subject: [Wikipedia-l] Using database queries

body:
Tim Marklew wrote:
> LDC - could you comment on how potentially dangerous this function is in
> terms of slowing down the site for others?  If a query results in a big
> table, this can slow down the server.  Is there an upper limit for how
> long a query can take, or the size of a table, before it would time
> out?  If so, how big is the limit?

Umm, not that I know of. I believe there's a timeout on PHP scripts, but
I'm not sure if that affects long queries on the database, which run in
a separate process.

On that note; currently the MySQL server is running at 99.5% CPU.
Whatever it's doing, it's slowing the wiki to a trickle; I can't even
get a connection through.

I note in the web server logs a POST request to the SQL-query page at
about 7:26 pm (server time, which is slight slow from PDT); from that
point on most web requests are logged with a size of "-", which means
that something croaked and no bytes were sent.

The IP address on this query looks suspiciously like yours, Tim! Exactly
what query did you run?

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


list: wikipedia-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Fwd: Re: Wikipedia.org request use of your modified 1913 dictionary definitions

body:
Yikes! I sent a request for permission to use the modified 1913 Webster
dictionary definitions yesturday and today I got the below response. I'll
probably need help answering some of these.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

----------  Forwarded Message  ----------

Subject: Re: Wikipedia.org request use of your modified 1913 dictionary
definitions
Date: Tue, 27 Aug 2002 08:43:20 -0400
From: Patrick Cassidy <cassidy at micra.com>
To: Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com>

Mr. Mayer,
    Thanks for your inquiry about the modified Webster (copied below).
    To answer the main question, the GCIDE files available on the
GNU server are freely usable under the GNU GPL.  Since it appears that
you plan to freely distribute any materials taken from the GCIDE,
I can't think of any reason why there should be any limit on your
use of the contents of the GCIDE, or any part of it.  The GNU
site version lags my latest master version typically by several months
to a year, though the differences are mainly in a few typos being
corrected here and there.  I am making some slight changes in
format, and there should be another version available in a
month or two.  If you would like, I can make it available to you
before it gets eventually to the GNU site.
     From what I have seen thus far, it seems that there should
likewise be no impediment to my copying and including any
relevant articles from Wikipedia into future versions of the
GCIDE (with references, of course) -- is this correct?
The hypertext format of the Wiki differs from the present format of
the GCIDE, and I would expect only some articles, or quotations
from them, to be included in GCIDE.  In most cases it would be
better to just have a reference to one of your pages, where
appropriate.  I only include parts of materials already on the
web where the relevant passages form only a small part of an
article, or I am afraid that the site will disappear soon.
     This is the first I have become aware of the Wikipedia or of
Nupedia, and it does appear that the purpose of the Webster
and of these projects are similar though the Webster does concentrate
on having definitions of words and phrases, in order to provide at
least a little information on every topic.
    I will try to look further at Wiki and Nupedia to gain a better
acquaintance.  If it appears that there are adequate quality controls,
I may suggest to anyone willing to submit articles to GCIDE that they
also submit them to the Wiki and/or Nupedia projects.  I am very
occupied right now with a different project, so this may take a while.
    I am also curious as to whether you have explored the possibility
of submitting any of your articles to the Open Mind project at MIT?
The GCIDE, Nupedia, Wikipedia and Open Mind all have the problem
of getting volunteers to contribute serious effort.  It would be
good if there were a mechanism to be sure that any such contributed
effort would be available to all [projects to use, perhaps in
slightly different ways.
    I am also curious to know how the Wiki project is supported, if
at all. I have been working on the Webster as a personal effort,
and it has no financial support from external sources.  Is
this also true of Wikipedia and Nupedia?

    I'm glad to see at last that there are others trying to get useful
information organized into a free downloadable encyclopedia-format
collection on the Web.   Congratulations on your progress so far.
I am impressed that you have already obtained 40,000 articles --
are these all recently written by volunteers?
    I do hope that we can keep in touch and share any resources, so as
to avoid any unnecessary duplication of effort.  Thus far I have been
concentrating on using older (pre-1923) public domain materials, to
permit the widest possible use and redistribution.  For technical
materials, however, there is no substitute for an up-to-date article
from an expert.

     Best regards,
     Pat

==================

Daniel Mayer wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I am one of the administrators of the free online encyclopedia Wikipedia
> and would like to know if it would be permissable for us to use your online
> dictionary database as one of our sources for article definitions (this
> would be done one article at a time where needed). Succinctly defining a
> term is oftentimes the most difficult thing to do when generating
> encyclopedia articles from scratch and it is our goal to first define each
> article before going into detail (creating a hybrid dictionary/encyclopedia
> -- although we do not encourage covering topics that can only be dictionary
> entries).
>
> All of our contributors and administrators freely donate their spare time
> in creating encyclopedia articles and these works are licensed under the
> GNU Free Documentation License (GNU FDL) which encourages collaboration and
> the sharing of ideas by ensuring content generated under this license is
> made forever free for other people to do the same. A copy of GNU FDL
> license can be accessed at http://www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl.html#TOC2 and a
> copy of Wikipedia's copyright policy is at
> http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/wikipedia:copyrights
>
> We already have nearly 40,000 articles and I think both Wikipedia and MICRA
> aim to create something similar given your own stated goals to provide a
> "starting point for development of a modern on-line comprehensive
> encyclopedic dictionary, by the efforts of all individuals willing to help
> build a large and freely available knowledge base."
>
> We could make it a Wikipedia policy, enforced by our administrators, to
> credit MICRA and the place where your version of the dictionary resides,
> dict.org, for any content our contributors take from the 1913 dictionary
> you provide.
>
> Daniel Mayer

--
=============================================
Patrick Cassidy

MICRA, Inc.                      || (908) 561-3416
735 Belvidere Ave.               || (908) 668-5252 (if no answer)
Plainfield, NJ 07062-2054        || (908) 668-5904 (fax)

internet:   cassidy at micra.com
=============================================

-------------------------------------------------------


from_name: The Cunctator

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Deletion of /pages/ with No Content

body:
"Daniel Mayer" <maveric149 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> On Monday 26 August 2002 12:20 pm, The Cunctator wrote:
> > And the doubt here shouldn't be an individual's doubt, but on
> > the doubt of everyone. And in the case of stubs, there will always be
> > doubt, because the determination of "useless" is not objective.
>
> Sorry but I must wholeheartedly disagree. A page that is blank or whose
only
> content is "Put your text for the new page here. alkjfl;asdkj;lkj" "or
"this
> is gay" IS objectively useless (worse than useless since it shows up as an
> active link). This is also true for pages whose only content is the title
of
> the page and arguably for pages whose only content is an external link.

Note that I wrote "in the case of stubs", not "in the case of pages that are
blank
or whose only content is 'Put your text for the new page here.
alkjfl;asdkj;lk'".

And "arguably" is a signifier of a subjective determination.

And utility is still a subjective determination. Even in the extreme case,
one could
imagine a person for whom the "this is gay" page is useful; say, someone who
wanted
proof of anti-homosexual sentiment on the Web, could devise a metric based
on the
 number of times "this is gay" appears on the Web, or even just on Wikipedia
in
general. There is interesting sociological data to be mined in the random
scribblings of
anonymous users of Wikipedia.

That said, I know that when you say "useless" you mean "not helping the
stated
purpose of the Wikipedia project". I'm not trying to be obtuse. I'm just
making a
careful distinction between stubs, which are of limited value but do fit
within the
rubric of Wikipedia, and random nonsense. They should not be conflated.


from_name: Andre Engels

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re:  Re: note to the militia

in_reply_to:
<3D6A6C32.6090301@telus.net> from Ray Saintonge at "Aug 26, 2002
 10:58:10 am"

body:
> Can there be a "Wikepedia reserve army" list where anybody that hasn't
> been seen in 90 days is listed.  To get back on the main list, one
> simple log-in would do the trick.  I would not object to seeing a lot of
> "accidental" registrations cancelled completely; many of these people
> have probably even forgotten that Wikipedia exists.  They can always
> re-register if they want.

There might also be cases of people who come to Wikipedia, register, forget
about it, then return a few months later, and completely forgot their
password, maybe even their registration name, and re-register under another
name.

Andre Engels


from_name: Brion VIBBER

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Using database queries

body:
I wrote:
> On that note; currently the MySQL server is running at 99.5% CPU.
> Whatever it's doing, it's slowing the wiki to a trickle; I can't even
> get a connection through.

...and we're back online, after an outage of about 2 and a half hours.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Tom Parmenter

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Slashcode

body:
|From: "Michael R. Irwin" <mri_icboise at surfbest.net>
|Date: Mon, 26 Aug 2002 18:38:19 -0700
|
|
|
|Jens Frank wrote:
|> On Mon, Aug 26, 2002 at 01:27:56AM -0700, Daniel Mayer wrote:
|> > On Monday 26 August 2002 12:20 pm, The Cunctator wrote:
|> stick to one consistent user interface for everything.
|
|Perhaps we should attempt to use meta to consolidate lengthy or
|persistent threads or topics.
|
|We may need to learn some standard patterns for laying
|controversial topics in ways that present the top level
|consensus overviews and mainstream information while
|preserving the radical fringes ability to evolve their
|views anyway.
|
|regards,
|Mike Irwin

I wrote up a brief and sensible outline for presenting controversial
topics a few weeks back, to precisely no reaction.

http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk%3AList_of_controversial_issues

It probably wouldn't help with Helga, but even there . . . maybe and
it would certainly work with more organized opponents.

Tom Parmenter
Ortolan88


from_name: lcrocker at nupedia.com

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Using database queries

body:
>> On that note; currently the MySQL server is running at 99.5% CPU.
>> Whatever it's doing, it's slowing the wiki to a trickle; I can't even
>> get a connection through.
>
>...and we're back online, after an outage of about 2 and a half hours.

I just noticed the outage, so I killed and restarted MySQL.  I guess
I picked a bad time to tell people to start ad-hoc queries.


from_name: Jens Frank

subject: [Wikipedia-l] German anti-free speech law and Helga

body:
On Mon, Aug 26, 2002 at 09:41:25AM -0700, lcrocker at nupedia.com wrote:
> > The law considers denying of the holocaust as an insultation
> > of the dead. Insulting someone is not protected by the right
> > of free speech, AFAIK that's the same in the US.
>
> No, it's not.  Insults are speech too, and often hig art.
> We protect them too, and rightly so.  As our supreme court
> said said, "If freedom means anything at all, it means
> freedom for the thought we hate."
>

So I might say "You are an asshole" and you couldn't sue
me for it in the US? Than our legal system has quite other
priorities than yours. The German constitution begins
with the words:

	Die Wuerde des Menschen ist unantastbar.

Meaning something like:

	The dignity of man is inviolable.

( from http://library.byu.edu/~rdh/eurodocs/germ/ggeng.html )

Freedom of Speech has to subordinate to this
principle. It's guaranteed in article 5 of the
Basic Law. N.B. 5(2):

(2) These rights are limited by the provisions of the general
    laws, the provisions of law for the protection of youth and
    by the right to inviolability of personal honor.

There was a very interesting process
some years ago between a soldier and a pacifist
who has said "Soldiers are murderers". The
decision of the court was: If you say it as a
general statement targeting more to "war" than
to a specific man, it's protected by the right
of free speech. If you say it to the face of
an soldier, meaning him personally, than it's
an insultation and violating the soldiers
dignity. The pacifist won the case since it
was a sticker on his car and therefor not
intended to a specific soldier.

(I think we're becomming off topic, but it's
an interesting difference between the US and
Germany I wasn't aware of)

Best regards,

JeLuF


from_name: Anthere

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Articles with No Content - printable version

body:
--- Stephen Gilbert <canuck_in_korea2002 at yahoo.com>
wrote:
>
> --- "Michael R. Irwin" <mri_icboise at surfbest.net>
> wrote:
>
> > It seems like silly makework to me.
> >
> > The article will be recreated again anytime anyone
> > clicks on one of the links leading to it.
> >
> > If it is a good title then it is an invitation
> > for anyone who encounters it to add to it.
>
> Here's the situation. Pretend Wikipedia had not
> article on, say, the Protestant Reformation. Someone
> follows a link to the empty article, edits the page
> and types "sadlhfhg". Now, when someone is reading
> another article with a link to the Protestant
> Reformation, it looks like we have an article. If
> they
> don't visit the page, they won't know that there's
> actually no article. If, however, the Protestant
> Reformation page was deleted, people will see empty
> links and think, "Hmmm... we should really have
> something on that topic."

Do any of you sometimes use the special print feature
(printable version)? I do from time to time print some
articles I want to keep, and read carefully, and
confront to other articles.

When one does print an article, all the links in the
text are indicated filled (they all seem to lead to an
existing article, as they are colored and underlined).

Though I understand looking at an article with ? at
the end of words would look pretty weird on paper, I
find that confusing.

I know we are in electronic times, but jee, my office
is still crowded with papers, for I used prints quite
a lot (to avoid losing information, for my poor eyes
sake, for online connexion availability, slow
understanding, for easier working out, annotation). It
doesnot kill interconnectivity process, and I believe
an encyclopedia article is something that must be
printable somehow.

However, I think it a poor idea to show all the links
as if they were filled. First, because it is somehow
"cheating" to pretend that information is available,
and of course, for all the reasons many of you give
against very short stubs (in particular, the fact you
don't feel the urge to get up in the middle of the
night to add something yourself).

Empty links and filled links should appear differently
on prints.

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Finance - Get real-time stock quotes
http://finance.yahoo.com


from_name: Tim Marklew

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Tracking articles by anonymous contributors

body:
>All I need is the ability to track "all articles written by a single
> >IP"....
For those not already aware, we can already do that.  You'll need to type
(or copy) a URL like this directly into the address line in your browser:

http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Contributions&target=66.47.62.78

The IP used there (66.47.62.78) is for Helga Jonat; you can substitute any
other as required. This is very useful for tracking anonymous vandals, so
I'm keen that everyone should know about it.

Tim (Enchanter)

_________________________________________________________________
Join the world?s largest e-mail service with MSN Hotmail.
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subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Slashcode

body:
On Mon, Aug 26, 2002 at 01:27:56AM -0700, Daniel Mayer wrote:
> On Monday 26 August 2002 12:20 pm, The Cunctator wrote:
> > Instead of a wikipedia slash, what we need to implement is something more
> > like the Yahoo! Groups, where the mailing list has a straightforward
> > bulletin board interface, which should be hooked into the Wikipedia user
> > database.Then we'd start getting somewhere.
>
> With so many posts to this list I think either your idea or mine would be
> better than the current situation. Each should be reviewed for their pros and
> cons (a big pro for Slashcode is that it is GPL and almost ready to go out of
> the box -- or so I've heard).

I oppose moving to a web based application. Those are so limited compared
to a good mail reader with thread support, a kill file for "uninteresting"
threads and an easy way to discover new articles. (No, Netscape Communicator
does not qualify as a good mail user agent). All web based bulletin boards
I've seen up to now can't provide the convenience of a good mail reader.

If I'm overruled and we are going to do it web based, than we should
probably integrate it tightly into the wiki markup, making it possible to
link to articles and to use bold and italic and the other things we are used
to. But we should have a separate "Recent Changes" from the main one!

We already learned from using sourceforge's bug tracking tool that we should
stick to one consistent user interface for everything.

Regards,

JeLuF


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Using database queries

body:
LDC wrote:
>I'd like to point out that every sysop here (and that's over
>15% of active users, as someone pointed out) can make SELECT
>queries to the database, which is all that's necessary for
>getting any kind of information you need.  I'd like to
>encourage more users to learn how to do this, and encourage
>those who already do know how to help them.
This feature is useful - I've been using it to produce pages like
[[Wikipedia:Defective redirects]] and [[Wikipedia:Disambiguation pages with
links]] that show up faulty links, as well as some of the stats I've been
posting.

LDC - could you comment on how potentially dangerous this function is in
terms of slowing down the site for others?  If a query results in a big
table, this can slow down the server.  Is there an upper limit for how long
a query can take, or the size of a table, before it would time out?  If so,
how big is the limit?

In the meantime, here are some ideas for database queries that I have found
useful.  Sysops can use by pasting them directly into the query box.  When
they seem to be taking a significant amount of time to run, use them
sparingly to avoid slowing things down too much for other users.  If you
don't understand how they work, feel free to use them, but I would suggest
using them 'as is' without changing them to avoid accidently slowing things
down seriously.

Here's a couple of queries to find the 20 most newly created users - useful
to find people to give welcome messages.  Kajakit recently requested
something like this.  It only counts users that have made edits (most users
who create a login never make a single contribution and are just passing by,
so it's not really worth welcoming them).

SELECT user_name, COUNT(*) FROM user, cur WHERE user_name=cur_user_text
GROUP BY user_id ORDER BY user_id DESC LIMIT 20

The above query gives the user names of the 20 most recently created users
and the number of edits they have made.  The query is not perfect - only
edits that have not been 'overwritten' by other edits are counted here.  To
do the same thing looking only at 'overwritten' edits use:

SELECT user_name, COUNT(*) FROM user, old WHERE user_name=old_user_text
GROUP BY user_id ORDER BY user_id DESC LIMIT 20

And here's the query that I used to create the page
[[Wikipedia:Disambiguation pages with links]]:

SELECT cur1.cur_title, COUNT(*) as co FROM cur cur1, links links1, links
links2 WHERE links2.L_from<>"Wikipedia:Links_to_disambiguating_pages" AND
links2.l_to = cur1.cur_id AND
links1.l_from="Wikipedia:Links_to_disambiguating_pages" AND links1.l_to =
cur1.cur_id GROUP BY cur1.cur_title ORDER BY co DESC LIMIT 100

Someone also asked about how the page [[Wikipedia:Defective redirects]] was
produced - the method of producing that page was a bit complicated so I
won't give it here.  I will however be reproducing that page every now and
then to help identify and fix redirects-to-redirects.

I hope this is useful.  Let me know if anyone has any more requests for
information like this that may be obtained from the database.

Tim (Enchanter)

_________________________________________________________________
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subject: [Wikipedia-l] A general note about info pages

in_reply_to:
<200208261941.g7QJfda10292@ross.bomis.com> from "lcrocker@nupedia.com"
 at "Aug 26, 2002 12:41:39 pm"

body:
> I'd like to point out that every sysop here (and that's over
> 15% of active users, as someone pointed out) can make SELECT
> queries to the database, which is all that's necessary for
> getting any kind of information you need.  I'd like to
> encourage more users to learn how to do this, and encourage
> those who already do know how to help them.

I don't need encouragement to learn this - what I need is to know
the place where I can learn it!

Andre Engels


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Most wanted stubs

body:
Stephen G wrote:
>Also, having existing but empty articles breaks the
>functionality of pages like "Most Wanted".
Yes. We can get around that, though.  I've just created a page at
[[Wikipedia:Most wanted stubs]] that lists very short pages that have a lot
of links to them.  We can work through the articles on that page to identify
the really short stubs and empty articles that need fixing.  The page will
need to be regenerated every now and then using a database query, but that
won't be too much effort.

Tim (Enchanter)

_________________________________________________________________
Send and receive Hotmail on your mobile device: http://mobile.msn.com


from_name: Michael R. Irwin

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Slashcode

body:
Tom Parmenter wrote:
>

> I wrote up a brief and sensible outline for presenting controversial
> topics a few weeks back, to precisely no reaction.
>
> http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk%3AList_of_controversial_issues
>
> It probably wouldn't help with Helga, but even there . . . maybe and
> it would certainly work with more organized opponents.

This looks like a pretty good starting point to me.  I
once proposed something similar at Meta which was eventually
endorsed by "24" but otherwise ignored.   Probably because
you were frequenting the alternate forum above while I had
been diverted to Meta.

Essentially, I think we are still a small enough community
that informal methods of discussing controversy are perceived
as adequate.  People who cannot handle informal give and
take techniques well are eventually classified as isolated
cranks and run off.  Many others may leave before it reaches
this level of conflict, many people avoid conflict if possible.

When we get larger such that a controversy around a larger
topic such as abortion, the Middle East, Invasion of Iraq,
etc. will suddenly attracts hundreds of participants (say 10%
of whom are inflammatory and reinforcing each others views
and behavior) in multiple factions then better methods may
be needed.  Alternatively we may fork or experience loss
of extreme factions instead of isolated individuals.  This
will help us return to a "community" size where the current
methods have stabized participation levels.

I think your approach could be an excellent foundation to
from which to start improving formal methods suitable for
larger participation levels.

I think it needs to be pre-established and perceived as
routine in developing multi-faceted content.  That way it
will not be threatening when implemented and people will
not get defensive instead of participating.

Perhaps, we could identify a potentially controversial
subject where our content is currently thin, and prototype
the method by developing the material.

regards,
Mike Irwin


from_name: Fred Bauder

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Movie naming convention: proposed tweak for
  simplicity

body:
At 10:53 AM 8/26/02 -0700, you wrote:
>As it is, our movie naming convention (which has been around since before
>January) reads:
>
>"Oftentimes movies share the same name as other movies, books or terms. When
>disambiguating a movie from something else use (movie) in the title when
only
>one movie had that name and (YEAR movie) in the title when there are more
>than one movies by that name (example: Titanic (1997 movie))."
>
>One user has for some time now been creating many movie titles in the form
>[[{movie name} (YEAR)]] (example [[Scareface (1932)]]. However I moved that
>page to the convention compliant [[Scareface (1932 movie)]]. After the
move I
>compared the two and quickly realized that the word "movie" is not at all
>needed for disambiguation because "Scareface" is already disambiguated by
>year (there wasn't anything else released that year named "Scareface" that I
>know of). What's more is the fact that Scareface (1932) actually has a
chance
>of being linked simply as [[Scareface (1932)]] instead of [[Scareface
>(1932)|Scareface]] (not that it matters too much with Lee's neat pipe
trick).
>
>So this is my proposed new wording of the convention (and I will assume
>acceptance of this as is if there are no objections):
>
>"Oftentimes movies share the same name as other movies, books or terms. When
>disambiguating a movie from something else use (movie) in the title when
only
>one movie had that name and (YEAR) in the title when there are more than one
>movies by that name (example: [[Titanic (1997)]])."
>
>We could add in the detailed movie convention page that if and when there
>/is/ more than one thing with the same name that is released in the same
>year, then the format of [[{name of movie} (YEAR movie)]] can be used.

Seems ok, although usually a new edition of the book is released at the
same time as the movie. Also sometimes you have to dig a bit to find the
year of release while you already know it's a movie. I would allow both
coventions. And also articles which under one title address both a book and
a movie based on it. Sometimes the book and the movie differ widely in
significance.

Fred


body:
Printed copies aside, how about showing several different types of links:

To articles not addressed at all yet

To stubs (including those where only the title remains) of 100 words or less

To articles of 100 to 1000 words

To articles of 1000 words or more

Could be color-coded maybe, but that would not be lynx compliant.

Maybe a note on the main page, perhaps every page, or perhaps on stub
pages, should explain that we have only just begun to address many topics
and that there are withing Wikipedia many short articles that need
development and how a new reader can freely jump in and help.

Fred

At 10:58 PM 8/26/02 -0700, you wrote:
>
>However, I think it a poor idea to show all the links
>as if they were filled. First, because it is somehow
>"cheating" to pretend that information is available,
>and of course, for all the reasons many of you give
>against very short stubs (in particular, the fact you
>don't feel the urge to get up in the middle of the
>night to add something yourself).
>
>Empty links and filled links should appear differently
>on prints.
>


body:
On Tuesday 27 August 2002 02:02 pm, you wrote:
> Would there be any objection to making the IP addresses as listed in
> Recentchanges and History be direct links to the contributions list?
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

No objection from me (this will help track vandals). Although I would like to
hear what others say first.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Restoring pre-January edit histories

body:
On Tuesday 27 August 2002 06:21 pm, you wrote:
> Brion wrote:
> >?Is there still interest in restoring those old versions?
>
> YES! Restoring the history of contributors is required by the license
> anyway.
>
> Axel

If actually amending the old histories to the current histories doesn't work
or becomes a major bear, then perhaps a link to the older history from within
the current history page would suffice?

If such a link can be made, it would also be nice to have this work for
redirects as well (that is, from the history of the target page there would
be a link to the redirect's history). That way if an article was previously
moved manually then there still would would be obvious links to that old
history at the newer page title's history.

I alone manually moved several hundred (at least) articles in February and
March from improperly capitalized and pluralized page titles to convention
complaint ones.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Database queries + an apology

body:
On Tuesday 27 August 2002 06:21 pm, you wrote:
> Again, sorry to everyone for any hassle caused.
>
> Tim (Enchanter)

You didn't cause me any hassle -- I was actually able to get some
non-Wikipedia work done for a change. If it were solely up to me and if I
were the only contributor, then I wouldn't mind more Wikipedia holidays -- so
long as everthing was fast all other times.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


subject: [Wikipedia-l] On the uselessness of stubs

body:
On Tuesday 27 August 2002 06:21 pm,  tarquin wrote:
> In the same way, Wikipedia is not a ready-made, printed, paper
> encyclopedia. It's a *working* encyclopedia.
> Stubs are part of that on-going work

Exactly -- we need to make this point more clear wherever appropriate. We
need to say something to the effect that: Wikipedia is betaware (at best) so
don't trust anything here and everything is still under fairly heavy
development. Sometime after we reach our stated goal of 100,000 /complete/
articles we will set up some type of validation system whereby articles are
either voted-for for accuracy or where qualified experts review the content.

We are probably several years away from our stated goal of 100,000 /complete/
articles (However, I wouldn't be surprised if we hit 100,000 articles under
our current liberal definition by the end of next year though -- maybe even
by the end of next summer).

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


from_name: Julie Hofmann Kemp

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Cool things Helga could find if she weren't wasting our time

body:
Like this!

http://events.calendarlive.com/top/1,1419,L-LATimes-Home-X!ArticleDetail
-68782,00.html

It's actually pretty neat -- if I were near the Getty (she says, having
lived 50 miles from it for years and never having made the trip), I'd go
see this!

Jules
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from_name: wojtek pobratyn

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Helga Jonat on [[Berlin]]

body:
> Julie Hofmann Kemp wrote
>
> > Taken to an extreme, Helga's arguments could be used to prove that
> > Iberia belongs to the Irish (choose a group of Celts) -- although
> > she'd probably stop at the Visigoths, since they're Germans.
> >
> Now there's an idea!!  I believe that the Galicians were originaly a
> Celtic people.  But there are also Galicians in Poland, so maybe Iberia
> should be Polish. ... That or Ireland should be Polish.  :-D
> Eclecticology

Forget it. We want Hawaii!
(for the weather of course:-)
WojPob

--
GMX - Die Kommunikationsplattform im Internet.
http://www.gmx.net


from_name: Steve Callaway

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Helga Jonat on [[Berlin]]

body:
I'll settle for home rule for [[Cornwall]]. Start small, think big.

Steve Callaway

----- Original Message -----
From: "wojtek pobratyn" <wojtek.pobratyn at gmx.net>
To: <wikipedia-l at nupedia.com>
Sent: Tuesday, August 27, 2002 7:14 AM
Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Helga Jonat on [[Berlin]]

> > Julie Hofmann Kemp wrote
> >
> > > Taken to an extreme, Helga's arguments could be used to prove that
> > > Iberia belongs to the Irish (choose a group of Celts) -- although
> > > she'd probably stop at the Visigoths, since they're Germans.
> > >
> > Now there's an idea!!  I believe that the Galicians were originaly a
> > Celtic people.  But there are also Galicians in Poland, so maybe Iberia
> > should be Polish. ... That or Ireland should be Polish.  :-D
> > Eclecticology
>
> Forget it. We want Hawaii!
> (for the weather of course:-)
> WojPob
>
> --
> GMX - Die Kommunikationsplattform im Internet.
> http://www.gmx.net
>
> [Wikipedia-l]
> To manage your subscription to this list, please go here:
> http://www.nupedia.com/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


from_name: Ray Saintonge

body:
The Cunctator wrote:

>
>
>And utility is still a subjective determination. Even in the extreme case,
>one could
>imagine a person for whom the "this is gay" page is useful; say, someone who
>wanted
>proof of anti-homosexual sentiment on the Web, could devise a metric based
>on the
> number of times "this is gay" appears on the Web, or even just on Wikipedia
>in
>general. There is interesting sociological data to be mined in the random
>scribblings of
>anonymous users of Wikipedia.
>
This is stretching things a bit.  "This is gay" written alone on these
pages rarely has anything to do with homosexuality despite the meaning
on the face of the expression.  This usage is possibly written by a good
Christian homophobe whose quality upbringing doesn't allow him to say
"fucking bullshit".

I also don't think that an encyclopedia is a place for generating data
sets intended to be used in sociological experiments.  Perhaps there
should be something in [What Wikipedia is no] about that.

>I know that when you say "useless" you mean "not helping the stated
>purpose of the Wikipedia project".
>
Surely, if we were to adopt a policy to delete "useless" pages, we would
need an understanding of what we mean by "useless"..  To me it adds
absolutely nothing to the user's knowledge.  If the article [Tucson,
Arizona] says only, "Tucson is a city in Arizona" it only states what
the user had to know to be able to look up the city in the first place.
 Even the concept "city" is implied by Wikipedia naming conventions.
 Simply changing the content to "Tucson is a city in 'southern'
Arizona." could put the uselessness in doubt because the word "southern"
provides an additional fact.
Eclecticology


from_name: Magnus Manske

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Gesell

body:
Ray Saintonge wrote:

> I never heard of him before, but seems like an interesting person who
> influenced John Maynard Keynes, whom many people do respect as an
> economist.  His ideas of free land and free money are described in his
> principal work, "The Natural Economic Order", which is available
> on-line in English at http://ccdev.lets.net/neo/neo2.htm Perhaps
> somebody could translate the articles from the German Wikipedia

I started translating Freiwirtschaft; I'd say it is a joke, but there
are several external links given. So either it is a really big joke, or
there really is such a thing. Weird.

Magnus


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Undelete...

body:
ldc..

Please undelete September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attack/Give Blood and
September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attack/World economic effects and
Wail Alshehri.

I'll discuss them on Votes for deletion if people still think they should be
deleted.
Deletion is being overused right now; which would be fine if there was an
undelete
function available.


from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Helga

body:
I'm insisting that Helga come here to discuss NPOV.

I find her perplexing.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] September 11 articles

in_reply_to: <004e01c24de6$6fa38740$f678d63f@partners.org>; from cunctator@kband.com on Tue, Aug 27, 2002 at 12:26:01PM -0400

body:
The Cunctator wrote:
> Similarly, with the casualties (and I'm working on correcting the
> missing persons/ casualties list--it's pretty inaccurate, but oddly,
> about the only one available on the Net), just because the current
> entries aren't full now doesn't mean they shouldn't be in the
> Wikipedia. There is tons of biographical information about nearly
> every one of the victims available; which should be added to
> Wikipedia.

Because we have no space constraints, I tend to agree with this.

However, I also am sympathetic with the point of view that almost all
of these are useless.  I mean no disrespect of the dead when I say
that millions of people die every year, and a reference work which
attempted a biography on all of them would be pretty useless.

For lots and lots of people, we enter the world, have an important
impact on our family and a few close friends, but we are of absolutely
no personal interest to the rest of the planet.

However, I think this points to a possible difference between
wikipedia and a future "centrally edited" encyclopedia like Nupedia or
like a vote-based version of wikipedia, intended for distribution in
other media.  If I paid to have paper books in my house, I would not
want them to be bull of biographies of 9/11 victims who I never even
heard of.

But if it's in the wikipedia then it's mostly harmless.

One possible exception, but at this early date in the life of
wikipedia, it doesn't really matter.  If a 9/11 victim is named
"Thomas Jefferson", and if lots of other random people are named
"Thomas Jefferson" then the search results will need to be prioritized
so that searchers can easily find the Jefferson they are looking for.

--Jimbo


from_name: Poor, Edmund W

subject: [Wikipedia-l] IP Tracking

body:
Thanks, Tim Enchanter and Daniel Maveric, for the IP-tracking URL. I can probably even adapt it to track newbies to vet their contributions for vandalism or just mere cluelessness.

	http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Contributions&target=66.47.62.78

Ed Poor


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Real owner of each country

body:
!> Taken to an extreme, Helga's arguments could be used to prove that
!> Iberia belongs to the Irish (choose a group of Celts) -- although
!> she'd probably stop at the Visigoths, since they're Germans.
!>
!Now there's an idea!!  I believe that the Galicians were originaly a
!Celtic people.  But there are also Galicians in Poland, so maybe Iberia
!should be Polish. ... That or Ireland should be Polish.  :-D
!Eclecticology

I think the real owner of the earth is God (as defined by the Unification Church), so any country not giving fealty to Him is "occupying" that territory unrighteously. Perhaps this POV is what enables me to view the Arab-Israeli conflict and the Helga controversy with equanimity: it doesn't matter who says what, because they're all thieves anyway!

Who is the real, rightful owner of the West Bank, or Ireland, or Prussia? From my POV it's God, but none of the other contributors has the sense to realize it!! :-)

Anyway, I hope this explains why I find it easy to avoid getting emotionally involved and sucked in to edit wars on this sort of thing.

I just stick to the bedrock principle of NPOV: A said B about C...

Ed Poor


from_name: Lars Aronsson

subject: [Wikipedia-l] An experiment - how 'complete' is the wikipedia?

body:
Karen AKA Kajikit wrote:
> I just did a small experiment. I hit the random button twenty times and
> recorded the articles that came up. Judging by this random sample there
> are three types of information presented in the wikipedia - 1)lists and
> templates  2)pathetic stubs and 3)complete articles. Out of my twenty

According to this metric, Nupedia is a complete success and Wikipedia
is a two-thirds failure.  I think you should add 200 articles that are
not yet written to each 20 that you found.  A lot can be done to
improve the existing articles and going to random links can be a
useful way to find them, but there is also a great need to add
more articles, and in my personal opinion it is better to add a stub
than not.

> 15) Government of Nigeria - CIA factbook information page. Essentially

Ah, that's why SpamAssassin caught your message.  :-)

--
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  tel +46-70-7891609
  http://aronsson.se/ http://elektrosmog.nu/ http://susning.nu/


from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [Wikipedia-l] RE: movie naming convention (in grater context)

body:
On Tuesday 27 August 2002 10:25 pm, Ray Saintonge wrote:
> Disambiguation can be an art. ?Considering the disambiguation of movies
> in isolotion from everything else can become a problem at a later stage.
> ?We need to look at the process (as distinct from format) of
> disambiguation as a whole. ?I would make the specific proposal that "the
> first level of disambiguation should answer the question 'what?'".

OK - This was never something I felt strongly about and I think you have a
good idea on answering "what" with disambiguation and then answering "when"
if needed.

Well, I guess I have some articles to move....

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Deletion of Articles with No Content

body:
Karl Juhnke wrote:

>--- Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
>
>Believe me, I am trying to get him on board!  (I will hook him before
>Wikipedia is mainstream, i.e. he won't be last to join.)  He is a
>historian, and was a college professor for over thirty years before
>retiring this past May.  He would be the perfect Wikipedia contributor,
>as he has both expertise and plenty of time he can choose to dispose of
>as he sees fit.
>
He sounds like an excellent candidate for graduation to Wikipedia!

>>Your father is likely the product of an educational philosophy that
>>promoted the passive consumption of knowledge.  What was then written
>>in the texbooks was undisputable truth that you only questioned at
>>your own peril.
>>
>On the contrary, he is a revisionist, you might say a subversive even.
>He believes in Truth, but also in disputation.  He's a genuine scholar.
>
Even revisionists have standards.  There's no shortage of disputation on
Wikipedia.  I hope that somebody like Helga doesn't scare him away;
she's already frustrating some our best historians.

>
>His conclusion: "Editorial accretion will never make a good article."
>
Interesting comment.  All historiography is a series of accretions,
because new information is regularly being discovered.  The perfect
article is an impossibility because it can't take into account what has
not yet been discovered.  That makes life very tough for the
perfectionist historian.

>Eventually the Wikipedia article will be
>superior to the one in our ancient Colliers.  He hasn't seen articles
>improving, so he doesn't know the mechanics.  But I think in general
>people who don't grok Wikipedia will judge it by comparing it to more
>static sources of information.  The more expertise they have, the
>higher the quality of existing information Wikipedia will need to have
>to excite thier interest and participation.
>
For a university professor it must be a horrifying vision to imagine
that all the really really bad term papers that he ever had to mark over
the years of his career would suddenly find status on the shelves of the
university library.  Without the participation of knowledgeable
historians that prophecy could come true.

My personal view toward Wikipedia is as a project for the
democratisation of knowledge.  (A subject where I could all too easily
become prolix.)  That process involves reconciling the knowledge held in
University Protectorates with the knowledge on the street.  That's not a
trivial task. For example:   In plant taxonomy the latest fad is
cladistics where plants are organized to reflect their real evolutionary
relationships.  This would replace a classification system published by
one Arthur Cronquist in 1981 which cladists declare obsolete.  The fact
is that the general public has never heard of Cronquist, and neither
have the big-box bookstores that the public might visit.  The Roger Tory
Peterson Field Guide series may be all they have as a reference.  That's
on a par with your old Colliers.  This is a challenging problem!

>But for now he has no inclination to cast his pearls before swine.  "Why
>would I want to collaborate with someone who can't be bothered to look
>up Jakob Amman's name?" he says, and I can't blame him.
>
Wikipedia is not even two years old.  It looks much better in the light
of that fact.  If I were interested in that topic I would regard that as
a simple non-contentious oversight, add a short sentence and move on to
something else.
Good luck, Ray (Eclecticology)

>P.S. Please understand that I am not casting aspersions on Wesley for
>his work on Anabaptists.
>
I've been having my own difficulties with Wesley and SLRubenstein over
the definition of [Biblical canon] where they want to insist that
inspiration by God is part of the definition.  I prefer the minimalist
view that it is a simple list of the books of the Bible, and the
reference to "inspiration" should come later in the article.

>Relating this back to stub articles, there's no way around the fact
>that people unfamiliar with the process will be turned off by stubs.
>To repeat a point from my previous article, we have to make every
>effort to _immediately_ re-edit and respond to anything a newbie does
>in order to initiate them into the joy.  There is no way to adequately
>explain it; a contributor has to viscerally experience what it means to
>be involved in collaborative editing.
>
To stay on topic, I agree.  There are many sites on the net where the
information is so scant that you wonder why Google wasted your time
sending you there.

I also agree about greeting newbies where Mav has been doing a wonderful
job.  I suggested the idea of Wikipediac certificates on his talk page.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Undelete...

body:
>Please undelete September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attack/Give Blood and
>September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attack/World economic effects and
>Wail Alshehri.

I recovered the former, though I frankly don't see much useful
about it.  I totally reject your "never delete information" idea.
Quality is as much about what to leave out as what to put in.

I didn't see an article with the second title in the archive.
There's one just titled ".../World economic effects", but it has
no content at all.

I'm not sure an "undelete" function is such a great idea.  It
shouldn't be too easy to recover things; it should only be done
when the deletion was really a mistake, and in that case we should
have some incentive to prevent further mistakes of that kind.


from_name: Brion VIBBER

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Fwd: Re: Wikipedia.org request use of your modified
 1913 dictionary definitions

body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:
>     Thanks for your inquiry about the modified Webster (copied below).
>     To answer the main question, the GCIDE files available on the
> GNU server are freely usable under the ***GNU GPL.***

Just remember that the GNU GPL and GNU FDL are not compatible. If he
owns the copyright, he can relicense the material suitably for our use
(but should explicitly do so!)

As far as importing our stuff into his project; copyright is held by the
contributors. Either he has to make the project GFDL, or ask permission
from the individual author(s) if they're not anonymous. (I would happily
say yes about any of my stuff.)

(However small quotations, particularly if marked as such and cited,
ought to be acceptable anyway under fair use.)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikipedia-l] More cool, NPOV (mostly) things Helga could have brought up

body:
Just read an interesting article dated 13 August 2002 in the New York
Times.  Seems that, now that the USSR is no more, inhabitants of
Kaliningrad are (with financial support from 'Der Spiegel' ) excavating
and possibly going to restore parts of old Koenigsberg.  As we all know,
Koenigsberg was annexed to the USSR after Potsdam, and the German
inhabitants were expelled.  One of the first acts was to destroy the old
castle and many traces of a German heritage.  Now, apparently, the
inhabitants of the city are raising the question of the city's cultural
roots -- Russian or German?  Of course, the article was in the NYT, and
a German magazine is helping fund the work, but at least this is an
article Helga could have found, from a reputable journal rather than a
crackpot website, that supports some of the things she says.

This is why I despair of Helga.  There is stuff out there that might
actually bolster her cause, but she only goes for the sources so bad and
biased that no one with sense can accept them, and we all end up
throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Cheers!

Jules
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from_name: koyaanisqatsi at nupedia.com

subject: [Wikipedia-l] September 11 articles

body:
Jeroen Heijmans Wrote:
>* The main article, as it is, has a very good start, and little has to
>be changed to that.

Yes, I'd say the beginning is quite good.

>Others can be severely shortened, removing the "news
>value" and reverting to facts and summaries. The parts of the
>subarticles that really have to do with the subsequent attack and
>anthrax attack should be at those articles. External links should be to
>pages that give a good summary of the issue, and not merely newspaper
>articles. Much of the remaining subpages could be included in the main
>article itself.

I would agree with that also.

>* As for the list of casualties and the individual articles on them, I
>think these should all go. In my view, the articles currently existing
>are terrible and useless. They're terrible because they are templates
>that say "(Name) was killed on September 11 (...) in
>(WTC/Pentagon/Airplane). He lived in (Place), (State) and was married to
>(Name). He had (#) children.". And these articles are about as useless
>an article on the man walking his dog that I can see out of my window
>right now. My opinion about a list of casualties is less strong, but I
>also think it has little value. A good link to a memorial site (I'm sure
>there are some) would be much better.

I not sure if I agree with this, only because I can't decide if it would be worthwhile to have an article on everyone ever killed in a terrorist bombing in the Middle East.  I suspect that it would not.  I'm inclined to want to remove them, though I'm also hesitant to state that something has /no/ encyclopedic value, because my metric for that is quite different from a philosopher's, or a biologist's, or a historian's.  Perhaps they should stay, if only because drivespace is cheap and people have found them useful in the past--it would, however, be great to have more information on each person than that they were killed in X place on Sept. 11.  All of these people had a life leading up to Sept. 11, and some of them undoubtedly were influential and noteworthy before the attack.

kq


from_name: lcrocker at nupedia.com

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Undelete...

body:
>> I didn't see an article with the second title in the archive.
>> There's one just titled ".../World economic effects", but it has
>> no content at all.

> Did it use to have content? Or did that entry just hit the ether
> and disappear?

Deleting an article puts all its old versions in the archive; I
see no evidence that this article ever had any content, so it may
be that it was created under UseMod and the old versions, if any,
are gone; or else it was created as a placeholder for future use
and never filled in.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Movie naming convention: proposed tweak for simplicity

body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:

>As it is, our movie naming convention (which has been around since before
>January) reads:
>
>"Oftentimes movies share the same name as other movies, books or terms. When
>disambiguating a movie from something else use (movie) in the title when only
>one movie had that name and (YEAR movie) in the title when there are more
>than one movies by that name (example: Titanic (1997 movie))."
>
>One user has for some time now been creating many movie titles in the form
>[[{movie name} (YEAR)]] (example [[Scareface (1932)]]. However I moved that
>page to the convention compliant [[Scareface (1932 movie)]]. After the move I
>compared the two and quickly realized that the word "movie" is not at all
>needed for disambiguation because "Scareface" is already disambiguated by
>year (there wasn't anything else released that year named "Scareface" that I
>know of). What's more is the fact that Scareface (1932) actually has a chance
>of being linked simply as [[Scareface (1932)]] instead of [[Scareface
>(1932)|Scareface]] (not that it matters too much with Lee's neat pipe trick).
>
>So this is my proposed new wording of the convention (and I will assume
>acceptance of this as is if there are no objections):
>
>"Oftentimes movies share the same name as other movies, books or terms. When
>disambiguating a movie from something else use (movie) in the title when only
>one movie had that name and (YEAR) in the title when there are more than one
>movies by that name (example: [[Titanic (1997)]])."
>
>We could add in the detailed movie convention page that if and when there
>/is/ more than one thing with the same name that is released in the same
>year, then the format of [[{name of movie} (YEAR movie)]] can be used.
>
In the first place the title was "Scarface" and not "Scareface".

The policy should remain that first level of disambiguation answers the
question "what?" rather than "when?". The 1932 movie "Scarface" was
based on the 1930 novel of the same name by Armitage Trail.  It is not
safe to assume that just because you have [[Scarface (1930)]] and
[[Scarface (1932)]] the earlier one must be the book.  During the silent
movie period (When TV's and home videos were in short supply) it was
quite common for a book to be produced after the movie, when it could be
illustrated with a selection of still shots from the movie. A person who
knows about movies does not always know about books.  I didn't find any
books entitled Scarface published in 1932, but there is nothing on the
net for books that is as comprehensive as IMDb is for movies.

Eclecticology


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: September 11 articles

body:
>"Jeroen Heijmans" <j.heijmans at stud.tue.nl> wrote:
>> Why? Every day I can read about at least a dozen of people
>> that died. I could enter an article on them. "John Doe died
>> on date X in a traffic accident." Not very useful, right? Or
>> should we also list the 6 million Jews, and millions of other
>> people that died because of some kind of artrocity? Have
>> articles about each Palestinian killed by an Israeli soldier?

> Yes, we should. The entries should be more complete, but yes,
> I do think there should be entries on everyone. As long as
> they're entered by hand, the numbers won't get out of hand.

I actually lean toward Cunc's side of this issue.  I don't have any
problem with the existence of articles on even the most obscure
subjects, including individuals who might not be of interest to a
traditional encyclopedia.  However, I don't want the database filled
with stubs either.  I think the best approach in situations like this
is that if a person has only a one- or two-line bio, that bio should
appear next to his name on a page with a list of other names of
related people.  For example, a list of victims of a disaster, or
members of some group. There's no need to create a separate page for
such individuals unless there's a full page or more of material on
him.


from_name: Andre Engels

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Movie naming convention: proposed tweak for simplicityy

in_reply_to:
<20020827055517.EPCU11061.sccrmhc01.attbi.com@there> from Daniel
 Mayer at "Aug 26, 2002 10:53:32 am"

body:
> We could add in the detailed movie convention page that if and when there
> /is/ more than one thing with the same name that is released in the same
> year, then the format of [[{name of movie} (YEAR movie)]] can be used.

I think that that is too specific to be interesting. At the moment, IIRC,
movies are the only things that use (YEAR), and even if there were others,
the number of times when there would be (say) a book and a movie with the
same title from the same year would be too rare to have a separate rule for.
Apart from that, I think that the proposed change would be a good one.

Andre


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Helga Jonat on [[Berlin]]

in_reply_to:
<001c01c24d9e$f2e60e90$0100a8c0@Kraftwerk> from Steve Callaway at
 "Aug 27, 2002 08:54:18 am"

body:
> I'll settle for home rule for [[Cornwall]]. Start small, think big.

Self rule? Forget it. You should be returned to the Carthaginian trading
empire!

Andre


body:
New rule!  "We will have only [[brilliant prose]] on this site.  If you do not write brilliant prose, you may prefer to donate your time somewhere else, or perhaps spend your time sulking in the corner."

Or, as Charles Bukowski said (I was an English major, and so I took particular delight in this passage [recognizing more than a little truth in it]):

editorial
the only ones who can write is us.  nobody else can write but us.  we are the only ones who can write.  I don't understand why other people can't write.  send money.  send your wife--for one night.  we do this for love.
we hate war.  we like guitars.  we paint.  we swim.  we know everything.  the world is evil.  we are not evil.  send money.  we send love.  we send love everywhere.  send your girlfriend--for 2 nights.  don't pay your income tax.  blow up the troop trains.  smoke pot.  sell pot.  write your president.  write your gov.  write your mother for money and send it to us.  don't send your mother--at all.  literature and the world are in bad shape.  we are dying.  legalize rape.
no payment for poetry.
yours, love,
Charles Bukowski

----
In short: are stubs an embarassment?  Yes.  Should we try not to write them?  Yes.  Should we delete the ones we have?  No, just add to them when possible.  Alternatively, we might hire the Comic Book Guy to drop in periodically and say "worst article ever."  ;-)

Cheers,

kq
You Wrote:
>Axel Boldt <axel at uni-paderborn.de> writes:
>
>> I can't see any possible use for stubs.
>
>I agree with everything Axel wrote in the above message.
>Stubs are embarrassing.


from_name: The Cunctator

subject: [Wikipedia-l] September 11 articles

body:
"Jeroen Heijmans" <j.heijmans at stud.tue.nl> wrote:
> * The main article, as it is, has a very good start, and little has to
> be changed to that. My main problems are with the subpage and related
> pages. First of all, many of the subpages, such as /Satire, /Slogans and
> terms, etc. should not be in an encyclopedia, or at most be noted in
> short piece of text with a few examples ("Most american media developed
> slogans like "America strikes back" at the start of American attacks on
> Afghanistan"). Others can be severely shortened, removing the "news
> value" and reverting to facts and summaries. The parts of the
> subarticles that really have to do with the subsequent attack and
> anthrax attack should be at those articles. External links should be to
> pages that give a good summary of the issue, and not merely newspaper
> articles. Much of the remaining subpages could be included in the main
> article itself.
> ....

I basically disagree with all of your proposals, which shouldn't be too
surprising
since I'm responsible for most of the entry. And being from New York I have
a certain personal weight on it.

But a general philosophy that I believe is true for the entire encyclopedia
which
applies here in particular is: Don't remove information. If someone has gone
to
the effort to add information to Wikipedia, and you feel it is poorly
presented,
then improve the presentation. Don't delete it. There's no good reason to
get rid
of the subpages. They should be edited such that they follow a pyramid
structure
of general overview to specific information, but specific information should
not be
lost.

We are under *no* constraints of size. This is not paper.

Similarly, with the casualties (and I'm working on correcting the missing
persons/
casualties list--it's pretty inaccurate, but oddly, about the only one
available on the Net),
just because the current entries aren't full now doesn't mean they shouldn't
be in the
Wikipedia. There is tons of biographical information about nearly every one
of the victims
available; which should be added to Wikipedia.

If you don't care about them, then ignore the entries, instead of deleting
them.
Other people do care. And that should be the criterion for what deserves to
be
in Wikipedia. As long as it follows the basic stylistic guidelines, any
topic is worthy
of entry.


from_name: Karen AKA Kajikit

body:
I just did a small experiment. I hit the random button twenty times and
recorded the articles that came up. Judging by this random sample there
are three types of information presented in the wikipedia - 1)lists and
templates  2)pathetic stubs and 3)complete articles. Out of my twenty
hits, six were templated lists of varying degrees of completeness, seven
were stubs with very little information, and seven were lengthy articles
that appeared complete whether they actually were or not. This suggests
to me that there is a LOT of work to be done... but then we knew that
already! In most entries the ratio of completed vs uncreated links
seemed pretty good too. Having a few blank links invites people to
contribute, but if they're ALL blank is just looks like nobody's doing
the work!

Karen

Here's the results:

1) 1620s - blank year template.

2) The Cain Mutiny - fairly lengthy and complete article on the movie
and the US Navy's response to it. Plenty of created links, and five
blanks.

3) Jean Fran?ois La P?rouse - fairly stubby, but contains several
paragraphs of complete information so it looks like an 'article' to the
casual passerby. Three active links, and three blanks.

4) Columbus Blue Jackets - stub. Contains blank template and a very
little information. Four active links, and one blank.

5) Neoconservative - stub with very little information. Currently
unwikified and unlinked

6) Zambesi - mini factoid stub (2 sentences) that supplies the necessary
factual information in a compact form. Several active links.

7) Thermal mass - five short paragraphs. Could be longer and more
detailed, but appears to be a complete article to the casual observer.
No blank links.

8) Okapi - Fairly complete article with species table inserted. Bunch of
links. two blank. All that seems to be missing is a photo.

9) Saul Kripke - one very very long paragraph. I got lost in the text so
I have no idea who he actually is. Five active links, no blanks.

10) Geosynchronous satellite - complete and informative article. Many
links, two blanks.

11) International Organisation for Migration - stub, two links

12) Kawasaki - list of company info. Not yet an article. No links

13) Context-sensitive language - looks fairly complete to me. Has
sub-headers. Several links, no blanks.

14) Pure qubit state - mathematical article. Looks complete. Five links,
three blanks.

15) Government of Nigeria - CIA factbook information page. Essentially
complete but unlinked and possibly out of date.

16) Centerville - list of US placenames, all blank links. (Are there no
'centreville's in other countries?)

17) Pomatomidae - minute stub.

18) Carolingian Dynasty - long list of links.

19) Moraceae - minute stub for a plant family, not yet taxonomised.

20) Boron - one of the complete-seeming chemical articles. Several
links, two blank.

--

Karen AKA Kajikit

And on the seventh day, God said 'What my world needs is a creature that
will truly appreciate it in all its facets' -
and so He made the kitten.

Come and visit my part of the web:
Kajikit's Corner: http://Kajikit.netfirms.com/
Aussie Support Mailing List: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AussieSupport
Allergyfree Eating Recipe Swap:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Allergyfree_Eating
Ample Aussies Mailing List: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ampleaussies/

Love and huggles to all!


from_name: Vicki Rosenzweig

subject: [Wikipedia-l] September 11 articles

body:
At 12:26 PM 8/27/02 -0400, the Cunctator wrote:

>Similarly, with the casualties (and I'm working on correcting the missing
>persons/
>casualties list--it's pretty inaccurate, but oddly, about the only one
>available on the Net),

I think the NYC medical examiner just released an update; it might be in one
of the local papers, or on nyc.gov (which I have the devil of a time with
because
it insists on referrers as well as Javascript, but you might do better).
--
Vicki Rosenzweig
vr at redbird.org
http://www.redbird.org


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Restoring pre-January edit histories (was Re: Undelete...)

body:
lcrocker at nupedia.com wrote:
> ...it may
> be that it was created under UseMod and the old versions, if any,
> are gone;...

Is there still interest in restoring those old versions? I can work on
adapting the import script to the new database format, but it might help
if I had access to the old data!

(I _think_ I have a backup from a few weeks before the conversion lying
about somewhere, but I'd prefer the latest version.)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


body:
Tim Marklew wrote:
>> All I need is the ability to track "all articles written by a single
>> >IP"....
>
> For those not already aware, we can already do that.  You'll need to
> type (or copy) a URL like this directly into the address line in your
> browser:
>
> http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Contributions&target=66.47.62.78
>
>
> The IP used there (66.47.62.78) is for Helga Jonat; you can substitute
> any other as required. This is very useful for tracking anonymous
> vandals, so I'm keen that everyone should know about it.

Would there be any objection to making the IP addresses as listed in
Recentchanges and History be direct links to the contributions list?

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikipedia-l] September 11 articles

body:
"Vicki Rosenzweig" <vr at redbird.org> wrote:
>
> I think the NYC medical examiner just released an update; it might be in
one
> of the local papers, or on nyc.gov (which I have the devil of a time with
> because
> it insists on referrers as well as Javascript, but you might do better).

Yes, that's what I'm working from. I just need to find the time to finish it
up.


body:
It has nothing to do with your experiment, but one of the pages you mentioned
had a subject that was very close to my own interests, and when I looked at it,
I found some remarkable things:

> 3) Jean Fran?ois La P?rouse - fairly stubby, but contains several
> paragraphs of complete information so it looks like an 'article' to the
> casual passerby. Three active links, and three blanks.

The first thing I noticed is that we have a second, longer article on this
person, under "La P?rouse". Reading that second one gave me a shock. It was
copyrighted material - of which I am quite certain, since I am the one who
wrote it. See http://www.win.tue.nl/~engels/discovery/perouse.html

Of course I hereby give Wikipedia my blessing to further use the material,
but I do get worried that this might mean that there is more copyrighted
material on Wikipedia than we sometimes suspect (the text in question had
been given free for further use, but on stricter terms than an open source
license, in particular by forbidding commercial use).

Andre Engels


subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Fw: Your message to Wikipedia-l awaits moderator
 approval

body:
Kurt Jansson wrote:
 >>The reason it is being held:
 >>
 >>    Message may contain administrivia
> What does that mean?

Apparently you've somehow tripped this filter:

   (Administrivia filter) Check postings and intercept ones that seem to
   be administrative requests?

   If you activate this feature Mailman will check traffic for
   administrative requests that have inadvertently been sent to the list.
   This will prevent the classic case of a user sending a note to the
   entire list membership saying "unsubscribe."

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Gesell

body:
Magnus Manske wrote:

> Ray Saintonge wrote:
>
>> I never heard of him before, but seems like an interesting person who
>> influenced John Maynard Keynes, whom many people do respect as an
>> economist.  His ideas of free land and free money are described in
>> his principal work, "The Natural Economic Order", which is available
>> on-line in English at http://ccdev.lets.net/neo/neo2.htm Perhaps
>> somebody could translate the articles from the German Wikipedia
>
>
> I started translating Freiwirtschaft; I'd say it is a joke, but there
> are several external links given. So either it is a really big joke,
> or there really is such a thing. Weird.

At the risk of seeming to beg the point, is it the German Wikipedia
article which is the joke, or Gesell's economic theories.  Gesell
certainly did live and write.  Whether right or wrong some people were
influenced by him; he was even Minister of Finance in a breakaway post
WWI independent Bavarian state.  That should at least get him an
historical footnote, but perhaps not a statue in the Economists' Hall of
Fame.

Eclecticology


from_name: John Cate

subject: [Wikipedia-l] The world according to Helga

body:
!> Taken to an extreme, Helga's arguments could be used to prove that
!> Iberia belongs to the Irish (choose a group of Celts) -- although
!> she'd probably stop at the Visigoths, since they're Germans.

Since Helga hasn't taken the time to fully explain all of this, I decided to
do it for her. Here's a complete list of all the nations that belong to the
Germans, and why:

Germany: for obvious reasons.
Austria: Ditto.
Italy: It once belonged to the Ostrogoths, who were victims of naked
aggression on the part of the Eastern Roman Empire under that brigand
Belisarius.
France: The Franks were Germans; Charlemagne's real name was Karl der
Grosse.
Poland: Half the country was unjustly taken from the Germans in 1945. The
other half was wrongfully taken from Prussia and Austria in 1806.
Czech Republic: The Sudetenland is rightfully German, and the rest of the
nation was built up under Austrian rule, or so Helga would tell you.
Slovakia: Wasn't Bratislava once known as "Pressburg"? Sounds pretty German
to me!
Switzerland: Largely speaks German today, historically belonged to the
Burgundians and Alamanni, who were Germans.
Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco and Libya: Belonged to the Vandals between 429 and
534. Lost through more naked aggression on the part of the Romans; many
Vandals cruelly expelled from their homes.
Spain: Modern Spainiards still claim descent from the Visigoths. Nation was
arguably founded by Pelayo the Visigoth in 718.
Netherlands, Belgium and Lux.: All part of the medieval Frankish Empire.
Romania: At one time, tens of thousands of Germans lived in Transylvania.
Was also ruled by the House of Hohenzollern for many years, and was ruled by
the Visigoths from 271 to 377.
Ukraine: L'viv was once known as Lemberg. Also belonged to the Ostrogoths
until 376.
Russia: Illegally possesses half of East Prussia and oppresses the Volga
Germans.
Lithuania: Illegally possesses the German city of Memel, wrongfully stolen
in 1919 and again in 1945.
Estonia: Capital of Talinn was once known as Reval and heavily populated by
Germans.
Latvia: City of Dvinsk's real name is Dunaburg.
Denmark: Illegally possesses northern Schleswig, wrongfully stolen from
Germans at Versailles in 1919.
Slovenia: Entire nation was part of Austria until 1918. Capital of
Ljubijana's real name is Laibach.
Portugal: Once belonged to the Suevi, Vandals and Visigoths.
England: Belonged to the Saxons until they fell victim to Norman French
aggression in 1066.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Helga Jonat on [[Berlin]]

body:
Steve Callaway wrote:

>I'll settle for home rule for [[Cornwall]]. Start small, think big.
>
There goes my idea that it should be vassal state of Lundy!
Ec


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Deletion of /pages/ with No Content

body:
"Ray Saintonge" <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> The Cunctator wrote:
> >I know that when you say "useless" you mean "not helping the stated
> >purpose of the Wikipedia project".
> >
> Surely, if we were to adopt a policy to delete "useless" pages, we would
> need an understanding of what we mean by "useless"..  To me it adds
> absolutely nothing to the user's knowledge.  If the article [Tucson,
> Arizona] says only, "Tucson is a city in Arizona" it only states what
> the user had to know to be able to look up the city in the first place.
>  Even the concept "city" is implied by Wikipedia naming conventions.
>  Simply changing the content to "Tucson is a city in 'southern'
> Arizona." could put the uselessness in doubt because the word "southern"
> provides an additional fact.

I absolutely agree. By the way, time and time again stubs have shown to be
excellent spurs for more complete entries. And since the definition of a
stub
is a matter of subjectivity, I recommend that we err on the side of
forgiveness.
And if a stub were to appear at the top of Google, that would be because it
was the most popular resource on that subject. So that hypothetical stub
would
be of use.

Rather than fearing more eyes seeing stubs, I think that should make us
happy.
The more eyes viewing an imperfect article, the more likely that it will be
improved.

Again, every single time there has a been a stub so egregious as to upset
people,
it's been edited extravagantly near instantaneously. If you look at
[[Wikipedia: Find or fix a stub]], you'll find very few super-stubs (of the
form
"Tucson is a city in Arizona"). Usually they're just interesting topics that
only
have a moderate amount of information. (By the way, [[information
technology]]
needs work.)


from_name: Julie Hofmann Kemp

subject: [Wikipedia-l] May I temporarily block...

body:
A new 24?  Not doing anything wrong, but probably needs to have a read
before creating more really stubby pointless pages..

Jules
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list: wikitech-l

from_name: Jason Richey

subject: [Wikitech-l] wikitech-l change

body:
This list's configuration has been changed.  As requested, the
'Reply-To:' header will now be set to the list rather than the
sender.  As I understood it, I had 2 votes for the change, one
against, and several people who didn't care.  So, it is changed.  I
deeply regret any difficulty this causes.

Also, the hostname should show correctly now.  The list is now aware
that it's address is wikitech-l at nupedia.com (instead of
wikitech-l at ross.bomis.com).  No vote was taken here, because I assume
that the majority of the community would prefer to have a list that is
not partly broken.

I think that about sums it up.

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


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: September 11 articles

body:
"Jeroen Heijmans" <j.heijmans at stud.tue.nl> wrote:
> Why? Every day I can read about at least a dozen of people that died. I
> could enter an article on them. "John Doe died on date X in a traffic
> accident." Not very useful, right? Or should we also list the 6 million
> Jews, and millions of other people that died because of some kind of
> artrocity? Have articles about each Palestinian killed by an Israeli
> soldier?

Yes, we should. The entries should be more complete, but yes, I do think
there should be entries on everyone. As long as they're entered by hand,
the numbers won't get out of hand.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Undelete...

body:
<lcrocker at nupedia.com> wrote:
> >Please undelete September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attack/Give Blood and
> >September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attack/World economic effects and
> >Wail Alshehri.
>
> I recovered the former, though I frankly don't see much useful
> about it.  I totally reject your "never delete information" idea.
> Quality is as much about what to leave out as what to put in.

I don't disagree. These entries were simply deleted very quickly. They
should
be up on Votes for deletion for a longer time than 4 hours. That's why I
asked
that they be restored.

> I didn't see an article with the second title in the archive.
> There's one just titled ".../World economic effects", but it has
> no content at all.

Did it use to have content? Or did that entry just hit the ether and
disappear?


body:
John Cate wrote:

>!> Taken to an extreme, Helga's arguments could be used to prove that
>!> Iberia belongs to the Irish (choose a group of Celts) -- although
>!> she'd probably stop at the Visigoths, since they're Germans.
>
>Since Helga hasn't taken the time to fully explain all of this, I decided to
>do it for her. Here's a complete list of all the nations that belong to the
>Germans, and why:
>	(long list)
>
Based on its absence from the list I'm glad to see that Germany will
continue to recognize the independace of Liechtenstein.
Ec.


subject: [Wikitech-l] Rewrite rules

body:
FYI, I've added a couple rewrite rules to the config on
de-beta.wikipedia.org:

     RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ([^&;]+)
     RewriteRule ^/wiki.cgi$ /w/wiki.phtml?title=%1 [L]
     RewriteRule ^/wiki.cgi$ /w/wiki.phtml

With these in place, URLs in the form of:
   http://de.wikipedia.com/wiki.cgi?Deutsche_Mark
   http://de.wikipedia.com/wiki.cgi?Nat%FCrliche_Zahlen
   etc

which are linked everwhere in the universe should continue to work when
de.wikipedia.com becomes merely an alternate name of an upgraded
de.wikipedia.org.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikipedia-l] RE: movie naming convention

body:
>The policy should remain that first level of
>disambiguation answers the question "what?"
>rather than "when?". The 1932 movie "Scarface"
>was based on the 1930 novel of the same name
>by Armitage Trail.  It is not safe to assume
>that just because you have [[Scarface (1930)]]
>and [[Scarface (1932)]] the earlier one must be the
book.

I wasn't talking about having a (YEAR) convention for
novels (that would have to be discussed separately).
The issue here is that there are two movies with the
name; Sacarface -- thus we would have [[Scarface
(1932)]] and [[Scarface (1983)]]. If there is only one
novel by that name then that would be at either
[[Scarface (novel)]] or just [[Scarface]] (with a
disambiguation block on top -- my preference). If
there were only one movie by the name Scarface and
only one novel by that name, then to disambiguate the
movie from the novel we would have [[Scarface
(movie)]].

The whole point here is to have the minimum amount of
disambiguation information in order to distinguish one
thing from another (thus the word "movie" is not
needed to differentiate between the two movies with
the same name).

A bonus of the (YEAR) convention is that this is
precisely the way movie titles are often written when
there are more than one movie that share a single name
(search Google for  "Scarface (1932)" and  "Scarface
(1983)"). This is seen in so many places that I would
call  "Scarface (1932)" a way to naturally
disambiguate movie titles when there are more than one
movie by the same name.

In fact one contributor has titled many movie articles
in this very format without even knowing there was a
movie naming convention (so many, that if the current
convention is kept and if it is to be effective, then
all those pages will have to be moved to the
unnecessary (YEAR movie) format that will never be
linked without pipes).

With the (YEAR) convention there is also less to type
since the word "movie" would not be used (as in (YEAR
movie) -- of course, (movie) would still be used when
needed to differentiate one movie from something else
that shares its name).

In short, when two or more things have the same name
/and/ they are the same type of thing, then it is
perfectly reasonable to differentiate them based on a
temporal aspect.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Finance - Get real-time stock quotes
http://finance.yahoo.com


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Contributions by IP

body:
!> For those not already aware, we can already do that.  You'll need to
!> type (or copy) a URL like this directly into the address line in your
!> browser:
!>
!> http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Contributions&target=66.47.62.78
!>
!>
!> The IP used there (66.47.62.78) is for Helga Jonat; you can substitute
!> any other as required. This is very useful for tracking anonymous
!> vandals, so I'm keen that everyone should know about it.
!
!Would there be any objection to making the IP addresses as listed in
!Recentchanges and History be direct links to the contributions list?
!
!-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

Actually, that's what I wanted all along. Thanks for suggesting it, Brion.

Ed Poor


from_name: Jeroen Heijmans

subject: [Wikipedia-l] September 11 articles

body:
Some time ago, I proposed to re-work the [[September 11, 2001 Terrorist
Attack]] articles to make them real encyclopedia articles. This was met
with agreement bij Maveric149 and Bryan Derksen, who however proposed to
postpone this until a year after the attack (mav) and move the curren
tpages to Wikipedia:Historical Wikipedia articles (Bryan), with which I
agreed.

As the time to start this work is approaching, I want to let the other
Wikipedians know about this and give their opinions, if they want to.
I'll give my view of the future articles below:

* The main article, as it is, has a very good start, and little has to
be changed to that. My main problems are with the subpage and related
pages. First of all, many of the subpages, such as /Satire, /Slogans and
terms, etc. should not be in an encyclopedia, or at most be noted in
short piece of text with a few examples ("Most american media developed
slogans like "America strikes back" at the start of American attacks on
Afghanistan"). Others can be severely shortened, removing the "news
value" and reverting to facts and summaries. The parts of the
subarticles that really have to do with the subsequent attack and
anthrax attack should be at those articles. External links should be to
pages that give a good summary of the issue, and not merely newspaper
articles. Much of the remaining subpages could be included in the main
article itself.

* As for the list of casualties and the individual articles on them, I
think these should all go. In my view, the articles currently existing
are terrible and useless. They're terrible because they are templates
that say "(Name) was killed on September 11 (...) in
(WTC/Pentagon/Airplane). He lived in (Place), (State) and was married to
(Name). He had (#) children.". And these articles are about as useless
an article on the man walking his dog that I can see out of my window
right now. My opinion about a list of casualties is less strong, but I
also think it has little value. A good link to a memorial site (I'm sure
there are some) would be much better.

As I'm sure there are people with different opinions, let it be heard! I
hope we can work out a future plan for these articles and then do this
job together.

Jeronimo


from_name: Bryan Derksen

body:
At 06:11 PM 27/08/02 +0100, Gareth Owen wrote:
>Axel Boldt <axel at uni-paderborn.de> writes:
>
> > I can't see any possible use for stubs.
>
>I agree with everything Axel wrote in the above message.
>Stubs are embarrassing.

Hear hear! We say that Wikipedia is not a dictionary, and then we go and
have articles like [[Robert Braden]] and [[Ununpentium]] which would get
laughed out of any half-decent dictionary as practically useless.

I think Wikipedia would be better served by having edit links pointing to
an empty page, rather than misleading people into thinking there's some
kind of useful information there.


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Tracking articles by anonymous contributors

body:
>
>
>>Would there be any objection to making the IP addresses as listed in
>>Recentchanges and History be direct links to the contributions list?
>>
>>-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
>>
I presume that you are referring to the addresses for unregistered
contributors.  That's fine.  But for registered users I'm just as happy
to be able to go to the user page which links to "user contributions" anyway
Ec


from_name: wiki pedista

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Undelete...

body:
I deleted the "September 11, 2201 Terrorist
Attack/World economic effects" page.
It had an history of one line, "script conversion",
and its content was "This page doesn't exist anymore"
or something like that (you can see the log).
Why can that be needed? Even if we want the article,
a link with a ? is more useful than that "article".
Should I have waited for a vote on "that"?

AstroNomer

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Finance - Get real-time stock quotes
http://finance.yahoo.com


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Database queries + an apology

body:
At 09:43 PM 27/08/02 +0000, Tim Marklew wrote:
>That said, the direct database queries can be really useful when done
>right.  I suggest that anyone who wants to experiment with them asks Lee
>Daniel Crocker for sysop access on the Wikipedia test site
>(http://www.piclab.com/newwiki/wiki.phtml?title=Main_Page).  That way you
>can test that things work as they should before trying them out on the
>main Wikipedia site.

How about creating a page where one can put "prepackaged" database queries
that can be simply cut-and-pasted into the query form? That would seem to
me to be a nice compromise between the danger and complexity of full SQL
access and asking the developers to add dozens and dozens of highly
specialized special pages.


from_name: Gareth Owen

subject: [Wikipedia-l] On the uselessness of stubs

body:
Axel Boldt <axel at uni-paderborn.de> writes:

> I can't see any possible use for stubs.

I agree with everything Axel wrote in the above message.
Stubs are embarrassing.
--
Gareth Owen
"Wikipedia does rock.  By the count on the "brilliant prose" page, there
 are 14 not-bad articles so far" -- Larry Sanger (12 Jan 2001)


body:
"John Cate" <jsc1973 at hotmail.com> writes:

> Since Helga hasn't taken the time to fully explain all of this, I decided to
> do it for her. Here's a complete list of all the nations that belong to the
> Germans, and why:
>
> Germany: for obvious reasons.

You missed:
  Wales : Lost by King Edward VII to Kaiser Wilhelm in drunken card game
--
Gareth Owen
"Wikipedia does rock.  By the count on the "brilliant prose" page, there
 are 14 not-bad articles so far" -- Larry Sanger (12 Jan 2001)


from_name: Axel Boldt

body:
Lars wrote:

> I think you should add 200 articles that are not yet written to each
> 20 that you found. [...] there is also a great need to add more
> articles, and in my personal opinion it is better to add a stub than
> not.

I disagree. If you spend a weekend researching a topic on E2, EB,
Google or in a library and then write a well-rounded 4 paragraph
article on it, you will have improved the world and yourself. If you
spend the weekend creating 200 stubs instead, you will have
accomplished precisely nothing.

A stub does not tell the reader anything that they didn't know already
or that they couldn't have found out in 2 minutes on the internet. If
the stub ever shows up at the top of a Google result list, it will
actually waste the reader's time and lower the general perception of
Wikipedia's quality. I can't see any possible use for stubs.

Axel


from_name: Stephen Gilbert

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Helga

body:
Generally, I agree with you Ed. But in this case,
Helga has been around far longer than you, and people
have been following her around the database all that
time, doing exactly what you suggest.

Stephen G.

--- "Poor, Edmund W" <Edmund.W.Poor at abc.com> wrote:
> We should not "stop" her; rather, we should
> neutralize her writings. Write things like:
>
> 	Some advocates blame the Daily Express article for
> starting the war, although most historians agree
> that...
>
> I'm not sure what goes in the ellipsis, but my point
> is, there is nothing wrong with Helga's views that
> attribution can't fix.
>
> Look what I've done with the Arab-Israeli Conflict
> articles: Palestine, Palestinian, Palestinian
> homeland, etc. There hasn't been an outbreak of edit
> war in nearly 2 weeks, which is epochal in terms of
> internet time.
>
> I bet if I start following Helga around, I can
> neutralize anything she says faster than she can say
> it; I can type 80 words a minute, and my English is
> superb. I am offering up to 5 hours per week to this
> end.
>
> All I need is the ability to track "all articles
> written by a single IP", so that when she forgets to
> log in I can still see her contributions. Or maybe
> Jimbo can give her a parole condition: if she agrees
> to contribute only while logged in, we won't ban
> her.
>
> I didn't realize people were so upset with Helga. I
> may have made a mistake in encouraging "H. Jonat" to
> stay in the first place. But she hasn't threatened
> anyone with physical violence, and she is answering
> Jimbo's e-mails. I say, teach her the norms of the
> community rather than exile her.
>
> Ed Poor
> [Wikipedia-l]
> To manage your subscription to this list, please go
> here:
> http://www.nupedia.com/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l

__________________________________________________
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Yahoo! Finance - Get real-time stock quotes
http://finance.yahoo.com


body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:

>>The policy should remain that first level of
>>disambiguation answers the question "what?"
>>rather than "when?". The 1932 movie "Scarface"
>>was based on the 1930 novel of the same name
>>by Armitage Trail.  It is not safe to assume
>>that just because you have [[Scarface (1930)]]
>>and [[Scarface (1932)]] the earlier one must be the
>>
>book.
>
>I wasn't talking about having a (YEAR) convention for
>novels (that would have to be discussed separately).
>The issue here is that there are two movies with the
>name; Sacarface -- thus we would have [[Scarface
>(1932)]] and [[Scarface (1983)]]. If there is only one
>novel by that name then that would be at either
>[[Scarface (novel)]] or just [[Scarface]] (with a
>disambiguation block on top -- my preference). If
>there were only one movie by the name Scarface and
>only one novel by that name, then to disambiguate the
>movie from the novel we would have [[Scarface
>(movie)]].
>
There are at least six distinct books three movies with the one word
title "Scarface" including the 1983 one by Paul Monette that relates to
the Oliver Stone screenplay for the movie from the same year.  I don't
know if they are all novels.  But the attitude of dealing with books or
novels later puts a far too narrow focus on the present issue.  How can
we ignore the books?  Another problem with the simple [Movie (year)]
format is that it may have the effect that a year-alone disambiguator
implies that the main word refers to a movie.  Do we really want to
reserve such an important disambiguation tool to apply to movies alone?

>The whole point here is to have the minimum amount of
>disambiguation information in order to distinguish one
>thing from another (thus the word "movie" is not
>needed to differentiate between the two movies with
>the same name).
>
"Minimum amount" is a good thing but not always the best.  If the most
effective disambiguation is a little longer that needn't be a big
problem.  A little redundancy can be very helpful.  We need a little
farsightedness here.  The shorter the movie title the greater the
likelihood that there a disambiguation problem lurking in the background.

>In fact one contributor has titled many movie articles
>in this very format without even knowing there was a
>movie naming convention (so many, that if the current
>convention is kept and if it is to be effective, then
>all those pages will have to be moved to the
>unnecessary (YEAR movie) format that will never be
>linked without pipes).
>
That's not a problem

>With the (YEAR) convention there is also less to type
>since the word "movie" would not be used (as in (YEAR
>movie) -- of course, (movie) would still be used when
>needed to differentiate one movie from something else
>that shares its name).
>
I think that many Wikipedians are long winded enough that typing one
more word should not be an excessive demand.

> In short, when two or more things have the same name
>/and/ they are the same type of thing, then it is
>perfectly reasonable to differentiate them based on a
>temporal aspect.
>
Disambiguation can be an art.  Considering the disambiguation of movies
in isolotion from everything else can become a problem at a later stage.
 We need to look at the process (as distinct from format) of
disambiguation as a whole.  I would make the specific proposal that "the
first level of disambiguation should answer the question 'what?'".


subject: [Wikipedia-l] German anti-free speech law and Helga

body:
--- Jens Frank <JeLuF at gmx.de> wrote:

> (I think we're becomming off topic, but it's
> an interesting difference between the US and
> Germany I wasn't aware of)

It is interesting, but (and I say this with much
respect) take to to the meta-wikipedia. :)

I didn't check my for the past two days, and I have
over 100 emails to deal with. Remind me to get off
Yahoo! mail and get a POP3 account...

Stephen G.

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Finance - Get real-time stock quotes
http://finance.yahoo.com


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Fwd: Re: Wikipedia.org request use of your modified 1913 dictionary definitions

body:
One problem is that the GPL and the GFDL are not
compatible. We would need him to relicense the
dictionary material.

Stephen G.

--- Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Yikes! I sent a request for permission to use the
> modified 1913 Webster
> dictionary definitions yesturday and today I got the
> below response. I'll
> probably need help answering some of these.

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Finance - Get real-time stock quotes
http://finance.yahoo.com


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Fwd: Re: Server down?

body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:
>
> ----------  Forwarded Message  ----------
>
> Subject: Re: Server down?
> Date: Mon, 26 Aug 2002 22:10:54 -0700
> From: lcrocker at nupedia.com
> To: Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com>
>
> > Is the server down for some reason? I can't access it.
>
> Well, maybe encouraging people to learn SQL wasn't such a
> great idea :-)  The SQL server was bogged down on something,
> so I just killed and restarted it.  Tim, if you were trying
> to run a query, let me know what it was and I'll see if I
> can come up with a faster equivalent.

It wasn't me I swear! I noticed the server crash-and-burn this
afternoon...

BTW your date is correct now, but there's something slightly screwy
about the time - according to netscape your message came through at
3.34am...

--

Karen AKA Kajikit

And on the seventh day, God said 'What my world needs is a creature that
will truly appreciate it in all its facets' -
and so He made the kitten.

Come and visit my part of the web:
Kajikit's Corner: http://Kajikit.netfirms.com/
Aussie Support Mailing List: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AussieSupport
Allergyfree Eating Recipe Swap:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Allergyfree_Eating
Ample Aussies Mailing List: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ampleaussies/

Love and huggles to all!


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: September 11 articles

body:
>
>
>I basically disagree with all of your proposals, which shouldn't be too
>surprising
>since I'm responsible for most of the entry. And being from New York I have
>a certain personal weight on it.
>
Yes, I expected you to respond.

>But a general philosophy that I believe is true for the entire encyclopedia
>which applies here in particular is: Don't remove information. If someone has gone
>to the effort to add information to Wikipedia, and you feel it is poorly
>presented, then improve the presentation. Don't delete it. There's no good reason to
>get rid of the subpages. They should be edited such that they follow a pyramid
>structure of general overview to specific information, but specific information should
>not be lost.
>
Well, we have some rules about what Wikipedia is not. Nr. 14 says: "A
news report". Many of the current entries
violate that, so they'll at least need some big rewrite. Many others
need NPOVing. Other articles such as "personal experiences" of course
NEVER belong in an encyclopedia.

>We are under *no* constraints of size. This is not paper.
>
Yes, but it is an encyclopedia. Also, it was proposed to move the
non-encyclopedic parts, not delete them.

>Similarly, with the casualties (and I'm working on correcting the missing
>persons/ casualties list--it's pretty inaccurate, but oddly, about the only one
>available on the Net), just because the current entries aren't full now doesn't mean they shouldn't
>be in the Wikipedia. There is tons of biographical information about nearly every one
>of the victims available; which should be added to Wikipedia.
>
Why? Every day I can read about at least a dozen of people that died. I
could enter an article on them. "John Doe died on date X in a traffic
accident." Not very useful, right? Or should we also list the 6 million
Jews, and millions of other people that died because of some kind of
artrocity? Have articles about each Palestinian killed by an Israeli
soldier?

>If you don't care about them, then ignore the entries, instead of deleting
>them. Other people do care. And that should be the criterion for what deserves to
>be in Wikipedia. As long as it follows the basic stylistic guidelines, any
>topic is worthy of entry.
>
With discussions going on about removing articles that say "A city in
Arizona", I think "A person that died on 9/11" is of the same category.
Also, the fact that some people care about an article does not
automatically mean it belongs in Wikipedia.

If these articles were not about an incident that happened in the USA,
most of these pages would have long been re-worked, adapted or deleted.

Jeronimo