body:
--- Anders Wegge Jakobsen <wegge at wegge.dk> wrote:
> Matt R <matt_crypto at yahoo.co.uk> writes:
> What I am saying is that editors who enter
> > into non-trivial interactions on the English Wikipedia should be
> > obliged to have a handle that can be grokked by speakers of the
> > English language.
>
>  The problem is that "speakers of the english language" seem to
> gravitate towards the lowest common denominator. We are writing an
> encyclopedia for Petes sake! Editors are supposedly in command of a
> skillset that's beyond burger flipping 101. If not, they have no place
> writing an encyclopedia anyway.

Yes...but what skillset are you thinking editors should have? No editor has the
ability to be able to easily recognise and distinguish every script a Wikipedia
editor might express a username in.

A lot Wikipedia thinking rests on associating knowledge of users with their
name: "ah, User:Foobar, I remember working with him on an article last year; I
don't need to check the minor edit he just made" etc. Such recognition -- the
basis of community, in fact -- is made much more difficult if "User:Foobar" was
"User:?????" or
User:<something_that_looks_remarkably_like_a_squiggle_to_the_uninitiated>.

>  Will the next demand be that interwiki targets must only be named
> with latin-1 characters?

Come on, that's a one of them strawman thingybobs: nobody's demanding this, and
there's no reason to thing anyone would. There are few Wikipedia interactions
that are affected by the ability to read non-Latin-1 interwiki targets.

-- Matt

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Matt_Crypto
Blog: http://cipher-text.blogspot.com

___________________________________________________________
New Yahoo! Mail is the ultimate force in competitive emailing. Find out more at the Yahoo! Mail Championships. Plus: play games and win prizes.
http://uk.rd.yahoo.com/evt=44106/*http://mail.yahoo.net/uk


list: wikimedia-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Matt R

subject: [Foundation-l] Sigh, problems with non-Latin usernames again


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Jim Hu

subject:
[Wikitech-l] ProtectSection.php modification - where
	topost/discuss?

body:
On Jan 29, 2007, at 9:56 PM, xaosflux wrote:

> How useful is section protection, I used to think hmm, sounds like
> a good
> idea, but can't think of anywhere wikimedia would get much use of it,
> afterall you could always jsut slap some <noinclude> tags around
> the sectoin
> and replace it.....

I think you mean <nowiki>  tags and actually SectionProtect is not
fooled by either noinclude or nowiki.
I just did the experiment.

JH

> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Jim Hu" <jimhu at tamu.edu>
> To: "Wikimedia developers" <wikitech-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
> Sent: Monday, January 29, 2007 12:05 PM
> Subject: [Wikitech-l] ProtectSection.php modification - where
> topost/discuss?
>
>
>> There was some discussion on one of the mailing lists about
>> protecting specific sections in a wiki page, where Rob Church noted
>> an extension called ProtectSection.php.  I have modified the code to
>> run one of the functions at a different hook, which allows me to also
>> kill any subsection Edit links on headings inside a protected
>> section.  I have it working on 1.8.3 and 1.7.1 locally.
>>
>> I noticed that ProtectSection in svn has been modified by tstarling
>> and hashar (tstarling says  "It's still completely broken with
>> section editing, though." ... but it seems to work for me, unless I'm
>> misunderstanding the issue.  Also, if the section edit links are
>> gone, the issue may be moot.).  How should I submit the code
>> modification for others to look at?  I wasn't sure if this should go
>> to bugzilla bug 4375 or here.  I hope that my code modification may
>> be worth looking at, but I worry that it's too hacky to warrant
>> consideration yet for the topic of the bug.
>>
>> Please advise.
>>
>> =====================================
>> Jim Hu
>>
>> p.s.  What I did was move the call to one of the functions,
>> wfStripProtectTags, to ParserAfterTidy, and changed it to:
>>
>>> function wfStripProtectTags ( &$parser , &$text) {
>>>
>>> $tmp = explode("<protect>",$text);
>>> $sections = array();
>>> $sections[] = array_shift($tmp);
>>> foreach($tmp as $block){
>>> $tmp = explode("</protect>",$block);
>>> $sections[] = "".preg_replace("/
>> class=\"editsection(.*?)<\/div>/i", "", $tmp[0])."";
>>> array_shift($tmp);
>>> $sections[] = implode('',$tmp);
>>> }
>>> $text = implode("",$sections);
>>> return true;
>>> }
>>
>> someday I'll learn how to use diff :(
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Wikitech-l mailing list
>> Wikitech-l at lists.wikimedia.org
>> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

=====================================
Jim Hu
Associate Professor
Dept. of Biochemistry and Biophysics
2128 TAMU
Texas A&M Univ.
College Station, TX 77843-2128
979-862-4054


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Berto 'd Sera

subject: [Wikipedia-l] RSS feeds: Wikies and OmegaWiki

body:
Hi!

I'm using the RSS feeds to quote wikies' stuff in Drupal based sites.
Anyway, just a list of new articles is often not very interesting, as many
of them are but sad looking stubs. Is there any special page giving a list
of "most modified" pages? It would extract the real meat, especially from
small editions.

A question about wikidata, too (BTW, is this the right plave to make a
question about it?). How can I extract a "per language" feed from OmegaWiki?
And how can I avoid having those long type declarations showing in the feed?
I get something like expression:word, I'd need only "word".

Thanks
B?rto ?d S?ra
Personagi dl?ann 2006 p?r l?arvista american-a Time (tanme tuti voj?otri)
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1569514,00.html


list: foundation-l

from_name: Andrew Gray

subject: [Foundation-l] Uzbekistan

body:
Hi all.

I just got an email telling me that access to uz.wikipedia.org (the
Uzbek WP) is blocked from within Uzbekistan. It's *only* uz.wp which
is blocked (en.wp; fr.wp; etc are fine), and it's been like this for
about two months.

I am not sure if anyone anywhere actually does anything about this
sort of thing, but if so they can now consider themselves informed!

(Maybe we ought to have a map, of places where we've been blocked and
to what level... be interesting to see)

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


subject: [Foundation-l] Uzbekistan


list: commons-l

from_name: Delphine Ménard

subject:
[Commons-l] "Did you know?" ... The family tree of
	[[Category:Copyright statuses]] and our broken category system.

body:
On 1/29/07, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> Did you know that "Bundt pans" is a copyright status?
>
> [[:category:Copyright_statuses]]->[[:category:Free_licenses]]->[[:category:GNU_licenses]]->[[:category:GFDL]]->[[:category:Periodic_table]]->[[:category:Chemical_elements_by_periodic_table_group]]->[[:category:Periodic_table_group_16]]->[[:category:Oxygen]]->[[:category:Oxygen_compounds]]->[[:category:Organo-oxygen_compounds]]->[[:category:Carbohydrates]]->[[:category:Sugars]]->[[:category:Sweet_food]]->[[:category:Cakes_and_cookies]]->[[:category:Cakes]]->[[:category:Bundt_cake]]->[[:category:Bundt_pans]]
>
> It was news to me.
>
> I guess I always knew that being a Harry Potter character would impact
> something's copyright status, but without commons I never would have
> known that this connection involved the humble hydrogen atom:
>
> [[:category:Copyright_statuses]]->[[:category:Free_licenses]]->[[:category:GNU_licenses]]->[[:category:GFDL]]->[[:category:Periodic_table]]->[[:category:Chemical_elements_by_periodic_table_row]]->[[:category:Periodic_table_row_1]]->[[:category:Hydrogen]]->[[:category:Hydrogen_compounds]]->[[:category:Water]]->[[:category:Bodies_of_water]]->[[:category:Islands]]->[[:category:Islands_of_Europe]]->[[:category:Ireland_(island)]]->[[:category:Ireland]]->[[:category:Culture_of_Ireland]]->[[:category:Languages_of_Ireland]]->[[:category:English_language]]->[[:category:Literature_of_England]]->[[:category:Writers_from_England]]->[[:category:J._K._Rowling]]->[[:category:Harry_Potter]]->[[:category:Harry_Potter_Characters]]
>
> (nevermind the fact that anything in the child cat is almost certainly
> an unlicensed derivative work...)

[snip]

> Unless I find huge opposition here, I'm going to begin changing the
> commons instruction pages to reflect this use of categories rather
> than our historic use.

Go go go!

Delphine
(who has never understood categories on any Wikimedia project anyway)

--
~notafish
NB. This address is used for mailing lists. Personal emails sent to
this address will probably get lost.


from_name: Luiz Augusto

body:
Single User Login is enabled on Wikia... hum... I think that this policy
from English Wikipedia is one of the reasons for this don't get enabled so
quick on Wikimedia

/me hides

On 1/28/07, Rory Stolzenberg <rory096 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Enwiki users are now trying to change policy so users with non-Latin
> usernames that don't provide transliterations in their signatures when
> they're told to can be blocked. Currently, the policy requests that users
> consider providing a transliteration, but does not require it. This came
> as
> a result of massive amounts of discussion that ended up in this change
> from
> blocking all non-Latin usernames. Now enwiki contributors are trying to
> move
> back towards blocking good faith contributors with non-Latin usernames,
> which will very likely create problems once Single User Login comes into
> effect. Will we block people who are honestly trying to improve the
> encyclopedia just because they haven't changed their signature to a Latin
> script?
>
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Username#Latin_character_transliterations
>
> --rory096
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>


body:
On Jan 29, 2007, at 10:45 PM, Jim Hu wrote:

> On Jan 29, 2007, at 9:56 PM, xaosflux wrote:
>
>> How useful is section protection, I used to think hmm, sounds like
>> a good
>> idea, but can't think of anywhere wikimedia would get much use of it,
>> afterall you could always jsut slap some <noinclude> tags around
>> the sectoin
>> and replace it.....
>
> I think you mean <nowiki>  tags and actually SectionProtect is not

I meant ProtectSection.php, of course, not SectionProtect.  Dyslexic
senior moment, I guess.

> fooled by either noinclude or nowiki.
> I just did the experiment.
>
> JH
>
>
>> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "Jim Hu" <jimhu at tamu.edu>
>> To: "Wikimedia developers" <wikitech-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
>> Sent: Monday, January 29, 2007 12:05 PM
>> Subject: [Wikitech-l] ProtectSection.php modification - where
>> topost/discuss?
>>
>>
>>> There was some discussion on one of the mailing lists about
>>> protecting specific sections in a wiki page, where Rob Church noted
>>> an extension called ProtectSection.php.  I have modified the code to
>>> run one of the functions at a different hook, which allows me to
>>> also
>>> kill any subsection Edit links on headings inside a protected
>>> section.  I have it working on 1.8.3 and 1.7.1 locally.
>>>
>>> I noticed that ProtectSection in svn has been modified by tstarling
>>> and hashar (tstarling says  "It's still completely broken with
>>> section editing, though." ... but it seems to work for me, unless
>>> I'm
>>> misunderstanding the issue.  Also, if the section edit links are
>>> gone, the issue may be moot.).  How should I submit the code
>>> modification for others to look at?  I wasn't sure if this should go
>>> to bugzilla bug 4375 or here.  I hope that my code modification may
>>> be worth looking at, but I worry that it's too hacky to warrant
>>> consideration yet for the topic of the bug.
>>>
>>> Please advise.
>>>
>>> =====================================
>>> Jim Hu
>>>
>>> p.s.  What I did was move the call to one of the functions,
>>> wfStripProtectTags, to ParserAfterTidy, and changed it to:
>>>
>>>> function wfStripProtectTags ( &$parser , &$text) {
>>>>
>>>> $tmp = explode("<protect>",$text);
>>>> $sections = array();
>>>> $sections[] = array_shift($tmp);
>>>> foreach($tmp as $block){
>>>> $tmp = explode("</protect>",$block);
>>>> $sections[] = "".preg_replace("/
>>> class=\"editsection(.*?)<\/div>/i", "", $tmp[0])."";
>>>> array_shift($tmp);
>>>> $sections[] = implode('',$tmp);
>>>> }
>>>> $text = implode("",$sections);
>>>> return true;
>>>> }
>>>
>>> someday I'll learn how to use diff :(
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Wikitech-l mailing list
>>> Wikitech-l at lists.wikimedia.org
>>> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Wikitech-l mailing list
>> Wikitech-l at lists.wikimedia.org
>> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>
>
>
> =====================================
> Jim Hu
> Associate Professor
> Dept. of Biochemistry and Biophysics
> 2128 TAMU
> Texas A&M Univ.
> College Station, TX 77843-2128
> 979-862-4054
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l


from_name: Webmaster

subject: [Wikitech-l] Our IP was blocked by mistake

body:
There is a misunderstanding, our IP was blocked today as a "Remote Loader".
We DO NOT load wikipedia's pages live, we only CACHE the pages in our
server. We send a monthly request to update our cache for requested pages,
so I don't understand why our IP was blocked.

As you can check, we are still providing the cached pages FROM OUR SERVER:

http://www.ebaita.com/enciclopedia.asp

http://www.tiosam.com/enciclopedia/

I also make sure the license and link to wikipedia are in all pages.

Please remove the block so we can update the pages when necessary.

Thanks,

Tony

Webmaster TioSam.com and eBaita.com


body:
--- Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
> Matt R schreef:
> > A lot Wikipedia thinking rests on associating knowledge of users with their
> > name <snip>

> Do you really believe that people remember who they worked with last
> year on an article? Given the sheer multitude of people only a tiny core
> of people are known. They are the "power users" of a project.

I recognise plenty of users by name, even people who aren't "power users", and
yes, even people I haven't worked with for a while. I'll say it again: a lot of
Wikipedia thinking rests on associating knowledge of users with their username.
Names are part of the framework of how a community interacts.

Because of this, whether by technical means or by policy, we need to ensure
that usernames on a single-language wiki are going to be widely comprehensible
to speakers of that wiki's language.

-- Matt

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Matt_Crypto
Blog: http://cipher-text.blogspot.com

___________________________________________________________
Now you can scan emails quickly with a reading pane. Get the new Yahoo! Mail. http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/nowyoucan.html


from_name: Bryan Tong Minh

subject: [Foundation-l] Fair Use (again)

body:
On 1/29/07, Brad Patrick <bradp.wmf at gmail.com> wrote:
> But I would once again encourage anyone interested in the issue to ask
> themselves first why the fair image *must* be there instead of a free one
> (rare examples) and why it is not instead an easy way out in lieu of the
> harder task of obtaining free images as equivalents.
>
To everybody just remember what power we have when we say we are from
Wikipedia. Everybody knows Wikipedia, and are honored to have there
images on Wikipedia. (I just said thank you to 500 Flickr users, so I
know what I am talking about)

Bryan


subject: [Foundation-l] Fair Use (again)


from_name: Gerard Meijssen

body:
Matt R schreef:
> --- Anders Wegge Jakobsen <wegge at wegge.dk> wrote:
>
>> Matt R <matt_crypto at yahoo.co.uk> writes:
>> What I am saying is that editors who enter
>>
>>> into non-trivial interactions on the English Wikipedia should be
>>> obliged to have a handle that can be grokked by speakers of the
>>> English language.
>>>
>>  The problem is that "speakers of the english language" seem to
>> gravitate towards the lowest common denominator. We are writing an
>> encyclopedia for Petes sake! Editors are supposedly in command of a
>> skillset that's beyond burger flipping 101. If not, they have no place
>> writing an encyclopedia anyway.
>>
>
> Yes...but what skillset are you thinking editors should have? No editor has the
> ability to be able to easily recognise and distinguish every script a Wikipedia
> editor might express a username in.
>
> A lot Wikipedia thinking rests on associating knowledge of users with their
> name: "ah, User:Foobar, I remember working with him on an article last year; I
> don't need to check the minor edit he just made" etc. Such recognition -- the
> basis of community, in fact -- is made much more difficult if "User:Foobar" was
> "User:?????" or
> User:<something_that_looks_remarkably_like_a_squiggle_to_the_uninitiated>.
>
Do you really believe that people remember who they worked with last
year on an article? Given the sheer multitude of people only a tiny core
of people are known. They are the "power users" of a project.
>
>>  Will the next demand be that interwiki targets must only be named
>> with latin-1 characters?
>>
>
> Come on, that's a one of them strawman thingybobs: nobody's demanding this, and
> there's no reason to thing anyone would. There are few Wikipedia interactions
> that are affected by the ability to read non-Latin-1 interwiki targets.
>
Come on, so you can call them thingybobs, the right name for this
attitude is discrimination. People are demanding things; they want to be
known by their own user ID. The one that they use on their own project
as well. You on the other hand deny them that they can. You may recall
that this is a flare up of something that was discussed last month. You
may want to read back what an impact it had on the Japanese Wikipedia.
You may want to read how much one of our most valuable Wikimedians was
distressed by this attitude.
Thanks,
    Gerard


from_name: Ashar Voultoiz

subject: [Wikitech-l] Performance of loading custom style sheets

body:
Alex Powell wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Mediawiki's performance has improved substantially over the versions. and
> 1.9 seems the snappiest yet. When I upgraded I found I had some slow stuff
> being loaded in addition to MW. Using Firebug beta (v cool BTW) I noticed
> something odd. The index.php for the page loads blindingly fast, but the
> following:
>
> /index.php?title=-&action=raw&smaxage=0&gen=js<http://www.exscien.com/internal/index.php?title=-&action=raw&smaxage=0&gen=js>
> /index.php?title=MediaWiki:Common.css&usemsgcache=yes&action=raw&ctype=text/css&smaxage=18000<http://www.exscien.com/internal/index.php?title=MediaWiki:Common.css&usemsgcache=yes&action=raw&ctype=text/css&smaxage=18000>
> /index.php?title=User:Alexp/monobook.css&action=raw&ctype=text/css<http://www.exscien.com/internal/index.php?title=User:Alexp/monobook.css&action=raw&ctype=text/css>
> /index.php?title=-&action=raw&gen=css&maxage=18000&smaxage=0&ts=20070129214411<http://www.exscien.com/internal/index.php?title=-&action=raw&gen=css&maxage=18000&smaxage=0&ts=20070129214411>
>
> ... seem to run very slowly (one was taking 2 seconds and each take over
> .5secs, on a page that took 16ms to render). What can be done to speed them?
> As far as I can see they are just simple js direct from the DB. Am I missing
> something or is there a performance hole there?

Get a better computer. Seriously, I suspect firebug is timing the
firefox rendering time (for css) and execution time (for js). Try using
wget, it will be faster (or disable javascript).

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


subject: [Wikipedia-l] school articles : enough

body:
Hoi!

> Isn't that what we all do?
Yeap :)

>The point that I was making there was that applying restrictions to what
>makes a corporation notable is meaningless when there is no movement to
>add this stuff in the first place.
I agree. I'd avoid restrictions in general, as they usually only make the
forbidden behavior more desirable that it used to be. Too bad that
restricting restrictions has the very same effect, so one must avoid that,
too :)

It's different if we speak about guidelines on what to look for when writing
about Company X. A sort of basic template that would suggest by its very
shape (yeah, the medium IS the message) what one needs to start with.

Once you told a guy what he should look for (kinda helpful for newbies,
isn't it?), you already 70% succeeded in brainwashing him into believing
that your POV is actually "the holy truth". LOLOLOLOL Governments and
parents call this Houdini trick "education" :))

That's why it's SOOO interesting to discuss what info is needed and what is
not. Containers shape whatever they hold... thought containers shape reality
:)) Companies do not worry me, our own corporate policies do...

B?rto ?d S?ra
Personagi dl?ann 2006 p?r l?arvista american-a Time (tanme tuti voj?otri)
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1569514,00.html


from_name: brion at pobox.com

subject: [Wikitech-l] MediaWiki automated test run failure 2007-01-30

body:
An automated run of parserTests.php showed the following failures:

This is MediaWiki version 1.10alpha (r19687).

Reading tests from "maintenance/parserTests.txt"...
Reading tests from "extensions/Cite/citeParserTests.txt"...
Reading tests from "extensions/Poem/poemParserTests.txt"...

  18 still FAILING test(s) :(
      * URL-encoding in URL functions (single parameter)
      * URL-encoding in URL functions (multiple parameters)
      * TODO: Table security: embedded pipes (http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2006-April/034637.html)
      * TODO: Link containing double-single-quotes '' (bug 4598)
      * TODO: message transform: <noinclude> in transcluded template (bug 4926)
      * TODO: message transform: <onlyinclude> in transcluded template (bug 4926)
      * BUG 1887, part 2: A <math> with a thumbnail- math enabled
      * TODO: HTML bullet list, unclosed tags (bug 5497)
      * TODO: HTML ordered list, unclosed tags (bug 5497)
      * TODO: HTML nested bullet list, open tags (bug 5497)
      * TODO: HTML nested ordered list, open tags (bug 5497)
      * TODO: Inline HTML vs wiki block nesting
      * TODO: Mixing markup for italics and bold
      * TODO: 5 quotes, code coverage +1 line
      * TODO: dt/dd/dl test
      * TODO: Images with the "|" character in the comment
      * TODO: Parents of subpages, two levels up, without trailing slash or name.
      * TODO: Parents of subpages, two levels up, with lots of extra trailing slashes.

Passed 489 of 507 tests (96.45%)... 18 tests failed!


body:
--- Anders Wegge Jakobsen <wegge at wegge.dk> wrote:

>  Learn to discern between squiggles then. If you claim that the
> average editor is able to remeber User:JoeBloggs from way back, then
> any claim of not beeing able to discern between squiggles revolve
> around being unable (or unwilling) to install the proper font needed
> to make sense out of User:???.

Non-Latin usernames make distinguishing and recognising users *much* harder.

How many different fonts do I have to install to cover all possible squiggles?
On all OSes on all my computers? Can I install these fonts on my old Unix
terminal? (Yes, I do use it for Wikipedia...) Can I install fonts on the
computers at my local library and Internet cafe? (Answer: No.) Do you expect
people less familiar with technology to know how to do this, or even that there
exists some way to resolve those question marks? Which will someone remember
longer: "User:JoeBloggs" or "User:some_weird_glyph"?

The inconvenience to en: Wikipedians is quite out of proportion to the
convenience of not having to spend the thirty seconds creating a Latin-1
username.

I'm not going to spend any more of my dwindling Wikipedia time on this, fun as
it is being put in the same moral category as racists and misogynists and
sneered at for lacking a universal knowledge of the world's writing systems.

> >>  Will the next demand be that interwiki targets must only be named
> >> with latin-1 characters?
>
> > Come on, that's a one of them strawman thingybobs: nobody's
> > demanding this, and there's no reason to thing anyone would. There
> > are few Wikipedia interactions that are affected by the ability to
> > read non-Latin-1 interwiki targets.
>
>  You are free to call that argument a strawman, as long as you accept
> that your basic premise (that latin-1 is the bee's knees) are a
> strawman as well.

Actually, I'm just free to call a strawman a strawman. Watch carefully and I'll
do it again!

How to win an argument:

1. Make an obvious strawman argument.
2. Wait for someone to call you on it.
3. Agree to concede that it's a strawman only if the person you're arguing with
concedes your main point.
4. ????
5. Profit!

-- Matt

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Matt_Crypto
Blog: http://cipher-text.blogspot.com

___________________________________________________________
The all-new Yahoo! Mail goes wherever you go - free your email address from your Internet provider. http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/nowyoucan.html


subject: [Wikipedia-l] RSS feeds: Wikies

body:
Hi Angela!

>You can find a list of similar special pages at
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Specialpages but they don't have
>RSS feeds yet.

To make an RSS feed useful you'd need something like "most revised this
week" (even better, today). The page you quote would only push readers into
a massive "see what you can do with G.Bush jr.'s page" edit-in... I quite
doubt that the en.wiki admins would welcome that :)))

I'd really like feeds made to attract traffic to specific sections. People
can subscribe to them, and if communities may have some tools to (say)
promote a category or another... then you can use them to direct
traffic/resources to your weak spots.

This is especially strategic for small communities. Can't think of many
sources offering a RSS in (say) Normand, so any site needing such feeds
would not have an alternative left. It's a pretty monopolistic situation.

Should there be concerns about server overloading, I suppose we could have
this stuff served from the download servers. Any idea?

Berto 'd Sera
Personagi dl'ann 2006 per l'arvista american-a Time (tanme tuti vojaotri)
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1569514,00.html


from_name: Anders Wegge Jakobsen

body:
Matt R <matt_crypto at yahoo.co.uk> writes:

> --- Anders Wegge Jakobsen <wegge at wegge.dk> wrote:

>>  The problem is that "speakers of the english language" seem to
>> gravitate towards the lowest common denominator. We are writing an
>> encyclopedia for Petes sake! Editors are supposedly in command of a
>> skillset that's beyond burger flipping 101. If not, they have no
>> place writing an encyclopedia anyway.

> Yes...but what skillset are you thinking editors should have? No
> editor has the ability to be able to easily recognise and
> distinguish every script a Wikipedia editor might express a username
> in.

 "squiggle Toad Worm Bird" Yup, I recognise the visuals.

> A lot Wikipedia thinking rests on associating knowledge of users
> with their name: "ah, User:Foobar, I remember working with him on an
> article last year; I don't need to check the minor edit he just
> made" etc. Such recognition -- the basis of community, in fact -- is
> made much more difficult if "User:Foobar" was "User:?????" or
> User:<something_that_looks_remarkably_like_a_squiggle_to_the_uninitiated>.

 Learn to discern between squiggles then. If you claim that the
average editor is able to remeber User:JoeBloggs from way back, then
any claim of not beeing able to discern between squiggles revolve
around being unable (or unwilling) to install the proper font needed
to make sense out of User:???.

>>  Will the next demand be that interwiki targets must only be named
>> with latin-1 characters?

> Come on, that's a one of them strawman thingybobs: nobody's
> demanding this, and there's no reason to thing anyone would. There
> are few Wikipedia interactions that are affected by the ability to
> read non-Latin-1 interwiki targets.

 You are free to call that argument a strawman, as long as you accept
that your basic premise (that latin-1 is the bee's knees) are a
strawman as well.

--
// Wegge
<http://geowiki.wegge.dk/wiki/Forside> - Alt om geocaching
Bruger du den gratis spamfighther ser jeg kun dine indl?g *EN* gang.


body:
--- Anders Wegge Jakobsen <wegge at wegge.dk> wrote:

> Matt R <matt_crypto at yahoo.co.uk> writes:
>
> > --- Anders Wegge Jakobsen <wegge at wegge.dk> wrote:
>
> > Non-Latin usernames make distinguishing and recognising users *much*
> > harder.
>
>  Sure ... Then go ahead and transliterate your name into
> chinese. After all, it's just 30 seconds og effort on your part :-)

We can presume that this would not normally be particularly difficult if I was
going to be having non-trivial interactions with other editors on the Chinese
Wikipedia -- the context under discussion if you have been following the
thread.

>  Tough for you then. Grow up and learn coping with the globalized
> world. I'm putting you in [[Category:Idiot]] you have failed to demonstrate
> the intelligence needed to be called bigot, much less racist. Tough
> shit.

I'm sad that you feel abuse is an acceptable method of arguing your point. I
presume it's because your rational arguments are exhausted. In any case, this
conversation is over.

-- Matt

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Matt_Crypto
Blog: http://cipher-text.blogspot.com

___________________________________________________________
What kind of emailer are you? Find out today - get a free analysis of your email personality. Take the quiz at the Yahoo! Mail Championship.
http://uk.rd.yahoo.com/evt=44106/*http://mail.yahoo.net/uk


from_name: geni

body:
On 30 Jan 2007 01:32:52 +0100, Anders Wegge Jakobsen <wegge at wegge.dk> wrote:
> Matt R <matt_crypto at yahoo.co.uk> writes:
>
> > --- Anders Wegge Jakobsen <wegge at wegge.dk> wrote:
>
> >>  Learn to discern between squiggles then. If you claim that the
> >> average editor is able to remeber User:JoeBloggs from way back, then
> >> any claim of not beeing able to discern between squiggles revolve
> >> around being unable (or unwilling) to install the proper font needed
> >> to make sense out of User:???.
>
> > Non-Latin usernames make distinguishing and recognising users *much*
> > harder.
>
>  Tough for you then. Grow up and learn coping with the globalized
> world.
>

The gloabalized world speaks english. However in this case we will
accept pretty much anything in the English alphabet. At random I don't
think Bjankuloski06en is english we tend not to include numbers
withint words.

>  Sure ... Then go ahead and transliterate your name into
> chinese. After all, it's just 30 seconds og effort on your part :-)

Tricky since it doesn't have a defined pronouceation in english. either

???

or perhaps

? ??????;???;???

--
geni


list: wiktionary-l

from_name: Tomasz Sienicki

subject: [Wiktionary-l] ru.wikt and empty templates

body:
Apparently people at ru have filled their their Wiktionary with completely empty templates saying "This word or expression has not been translated yet. Please add your translation."

ru.wikt has 105 877 entries, out of which 81 496 are empty templates.

This makes the Russian Wiktionary entirely useless; people complain they have stopped checking it, because they keep seeing empty entries.

I suggest we stop adding interwiki links to ru:.

--tsca


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [Foundation-l] Fair Use (again)

body:
Brad Patrick wrote:

>I wanted to simply state that I have been reading this thread with
>interest.  When it comes to content, it is the editors and users and not the
>Foundation who decide what is on.  I don't presently serve as, and don't
>intend to become, the central authority for what is and isn't acceptable for
>fair use questions. It is not a subject that is prone to sweeping policy
>decisions, as counterexamples etc. abound.  Again, since the license is the
>key to the forward looking nature of the project (here en:wp) why someone
>feels compelled to take the easy way out and {{fairuse}} image the heck out
>of articles out of a sense of obligation to "improve" it is beside the
>point.
>
>The images are fair - not free - and that isn't the same thing.  You can
>argue til the cows come home about any particular example.  People do.  ;-)
>But I would once again encourage anyone interested in the issue to ask
>themselves first why the fair image *must* be there instead of a free one
>(rare examples) and why it is not instead an easy way out in lieu of the
>harder task of obtaining free images as equivalents.
>
>What happens in legal terms depends, of course, on the situation.  WMF has
>no interest in fighting really hard for "fair use" in principle, since we
>are all about free images where there is a choice.  Be honest - wouldn't the
>best Wikipedia be one with no strings attached, with content of equivalent
>quality?
>
Thank you for expressing this position.  I absolutely agree that it
should not be the Board's function to defend some user's claim to fair
use, or, for that matter, any user's challenge of a specific copyright
under other provisions of the law.  Nevertheless, I do feel that the
Board should help to facilitate challenges to copyright by individual
users, providing that they understand that they are doing so at their
own expense, and that WMF must comply fully with legal orders arising
from the issue.

I do agree too that what some users claim to be fair use may not be fair
use at all.  Some of these claims seem to be based on little more than
the convenience of the uploading editor.  Individual free access should
be accompanied by individual free responsibility.

Ec


subject: [Foundation-l] Fair Use (again)


body:
Matt R <matt_crypto at yahoo.co.uk> writes:

> --- Anders Wegge Jakobsen <wegge at wegge.dk> wrote:

>>  Learn to discern between squiggles then. If you claim that the
>> average editor is able to remeber User:JoeBloggs from way back, then
>> any claim of not beeing able to discern between squiggles revolve
>> around being unable (or unwilling) to install the proper font needed
>> to make sense out of User:???.

> Non-Latin usernames make distinguishing and recognising users *much*
> harder.

 Tough for you then. Grow up and learn coping with the globalized
world.

> How many different fonts do I have to install to cover all possible
> squiggles?  On all OSes on all my computers? Can I install these
> fonts on my old Unix terminal? (Yes, I do use it for Wikipedia...)
> Can I install fonts on the computers at my local library and
> Internet cafe? (Answer: No.) Do you expect people less familiar with
> technology to know how to do this, or even that there exists some
> way to resolve those question marks? Which will someone remember
> longer: "User:JoeBloggs" or "User:some_weird_glyph"?

 Personally I remeber the entire IP-range of the danish educational
network. So ...

> The inconvenience to en: Wikipedians is quite out of proportion to
> the convenience of not having to spend the thirty seconds creating a
> Latin-1 username.

 Sure ... Then go ahead and transliterate your name into
chinese. After all, it's just 30 seconds og effort on your part :-)

> I'm not going to spend any more of my dwindling Wikipedia time on
> this, fun as it is being put in the same moral category as racists
> and misogynists and sneered at for lacking a universal knowledge of
> the world's writing systems.

 I'm putting you in [[Category:Idiot]] you have failed to demonstrate
the intelligence needed to be called bigot, much less racist. Tough
shit.

...

>>  You are free to call that argument a strawman, as long as you
>> accept that your basic premise (that latin-1 is the bee's knees)
>> are a strawman as well.

> Actually, I'm just free to call a strawman a strawman. Watch
> carefully and I'll do it again!

 Sure. I've already seen that it's the only thing you can.

> How to win an argument:
>
> 1. Make an obvious strawman argument.
> 2. Wait for someone to call you on it.
> 3. Agree to concede that it's a strawman only if the person you're arguing with
> concedes your main point.
> 4. ????
> 5. Profit!

 6. A fork of non-en wikipedias, ignoring the WMF.

 All thanks to you.

--
// Wegge
<http://geowiki.wegge.dk/wiki/Forside> - Alt om geocaching
Bruger du den gratis spamfighther ser jeg kun dine indl?g *EN* gang.


from_name: Gregory Maxwell

subject:
[Commons-l] Fwd: "Did you know?" ... The family tree of
	[[Category:Copyright statuses]] and our broken category system.

body:
On 1/30/07, Brianna Laugher <brianna.laugher at gmail.com> wrote:
> It works poorly if you expand all the way, and the higher up in the
> tree you start, the worse it works. In my experience using
> Duesentrieb's tool, it works quite well when you specify a low depth
> (depth=1,2,3). Often 1 is appropriate.

*sigh*.

In my example, cutting at depth 3 would prevent you from finding many
of the copyright tags for example,
[[:category:Copyright_statuses]]->[[:category:Public_domain]]->[[:category:PD_US_Government]]->[[:category:PD_US_Military]]->[[:category:PD_US_Navy]]->[[:category:PD_US_Navy_Historical_Center]]

The policy of only placing the most specific categories combined with
a constant pressure to shrink categories ensures that objects are
placed at maximal depth.

If I fix bug1211 on commons will you withdraw your objection to large
categories? Changing the code to make two queries probably wouldn't be
too stab worthy.

In any case, even marked up relationships don't solve the drift
problem.. because you can still get it with pure subset operations.
Not to mention that multiple edge types makes writing queries even
more mind bending.

Frankly, I think it's really offensive that we'll waste are time
talking about army waving dreams of semantic mediawiki with its
academic appeal, when we can't even manage to provide the basic
service our users require.

Go over to Getty images
(http://creative.gettyimages.com/source/home/home.aspx) and try out
their search and see just how much we suck.  Do a 'search all
creative' and type in 'black child eating icecream'.

Their system is quite simple but very powerful. They have many tags,
from very broad to very specific, and images are marked with all that
apply (sometimes many dozens). A simple tag suggestion system makes it
easy to find the tags that are in use, and clear up ambiguities (do
you want black the color or black the race?).  You then query them
with a simple and quick intersection tool. You can drill down or
adjust your search string, but it's all very simple quick and easy.
There are no complex query languages, no snazzy semantic markup, no
funky idea hierarchies.  It just WORKS. And it works for many tens of
thousands of people every day.

With the man power we can put behind marking up our content there is
no reason we couldn't be just as good in this regard as the commercial
stock photo houses. But we're not. Commons stinks in comparison and if
we continue to put off simple and straight-forward measures which will
provide the basic features that people need in favor of using commons
as a science project and forever waiting for some ill-defined great
academic pie in the sky that may never come true... we will just
continue to suck.

Oh well, at least we're Free. :)


from_name: Robert Scott Horning

subject: [Foundation-l] Fair Use (again)

body:
rfrangi at libero.it wrote:

>>That may not be true in 10 or 20 years, but for now, we should embrace
>>Fair Use and use it.  Fairly, legally, and stomping on those who would
>>attempt to abuse Fair Use in our project, but we should embrace it
>>nonetheless.
>>
>
>I beg you all, please consider that a considerable part of the contributors to Wikimedia projects (and possibly a considerable part of people willing to reuse commercially its contents) cannot embrace fair use, simply because fair use does not exist in their legislation.
>
>And once again, if the point is to stick to the GFDL, fair use contents is not compliant.
>
>If the ponit is "articles look better with... whatever", some go for fair use, some others go for NC images. And even if I don't want neither, I have to say that fair use is something decided by the user (possibly wrongly), NC is something decided by the author (thus safer from the point of view of a legal action).
>
>Roberto (Snowdog)
>
One of the problems with fair use for images is that they don't normally
follow the traditions and practices of fair-use textual quotations.
 This is also why the doctrines divirge so much from one country to the
next for these items.

Still, I would like to point out that while fair-use doctrine may only
be an American concept (largely), similar concepts do exist in virtually
all other countries, even if to a significantly lesser extent.  There
may be some images that are not strictly available for any purpose under
the GFDL, but may under certain circumstances be legitimately used in
GFDL'd content.  Trying to draw the line between what is acceptable
content and stuff that simply needs to be deleted is where the problem
comes in.  Erring on the side of caution and exclude fair-use content
altogether may be one solution on some projects where fair use content
isn't so critical.

What I find amazing is the philosophy of some en.wikipedia users that
are now pushing to allow content on Wikipedia even if it invalidates the
GFDL when it is included in a Wikipedia article.  It is this expansion
of the range of images being permitted that surprises me, where the only
limit to allowed content is only what is strictly legal in the USA, and
trying to take fair use to the ultimate limits in U.S. Common Law and
asserting educational and non-profit justifications for its inclusion.

I believe there is some middle ground that can be found between this
free-for-all philosohpy and complete exclusion of fair use that would be
easy to understand, work in nearly every country with significant
numbers of Wikimedia users, and be simple enough to see a policy that is
just a couple of paragraphs long about the topic.  Perhaps I'm overly
optimistic here.

BTW, I love the it.wikipedia's attitude on this topic, which does a
pretty good job of finding this middle ground.

--
Robert Scott Horning


subject: [Foundation-l] Fair Use (again)


from_name: Delirium

references:
<619497.62281.qm@web25008.mail.ukl.yahoo.com>	<m3ps8x8ibv.fsf@obelix.wegge.dk>	<45BE9CC0.7090105@hackish.org>
	<45BEF161.9050208@gmail.com>

body:
Gerard Meijssen wrote:
> Delirium schreef:
>
>> Anders Wegge Jakobsen wrote:
>>
>>>  Tough for you then. Grow up and learn coping with the globalized
>>> world.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>> But this is directly contrary to the spirit of Wikipedia, which is to
>> give everyone knowledge in *their own language*.  A user of [language x]
>> should only have to be familiar with [language x] in order to contribute
>> to their local Wikipedia, not also familiar with all other languages.
>> Usually English is the worst offender in this regard (people should
>> *not* have to know English, or even necessarily be familiar with Latin
>> script, in order to contribute to a non-English Wikipedia), but it's no
>> better when it goes the other way either.
>>
>> -Mark
>>
> Hoi,
> With people using their own script for their user name, it does not
> detract a thing from the information being in English on the English
> language Wikipedia.
>

No, but it detracts from people who only speak English being able to
productively work on the English-language Wikipedia.

I see this as pretty much common courtesy.  I currently use a
Latin-alphabet name on the Greek Wikipedia, because I wasn't really
thinking much when I chose it.  In retrospect, I should have chosen a
Greek-alphabet name.  I'll probably keep my current name via inertia if
nobody complains, but if it did cause problems for a significant portion
of the community, and they asked me to change it to a Greek-alphabet
name, I would of course do so.  Why wouldn't I?  What possible
justification would there be for forcing a foreign script upon them?
Would it really be defensible to be a jackass and tell them, "Tough for
you then. Grow up and learn coping with the globalized world."?

-Mark


from_name: Tim Starling

body:
Webmaster wrote:
> There is a misunderstanding, our IP was blocked today as a "Remote Loader".
> We DO NOT load wikipedia's pages live, we only CACHE the pages in our
> server. We send a monthly request to update our cache for requested pages,
> so I don't understand why our IP was blocked.
> As you can check, we are still providing the cached pages FROM OUR SERVER:
> http://www.ebaita.com/enciclopedia.asp
>
> http://www.tiosam.com/enciclopedia/
>
> I also make sure the license and link to wikipedia are in all pages.
>
> Please remove the block so we can update the pages when necessary.

So I suppose when you made 500,000 requests over 3 days with a faked
User-Agent string, for a cumulative server processing time of 14 hours,
you were updating your cache?

-- Tim Starling


subject: [Wikitech-l] MessageCache v. Language

references:
<eplpi2$7ju$1@sea.gmane.org> <eplqoo$c5b$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<eplrrr$g8n$1@sea.gmane.org>

body:
Edward Z. Yang wrote:
> Tim Starling wrote:
>> MessageCache is a cache of the MediaWiki namespace, a cache which is
>> conceptually merged with various other message sources. Sometimes Language
>> needs to access the MediaWiki namespace, and it does so via MessageCache.
>> Language::getMessageFromDB is a helper function to facilitate such access.
>> This is required to support important features such as per-wiki
>> customisation of month names.
>
> Ah, when put in that context, that makes sense. Not such an ugly hack,
> then. (referring to the docblock on line 335 of Language.php)
>
>> The way MessageCache supports multiple language objects is hackish,
>> because the ability to support multiple language objects was added after
>> MessageCache was designed, and it was never properly refactored.
>
> After refactoring, what would MessageCache look like?

MessageCache::get could accept a language code as input instead of a
boolean for-content flag. That would avoid the ugly hack in
Language::getMessageFromDB(), i.e. the comparison of the language code
against the content and user languages.

> Would you have all the language objects cached in their own registry?

That doesn't appear to be necessary, all the language data that
MessageCache needs is available via the static member function
Language::getMessagesFor().

> This has a relationship to the key/lang syntax?

In part, yes.

>
>> The object is named after the data it contains. The member functions are
>> tools for operating on that data. We could call it MessageUtilities, but
>> then it would sound like a mere collection of functions, and it would not
>> be clear what happens when you instantiate, clone or serialize one of them.
>
> In that context, the name makes sense. However, there are still quite a
> bit of methods that aren't really tied to that. What if you seperated
> the less related methods (get() stands out as one) into
> MessageUtilities, so that only methods directly manipulating the
> MediaWiki cache are in the MessageCache object. An extra file, yes, but
> possibly the difference between caching MediaWiki messages, and
> retrieving a message from multiple sources is sufficiently great enough
> to merit another include.

I'm happy with it as it is.

-- Tim Starling


list: wikien-l

from_name: · Firefoxman

subject: [WikiEN-l] An obscene example of remote loading

body:
Yahoo has its own special file made for it. See
http://download.wikimedia.org/enwiki/20070124/
Extracted page abstracts for Yahoo
1.3 GB!

On 1/28/07, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 28/01/07, Roberto Alfonso <rpgrca at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > I believe reference.com and about.com are, along with answers.com,
> > the biggest reusers in profile and size.
>
>
> Does Yahoo still take a live feed?
>
>
> - d.
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

--
-Firefoxman


subject:
[Foundation-l] Publishing group hires 'Pit Bull of PR' to fight
 open access

body:
David Gerard wrote:
> (courtesy Mathias Schindler)
>
> http://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/mensch/0,1518,462845,00.html
> http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/25/AR2007012501705.html
> http://www.nature.com/news/2007/070122/full/445347a.html
>
> Now, is there anything WMF can do to advocate free content? Is that
> political or entirely in accordance with our goals? Or what can
> individuals do?
>
This is a somewhat different fight, since *neither* side in the
open-access debate is advocating free content.  The argument is over
whether journal issues and/or archives should be available fee-free on
the internet, or should require a subscription fee---but neither side is
advocating that the articles should become any form of free content.

It is vaguely in line with our goals, though, since we can more easily
research for our own articles if the primary and secondary literature is
more widely and freely available.

-Mark


body:
Gerard Meijssen wrote:
> I do not have a problem to be a lonely voice that identifies
> discrimination where I see it. I prefer to be seen as someone who does
> make himself heard than someone who mutters in the background.
>
You mean you don't have a problem with poisoning debate by attacking
good-faith Wikipedia contributors as bigots.  Welcome to the killfile.

-Mark


subject: [Foundation-l] [Announcement] Welcome to the advisory group

body:
Hoi,
Given that Sunir is probably an OK guy, and even that he contributed
early in our projects, that still does not demonstrate the added value
he has over many of the people that are already in our project. What I
was looking for is what he adds to the equation, what I find that he may
be a great guy but I do not understand what his added value would be.
This complementary value is what you look for in people that are
relevant for the advisory board.
Thanks,
    GerardM

The Cunctator schreef:
> On 1/29/07, Cormac Lawler <cormaggio at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On 1/29/07, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Ray Saintonge schreef:
>>>
>>>> Gerard Meijssen wrote:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>> There are many people who could make a valuable contribution to this
>>>>> advisory board. You apparently have yours and I do not even know
>>>>>
>> Sunir
>>
>>>>> Shah.
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>> He was at Wikimania in Frankfort.
>>>>
>>>> Ec
>>>>
>>> Hoi,
>>> So were you and I, so was Richard Stallman if that is what makes you
>>> notable ...
>>> Thanks,
>>>     GerardM
>>>
>>>
>> Sunir Shah is the (co)founder of Meatball Wiki:
>> <http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?MeatballWiki> ;
>> <http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?SunirShah>. You can find his
>> Wikimania 2005 presentation details at:
>> <
>> http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania_2005_Presentations#Other_Talks
>>
>>> .
>>>
>> I agree with Jussi-Ville that he could be of great service to the
>> advisory group.
>>
>
>
> And one of the earliest Wikipedia contributors.


body:
Hoi,
When people are told to transliterate their name, they will do just that
and that way you cannot require them to be uniquely known. Your
suggestion is not even feasible. I repeat this proposed practice is
highly discriminatory, it does not fit in with the Single User Login
that is to be implemented.

Your basic assumption, that it is up to the English language Wikipedia
to be discriminatory may be something that can pulled off. It will be a
disgrace for the project when it is reinstated, it is already a disgrace
for the people who propose it.

Thanks,
    GerardM

Matt R schreef:
> --- Anders Wegge Jakobsen <wegge at wegge.dk> wrote:
>
>
>>  Learn to discern between squiggles then. If you claim that the
>> average editor is able to remeber User:JoeBloggs from way back, then
>> any claim of not beeing able to discern between squiggles revolve
>> around being unable (or unwilling) to install the proper font needed
>> to make sense out of User:???.
>>
>
> Non-Latin usernames make distinguishing and recognising users *much* harder.
>
> How many different fonts do I have to install to cover all possible squiggles?
> On all OSes on all my computers? Can I install these fonts on my old Unix
> terminal? (Yes, I do use it for Wikipedia...) Can I install fonts on the
> computers at my local library and Internet cafe? (Answer: No.) Do you expect
> people less familiar with technology to know how to do this, or even that there
> exists some way to resolve those question marks? Which will someone remember
> longer: "User:JoeBloggs" or "User:some_weird_glyph"?
>
> The inconvenience to en: Wikipedians is quite out of proportion to the
> convenience of not having to spend the thirty seconds creating a Latin-1
> username.
>
> I'm not going to spend any more of my dwindling Wikipedia time on this, fun as
> it is being put in the same moral category as racists and misogynists and
> sneered at for lacking a universal knowledge of the world's writing systems.
>
>
>>>>  Will the next demand be that interwiki targets must only be named
>>>> with latin-1 characters?
>>>>
>>
>>
>>> Come on, that's a one of them strawman thingybobs: nobody's
>>> demanding this, and there's no reason to thing anyone would. There
>>> are few Wikipedia interactions that are affected by the ability to
>>> read non-Latin-1 interwiki targets.
>>>
>>  You are free to call that argument a strawman, as long as you accept
>> that your basic premise (that latin-1 is the bee's knees) are a
>> strawman as well.
>>
>
> Actually, I'm just free to call a strawman a strawman. Watch carefully and I'll
> do it again!
>
> How to win an argument:
>
> 1. Make an obvious strawman argument.
> 2. Wait for someone to call you on it.
> 3. Agree to concede that it's a strawman only if the person you're arguing with
> concedes your main point.
> 4. ????
> 5. Profit!
>
> -- Matt
>
> Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Matt_Crypto
> Blog: http://cipher-text.blogspot.com
>
>
>
> ___________________________________________________________
> The all-new Yahoo! Mail goes wherever you go - free your email address from your Internet provider. http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/nowyoucan.html
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>
>


references:
<619497.62281.qm@web25008.mail.ukl.yahoo.com>	<m3ps8x8ibv.fsf@obelix.wegge.dk>
	<45BE9CC0.7090105@hackish.org>

body:
Delirium schreef:
> Anders Wegge Jakobsen wrote:
>
>> Matt R <matt_crypto at yahoo.co.uk> writes:
>>
>>
>>
>>> Non-Latin usernames make distinguishing and recognising users *much*
>>> harder.
>>>
>>>
>>  Tough for you then. Grow up and learn coping with the globalized
>> world.
>>
>>
>
> But this is directly contrary to the spirit of Wikipedia, which is to
> give everyone knowledge in *their own language*.  A user of [language x]
> should only have to be familiar with [language x] in order to contribute
> to their local Wikipedia, not also familiar with all other languages.
> Usually English is the worst offender in this regard (people should
> *not* have to know English, or even necessarily be familiar with Latin
> script, in order to contribute to a non-English Wikipedia), but it's no
> better when it goes the other way either.
>
> -Mark
Hoi,
With people using their own script for their user name, it does not
detract a thing from the information being in English on the English
language Wikipedia.
Thanks,
    GerardM


body:
Tomasz Sienicki schreef:
> Apparently people at ru have filled their their Wiktionary with completely empty templates saying "This word or expression has not been translated yet. Please add your translation."
>
> ru.wikt has 105 877 entries, out of which 81 496 are empty templates.
>
> This makes the Russian Wiktionary entirely useless; people complain they have stopped checking it, because they keep seeing empty entries.
>
> I suggest we stop adding interwiki links to ru:.
>
> --tsca
>
Hoi,
It is sad that the craze of creating more entries on a Wiki has made a
wiki useless. I would support the removal of these 81.496 empty pages,
they are not helpful at all.

It is not possible to stop adding interwiki links to ru. The process is
based on checking the existence of an expression that is spelled exactly
the same on other Wiktionaries. There is no reason to believe that the
expression that you are looking at on a Wiktionary means the same on the
other Wiktionary anyway.

I run the interwiki bot as a service. I have not programmed it, I try to
address issues when they arise by asking Andre Engels to have a look at
the code to fix an issue.

Thanks,
    GerardM


from_name: Andrew Gray

body:
On 30/01/07, Luiz Augusto <lugusto at gmail.com> wrote:
> Single User Login is enabled on Wikia... hum... I think that this policy
> from English Wikipedia is one of the reasons for this don't get enabled so
> quick on Wikimedia

There is no requirement, of course, that SUL means "have the username
display the same way everywhere". Even if any given username only has
one person behind it, it doesn't stop us declaring the "real user" to
be an arbitrary database code and hanging a dozen visible usernames
off that... ;-)

[I would utterly love a hack which allowed you to ask for any
non-Latin username - or perhaps any username - to have an arbitrary
User-ID appended to the back of it - "foobar" or "foobar (123456)" -
whenever it showed up in logs. Those who find it useful can flip a
switch and on it comes; those who don't, well, it'd be off by default)

But looking back over the thread, there is an awful lot of stupidity
and - not to put too fine a point on it - desire To Make A Fuss being
demonstrated here. Tthe proposal is not some grand racist conspiracy
to prevent contributions from non-Anglophones. The proposal is to ask
them, *when they sign things on discussion pages*, to use a
transliteration. It's a proposal to solve a problem that doesn't yet
significantly exist - we'd do much better to BAN PEOPLE WITH GIANT
COLOURED FOUR-LINE SIGNATURES, if you ask me - so not a desperately
helpful one, but it really doesn't deserve this much screaming. We
have bigger problems to worry about.

Please, people, cool off a little...

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


from_name: David Gerard

subject:
[Commons-l] 'Did you know?' ... The family tree of
	[[Category:Copyright statuses]] and our broken category system.

body:
On 30/01/07, Florian Straub <Flominator at gmx.net> wrote:

> What about the category intersection tool mentioned above?

Yes. The point being to make "categories" function more like "tags",
for added searchability. (And added Web 2.0 'l33tn3ss.)

Ya know what Commons needs? A dev with access to large image libraries
like Getty, etc. If we want to get the best press in the world, make
an interface so simple even journalists can use it.

- d.


from_name: Matthieu Barba

subject: [Wiktionary-l] RE : Re:  ru.wikt and empty templates

body:
Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> a ?crit : Tomasz Sienicki schreef:
> Apparently people at ru have filled their their Wiktionary with completely empty templates saying "This word or expression has not been translated yet. Please add your translation."
>
> ru.wikt has 105 877 entries, out of which 81 496 are empty templates.
>
> This makes the Russian Wiktionary entirely useless; people complain they have stopped checking it, because they keep seeing empty entries.
>
> I suggest we stop adding interwiki links to ru:.
>
> --tsca
>
Hoi,
It is sad that the craze of creating more entries on a Wiki has made a
wiki useless. I would support the removal of these 81.496 empty pages,
they are not helpful at all.

It is not possible to stop adding interwiki links to ru. The process is
based on checking the existence of an expression that is spelled exactly
the same on other Wiktionaries. There is no reason to believe that the
expression that you are looking at on a Wiktionary means the same on the
other Wiktionary anyway.

I run the interwiki bot as a service. I have not programmed it, I try to
address issues when they arise by asking Andre Engels to have a look at
the code to fix an issue.

Thanks,
    GerardM

_______________________________________________
Wiktionary-l mailing list
Wiktionary-l at lists.wikimedia.org
http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiktionary-l
Hi,
I agree with GerardM : these entries are useless and should be deleted. Stopping interwiki links will not resolve the problem :-/
Darkdadaah

---------------------------------
 D?couvrez une nouvelle fa?on d'obtenir des r?ponses ? toutes vos questions ! Profitez des connaissances, des opinions et des exp?riences des internautes sur Yahoo! Questions/R?ponses.


from_name: Webmaster

body:
Tim,
You are probably talking about some other mirror. No faked User-Agent string
here. If I wanted to hide something, I'd use a proxy. Ebaita.com and
enciclopedia.tiosam.com share the same cache in the same server, with more
than 200 thousand cached pages, as you can see when you google
"site:enciclopedia.tiosam.com". As pages are cached for 30 days from the
date they are requested, you can easily verify that the pages are being
served by us.
Tony

-----Original Message-----
From: wikitech-l-bounces at lists.wikimedia.org
[mailto:wikitech-l-bounces at lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Tim Starling
Sent: Tuesday, January 30, 2007 12:25 AM
To: wikitech-l at lists.wikimedia.org
Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] Our IP was blocked by mistake

Webmaster wrote:
> There is a misunderstanding, our IP was blocked today as a "Remote
Loader".
> We DO NOT load wikipedia's pages live, we only CACHE the pages in our
> server. We send a monthly request to update our cache for requested
> pages, so I don't understand why our IP was blocked.
> As you can check, we are still providing the cached pages FROM OUR SERVER:
> http://www.ebaita.com/enciclopedia.asp
>
> http://www.tiosam.com/enciclopedia/
>
> I also make sure the license and link to wikipedia are in all pages.
>
> Please remove the block so we can update the pages when necessary.

So I suppose when you made 500,000 requests over 3 days with a faked
User-Agent string, for a cumulative server processing time of 14 hours, you
were updating your cache?

-- Tim Starling

_______________________________________________
Wikitech-l mailing list
Wikitech-l at lists.wikimedia.org
http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l


body:
Where can we find them?
Thanks

-----Original Message-----
From: wikitech-l-bounces at lists.wikimedia.org
[mailto:wikitech-l-bounces at lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of David Gerard
Sent: Tuesday, January 30, 2007 9:07 AM
To: Wikimedia developers
Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] Our IP was blocked by mistake

On 30/01/07, Webmaster <webmaster at tiosam.com> wrote:

> You are probably talking about some other mirror. No faked User-Agent
> string here. If I wanted to hide something, I'd use a proxy.
> Ebaita.com and enciclopedia.tiosam.com share the same cache in the
> same server, with more than 200 thousand cached pages, as you can see
> when you google "site:enciclopedia.tiosam.com". As pages are cached
> for 30 days from the date they are requested, you can easily verify
> that the pages are being served by us.

If you're just caching a regular snapshot, what's wrong with the database
dumps which are created specifically to make a regular snapshot available?

- d.

_______________________________________________
Wikitech-l mailing list
Wikitech-l at lists.wikimedia.org
http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l


from_name: Raimond Spekking

subject: [Wikitech-l] Please block live mirror

body:
The site http://www.netis.de/Rhein.phtml is grabbing the images live
from upload.wm.o

Please block it. Thanks.

Raymond.

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 250 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
URL: <http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/attachments/20070130/6778bf23/attachment.pgp>


body:
Sorry, I didn't know that a periodic cache update wasn't acceptable.
Also, we didn't fake the Agent string - but I'm not sure what string the
Microsoft.XMLHTTP object shows when visiting.
I will check the link provided and rewrite the code so everybody is happy :)
Thanks,
Tony

-----Original Message-----
From: wikitech-l-bounces at lists.wikimedia.org
[mailto:wikitech-l-bounces at lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Rob Church
Sent: Tuesday, January 30, 2007 9:20 AM
To: Wikimedia developers
Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] Our IP was blocked by mistake

On 30/01/07, Webmaster <webmaster at tiosam.com> wrote:
> Where can we find them?
> Thanks

http://download.wikimedia.org

In general, we discourage people remote loading content from our sites, in
part because it causes extra load on our servers which hasn't come from one
of our direct users, and in part because a vast number of such sites end up
violating one or more of the terms of the content licence, usually the
attribution side of things.

We provide regular database dumps to make the information freely available
in a manner that is friendlier to our servers, and that is usually easier to
process and import - it's much more convenient for both parties to import
all the revision text at once, rather than crawling for it.

Even a "periodic cache update" is not particularly acceptable, as it implies
a burst of load, such as the one Tim mentioned. We have the logs, we know
what goes on.

Rob Church

_______________________________________________
Wikitech-l mailing list
Wikitech-l at lists.wikimedia.org
http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l


body:
Matt R <matt_crypto at yahoo.co.uk> writes:

> --- Anders Wegge Jakobsen <wegge at wegge.dk> wrote:

>>  Tough for you then. Grow up and learn coping with the globalized
>> world. I'm putting you in [[Category:Idiot]] you have failed to
>> demonstrate the intelligence needed to be called bigot, much less
>> racist. Tough shit.

> I'm sad that you feel abuse is an acceptable method of arguing your
> point. I presume it's because your rational arguments are
> exhausted. In any case, this conversation is over.

 Whatever. Earlier you claimed you could call a strawman at any time
you wanted. I, on the othert hand, can tell the truth any time I want
to.

--
// Wegge
<http://geowiki.wegge.dk/wiki/Forside> - Alt om geocaching
Bruger du den gratis spamfighther ser jeg kun dine indl?g *EN* gang.


from_name: Chris McKenna

subject:
[Commons-l] 'Did you know?' ... The family tree of
 [[Category:Copyright statuses]] and our broken category system.

body:
On Tue, 30 Jan 2007, Florian Straub wrote:
> One idea for a consensus: Categories are no longer allowed to contain whitespaces or underscores :)

That simply wont work - most of the categories I deal with are related to
railways, where many of them need multiple words because they are proper
names - e.g. [[category:First Great Western]], [[category:London
Underground]], [[category:British Rail Class 153]]

--
Chris 'Awkward' McKenna

cmckenna at sucs.org
www.sucs.org/~cmckenna

The essential things in life are seen not with the eyes,
but with the heart

Antoine de Saint Exupery


subject: [Foundation-l] Fair Use (again)

body:
Robert Scott Horning wrote:

>I should note that I got into this whole mess because I was involved
>with a group that was trying to write a Wikibook about M.C. Escher, and
>I tried to point out that they couldn't reproduce the Escher artwork
>unless they somehow were able to obtain a license that could be used
>under the GFDL.  The response was that the images were being used on
>Wikipedia, so why not Wikibooks?  The Escher reproductions are claiming
>fair use, but I think it has gone way too far on Wikipedia, as I believe
>these to be merely a copyright violation.
>
I would observe that there is one significant difference between the two
situations.  It is one thing to use a couple of Escher's art works in
Wikipedia to illustrate a biographical article about him; in my mind
that could reasonably be viewed as fair use.  The wholesale reproduction
of his works in Wikibooks would probably not be.  The difference is in
the application in the substantiality rule of fair use law.

Of course, it doesn't help to know that some of Escher's works MAY be in
the public domain, but it's not up to us to research and make that case
on behalf of the uploader.

Ec


subject: [Foundation-l] Fair Use (again)


body:
Thank you.

-----Original Message-----
From: wikitech-l-bounces at lists.wikimedia.org
[mailto:wikitech-l-bounces at lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Stephen Bain
Sent: Tuesday, January 30, 2007 9:19 AM
To: Wikimedia developers
Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] Our IP was blocked by mistake

On 1/31/07, Webmaster <webmaster at tiosam.com> wrote:
>
> Where can we find them?

http://download.wikimedia.org

Not hard to find. See also http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Data_dumps

--
Stephen Bain
stephen.bain at gmail.com

_______________________________________________
Wikitech-l mailing list
Wikitech-l at lists.wikimedia.org
http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l


from_name: Florian Straub

body:
samuli at samulilintula.net wrote:

> In fact, finding a category is often hardest when the categories aren't
> specific enough. And when it comes to finding an image, for example, for
> an article about art nouveau/jugend windows, [[:Category:Windows]] is just
> useless. We do need categories like [[:Category:Jugend windows in
> Finland]].

What about the category intersection tool mentioned above?

Regards,

Flo
--
Der GMX SmartSurfer hilft bis zu 70% Ihrer Onlinekosten zu sparen!
Ideal f?r Modem und ISDN: http://www.gmx.net/de/go/smartsurfer


subject:
[Commons-l] 'Did you know?' ... The family tree
	of	[[Category:Copyright statuses]] and our broken category system.

body:
 "David Gerard" <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:

> Yes. The point being to make "categories" function more like "tags",
> for added searchability. (And added Web 2.0 'l33tn3ss.)

One idea for a consensus: Categories are no longer allowed to contain whitespaces or underscores :)

Regards,

Flo
--
"Feel free" - 5 GB Mailbox, 50 FreeSMS/Monat ...
Jetzt GMX ProMail testen: http://www.gmx.net/de/go/promail


body:
"Raul Kern" <raunator at gmail.com> wrote:

> 2007/1/30, Florian Straub <Flominator at gmx.net>:
> > What about the category intersection tool mentioned above?

> But what about when there's article about 'Jugend windows in Finland' in
> some wiki, should then the gallery page link to commons made also using
> category intersection tool?

It should link to an article that is located in the categories Jugend, windows and Finland.

Regards,

Flo
--
Der GMX SmartSurfer hilft bis zu 70% Ihrer Onlinekosten zu sparen!
Ideal f?r Modem und ISDN: http://www.gmx.net/de/go/smartsurfer


from_name: Gerard Meijssen

body:
Andrew Gray schreef:
> On 30/01/07, Luiz Augusto <lugusto at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Single User Login is enabled on Wikia... hum... I think that this policy
>> from English Wikipedia is one of the reasons for this don't get enabled so
>> quick on Wikimedia
>>
>
> There is no requirement, of course, that SUL means "have the username
> display the same way everywhere". Even if any given username only has
> one person behind it, it doesn't stop us declaring the "real user" to
> be an arbitrary database code and hanging a dozen visible usernames
> off that... ;-)
>
> [I would utterly love a hack which allowed you to ask for any
> non-Latin username - or perhaps any username - to have an arbitrary
> User-ID appended to the back of it - "foobar" or "foobar (123456)" -
> whenever it showed up in logs. Those who find it useful can flip a
> switch and on it comes; those who don't, well, it'd be off by default)
>
> But looking back over the thread, there is an awful lot of stupidity
> and - not to put too fine a point on it - desire To Make A Fuss being
> demonstrated here. Tthe proposal is not some grand racist conspiracy
> to prevent contributions from non-Anglophones. The proposal is to ask
> them, *when they sign things on discussion pages*, to use a
> transliteration. It's a proposal to solve a problem that doesn't yet
> significantly exist - we'd do much better to BAN PEOPLE WITH GIANT
> COLOURED FOUR-LINE SIGNATURES, if you ask me - so not a desperately
> helpful one, but it really doesn't deserve this much screaming. We
> have bigger problems to worry about.
>
> Please, people, cool off a little...
Hoi,
You have your terminology wrong. Nobody said anything about this being
racist, it is discriminatory. Compulsory transliteration will not work
either because it will not satisfy the uniqueness criterion. The notion
that this problem does not significantly exist is wrong as well. See
what Aphaia wrote about it when this subject was raised last time.

Feel free to ban people with giant four line signatures. Nothing wrong
with that imho.

Thanks,
    GerardM


from_name: Marc Riddell

subject: [WikiEN-l] Freedom of Speech in WP

body:
Hello,

Recently the Mayor of a small town in Texas tried to pass an ordinance
making it against the law to use the ?N? word within the city limits. Fine:
$500 for each offense.

He went into this believing the ordinance?s passage would be a slam dunk ?
it wasn?t. The vast majority of the multiracial citizens of the town
protested to such a degree that he finally gave up and abandoned the idea.
The citizens' basic argument: what word is next?

I bring this up because, when I first came to WP, the one policy I found
most disturbing was the one concerning ?incivility?. Most especially the
practice of banning (punishing) members of the WP community for using words
and phrases considered by whoever made up the policy to be ?offensive?.
This, to me, made WP free in every thing but speech.

I know this issue has been touched upon several times in this Mailing List
just since I started participating in it, but I wanted to speak directly to
the policy and its practice at this time.

If a particular word or phrase offends you hit delete and move on.

What are your thoughts and feelings about this?

Marc Riddell


from_name: Rob

subject: [WikiEN-l] Freedom of Speech in WP

body:
On 1/30/07, Marc Riddell <michaeldavid86 at comcast.net> wrote:

> I bring this up because, when I first came to WP, the one policy I found
> most disturbing was the one concerning ?incivility?. Most especially the
> practice of banning (punishing) members of the WP community for using words
> and phrases considered by whoever made up the policy to be ?offensive?.
> This, to me, made WP free in every thing but speech.
>
> I know this issue has been touched upon several times in this Mailing List
> just since I started participating in it, but I wanted to speak directly to
> the policy and its practice at this time.
>
> If a particular word or phrase offends you hit delete and move on.

While I am a passionate advocate for free speech in the public sphere,
Wikipedia is a private space dedicated to a specific goal.  Allowing
juvenile incivility, namecalling, racial slurs, etc. would be
detrimental to that goal.  It only makes sense to insulate as best we
can productive contributors from moronic nonsense and harassment so
they can continue to be productive contributors.


from_name: Guillaume Paumier

subject:
[Commons-l] Finding the description page of an image on Flickr with
	its static address

body:
Hello,

One problem when checking licenses of images coming from Flickr is some
users provide the static link to the image on Flickr, instead of the
description page showing the license. That makes the verification very
difficult because you have to search Flickr images hoping you'll find the
good tag that will lead you to the good image.

I've contacted the Flickr support team to know if there was a tool or a
special page to help finding the description page from the static link.
Their answer is below and it seems to work. I hope it will help.

Cheers!
Guillaume

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Flickr Support <case202439 at support.flickr.com>
Date: 29 Jan 2007 20:41:51 +0000
Subject: [Flickr Case 202439] Re: Other Issues
To: guillom.pom at gmail.com

Hi there,

Sorry for the delay in getting back to you -- we're
swamped!

You can find the original photo page thusly:

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/153/357298706_b406a56e06.jpg

to:

http://www.flickr.com/photo.gne?id=357298706

Hope this helps!

Cheers,
Ben

--
Guillaume Paumier
[[m:User:guillom]]
http://www.wikimedia.org
-------------- section suivante --------------
Une pi?ce jointe HTML a ?t? nettoy?e...
URL: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/commons-l/attachments/20070130/9cd90024/attachment.htm


subject: [Foundation-l] Sigh, problems with non-Latin usernames again

body:
On 29/01/07, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:

> Do you really believe that people remember who they worked with last
> year on an article? Given the sheer multitude of people only a tiny core
> of people are known. They are the "power users" of a project.

Actually, to a large extent they do. Remember that most articles in
en:wp have been shown (Greg Maxwell ran the numbers in January 2006)
to be largely written by only a few users.

> Come on, so you can call them thingybobs, the right name for this
> attitude is discrimination. People are demanding things; they want to be
> known by their own user ID.

I remember that you were the sole voice against having them
identifiable to other users who did not happen to be able to read that
script.

It is not realistic to require of all editors on the English Wikipedia
to be able to read every script in all of Unicode to be able to work
with others on a project written in a Latin script language.

- d.


from_name: samuli at samulilintula.net

body:
[[:category:Copyright_statuses]]
->[[:category:Free_licenses]]
->[[:category:GNU_licenses]]
->[[:category:GFDL]]
->[[:category:Periodic_table]]
->[[:category:Chemical_elements_by_periodic_table_row]]
->[[:category:Periodic_table_row_1]]
->[[:category:Hydrogen]]
->[[:category:Hydrogen_compounds]]
->[[:category:Water]]
->[[:category:Bodies_of_water]]
->[[:category:Islands]]
->[[:category:Islands_of_Europe]]
->[[:category:Ireland_(island)]]
->[[:category:Ireland]]
->[[:category:Culture_of_Ireland]]
->[[:category:Languages_of_Ireland]]
->[[:category:English_language]]
->[[:category:Literature_of_England]]
->[[:category:Writers_from_England]]
->[[:category:J._K._Rowling]]
->[[:category:Harry_Potter]]
->[[:category:Harry_Potter_Characters]]

> I don't think most people realize it... But our category system is
> terribly broken today.  I have provided just a few example which are
> fairly easy to fix, but everywhere you look in the category system you
> can find problems like this.

> Direct navigation is nice, but it doesn't scale to millions of images.
> For people to be able to find images on commons they will increasingly
> depend on search.

What is the problem? If people look for Harry Potter images characters,
they don's start from [[:category:Free_licenses]]. They go straigh to
[[:category:Harry_Potter]]. 2 levels deep!

Really, our system is far more useful than what Gregory suggests. I know
this because every week I transfer tens of images from fi.wikipedia to
Commons and I will have to find categories for things whose name I don't
know in English (or even in Finnish).

In fact, finding a category is often hardest when the categories aren't
specific enough. And when it comes to finding an image, for example, for
an article about art nouveau/jugend windows, [[:Category:Windows]] is just
useless. We do need categories like [[:Category:Jugend windows in
Finland]].

--
Yst?v?llisin terveisin,
Samuli Lintula


body:
samuli at samulilintula.net wrote:
> >
> >> In fact, finding a category is often hardest when the categories aren't
> >> specific enough. And when it comes to finding an image, for example,
> for
> >> an article about art nouveau/jugend windows, [[:Category:Windows]] is
> >> just
> >> useless. We do need categories like [[:Category:Jugend windows in
> >> Finland]].
> >
> > What about the category intersection tool mentioned above?
>
> Does it exist? Or is it just a theoretical concept?

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

> Yes, it would work fine if all our users were perfect. Let's continue with
> the same example and imagine what Catgory:Finland would become like.
> 10.000 images, maybe? Then we have this dufus (see
> http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Welcome_log) who uploads an
> image with only [[Category:Finland]]. That image will be lost forever. No
> one will ever find it and no one will ever be able to use.

One could create a query or a special page that lists images with few categories. Maybe we could even sort them by age ...

Regards,

Flo
---
User:Flominator
--
Der GMX SmartSurfer hilft bis zu 70% Ihrer Onlinekosten zu sparen!
Ideal f?r Modem und ISDN: http://www.gmx.net/de/go/smartsurfer


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] What is in the "page extracts for Yahoo" file?

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

David Gerard wrote:
> http://download.wikimedia.org/enwiki/20070124/ - "page abstracts for
> Yahoo" - what is this file?

It's page extracts, for Yahoo.

(But you could use them too, I guess. :)

- -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.2.2 (Darwin)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

iD8DBQFFv2aowRnhpk1wk44RAqb6AKDO0RYhiiLEsdL2VmTENAYUXt83nACghSif
YvKvs+2cJq8govjj5arntCs=
=KQU3
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----


subject: [Wikitech-l] LuceneSearch::doTitlePrefixSearch()

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

Kasimir Gabert wrote:
> I have implemented Lucene search in my MW 1.9.1 installation, and
> everything is working fine.  However, I want to have title
> suggestions, and as it appears it exists and was enabled by default,
> but when I try to enable it (after disabling it) I get the error:
>
>
Fatal error: Call to undefined method
> LuceneSearch::doTitlePrefixSearch() in {MY LOCAL
> FOLDER}/w/extensions/lucene/LuceneSearch body.php on line
> 299

>
> in a  tag right beneath my search text box.
>
> I do have sleepycat installed.
>
> I am wondering whether this has been implemented yet, or whether it is
> on somebody's TODO list.

This isn't implemented in the version we currently use and should
probably just be taken out? Otherwise take a peek at the code and fix
it; patch welcomed.

- -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com / brion @ wikimedia.org)
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.2.2 (Darwin)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

iD8DBQFFv2eDwRnhpk1wk44RAkXOAJ4249FyyXjojYQME9w5I17FHDEw+QCeKJGH
KTBgI3ZieFjDr3yaXXwVhUc=
=GXrm
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----


body:
On 30/01/07, Andrew Gray <shimgray at gmail.com> wrote:

> There is no requirement, of course, that SUL means "have the username
> display the same way everywhere". Even if any given username only has
> one person behind it, it doesn't stop us declaring the "real user" to
> be an arbitrary database code and hanging a dozen visible usernames
> off that... ;-)
> [I would utterly love a hack which allowed you to ask for any
> non-Latin username - or perhaps any username - to have an arbitrary
> User-ID appended to the back of it - "foobar" or "foobar (123456)" -
> whenever it showed up in logs. Those who find it useful can flip a
> switch and on it comes; those who don't, well, it'd be off by default)

Remember that in the previous thread, it was CONCLUSIVELY PROVEN that
even giving the option to hang the database UID number off a handle
makes you indistinguishable from a NAZI!

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2006-December/026128.html

- d.


from_name: Steve Summit

subject: [WikiEN-l] Freedom of Speech in WP

body:
Rob wrote:
> On 1/30/07, Marc Riddell <michaeldavid86 at comcast.net> wrote:
>> I bring this up because, when I first came to WP, the one policy I found
>> most disturbing was the one concerning "incivility". Most especially the
>> practice of banning (punishing) members of the WP community for using words
>> and phrases considered by whoever made up the policy to be "offensive".
>>
>> If a particular word or phrase offends you hit delete and move on.
>
> While I am a passionate advocate for free speech in the public sphere,
> Wikipedia is a private space dedicated to a specific goal.

And in fact the right answer here is not even to concede that
Wikipedia isn't free or is censored, but rather, to observe that
offensiveness is largely orthogonal to word usage.  We do care
about offensiveness; we don't generally care about specific words.

I can say the mere words "God damn", "fuck", and "cunt" here
(or on a talk page) with little fear of being censured or banned.
But if I were to say that Rob's mother is a deity-forsaken
substance-abusing prostitute who regularly has carnal knowledge
of sailors, winos, and goats, that's a horribly offensive thing
to say regardless of the words I couch the statement in.

If someone gets banned for being offensive, they're banned for
being offensive, not for using certain words.  (But with that
said, and although I just said the issues are orthogonal, for
many people, and in particular for the people who are regularly
horribly offensive and who do deserve censure, the two are of
course pretty highly correlated.)

Wikipedia's freedom of speech is just about like Usenet's: you
can say (post) anything you can get away with.  (But that doesn't
mean you can get away with anything and everything.  And it's an
imperfect policy, for one thing because different people are able
to get away with different things.  But like it or not, that's
about the way it is right now.)


from_name: Raul Kern

body:
But what about when there's article about 'Jugend windows in Finland' in
some wiki, should then the gallery page link to commons made also using
category intersection tool?

-raul-

2007/1/30, Florian Straub <Flominator at gmx.net>:
>
> samuli at samulilintula.net wrote:
>
> > In fact, finding a category is often hardest when the categories aren't
> > specific enough. And when it comes to finding an image, for example, for
> > an article about art nouveau/jugend windows, [[:Category:Windows]] is
> just
> > useless. We do need categories like [[:Category:Jugend windows in
> > Finland]].
>
> What about the category intersection tool mentioned above?
>
> Regards,
>
> Flo
> --
> Der GMX SmartSurfer hilft bis zu 70% Ihrer Onlinekosten zu sparen!
> Ideal f?r Modem und ISDN: http://www.gmx.net/de/go/smartsurfer
>
> _______________________________________________
> Commons-l mailing list
> Commons-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/commons-l/attachments/20070130/7e6773d9/attachment.htm


from_name: rfrangi at libero.it

subject: [Foundation-l] Fair Use (again)

body:
> That may not be true in 10 or 20 years, but for now, we should embrace
> Fair Use and use it.  Fairly, legally, and stomping on those who would
> attempt to abuse Fair Use in our project, but we should embrace it
> nonetheless.
>
>
> --
> -george william herbert
> george.herbert at gmail.com

I beg you all, please consider that a considerable part of the contributors to Wikimedia projects (and possibly a considerable part of people willing to reuse commercially its contents) cannot embrace fair use, simply because fair use does not exist in their legislation.

And once again, if the point is to stick to the GFDL, fair use contents is not compliant.

If the ponit is "articles look better with... whatever", some go for fair use, some others go for NC images. And even if I don't want neither, I have to say that fair use is something decided by the user (possibly wrongly), NC is something decided by the author (thus safer from the point of view of a legal action).

Roberto (Snowdog)

------------------------------------------------------
Passa a Infostrada. ADSL e Telefono senza limiti e senza canone Telecom
http://click.libero.it/infostrada30gen07


subject: [Foundation-l] Fair Use (again)


body:
> samuli at samulilintula.net wrote:
>
>> In fact, finding a category is often hardest when the categories aren't
>> specific enough. And when it comes to finding an image, for example, for
>> an article about art nouveau/jugend windows, [[:Category:Windows]] is
>> just
>> useless. We do need categories like [[:Category:Jugend windows in
>> Finland]].
>
> What about the category intersection tool mentioned above?

Does it exist? Or is it just a theoretical concept?

Yes, it would work fine if all our users were perfect. Let's continue with
the same example and imagine what Catgory:Finland would become like.
10.000 images, maybe? Then we have this dufus (see
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Welcome_log) who uploads an
image with only [[Category:Finland]]. That image will be lost forever. No
one will ever find it and no one will ever be able to use.

Thanks to what we have now, that wasn't the fate of these images:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Contributions&offset=20070114175434&limit=60&target=Samulili

--
Yst?v?llisin terveisin,
Samuli Lintula


from_name: Bryan Tong Minh

subject:
[Commons-l] Finding the description page of an image on Flickr
	with its static address

body:
Take for example
http://farm1.static.flickr.com/145/370027865_d72262821b_s.jpg. The
first digits of the filename is the so called photo_id: 370027865. The
goto [http://www.flickr.com/services/api/explore/?method=flickr.photos.getInfo]
and enter the photo_id there. You will then find at the tail of the
xml that is being output: <url
type="photopage">http://www.flickr.com/photos/bryan-tongminh/370027865/</url>.
And that is where the picture is located :)

Bryan

On 1/30/07, Guillaume Paumier <guillom.pom at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> One problem when checking licenses of images coming from Flickr is some
> users provide the static link to the image on Flickr, instead of the
> description page showing the license. That makes the verification very
> difficult because you have to search Flickr images hoping you'll find the
> good tag that will lead you to the good image.
>
> I've contacted the Flickr support team to know if there was a tool or a
> special page to help finding the description page from the static link.
> Their answer is below and it seems to work. I hope it will help.
>
> Cheers!
> Guillaume
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Flickr Support <case202439 at support.flickr.com >
> Date: 29 Jan 2007 20:41:51 +0000
> Subject: [Flickr Case 202439] Re: Other Issues
> To: guillom.pom at gmail.com
>
> Hi there,
>
> Sorry for the delay in getting back to you -- we're
> swamped!
>
> You can find the original photo page thusly:
>
> http://farm1.static.flickr.com/153/357298706_b406a56e06.jpg
>
> to:
>
>  http://www.flickr.com/photo.gne?id=357298706
>
> Hope this helps!
>
> Cheers,
> Ben
>
> --
> Guillaume Paumier
> [[m:User:guillom]]
>  http://www.wikimedia.org
> _______________________________________________
> Commons-l mailing list
> Commons-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l
>
>
>


from_name: Ivan Krstić

subject: [Wikitech-l] Our IP was blocked by mistake

body:
Tim Starling wrote:
> No faked user agent string? So I suppose you were using "save as" in IE?
> Mozilla/4.0%20(compatible;%20MSIE%207.0;%20Windows%20NT%205.2;%20.NET%20CLR%201.1.4322;%20.NET%20CLR%202.0.50727)

No, he was using the Microsoft.XMLHTTP object from ASP, as he indicated
in a previous message. Said object identifies itself as MSIE and gives
the .NET CLR version in the User-Agent.

--
Ivan Krsti? <krstic at solarsail.hcs.harvard.edu> | GPG: 0x147C722D


from_name: David Gerard

body:
On 30/01/07, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:

> What you call unrealistic is basically something that is something that
> people do not do anyway. People on the English Wikipedia can read my
> name easily enough, they cannot pronounce it properly, they do not know
> if there is a meaning to my name. The only thing they need to do is
> register that the characters in my name exist. That is all that is required.

Yes, but that's easy for users of Latin characters because your name
is written in Latin characters. That's not an example of the problem.

- d.


from_name: Marco Chiesa

subject: [Foundation-l] Fair Use (again)

body:
rfrangi a libero.it wrote:

>I beg you all, please consider that a considerable part of the contributors to Wikimedia projects (and possibly a considerable part of people willing to reuse commercially its contents) cannot embrace fair use, simply because fair use does not exist in their legislation.
>
>And once again, if the point is to stick to the GFDL, fair use contents is not compliant.
>
>If the ponit is "articles look better with... whatever", some go for fair use, some others go for NC images. And even if I don't want neither, I have to say that fair use is something decided by the user (possibly wrongly), NC is something decided by the author (thus safer from the point of view of a legal action).
>
>Roberto (Snowdog)
>
>
Just to make an example of how fair use is not allowed in Italy, a
couple of weeks ago an Italian amateur website about contemporary art
was sued and forced to pay about 5.000 ? because it displayed a few
photographs of work of arts. The website is non-profit and was using the
images to illustrate what it was talking about, pretty much in the same
way that Wikipedia uses fair use images. I guess this would easily
qualify as fair use in the US, but this is not the case in Italy. The
article (in Italian, I don't know if English-language press had talked
about it) is at http://punto-informatico.it/p.aspx?id=1858783&r=PI

Marco (Cruccone)


subject: [Foundation-l] Fair Use (again)

body:
rfrangi at libero.it wrote:

>I beg you all, please consider that a considerable part of the contributors to Wikimedia projects (and possibly a considerable part of people willing to reuse commercially its contents) cannot embrace fair use, simply because fair use does not exist in their legislation.
>
>And once again, if the point is to stick to the GFDL, fair use contents is not compliant.
>
>If the ponit is "articles look better with... whatever", some go for fair use, some others go for NC images. And even if I don't want neither, I have to say that fair use is something decided by the user (possibly wrongly), NC is something decided by the author (thus safer from the point of view of a legal action).
>
>Roberto (Snowdog)
>
>
Just to make an example of how fair use is not allowed in Italy, a
couple of weeks ago an Italian amateur website about contemporary art
was sued and forced to pay about 5.000 ? because it displayed a few
photographs of work of arts. The website is non-profit and was using the
images to illustrate what it was talking about, pretty much in the same
way that Wikipedia uses fair use images. I guess this would easily
qualify as fair use in the US, but this is not the case in Italy. The
article (in Italian, I don't know if English-language press had talked
about it) is at http://punto-informatico.it/p.aspx?id=1858783&r=PI

Marco (Cruccone)


body:
On 30/01/07, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
> David Gerard schreef:

> > Remember that in the previous thread, it was CONCLUSIVELY PROVEN that
> > even giving the option to hang the database UID number off a handle
> > makes you indistinguishable from a NAZI!
> > http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2006-December/026128.html

> Hoi,
> So you lost this argument by referring to Nazis for the first time.

Of course! I should just have said "In the Netherlands in the second
world war" as you did, and thus just *imply* it.

- d.


body:
>> Yes, it would work fine if all our users were perfect. Let's continue
>> with
>> the same example and imagine what Catgory:Finland would become like.
>> 10.000 images, maybe? Then we have this dufus (see
>> http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Welcome_log) who uploads an
>> image with only [[Category:Finland]]. That image will be lost forever.
>> No
>> one will ever find it and no one will ever be able to use.
>
> One could create a query or a special page that lists images with few
> categories. Maybe we could even sort them by age ...

We could. The problem is that it would make a common user more dependent
on the work that admins do. And admins don't need any more jobs - we can't
handle what we have now. But that is not my main concern. Maybe,
eventually, we will cope better with the workload.

My main concern is now, if we have a problem that needs fixing? Or if we
are inventing one because we have a technical way of solving it? (With an
external tool whose interface was so difficult it took me ten minutes to
figure it out.)

--
Yst?v?llisin terveisin,
Samuli Lintula