.
>
>
>
Oh, and don't forget the Gbytes and Gbytes of RAM!

>>for your servers, and hence your data and syadmin sanity. An ounce of
>>prevention is again worth a pound of cure.
>>
>>
>
>Amen.
>
>
>
>>Finaly, you might consider buying a cheap radio clock on a per-site
>>basis, if your colo does not already provide you with a local stratum-1
>>
>>
>
>Am I missing something? Can we not just sync with
>{tick,tock}.usno.navy.mil? If usno.navy.mil goes down, we have much
>bigger problems than a toasted wikipedia.
>
>
Consider connectivity going down at a remote site (takes just one
backhoe at the site 1/4 mile down the road where all of your supposedly
"diverse" fibers join the same duct, or simply a router going mad, or
someone hitting the Big Red Power-Off Button at ********* *****
[substitute your national Achilles Heel IXP]), rather than Global
Thermonuclear War. Trust me, a local clock is a good thing. That's why
it's such a useful service to have onsite.

>Nobody's mentioned backups. Automated backups are hard to do, and
>manual backups require somebody to go there and swap tapes. Is a tape
>changer in the cards for us? We'd need to go with LTO or something....
>and that's pretty ugly, money wise. Anyone?
>
>aa
>
>
Now, that's a very good point. However, it might be better to do what
Linus does and "let millions of people mirror it everywhere". This might
be something to ask organizations like to UK Mirror Service, Internet
Archive and Google to do on a formal basis. This way, the backups are
off-site too. The current archive is 50G. If we take a week to back it
up, that's a data rate of 50e9*8/(86400*7) = 662 kbps < 1 Mbps. So
Wikipedia could perform complete backups weekly to three different sites
at a cost of 3 Mbps sustained. That's cheaper than the cost of the tape
media.

-- Neil


from_name: Magnus Manske

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Article validation feature, or: The Feature,
	Resurrected

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

(Note: I'm posting this here instead of wikitech-l because I believe it
is of broader interest)

I have finished updating (well: rewriting) the article validation
feature for the current development software version (1.5), to a point
where all essential functions work. I'll do some prettyfication (is that
a word?) later, or wait for someone else to do it ;-)

Is there a 1.5 test site to demonstrate it? I know 1.5 is still
considered insecure, but we'll need a test site at some point for actual
living users to beat the bits out of it...

Tech howto follows:
Run "patch-validate.sql" to update the table schema. Set
"$wgUseValidation=true" in LocalSettings. Enjoy.
Caveats:
* Currently PHPTal only
* The old (1.4) code is still in SpecialValidate.php, but commented out
* Currently every logged-in user can both validate and set topics for
validation. At least the latter has to be severly restricted in a live
version, as deletion of a topic will delete all data associated with the
topic as well.

Magnus
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Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

iD8DBQFCO2LSCZKBJbEFcz0RAql/AJ9BQJGRSy+kUjLGV8fwXKFCqxdqeQCfbDvK
r+La9gYcy8Mm/hWuADEMmyA=
=4k1x
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from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikimedia Collaboration of the Week

body:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_COTW is a proposal for a weekly
cross-project collaboration similar in process to the English Wikipedia
Collaboration of the Week (COTW). To trial this idea, I suggest adding a
WM-COTW box to the English Wikipedia Community Portal.

Plase comment on this proposal at:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Community_Portal (bottom)

If this leads to people actually working and voting on the COTW, I will
then proceed to propagate the idea to other projects (though hopefully
some people will read this list and suggest it on their own on their
local Wikimedia project). Ideally, the current WM-COTW would be
prominently featured on all the sites, and lead to lots of activity on
important tasks such as documentation and promotional materials, as well
as an increased group identity, raised awareness of Wikimedia and Meta,
and more exposure for our smaller projects.

All best,

Erik


from_name: John Lee

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Five points we should be discussion
	about	themediawiki projects

body:
Alex J. Avriette wrote:

>* What can we do to streamline or otherwise improve the performance of
>the project?
>-- The "fancruft" thing has been nagging at me since David started
>attacking me on it. I really don't care what kind of article it is,
>but would it be possible to create "clusters" of articles (represented
>in the database as such) to make it easier for the database engine to
>find what it wants? I'll continue these thoughts in reply to David's
>message.
>
>
Actually, the developers have repeatedly stated that article numbers are
not a concern (as I'm sure you must have been told already). This is not
because there is no performance hit but because the performance hit is
negligible.

I do strongly approve of merging small articles, however. I would not
support a stand-alone school article, however, but I would support
merging it with the relevant article on its locality. When there's
enough information on it, it can be broken out into its own article. I
won't go into philosophical reasons here since this is Wikitech-l, after
all, but I do agree with the stance that small articles should be moved.
I just think a point or two behind your reasoning is faulty. ;-)

John Lee
([[en:User:Johnleemk]])


subject: [Foundation-l] uk.wikinews.org launched

body:
As announced yesterday, I have set up http://uk.wikinews.org/
(Ukrainian) in accordance with the existing language policy and notified
the interested participants. This is also the first time the optional
additional process at
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/New_language_pre-launch has been used.

Related question: Should I continue announcing new Wikinews editions to
foundation-l, or is it enough to post to wikinews-l? I don't want to
spam the list with this. Coming up next is probably Italian.

All best,

Erik


subject: [Foundation-l] uk.wikinews.org launched


from_name: Karl Eichwalder

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Everything Is In the Edit History (Re: French
	wikipedians requesting ...)

body:
"Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales" <jwales at wikia.com> writes:

> It's the wiki way.  Having the ability to edit what other people write
> gives rise to a culture of co-operation rather than confrontation.

That's how things ought to work for article text.  "Signed" posts on
talk pages are different.  At least, if you edit someone's post on a
talk page, make sure to remove the signature (this --~~~~ marker
resp. its expansion).

> We don't have a strong culture of refactoring, but it is traditional
> in a wiki to refactor discussions, which means, for someone to come
> through and take a large discussion and neutrally summarize what it
> was all about.  Everything is in the edit history, and of course
> people can refactor the refactoring.

Yes, in general it works this way.  Unfortunately, that's not the truth
if people "rename" or "join" articles; this basically often means to
delete an article and its edit history.  Recently I tracked down such a
case on the German WP:

    1/ In January 2003 [[de:Konrad Witz]] was created - by me,
       accidentally.

    2/ During the next two years some 10 edits took place without
       enhancing it remarkable.

    3/ In February 2005 an IP user created a badly written article
       (babelfish?) with the name [[de:Conrad Witz]]; it is longer and
       offers more "facts".

    4/ Some days later a WP admin moved away the old "Konrad Witz"
       article with the intend to rename [[de:Conrad Witz]] to
       [[de:Konrad Witz]].
       ATM, "Konrad Witz" sit in the "trash" area waiting deletion.

    5/ Some copied a sentence from the old article and basically written
       in 2003  to the new one - without a proper checkin message; now
       it looks as if this sentence was written in 2005.

Looking at the current edit history of [[de:Konrad Witz]] you will
believe, info on "Konrad Witz" was missing in the German WP up til
February 2005.  Similar "accidents" happen all the time and as time goes
by, edit histories lie more and more.

I will publish this message as
[[en:User:Keichwa/Everything Is In the Edit History]]

--
http://www.gnu.franken.de/ke/                           |      ,__o
                                                        |    _-\_<,
                                                        |   (*)/'(*)
Key fingerprint = F138 B28F B7ED E0AC 1AB4  AA7F C90A 35C3 E9D0 5D1C


from_name: notafish

subject: [Foundation-l] uk.wikinews.org launched

body:
Please, do continue posting here.
A new Wikinews is a new Wikimedia project, I find it only normal that
Foundation-l should be kept informed.

Delphine

On Sat, 19 Mar 2005 02:48:47 +0100, Erik Moeller <erik_moeller at gmx.de> wrote:
> As announced yesterday, I have set up http://uk.wikinews.org/
> (Ukrainian) in accordance with the existing language policy and notified
> the interested participants. This is also the first time the optional
> additional process at
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/New_language_pre-launch has been used.
>
> Related question: Should I continue announcing new Wikinews editions to
> foundation-l, or is it enough to post to wikinews-l? I don't want to
> spam the list with this. Coming up next is probably Italian.
>
> All best,
>
> Erik
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>


subject: [Foundation-l] uk.wikinews.org launched


from_name: actionforum at comcast.net

subject:
[WikiEN-l] interview with Jimmy Wales on web site of the journal
	Nature

body:
http://www.nature.com/news/2005/050314/full/050314-17.html

Not particularly notable, brief discussion of "no original research" and neutrality policy.

-- Silverback


from_name: Ray Saintonge

body:
James D. Forrester wrote:

>On Saturday, March 19, 2005 8:07 AM, Rick <giantsrick13 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>
>
>>--- "James D. Forrester" <james at jdforrester.org> wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>>>On Friday, March 18, 2005 7:56 PM, Rick
>>><giantsrick13 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>>How can a red dot on an otherwise blank map of British
>>>>Columbia with the county lines listed, possibly be
>>>>copyrighted?
>>>>
>>>>
>>>One imagines that the contention is that the source blank map is in
>>>fact held in copyright.
>>>
>>>
>>How is a blank map with the outlines of the counties
>>copyrighted?  Any more than a list of counties would
>>be copyrightable.
>>
>>
>The former is a work of art (there is always going to be some imprecision in
>the drawing of a map vs. the original actual borders as seen on the Earth
>from a height which might serve to cause the map's creation to be seen as
>sufficiently intelligent as to warrant copyright status, notwithstanding the
>selection of transformation to map from an ablate sphere to a plane, itself
>(the selection, not the mechanical transformation, of course) arguably a
>concious design creation.
>
>Case in point: in the UK, the Ordanance Survey (governmental agency) and the
>AA (car rescue service) both make maps independently; they alter these maps
>by adding small deviances (bends in borders, squiggles in rivers, et al.) so
>that copiers are detectable, but it is the copying of the map itself, not
>the inclusion of their random squiggles. BICBW.
>
>
I don't think that the issue is that simple.  The regional districts in
British Columbia are a creation of provincial legislation, and although
I have not researched in detail the statutes that began creating these
in 1965, a formal dexcription (if not a map) of these districts is a
part of the law.  This then leads to the question of the extent to which
crown copyright applies to statutory law.  In the recent Supreme Court
ruling (CCH Canadian v. Law Society of Upper Canada) which had to do
with photocopying headnotes and other added material from reports of
legal cases there was a clear statement that the decisions of judges
themselves were not copyrightable, but nothing was said about the
underlying statutes.

The current BC government is particularly business friendly, and is very
keen to put a lot of public services into private hands to the delight
of the people who are its most ardent supporters.  Where government
printing and publishing services are concerned it is clear that the
illusion of copyright protection makes the enterprise more marketable.

I'm aware of the trick that would make inconsequential changes to
geographic features for the purpose of being able to trace the source of
a map.  But Mr. O'Neil has made no such claim in support of his
allegation.  Such changes would be probative only, and would be too
trivial to generate any kind of derivative copyright  Non-trivial
changes in this case would be wilfull misrepresentation of laws by
government employees, and I doubt that they would want to go down that
road   Opposition voices might see this differently in the context of
the upcoming provincial election in May.

I think we should keep the maps.  It should be made clear, though, that
their status in the public domain existed before they were contributed,
and that that status does not arise because of the actions of the
contributor.  What can O'Neil do about it?

Ec


body:
Andre Engels wrote:

>On Sat, 19 Mar 2005 21:21:32 +0900, Aphaia <aphaia at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>>On Fri, 18 Mar 2005 23:28:50 +0100, Yann Forget <yann at forget-me.net> wrote:
>>
>>
>>>BTW, there is also an article in Hebrew about Coca-Cola,
>>>but no link from en.wikipedia.org.
>>>
>>>
>>So articles not wrtten with latin alphabet tend to isolate from
>>interlingual link network. This tendency is strong on newly launched
>>projects which need more help than larger ones.
>>
>>
>There will indeed be an effect in that direction. I myself do
>bot-assisted addition of interwiki-links, and to do that I have to
>'guess' what the title of a subject in various languages is. Many
>subjects (names of people, cities etc.) will be the same among the
>various Latin alphabet wikipedias, but not in other languages. Thus, I
>will pick up the former much easier than the latter. On the other
>hand, if there is one link plus backlink somewhere, a bot can
>relatively easily add the rest.
>
I think that the members of minor Wikis will need to accept the major
responsibility for this.  The rest of us just don't have the required
knowledge. For them to create at least one Latin alphabet link to any
such language every time they start an article would give you a starting
point.  This can be started more easily on a very small wiki; after that
it could perhaps become a habit for its members.

Ec


from_name: Marc O'Morain

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re:WikiIndex (idea)

references:
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	<4239e035.23eb7a3f.05a4.ffffdda6SMTPIN_ADDED@mx.gmail.com>
	<d8b8be2d050317165050e4ee14@mail.gmail.com>
	<423AC0D1.5040105@tonal.clara.co.uk>

body:
On Fri, 18 Mar 2005 11:51:45 +0000, Neil Harris <neil at tonal.clara.co.uk> wrote:
> At the risk of repeating myself, it would be really neat if we could
> write something like
>
> [[attribute = value]]

A minor niggle:

The = operator should be used for equailty, not for assignment :)
[[Attribute := Value]]
Would be far nicer!

Does anyone know of any existing RDF schemas for describing the sets
of the information that may be in an encyclopedia? History, People,
Places etc.

--
Marc O'Morain


from_name: Tels

subject: [Wikitech-l] many-wiki spam solution

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

Moin,

On Friday 18 March 2005 21:20, Evan Prodromou wrote:
> On Thu, 2005-17-03 at 20:12 -0700, Brian wrote:
> > Small wikis no-doubt get the most spam. I run several smallish wikis
> > and removing spam from them is nearly an everyday occurance. Take for
> > instance the bomis wiki. [1]. Scroll down to the bottom and take a
> > look at how hard it is getting hit (that's use mod)
> >
> > So the idea is to build into the mediawiki software an interwiki
> > watchlist, hosted by the foundation. This requires little
> > modification as we can use the RSS feed that is already generated by
> > the software and found at RC.  A simple opt-in during the install of
> > the software and a message will be sent home to retrieve the feed
> > every so often.
> >
> > What it is appropriate to do after that, i'm not sure. But there are
> > a lot of ways it could go.
> >
> > Just wanted to throw this out there and see if it has merit. I think
> > it is a simple solution at identifying lots of spam around the web.
>
> It's probably worth noting that there's already an excellent shared
> regexp list here:
>
> http://www.emacswiki.org/cw/BannedContent

Technical note:

	...
	foo\.com
	foos?\.com
	foos.com
	...

This list contains many rendund regexps, foos?\.com will match exactly
(and only) foo.com and foos.com, so there is no need to list them again.
Likewise, it would probably a good idea to combine many of the regexps
like:

	...
	foo\.com
	bar\.com
	...

into	(foo|bar)\.com - this would reduce the number of matches to be done,
and so speed up the matching process. Similiar:

	foo\.(com|net|org)

instead of

	foo\.com
	bar\.com

Of course, combined regexps are harder to edit, but matching 10000
small/short regexps takes way longer than matching 100 one with 100
alternations each.

Best wishes,

Tels

- --
 Signed on Sat Mar 19 10:51:37 2005 with key 0x93B84C15.
 Visit my photo gallery at http://bloodgate.com/photos/
 PGP key on http://bloodgate.com/tels.asc or per email.

 "My other computer is your Windows box." -- Dr. Brad (19034) on
 2004-08-13 at /.

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from_name: James D. Forrester

body:
On Saturday, March 19, 2005 8:07 AM, Rick <giantsrick13 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> --- "James D. Forrester" <james at jdforrester.org> wrote:
>
> > On Friday, March 18, 2005 7:56 PM, Rick
> > <giantsrick13 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> >
> > > How can a red dot on an otherwise blank map of British
> > > Columbia with the county lines listed, possibly be
> > > copyrighted?
> >
> > One imagines that the contention is that the source blank map is in
> > fact held in copyright.
>
> How is a blank map with the outlines of the counties
> copyrighted?  Any more than a list of counties would
> be copyrightable.

The former is a work of art (there is always going to be some imprecision in
the drawing of a map vs. the original actual borders as seen on the Earth
from a height which might serve to cause the map's creation to be seen as
sufficiently intelligent as to warrant copyright status, notwithstanding the
selection of transformation to map from an ablate sphere to a plane, itself
(the selection, not the mechanical transformation, of course) arguably a
concious design creation.

Case in point: in the UK, the Ordanance Survey (governmental agency) and the
AA (car rescue service) both make maps independently; they alter these maps
by adding small deviances (bends in borders, squiggles in rivers, et al.) so
that copiers are detectable, but it is the copying of the map itself, not
the inclusion of their random squiggles. BICBW.

Yours,
--
James D. Forrester -- Wikimedia: [[W:en:User:Jdforrester|James F.]]

Mail: james at jdforrester.org | jon at eh.org | csvla at dcs.warwick.ac.uk
IM  : (MSN) jamesdforrester at hotmail.com


subject: [Foundation-l] suggestion for coming fundraising drives

body:
Aphaia wrote:

> but there are many people at least in Japan" who don't think or understand" a
> non-profit organisation should rely on donation at any rate
>
>
It is understandable that people in different countries can look at the
concept of a "non-profit organisation" in different ways.  It would be
interesting if you told us what Japanese people understand with this
idea?  How do they understand the best way of financing such an
organisation?  Is there a form of organisation that makes more sense to
the Japanese mind?

Ec


from_name: Alfio Puglisi

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re:WikiIndex (idea)

references:
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	<4239e035.23eb7a3f.05a4.ffffdda6SMTPIN_ADDED@mx.gmail.com>
	<d8b8be2d050317165050e4ee14@mail.gmail.com>
	<423AC0D1.5040105@tonal.clara.co.uk> <423B5DEA.10202@hackish.org>

body:
On Fri, 18 Mar 2005, Delirium wrote:

>Neil Harris wrote:
>
>> At the risk of repeating myself, it would be really neat if we could
>> write something like
>>
>> [[attribute = value]]
>>
>> in articles, since we could then use it to generate all sorts of good
>> stuff, including automatic rendering of navigation tables in the UI,
>> structured search, and autogeneration of RDF for semantic search engines.
>
>Not to mention that this data can be reused.  For example, there are all
>sorts of attributes on the Wikiproject Mountains pages.  If I could
>specify "height=1377 meters" somewhere, then it could *both* be used to
>generate the infobox, *and* used to sort mountains by height and
>whatnot.

Maybe we can leverage the existing templates for this? Say we have a
[[Template:Mountain]] with parameters such as height and geographical
position and others. The wikicode would look like:

{{Mountain|name=Foo|height=1337|lat=+13? 33'|lon=233? 21'}}

I would assume such a template already exists. Then each page that uses
the template has automatic attributes of the form "Mountain_height=1377",
"Mountain_name=Foo", etc. When one searches for "mountain", look up if a
suitable template exists. Now you can offer a list of mountain by height,
position and so on.

Alfio


from_name: Phil Sandifer

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Edit speed choking

references:
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	<4239e035.23eb7a3f.05a4.ffffdda6SMTPIN_ADDED@mx.gmail.com>
	<d8b8be2d050317165050e4ee14@mail.gmail.com>
	<423AC0D1.5040105@tonal.clara.co.uk>
	<d8b8be2d05031902526c6784d2@mail.gmail.com>

body:
I know en is suffering from a seeming increase in the number of people
who engage in high speed vandal attacks. My guess is other Wikipedias,
if they don't already get this, will. Certainly, there are some
technical measures in place and being put in place. Rollbacks on page
moves are nice, plugging the interwiki redirect hole is very nice. But
new problems will come up, and some of the existing problems (Page
creation vandalism) won't go away with an easy technical solution
addressing that specific problem.

What would be the result/problem/whatever of an edit speed throttle on
new accounts. I'm thinking an edit a minute for the first 100 edits. I
know edit count is a resource intensive query, so presumably some sort
of technical wizardry would need to be come up with to check whether or
not the throttle should be set. I'd assume the easiest way to do this
would be to only check to see if the throttle should be lifted. That
is, have the edit count only be employed if the editor is currently
throttled - once 100 edits hits, the check wouldn't need to be
performed anymore. Perhaps a new function could also be written that
would be less database intensive but only check edits up to a certain
number. (That is, instead of doing horrifyingly huge checks on users
like Rambot who have millions of edits, once it notices that the number
exceeds 100, it stops)

I don't know the tech answers here as I'm not a dev. My main two
questions are:

1) Is an edit throttle feasable?
2) What good reasons are there to not throttle contributors for their
first 100 edits so that they cannot launch widespread  changes? (That
is, does anything that people tend to do in their first 100 edits
actually require editing more than once a minute?)

-Snowspinner


from_name: steven l. rubenstein

subject: [WikiEN-l] Test case: policing content

body:
A short time ago there was an extensive debate on this list-serve about the
nature of our dispute-resolution process, and about the difference between
violations of behavioral rules and content rules.  Apparently, most people
believe that the available processes are adequate to the problems we
face.  Well, here is a test case and frankly, I do not know -- based on our
current policies -- what to do.

Over the past couple of weeks there has been vigorous debate at the
Capitalism article concerning the introduction.  The debate has mostly been
between me and Ultramarine on one side, and RJII on the other.  Two
policies are relevant: NPOV and NOR.  RJII insists on writing his own
definition of capitalism.  He has provided NO evidence of any research,
beyond looking up the word "capitalism" on the OED.  He consistently
provides what he calls a "marxist" definition of capitalism that
Ultramarine and I insist is not Marxist, and he refuses to provide a
source.  Most recently, he posted this comment:

>Explanation... I used the term "typically regarded" so that stray
>definitions by malcontent college professors don't count.

My understanding of this is that he is flagrantly disregarding the basic
encyclopedic principle that articles should be based on research.  He uses
"typically regarded" (and, in other instances, "common knowledge" or
"obvious") to explain why he does not need to provide a source for his own
definition of capitalism, and to explain why it is intrinsically NPOV,
despite my and Ultramarine's vigorous objections.  To this he now adds that
he is dismissive of definitions provided by scholars!

But my problem is not just with RJII, it is with the Wikipedia community,
and the community's apparent inability to deal with such problems.

Ultramarine and I made several compromises with RJII, but we have reached a
point where there can be no compromise (you can't compromise with someone
who makes up a definition, refuses to cite sources, and disregards the
research other editors do, and thinks that precisely because we can provide
a source, which comes from a scholar, that the definition is therefore
invalid).  On many days we have simply taken turns reverting and reverting
-- and as some here have observed, the result was that I was blocked one
day for violating the three revert rule.  So the first mechanism -- "Most
policies and guidelines are thus enforced by individual users editing
pages, and discussing matters with each other" -- is not working.

I posted a request for comment, and there has been no response.

What else can I do?  I will not go to the mediation or arbitration
committee for two reasons.  First, I am not concerned with any possible
violations of behavioral guidelines by RJII, I am concerned only with his
violation of content guidelines.  Second, I do not view this as a personal
dispute between he and I, and I do not want others to characterize this as
a dispute between he and I.  I am not defending my own version of the
introduction, or my own definition of capitalism.  I do not need someone
else to help us come to a compromise definition.  I do not want someone
else to start investigating my own behavior (for the record, with the
exception of the multiple reversions, I have been at pains to avoid any
personal attacks.  But my point is, my own behavior should not be an issue
here.  I will gladly voluntarily refrain from editing this article if that
would solve anything.  But the problem is not the fact that RJII and I do
not agree on a definition, the problem is that he consistently refuses to
follow basic policies).  What we do need is someone who will either make
RJII follow our content policies, or who will block him from the article.

The introduction, a month ago, was not perfect.  But it did introduce the
article in an NPOV way.  Today it is a shambles, and the discussion on the
talk page gives no reason for anyone to believe that it is going to get
better in the near future.

Is this the process we want to encourage?

Steve

Steven L. Rubenstein
Associate Professor
Department of Sociology and Anthropology
Bentley Annex
Ohio University
Athens, Ohio 45701


from_name: Brion Vibber

body:
Thomas Gries wrote:
> On Fri, 18 Mar 2005 22:33:19 -0800, Brion Vibber wrote:
>>> ... in MediaWiki 1.5 we've made a major (database) schema change
>>>
> I'd like to know, whether the new scheme is a permanent solution to
> "Delete + undelete cycle doesn't preserve old_id"
> http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=603 .
>
> Is the schema change already done ?

Yes, that change has been made. At this point revision IDs should indeed
be preserved across deletion/undeletion.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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body:
Tomer Chachamu wrote:
> Thank you very much for this update. I just have some questions.
>
> Where will deleted articles be? Tables archive_page, archive_revision,
> archive_text? Will it just be like the current version?

At the moment it uses an archive table only slightly modified from 1.4
(it includes a stored revision ID also so this can be restored on
undeletion), however I expect to be changing this soon to make it easier
to eg show the existence of deleted items in page contributions, or
individual revisions in a page's history which have been removed for
copyvio etc. A rev_deleted flag is likely; I'm not quite sure yet how
best to handle it on the page side.

> At what stage (beta, rc, etc) of 1.5 will you be using it on Wikimedia
> sites?

Generally we've declared "beta" at the point at which we're willing to
roll out the software on some of our production wikis for live testing.

> Will you wait for 1.4.0 first?

I'm pretty sure 1.4.0 will be out first. :) Just finishing up some
language file tweaks etc.

> Is a Bugzilla search for the new features possible? Can you provide a
> link or some instructions?

You can check the RELEASE-NOTES if anyone's updated. Probably not. ;)

> Will you bring up http://test.wikipedia.org again soon?

I'm planning to set up a 1.5 test wiki on my personal site soon. I took
down the old test.wikipedia.org because we've had a history of having
what are in fact security holes checked in on the dev branch and not
noticed for a while, and I really don't want that running on our
production servers at this stage.

> Is the HEAD branch in CVS the one which will become REL1_5? (I don't
> understand CVS very much)

Right; at some point we'll create a REL1_5 branch which will freeze the
state of the trunk.

> Is that branch currently usable without major developer knowledge?
> Might I find anything really cool if I tried to use it?

It's still going through some upheaval, so I wouldn't recommend it.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Andre Engels

body:
On Sat, 19 Mar 2005 21:21:32 +0900, Aphaia <aphaia at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, 18 Mar 2005 23:28:50 +0100, Yann Forget <yann at forget-me.net> wrote:
> > BTW, there is also an article in Hebrew about Coca-Cola,
> > but no link from en.wikipedia.org.
>
> So articles not wrtten with latin alphabet tend to isolate from
> interlingual link network. This tendency is strong on newly launched
> projects which need more help than larger ones.

There will indeed be an effect in that direction. I myself do
bot-assisted addition of interwiki-links, and to do that I have to
'guess' what the title of a subject in various languages is. Many
subjects (names of people, cities etc.) will be the same among the
various Latin alphabet wikipedias, but not in other languages. Thus, I
will pick up the former much easier than the latter. On the other
hand, if there is one link plus backlink somewhere, a bot can
relatively easily add the rest.

Andre Engels


body:
Alex J. Avriette wrote:
>>Oh, and don't forget the Gbytes and Gbytes of RAM!
>
> For database servers? Yeah. 4gb minimum. If MySQL supports being built
> 64-bit, and is designed to take advantage of it, we can reap
> SUBSTANTIAL rewards from this.

We've been running our MySQL boxen compiled for x86_64 on 4GB Opterons
for some time.

What software are you aware of that doesn't "support being built 64-bit"?

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [WikiEN-l] Test case: policing content

body:
Okay, I have to qualify what I wrote before -- I actually am irritated by
the following examples of personal attacks (or at least, very rude
behavior) by RJII.

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Capitalism&diff=0&oldid=11293681

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Capitalism&diff=11292020&oldid=11291155

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Capitalism&diff=11293352&oldid=11293257

Nevertheless, I am still afraid of requesting mediation or arbitration
because however much these irritate me, I maintain that the real problem is
the damage RJII is doing to the article by disregarding content policies --
and I do not want my his rude behavior to divert attention from the real
problem.

Steve

Steven L. Rubenstein
Associate Professor
Department of Sociology and Anthropology
Bentley Annex
Ohio University
Athens, Ohio 45701


from_name: Lee Daniel Crocker

subject: [Wikitech-l] speakers list

body:
On Sat, 2005-03-19 at 21:42 +0100, Elisabeth Bauer wrote:
> Since we quite often receive more or less important requests for
> wikipedia presentations, I am compiling a speakers' list on
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Presentations

To quash the exaggerated rumors of my death, I'll point out that
I have recently arranged my life to have more time to get back into
to fray here (including resubscribing to Wikitech--I'm currently
reading up on the current hardware setup--miles away from when I
installed everything on Pliny and Larousse).  I've spoken at
conferences and such before, and would be happy to do so for
Wikipedia.  I'm a die-hard techie, but I can pretty competently
talk legal/social issues too (especially copyright law, open source
community, etc.)

--
Lee Daniel Crocker <lee at piclab.com>


body:
Alex J. Avriette wrote:
>>We've been running our MySQL boxen compiled for x86_64 on 4GB Opterons
>>for some time.
>
> Postgres had some issues back in version 7 on some versions of Solaris.

That's nice.

>>What software are you aware of that doesn't "support being built 64-bit"?
[irrelevant window managers snipped]

How about current versions of relevant software that we use in
production? Since you don't even care enough to check whether MySQL
ships compiled for AMD64 before spouting off, I guess I shouldn't be
surprised.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [WikiEN-l] Test case: policing content

body:
Charles Mathews writes:
>But you
>do seem to be implying that content disputes could somehow be separated
>surgically from the existing processes for conflict resolution.  Would that
>they could.

Yes, would that they could.  I understand and appreciate your point.  But
just to be clear: my main concern is simply to focus on what is most
important: following content policies.  Whatever process is available, I
just don't want any personal arguments between me and RJII on the talk
pages to divert attention from, or overwhelm, these content-issues.

Steve

Steven L. Rubenstein
Associate Professor
Department of Sociology and Anthropology
Bentley Annex
Ohio University
Athens, Ohio 45701


from_name: Tomer Chachamu

body:
On Fri, 18 Mar 2005 22:33:19 -0800, Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:
> Just a reminder of work in progress and general background, for those
> who might be commenting without being aware of present work...
>
> First, in MediaWiki 1.5 we've made a major schema change, intended to
> reduce the number of changes to data rows that have to be made and to
> slim down the amount of data that has to be pulled per-row when scanning
> non-bulk-text metadata.
>
> Specifically, the 'cur' and 'old' tables are being split into 'page',
> 'revision', and 'text'. Lists of pages won't be trudging through large
> page text fields, and operations like renames of heavily-edited pages
> won't have to touch 15000 records. This will also give us the potential
> to move the bulk text to a separate replicated object store to keep the
> core metadata DBs relatively small and limber (and cacheable).
>
> Talk to icee in #mediawiki if interested in the object store; he's
> working on a prototype for us, to use for image uploads and potentially
> bulk text storage.
>
> Second, remember that each wiki's database is independent. It's very
> likely that at some point we'll want to split out some of the larger
> wikis to separate master servers; aside from localizing disk and cache
> utilization, this could provide some fault isolation in that a failure
> in one master would not affect the wikis running off the other master.
>
> Third, we're expecting to have at least two new additional data centers
> soon in Europe and the US. Initially these are probably going to be
> squid proxies since that's easy for us to do (we have a small offsite
> squid farm in France currently in addition to the squids in the main
> cluster in Florida) but local web server boxen pulling from local slaved
> databases at least for read-only requests is something we're likely to
> see, to move more of the load off of the central location.
>
> Finally, people constantly bring up the 'PostgreSQL cures cancer'
> bugaboo. 1.4 has experimental PostgreSQL support, which I'd like to see
> as a first-class supported configuration for the 1.5 release. This is
> only going to happen, though, if people pitch in to help in testing, bug
> fixing, and of course make some benchmarks and failure mode tests
> compared to MySQL! If you ever want Wikimedia to consider switching, the
> software needs to be available to make it work and it needs to be
> demonstrated as a legitimate improvement with a feasible conversion.
>
> Domas is the PostgreSQL partisan on our team and wrote the existing
> PostgreSQL support. If you'd like to help you should probably track him
> down; in #mediawiki you'll usually find him as 'dammit'.

Thank you very much for this update. I just have some questions.

Where will deleted articles be? Tables archive_page, archive_revision,
archive_text? Will it just be like the current version?

At what stage (beta, rc, etc) of 1.5 will you be using it on Wikimedia
sites? Will you wait for 1.4.0 first?

Is a Bugzilla search for the new features possible? Can you provide a
link or some instructions?

Will you bring up http://test.wikipedia.org again soon?

Is the HEAD branch in CVS the one which will become REL1_5? (I don't
understand CVS very much)

Is that branch currently usable without major developer knowledge?
Might I find anything really cool if I tried to use it?


from_name: Chad Perrin

body:
Neil Harris wrote:

> Remember that your tightest constraint is admin skills and time; having
> a highly standardized system for deployment will save you _vast_ amounts
> of scarce time, and any deployment automation you can use will make for
> vastly more reliable systems deployment. Consider Debian as both an
> operating system and a deployment system: at the moment, different
> machines run different operating system flavours, making sysadminning
> harder.

Keep recommending Debian.  I won't complain.

--
Chad
[ CCD CopyWrite | http://ccd.apotheon.org ]


from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [Wikitech-l] speakers list

body:
--- Lee Daniel Crocker <lee at piclab.com> wrote:
> On Sat, 2005-03-19 at 21:42 +0100, Elisabeth Bauer wrote:
> > Since we quite often receive more or less important requests for
> > wikipedia presentations, I am compiling a speakers' list on
> > http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Presentations
>
> To quash the exaggerated rumors of my death, I'll point out that
> I have recently arranged my life to have more time to get back into
> to fray here (including resubscribing to Wikitech--I'm currently
> reading up on the current hardware setup--miles away from when I
> installed everything on Pliny and Larousse).  I've spoken at
> conferences and such before, and would be happy to do so for
> Wikipedia.  I'm a die-hard techie, but I can pretty competently
> talk legal/social issues too (especially copyright law, open source
> community, etc.)

Real, real nice to hear from you again.

I knew you could not stay away. :)

-- mav

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Small Business - Try our new resources site!
http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/resources/


body:
--- Aphaia <aphaia at gmail.com> wrote:
> Would you think we can provide such information, particularly what
> happend or would happen with the money ? I think it is worthy to
> inform on the WMF site.

I keep track of spending and do comparisons of actual vs budgeted spending. The
board has simply not got around to approving what I've done so I can
prominently link to it yet (probably since I haven't pushed much for that).

> And I think it would be useful for us to why we need those fund drives
> and daily donation (but now I am not sure where is the best place). I
> hesitate to say it, but there are many people at least in Japan a
> non-profit organisation should rely on donation at any rate (I should
> add hereby the concept of non-profit organisation is relatively
> unfamiliar here in Japan) . Once I read a Ja sysop or someone under
> his name expressed his opposition toward  fund drives (not on the site
> though)  and accusation the foundation "raised" the price --- is there
> anything we can do to avoid misunderstanding ?

Simple: We are too popular and servers are not free.

-- mav

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Small Business - Try our new resources site!
http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/resources/


from_name: Alex J. Avriette

subject:
[Wikitech-l] You have lots of money to spend ;
	time to get to it! :-)

body:
> However, consider the global supplier situation for Opterons. Alas, Dell
> don't do them. Who would be the right supplier for this?

HP makes em and supports them (they even support Windows on them in an
experimental beta, but I didn't tell you that). Additionally, Sun
makes them, and they sell them VERY cheaply. That might be the best
route. You don't gotta run Sun Linux 5.0 (or whatever they're calling
it these days). Sun sold us (AOL) a dual opteron 242 for $2500 with
2gb of ram and 72gb of 15krpm disk not terribly long ago. Wikimedia
doesn't exactly have AOL's relationship with Sun, but it might be
possible to call and "talk them down" a little. And the FOSS argument
doesn't apply to hardware, right? (because I know we have some Sun and
Solaris haters here)

> Oh, and don't forget the Gbytes and Gbytes of RAM!

For database servers? Yeah. 4gb minimum. If MySQL supports being built
64-bit, and is designed to take advantage of it, we can reap
SUBSTANTIAL rewards from this. I'd say go with 8gb if we can afford
it.

DBA's, speak up...

> >Am I missing something? Can we not just sync with
> >{tick,tock}.usno.navy.mil? If usno.navy.mil goes down, we have much
> >bigger problems than a toasted wikipedia.
> >
> >
> Consider connectivity going down at a remote site (takes just one
> backhoe at the site 1/4 mile down the road where all of your supposedly
> "diverse" fibers join the same duct, or simply a router going mad, or
> someone hitting the Big Red Power-Off Button at ********* *****
> [substitute your national Achilles Heel IXP]), rather than Global
> Thermonuclear War. Trust me, a local clock is a good thing. That's why
> it's such a useful service to have onsite.

I don't buy it. I've been syncing to USNO for years, and it Just
Doesn't Happen to them. It doesn't happen to the DoD because DISA
doesn't let them. NRO and {{spooky agencies}} all use them.

> Now, that's a very good point. However, it might be better to do what
> Linus does and "let millions of people mirror it everywhere". This might
> be something to ask organizations like to UK Mirror Service, Internet
> Archive and Google to do on a formal basis. This way, the backups are

On a formal, hourly basis? Or do we decide we're comfortable with a
day's loss of data if a nuke falls on florida?

> off-site too. The current archive is 50G. If we take a week to back it
> up, that's a data rate of 50e9*8/(86400*7) = 662 kbps < 1 Mbps. So
> Wikipedia could perform complete backups weekly to three different sites
> at a cost of 3 Mbps sustained. That's cheaper than the cost of the tape
> media.

Weekly doesn't cut it. For full backups, it does. For incrementals, we
need nightly or hourly. Does MySQL support live backups? (I understand
on-the-fly transactions)

aa (talking systems shit and not getting flamed, yay)

--
Alex Avriette
avriette at gmail.com


from_name: Robert

subject: [WikiEN-l] GFDL violation - Laborlawtalk.com

body:
I have come across a website that mirrors Wikipedia, but
does not note that all of their text is copied from
Wikipedia, nor do they note that the text is licensed under
a GFDL license.

Someone should drop them a line and let them know they are
violating the conditions for using our material.

http://encyclopedia.laborlawtalk.com/The_Foundation_Series

http://encyclopedia.laborlawtalk.com/Impact_event

Robert (RK)

__________________________________
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Yahoo! Small Business - Try our new resources site!
http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/resources/


from_name: Thomas Gries

body:
On Fri, 18 Mar 2005 22:33:19 -0800, Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:

>>... in MediaWiki 1.5 we've made a major (database) schema change
>>
I'd like to know, whether the new scheme is a permanent solution to
"Delete + undelete cycle doesn't preserve old_id"
http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=603 .

Is the schema change already done ?

Then I can finally publish my patch for
http://bugzilla.wikipedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=536
For pages on watchlist save last version number and
http://bugzilla.wikipedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=804
Last-visited revision repository ..
Tom


from_name: John Fader

subject: [Wikitech-l] add worldwind URL scheme?

body:
Hi,
  Would it be possible to add the worldwind URL scheme to the list of
acceptable URL schemes that en.wikipedia accepts as valid for external
links?

With that done, links like:

  worldwind://goto/world=Earth&lat=37.23806&lon=-115.81324&alt=2969&dir=3.5

would launch an external copy of [[NASA World Wind]], if installed, to
show the indicated location on the globe.  I'm not aware of any
security, spam, or other abuse implications to doing this.

I see that worldwind's own mediawiki installation
(http://www.worldwindcentral.com/wiki/Main_Page) has enabled this URL
scheme.

Gracias,
John Fader


subject: [WikiEN-l] Use of Wikipedia content

body:
Note: I've CC'd this note to the public English Wikipedia mailing list.

Hello -

I noticed you use content from Wikipedia - that's great!

However I do not see any attempt to comply by the Wikipedia license that is
required in order to use their content. Specifically, there is no link back to
the copied article and no link or mention of the GNU Free Documentation
License. LaborLawTalk.com also incorrectly claims ownership and control of the
copied articles with this notice on the bottom of every page:

Copyright ? 2004 LaborLawTalk.com All rights reserved. Legal notices.

Please fix this situation as soon as possible.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Copyrights#Example_notice

Thank you,

Daniel Mayer,
Wikipedia author

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


body:
--- David Gerard <fun at thingy.apana.org.au> wrote:
> Magnus Manske wrote:
>
> > I have finished updating (well: rewriting) the article validation
> > feature for the current development software version (1.5), to a point
> > where all essential functions work. I'll do some prettyfication (is that
> > a word?) later, or wait for someone else to do it ;-)
>
> Woohoo! *throws hat in air* Thank you!

This really is great news. Wikipedia 1.0 is starting to look less and less like
vaporware. :)

-- mav

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Small Business - Try our new resources site!
http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/resources/


from_name: Mark Williamson

subject: [Wikipedia-l] no need to remove the article nor the chapter

body:
I don't believe we're referring to existing articles to which
copyrighted text is added, but rather articles that were 100% copyvio
but which are edited and thus become "derived works".

Mark

On Fri, 18 Mar 2005 15:34:18 +0100, Jean-Baptiste Soufron
<jbsoufron at free.fr> wrote:
> I agree with you but not for the same reasons.
>
> Inserting a copyrighted text in an article is not creating a derivative
> work from the insterted text, but a derivative work from the original
> article.
>
> The use of the copyrighted text is prohibited, that's for sure.
>
> But the article is not a derivative work of this copyrighted text. It
> is a derivative work of the original article, including a copyrighted
> work without proper authorization. This derivative work is not
> forbidden because it derivates of a copyrighted text, but because it is
> a derivative work including a copyrighted text.
> Then, removing this part should be far enough.
>
> I will provide some jurisprudence about this when I can.
>
> > I disagree with this. Do you really intend to allow that if you add
> > something to an article that has later found to have a bit of text
> > that is copyrighted, your text should be removed because it 'could be
> > derived from the copyrighted work'? But what then with using a source?
> > That 'could be derived' too. Wikipedia is very pro-active when there
> > are copyright violations, and I think rightfully so. But to delete
> > non-violating pieces of texts because they appear in one article with
> > violating pieces is a level of destruction that even as a rather
> > strong deletionist I find abhorrent.
>
> >
> > Now, if I were to *change* a paragraph that later appeared to be a
> > copyright violation, that's another issue. But adding something
> > separate or changing another part of the article are changes I don't
> > think should be undone. We might as well rollback the whole Wikipedia
> > (what if we consider Wikipedia as a single work, then it is derived
> > too, right?)
> >
> > Andre Engels
> >
> >
> > On Thu, 17 Mar 2005 23:25:23 -0500, Gregory Maxwell
> > <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> I am concerned that the current handling of copyright problems on
> >> wikipedia may be insufficient.  As it stands, after detection the
> >> offending text is completely removed.
> >>
> >> Unfortunately, if there has been a long time span since the insertion
> >> of the infringing text there may have been a substantial number of
> >> valuable contributions to the article. With the way that  most content
> >> grows organically over time, it may be very difficult to say if the
> >> new text would have been created without the infringing text with any
> >> certainty.
> >>
> >> In the United States the recent tendency in court appears to be to
> >> favor the most expansive definition of a derived work possible.
> >> Because of this, I suspect that it would be likely that at least some
> >> of the contributions made to an article after the insertion of
> >> infringing text would be found by a US court to be derived, thus
> >> placing their ownership in question.  This interpretation of derived
> >> isn't necessitated by current international treaty, and would likely
> >> be different (and possibly more sane) in other locations, but I
> >> suspect that US legality is a substantial concern.
> >>
> >> Determining if a piece of text is derived from another, at least in
> >> the over broad sense favored by US courts, is an intractable problem,
> >> but the policy could do a better job of avoiding these concerns.
> >> Reverting to the point where a substantial amount of infringing text
> >> was added, and deleting *all* modifications after that point would be
> >> much more certain to avoid impinging on the intellectual property
> >> rights of others.
> >>
> >> The cost of destroyed improvements might be mitigated by the benefit
> >> of creating a greater incentive for frequently contributors to quickly
> >> catch and remove violating text.
> >>
> >> Of course, none of this is legal advice...
> >> _______________________________________________
> >> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> >> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> >> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
> >>
> > _______________________________________________
> > Wikipedia-l mailing list
> > Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
> >
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


body:
> We've been running our MySQL boxen compiled for x86_64 on 4GB Opterons
> for some time.

Postgres had some issues back in version 7 on some versions of Solaris.

> What software are you aware of that doesn't "support being built 64-bit"?

Afterstep had some issues a while ago:

http://sunportal.sunmanagers.org/pipermail/summaries/2003-March/003425.html

My introduction to Linux started in 1999 with LinuxPPC on my Macintosh
G3. Lots of bright linux programmers made all sorts of assumptions
about endianness and things like xmms wouldn't compile. Programs like
Jack the Ripper had assembler in them that would explode
spectacularly. These same people are out there, right now, writing
code on their 32-bit athlons or whatever, assuming that the rest of
the world uses their flavor of linux on their flavor of hardware.

It's nice to see that MySQL doesn't suffer from these problems, but
its previous failings (subselects, pl/sql, still lack of ACID, etc),
left me in doubt of its ability to build natively n64.

Just been bitten many times by porting software. As I said, my
background is with many Unixes. Porting stuff from Linux to IRIX is
probably the worst, especially when the linux guy used gcc, and I
wanted to use the SGI compiler. But I digress.

Happy for mysql. Would anyone else like to troll me?

aa

--
Alex Avriette
avriette at gmail.com


subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Congratulations are in order (an overlooked
	milestone)

body:
At about the same time, the Georgian Wikipedia grew from around 17
articles to well over 100, and the Armenian Wikipedia grew from about
3 articles to well over 100. The Breton Wikipedia grew from 57 or so
articles to well over 100.

Other Wikipedias had a similar sudden growth just a little bit prior,
such as the Aragonese and Limburgish Wikipedias.

All of this growth occurred in the space of 1-3 weeks, and sometimes even less.

Mark

On Fri, 18 Mar 2005 21:53:42 EST, daniwo59 at aol.com <daniwo59 at aol.com> wrote:
> With all the hype about English hitting 500k, I just want to point out
> another milestone that is being overlooked.
>
> A while back, Amikeco and some others began pressing for an Ossetian
> Wikipedia. It took a while, but they finally got it, and in a very short time,  they
> passed the 100 article mark. This is especially impressive for a language
> that few people have heard of. Great work for a small group of committed
> editors.
>
> I just want to congratulate them on this achievement, and hope that it
> inspires some of the other small Wikis to pick up speed and grow.
>
> Good work.
>
> Danny
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


from_name: daniwo59 at aol.com

subject: [Wikipedia-l] speakers list

body:
In a message dated 3/19/2005 3:42:35 PM Eastern Standard Time,
elian at djini.de writes:

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Presentations

It may be a good idea to make a powerpoint presentation or short dvd
available to potential speakers

Danny


from_name: Jim Higson

subject: [Wikitech-l] Another demo of client-side wiki presentation layer

body:
I have some quite nice things working now, so thought I might put it in
front of an audience again. Near real-time edit previews are working now,
plus a few other neat things like template dereferencing.

Point moz at:
http://81.5.150.113/wysi

As before, if you want to upload edits you'll want the PHP interface:
http://81.5.150.113/wiki

Of course, there are bugs! But most normal syntax is now handled ok.

--
Jim

Ps. maybe there a better place than the tech list for this kind of
announcement...?


subject:
[WikiEN-l] Re: interview with Jimmy Wales on web site of the
	journal Nature

body:
actionforum at comcast.net wrote:
> http://www.nature.com/news/2005/050314/full/050314-17.html
>
> Not particularly notable, brief discussion of "no original research" and neutrality policy.
>
> -- Silverback

Not surprisingly the Nature interview discuses Wikispecies.
I discuss some of the inaccuracies in the article relating to the Tree
of Life Wikipedia pages on my user page -

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Pcb21#Wikispecies

Pete


body:
Alex J. Avriette wrote:
>>How about current versions of relevant software that we use in
>>production? Since you don't even care enough to check whether MySQL
>>ships compiled for AMD64 before spouting off, I guess I shouldn't be
>>surprised.
>
> Brion, if you don't want me here, please tell me so, and please
> indicate to jwales and chaper that you felt this pissing contest of
> yours was more important than my input -- which both requested.

Input's fine, but it'd be nice if we can get input without having to put
up with being told we're all incompetent and  U N S C A L E A B L E  by
someone who won't take a minute to find out about our current
development work before declaring it nonexistent, or check if the
software he's bashing is available for 64-bit before bashing it on the
assumption that it's too backward to possibly work.

More flies with honey and all that...

I'm sorry if I've offended you, but it seems you've started off on the
wrong foot and a negative impression's been made; taking offense has not
been limited to your side.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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body:
Brion Vibber wrote:

> What software are you aware of that doesn't "support being built 64-bit"?
>

Windows?

Err, sorry.  Just a little humor, there.  Very little.

--
Chad
[ CCD CopyWrite | http://ccd.apotheon.org ]


from_name: dpbsmith at verizon.net

subject: [WikiEN-l] Blank maps

body:
> From: Rick <giantsrick13 at yahoo.com>
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia map of British Columbia
> --- "James D. Forrester" <james at jdforrester.org>
> wrote:
>> On Friday, March 18, 2005 7:56 PM, Rick
>> <giantsrick13 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>>
>>> How can a red dot on an otherwise blank map of
>> British
>>> Columbia with the county lines listed, possibly be
>>> copyrighted?
>>
>> One imagines that the contention is that the source
>> blank map is in fact
>> held in copyright.
>
> How is a blank map with the outlines of the counties
> copyrighted?  Any more than a list of counties would
> be copyrightable.
>
> RickK

Off-topic, yet, somehow, I feel, relevant:

He had bought a large map representing the sea,
  Without the least vestige of land:
And the crew were much pleased when they found it to be
  A map they could all understand.

"What`s the good of Mercator`s North Poles and Equators,
  Tropics, Zones, and Meridian Lines?"
So the Bellman would cry: and the crew would reply
  "They are merely conventional signs!

"Other maps are such shapes, with their islands and capes!
  But we`ve got our brave Captain to thank:
(So the crew would protest) "that he`s bought us the best--
  A perfect and absolute blank!"

   --Lewis Carroll, "The Hunting of the Snark"

And the iTunes Music Store sells completely silent tracks with DRM
protection for $0.99...

...and John Cage's publisher claims copyright protection for the work
4'33", consisting of that quantity of silence, and claimed infringement
and demanded a quarter of the royalties for a work by Mike Batt
consisting of a minute of silence, see
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/music/2133426.stm . (Batt
insisted his silence was original and not a quotation a portion of
Cage's work...) By the way, anyone who thinks that's ludicrous had
better be aware that it's nothing but... and should consider joining
the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

--
Daniel P. B. Smith, dpbsmith at verizon.net
"Elinor Goulding Smith's Great Big Messy Book" is now back in print!
Sample chapter at http://world.std.com/~dpbsmith/messy.html
Buy it at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1403314063/


body:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Www.wikipedia.org_template/temp
(preview of actual appearance:
http://portal-test.mediawiki.org/extract2.php?template=Www.wikipedia.org_template/temp
)

I have received mostly positive feedback for the minor design
modifications I made. A comment regarding the Cyrillic version of the
name used in the background: it is intentionally based on the
Ukrainian version rather than the Russian version because at the
moment Ukrainian is higher in the list of largest Wikipedias. For the
same reason, the Hebrew name instead of the Yiddish name, the Arabic
name instead of the Farsi or Urdu names, etc.

Mark

On Sun, 20 Mar 2005 01:27:54 +0000, David Gerard
<fun at thingy.apana.org.au> wrote:
> Mark Williamson wrote:
>
> > At about the same time, the Georgian Wikipedia grew from around 17
> > articles to well over 100, and the Armenian Wikipedia grew from about
> > 3 articles to well over 100. The Breton Wikipedia grew from 57 or so
> > articles to well over 100.
> > Other Wikipedias had a similar sudden growth just a little bit prior,
> > such as the Aragonese and Limburgish Wikipedias.
> > All of this growth occurred in the space of 1-3 weeks, and sometimes even less.
>
> If someone could go and update the www.wikipedia.org template page
> accordingly ...
>
> - d.
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


from_name: Charles Matthews

subject: [WikiEN-l] Test case: policing content

body:
steven l. rubenstein wrote

> Nevertheless, I am still afraid of requesting mediation or arbitration
> because however much these irritate me, I maintain that the real problem
> is the damage RJII is doing to the article by disregarding content
> policies --
> and I do not want my his rude behavior to divert attention from the real
> problem.

Well, I didn't enjoy getting involved in a mediation.  Who would?  But you
do seem to be implying that content disputes could somehow be separated
surgically from the existing processes for conflict resolution.  Would that
they could.

Charles


body:
In a message dated 3/19/2005 7:46:48 PM Eastern Standard Time,
node.ue at gmail.com writes:

At about  the same time, the Georgian Wikipedia grew from around 17
articles to well  over 100, and the Armenian Wikipedia grew from about
3 articles to well  over 100. The Breton Wikipedia grew from 57 or so
articles to well over  100.

Other Wikipedias had a similar sudden growth just a little bit  prior,
such as the Aragonese and Limburgish Wikipedias.

All of this  growth occurred in the space of 1-3 weeks, and sometimes even
less.

Mark

THanks for pointing that out Node. That is great news!

Danny


from_name: Elisabeth Bauer

body:
daniwo59 at aol.com wrote:
> With all the hype about English hitting 500k, I just want to point out
> another milestone that is being overlooked.
>
> A while back, Amikeco and some others began pressing for an Ossetian
> Wikipedia. It took a while, but they finally got it, and in a very short time,  they
> passed the 100 article mark. This is especially impressive for a language
> that few people have heard of. Great work for a small group of committed
> editors.
>
> I just want to congratulate them on this achievement, and hope that it
> inspires some of the other small Wikis to pick up speed and grow.

Congratulations from me, too - the work done looks pretty impressive so
far :-)

greetings,
elian


body:
> How about current versions of relevant software that we use in
> production? Since you don't even care enough to check whether MySQL
> ships compiled for AMD64 before spouting off, I guess I shouldn't be
> surprised.

Brion, if you don't want me here, please tell me so, and please
indicate to jwales and chaper that you felt this pissing contest of
yours was more important than my input -- which both requested.

I'll just stick to editing {{mil-cruft}} articles and get banned on
irc when something breaks next week.

If that's okay with you, that is.

Alex

--
Alex Avriette
avriette at gmail.com


from_name: Ben Brockert

body:
On Saturday, March 19, 2005, at 07:57  PM, Alex J. Avriette wrote:
> Brion, if you don't want me here, please tell me so, and please
> indicate to jwales and chaper that you felt this pissing contest of
> yours was more important than my input -- which both requested.

He's always pissy, you get used to it.

Ben


from_name: Aphaia

body:
On Fri, 18 Mar 2005 23:28:50 +0100, Yann Forget <yann at forget-me.net> wrote:
> BTW, there is also an article in Hebrew about Coca-Cola,
> but no link from en.wikipedia.org.

So articles not wrtten with latin alphabet tend to isolate from
interlingual link network. This tendency is strong on newly launched
projects which need more help than larger ones.

I ask here such people, like  Bg, Ru, Zh users to give a look to
projects not only Wikipedia but also younger projects like Wikiquote
and put interlingual link to English and link it back to their own
language; it would be very helpful to make interlingual links dense
much more and help the development of those projects.

--
Aphaea@*.wikipedia.org
email: Aphaia @ gmail (dot) com


subject: [Foundation-l] speakers list

body:
Hiho,

Since we quite often receive more or less important requests for
wikipedia presentations, I am compiling a speakers' list on
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Presentations

I already added some people where I have reason to believe that they
will do this
Please
a) add yourself if you are willing and feel qualified to hold talks
about Wikipedia with
* your area of expertise (general, technical, scientific studies etc.)
* the languages in which you can speak
* your area
and
b) provide me with a contact address so that I can mail such requests around

It would be especially nice to have some of the developers there.

greetings,
elian


subject: [Foundation-l] speakers list


subject: [Wikipedia-l] speakers list


subject: [Wikitech-l] speakers list


body:
> > Brion, if you don't want me here, please tell me so, and please
> > indicate to jwales and chaper that you felt this pissing contest of
> > yours was more important than my input -- which both requested.
>
> Input's fine, but it'd be nice if we can get input without having to put
> up with being told we're all incompetent and  U N S C A L E A B L E  by
> someone who won't take a minute to find out about our current
> development work before declaring it nonexistent, or check if the
> software he's bashing is available for 64-bit before bashing it on the
> assumption that it's too backward to possibly work.
>

Yeah, I'm outta here.

You guys just keep scaling (no spaces this time) the way you've been
doing it. I'm sure the weekly outages will stop and the database will
magically become multi-homed, and you'll have fancy datacenters in
germany and belgium. I'm sure that my donations will help you maintain
the status quo, and that i'll be seen as the asshole who came along
and made all these inflammatory statements and left in a huff.

So be it.

You'll see me editing {{mil-cruft}}.

Push hard enough, brion, and there's just a point when somebody who is
a /volunteer/ will leave. Maybe I'll form a "conscientious objectors"
lobby, or maybe I'll just laugh the next time the wikipedia and its
related projects are down and go for a walk in the big blue room.

<sound of door slamming />

Alex

--
Alex Avriette
avriette at gmail.com


from_name: Christiaan Briggs

subject: [WikiEN-l] Images on Answers.com and copyright conditions

body:
Is anyone else surprised that Answers.com doesn't seem to follow GFDL
or CCbySA conditions with regard to images used from Wikipedia, such as
crediting authors:

http://www.answers.com/library/Wikipedia+Images

Or am I misunderstanding the process?

Christiaan


from_name: Gregory Maxwell

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re:WikiIndex (idea)

body:
On Sun, 20 Mar 2005 12:05:30 +1000, Craig Franklin <craig at halo-17.net> wrote:
> The only thing is that it should be kept as simple as possible, some of the
> proposals I see are too complicated for "ordinary" users to understand.  We
> shouldn't require that a user be familiar with complex metadata tagging
> schemes just to write articles - even if those schemes are the widely
> adopted standards on the Internet at large.

Thats why it's a wiki...  "ordinary" user writes the page.. Omits the
metadata, because they don't understand it, aren't aware of it, or
just don't care.

Someone else notices the missing metadata and adds it, ... and since
they apparently care about metadata they probably known enough to do
it right, even if the system turns out to be fairly complicated.

The metadata for an article will likely change very slowly, if at all,
so keeping the metadata accurate should be a non-issue.


body:
MacGyverMagic/Mgm wrote:

> Well, I could be misunderstanding the process myself, but aren't they
> following GFDL by telling us it's a Wikipedia article to start with?

It's specifically the images I'm talking about, not the articles.

Christiaan


from_name: El C

subject: [WikiEN-l] Test case: policing content

body:
Indeed, there is no reason to have a purely intellectual impass,
whereby one side consistently refuses to cite their sources, turn into
a 'personal' dispute. I realize that, in a certain sense, when one
fails to provide references after being requested to do so, might be
counted as a form of misconduct; but that's really a stretch since it
can take place with all due civility. Of course, when dragged for too
long, the exchanges almost invariably turn uncivil, which, I think,
Steve is alluding to as something that can, and should be, avoided.
There is no need for such needless, eliptical stress, on the article
and those editing it if the content policies (providing verifiable
sources when requested to do so) are adhered to, as a matter of
principle, not merely loose convention.

This is another instance in which Conduct/Community, by design,
muddles and places Content/Encyclopedia to 2ndry role; in needlessly
-driving- intellectual disputes towards the personal after much waste
of genuine effort and potential (including amongst the content policy
violators themselevs, who are, yes, encouraged, but not urged, to
follow said policies) ensue. In short, it's not a republic.

El_C

>I  just don't want any personal arguments between me and RJII on the talk
>pages to divert attention from, or overwhelm, these content-issues.


from_name: MacGyverMagic/Mgm

body:
> Is anyone else surprised that Answers.com doesn't seem to follow GFDL
> or CCbySA conditions with regard to images used from Wikipedia, such as
> crediting authors:
>
> http://www.answers.com/library/Wikipedia+Images
>
> Or am I misunderstanding the process?
>
> Christiaan

Well, I could be misunderstanding the process myself, but aren't they
following GFDL by telling us it's a Wikipedia article to start with?

Mgm


from_name: Kurt Jansson

subject: [Wikitech-l] speakers list

body:
Lee Daniel Crocker schrieb:

> To quash the exaggerated rumors of my death, I'll point out that
> I have recently arranged my life to have more time to get back into
> to fray here (including resubscribing to Wikitech--I'm currently
> reading up on the current hardware setup--miles away from when I
> installed everything on Pliny and Larousse).

Wow, can I really trust my eyes? Welcome back, Lee! :-)
(BTW, your last message on this list was on 2003-07-30.)

Kurt


from_name: Bryan Derksen

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re:WikiIndex (idea)

body:
Craig Franklin wrote:

>You know, the more I hear about this idea, the more I enjoy it.  Personally,
>I don't really see the point of the categories system - you get everything
>mixed together with no context that way, and I don't see any way it can be
>made to work so that you can do a search for multiple keywords, like
>"Jewish", "Authors", "Died 1945", "Females".  Heck, I imagine that if you
>tried to put a category of any of those together, some well-meaning person
>would probably delete them anyway, claiming they weren't specific enough.
>
>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Jews
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Writers
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:1945_deaths
The only one missing is "females" :)


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] MediaWiki Issue - Create table fails

body:
Travis McArthur wrote:
> Creating tables...Query "CREATE TABLE user ( user_id int(5) unsigned NOT
> NULL auto_increment, user_name varchar(255) binary NOT NULL default '''',
> user_real_name varchar(255) binary NOT NULL default '''', user_rights
> tinyblob NOT NULL default '''', user_password tinyblob NOT NULL default
> '''', user_newpassword tinyblob NOT NULL default '''', user_email tinytext
> NOT NULL default '''', user_options blob NOT NULL default '''',
> user_touched char(14) binary NOT NULL default '''', UNIQUE KEY user_id
> (user_id) ) PACK_KEYS=1" failed with error code "BLOB/TEXT column
> 'user_rights' can't have a default value".

Sorry this took a while, Travis, but it's one of those insidious PHP
configuration problems that's hard to track down unless you already know
the secret. :P

It looks like your PHP configuration has the magic_quotes_runtime and
magic_quotes_sybase options turned on. These corrupt data input in hard
to predict ways and should probably never be used; any application that
relies upon them is probably flawed, and any application that doesn't
will have its corrupted unexpectedly.

Turn them both off in your php.ini and it should clear things up.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [Wikitech-l] speakers list

body:
Lee Daniel Crocker wrote:
> To quash the exaggerated rumors of my death, I'll point out that
> I have recently arranged my life to have more time to get back into
> to fray here (including resubscribing to Wikitech--I'm currently
> reading up on the current hardware setup--miles away from when I
> installed everything on Pliny and Larousse).

Welcome back!

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: David Gerard

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Congratulations are in order (an
	overlooked	milestone)

body:
Mark Williamson wrote:

> At about the same time, the Georgian Wikipedia grew from around 17
> articles to well over 100, and the Armenian Wikipedia grew from about
> 3 articles to well over 100. The Breton Wikipedia grew from 57 or so
> articles to well over 100.
> Other Wikipedias had a similar sudden growth just a little bit prior,
> such as the Aragonese and Limburgish Wikipedias.
> All of this growth occurred in the space of 1-3 weeks, and sometimes even less.

If someone could go and update the www.wikipedia.org template page
accordingly ...

- d.


body:
Magnus Manske wrote:

> I have finished updating (well: rewriting) the article validation
> feature for the current development software version (1.5), to a point
> where all essential functions work. I'll do some prettyfication (is that
> a word?) later, or wait for someone else to do it ;-)

Woohoo! *throws hat in air* Thank you!

> Is there a 1.5 test site to demonstrate it? I know 1.5 is still
> considered insecure, but we'll need a test site at some point for actual
> living users to beat the bits out of it...

When you find one, I will want to beat on it severely, because of it being
a major part of my plans for a Wikipedia 1.0 in whatever form ...

- d.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] speakers list

body:
daniwo59 at aol.com wrote:
>
> In a message dated 3/19/2005 3:42:35 PM Eastern Standard Time,
> elian at djini.de writes:
>
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Presentations
>
> It may be a good idea to make a powerpoint presentation or short dvd
> available to potential speakers

If you look at the top of the page, you'll find more than just one
powerpoint presentation (Most are openoffice, though ;-).

Anyway, the persons adding themselves to the list should be able to
create a presentation on their own. To draw inspirations from others is
of course not bad, either.

greetings,
elian


subject: [Wikitech-l] MediaWiki 1.5 work and general notes

body:
MaPhi Werner wrote:
> Do you have a rough plan how long implementations of new features will
> be accepted before 1.5 goes into strict bug-fixing mode?

Perhaps as long as a month.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Derek Ross

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Setting up a Scots Wikipedia

body:
I'd like to request that a Scots language Wikipedia be set up.  There are estimated to be around 1.6 million Scots speakers together with at least another 2 million Scots who passively understand the language to some extent.  This must make it one of the largest European languages for which we do not have a Wiki. The 3 letter language code for Scots is sco so the URL should be http://sco.wikipedia.org/ since there is no two letter code. I am a native speaker and am more than willing to start the necessary translation and configuration work once the initial site has been created.

Cheers

Derek http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Derek_Ross

---------------------------------
Post your free ad now! Yahoo! Canada Personals


body:
On Fri, 18 Mar 2005 11:02:08 -0800 (PST), Daniel Mayer
<maveric149 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> --- Elisabeth Bauer <elian at djini.de> wrote:
> > Hi,
> > Next time we should definitely publish a press
> > release - best in several languages-, summarizing the results of the
> > fundraising drive.
> >
> > putting this idea here so it doesn't get forgotten.
>
> Good idea.

Would you think we can provide such information, particularly what
happend or would happen with the money ? I think it is worthy to
inform on the WMF site.

And I think it would be useful for us to why we need those fund drives
and daily donation (but now I am not sure where is the best place). I
hesitate to say it, but there are many people at least in Japan a
non-profit organisation should rely on donation at any rate (I should
add hereby the concept of non-profit organisation is relatively
unfamiliar here in Japan) . Once I read a Ja sysop or someone under
his name expressed his opposition toward  fund drives (not on the site
though)  and accusation the foundation "raised" the price --- is there
anything we can do to avoid misunderstanding ?


body:
Sorry, eratta

On Sun, 20 Mar 2005 02:46:50 +0900, Aphaia <aphaia at gmail.com> wrote:

> hesitate to say it, but there are many people at least in Japan a
> non-profit organisation should rely on donation at any rate

Corrected:
 but there are many people at least in Japan" who don't think or understand" a
 non-profit organisation should rely on donation at any rate

Apologies for your inconvinince.

--
Aphaea@*.wikipedia.org
email: Aphaia @ gmail (dot) com


from_name: JAY JG

subject: [WikiEN-l] The Blair witch-hunting project

body:
>This whole affair has been yet another bit of public muckraking sand
>brawling that has resulted in a
>longterm contributor leaving (how long has jdwolff been here?)

I'm not sure why it's relevant, but according to Jfdwolff's user page he's
been here since Feb 2004, and an admin since May 2004.

Jay.


from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [WikiEN-l] Everyone's favorite FUD-master is at it again

body:
--- Mark Pellegrini <mapellegrini at comcast.net> wrote:
> /This is the same guy who called us the Faith-based encyclopedia and
> compared us to a public toilet-
> http://www.techcentralstation.com/111504A.html

And the same guy that is going to have dinner with Jimbo soon. I'd like to be a
fly on a wall in that room (or is it, a spider under the table?). :)

-- mav

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