body:
Amgine wrote:

>
> On 17-Aug-06, at 3:28 PM, Jeff V. Merkey wrote:
>
>>>
>> Well, as I said, I really could care less, and since a response  does
>> not
>> appear to be forthcoming to my question, I'll simply plod along and  get
>> back to
>> my translating work and MediaWiki enhancements. I have a talk page
>> is on
>> meta and I am placing my **individual** name removed by Aphia
>> back as a Cherokee translator (Aphia does not respond to any of my
>> questions on any site and is a non-responsive translation  coordinator).
>> I've enabled notification, and since you have stated I am welcome as a
>> Cherokee translator as in individual, I'll certainly be available.
>>
>> Jeff
>
>
> Such good-faith assumptions should not go unrewarded. Aphaia is not
> in US CDT (-5 UTC); she is in fact in +9 UTC, and may soon be waking
> up. Of course I am sure that you're completely opposed to expecting
> people who are not in your cultural milieu/timezone/language to
> respond promptly and immediately to an ettiquette demand from you,
> and that you will retract your caddish insensitive remarks. Unless
> you really do want to sound that way, in which case I apologize.
>
> Amgine
>
I've left messages for over a week to Aphia - she does not respond to me
at all.   That's ok.  No, I meant nothing by it other than to state
facts.   Please calm down and don't get so excited.    Aphia doesn't
have to talk to me, but convening secret conferences to discuss
something as meaningless and trivial to me as a website URL seems a
waste of everyone's time.  Particularly since I left it there as a
courtesy to the community and I could care less if it's on your page or
not.

Jeff

>
>
>
>------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>_______________________________________________
>foundation-l mailing list
>foundation-l at wikimedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>
>


list: wikimedia-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Jeff V. Merkey

subject: [Foundation-l] Removal of Cherokee Translators from Wikimedia


list: foundation-l

from_name: Gregory Maxwell

subject:
[Foundation-l] Wikimania 2008 and reflecting on what Wikimania
	is all about

body:
On 8/17/06, Robert Scott Horning <robert_horning at netzero.net> wrote:
> I do hope that Wikimania never gets to the size of mega-conferences like
> Comdex (which collpased under its own weight).  Still, as has been
> pointed out above, the number of Wikimedia participants has grown
> considerably, and there are more that 250 "active" Wikimedia projects
> right now with signficant content.  Getting even one rep from each one
> would be quite an undertaking at the moment.

It won't be easy to get solid data until after we have single sign in
but I suspect that, once you exclude the biggest projects, the overlap
is pretty significant. So it might not be as hard getting additional
coverage as you suspect.


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Steve Bennett

subject: [Wikitech-l] Wikipedia Suggest

body:
On 8/17/06, Nick Jenkins <nickpj at gmail.com> wrote:
> Yes, that is a problem, and to get around it I configured my proxy to silently rewrite certain requests so that they look like they
> come from en.wikipedia.org, but in reality they come from Julien's site. That allows me to get around this restriction (and probably
> GreaseMonkey would let you do something similar), but it won't be a viable option for 99.9% of people. For them, the suggestions
> need to come from the wikipedia (even if it's just a temporary two line script which bounces the request straight off to Julien's
> site).

Just to clarify, a greasemonkey script would allow anyone with:
a) firefox
b) greasemonkey installed (it's just a firefox extension)
c) the appropriate greasemonkey script installed (*very* quick and painless)
...to do this without hacking their proxy :)

Steve


list: commons-l

from_name: Brianna Laugher

subject: [Commons-l] Rethinking [[COM:DEL]]

body:
> > What do you mean, "within the image"?
> Discussing the matter withing the image description. The problem would be the missing documentation when the picture is deleted.

I would prefer to discuss on the talk page, it should be separated so
that if the result is 'keep' the debate is still around without diving
into the history.

> What about simple daily pages like we use at http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:LKB?

There's nothing inherently wrong with that approach... except there
are currently 48 days listed on [[COM:DEL]].... instead of the 7-10
you might expect. I don't know that making those ancient debates (back
to June 25, what is that, 7 weeks?) less visible is going to make them
more likely to be resolved.

Brianna


subject: [Wikitech-l] Apple's Wiki Server brings WYSIWYG to wiki

body:
On 8/17/06, Neil Harris <usenet at tonal.clara.co.uk> wrote:
> Use backquotes instead? eg. d``a, d``o, in which `` gets treated as a
> magic word (like RFC or ISBN) which is automagically, and transparently,
> converted to d""a and d""o within the parser at an
> early stage during page rendering?

If you're doing that, then why not just make d''a a magic word?

> Kludgy, yes, but backquote is a standard ASCII character, and at least
> on my keyboard, is easily accessible.

Yes, I don't think it's reasonable to expect people to click a menu
every time they want to insert an apostrophe...

Steve


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: [LiM] Manop

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Thai Wikipedia freezes

body:
Recently I have a problem accessing to Thai Wikipedia (
http://th.wikipedia.org). It froze many times with blank white pages with no
any single HTML code when I viewed the source. I need to reload two or three
times before the text came out. I also wrote on the Village Pump in Thai WP
several days ago, but seems no one has discussed about this problem yet.

I'm using both Firefox 1.5.0.6 and IE 7 beta 2 on Windows XP SP 2.

Best regards,
Manop (Thai Wikipedia)


from_name: Magnus Manske

subject: [Commons-l] Rethinking [[COM:DEL]]

body:
Brianna Laugher schrieb:
> On 17/08/06, Florian Straub <flominator at gmx.net> wrote:
>
>> What about having one page per day, discussing the deletion requests on the
>> talk page of the image and collecting them by using a template on the daily
>> page? Just an idea:
>> http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Flominator/Deletion_proposal
>>
>
> That's quite nice. Having the discussion on the image talk page is
> good because at the moment discussions are very separated from the
> images. However when we delete the image, would we then keep the talk
> page? That's a little odd.
>
> Also it wouldn't work for mass or multiple deletion requsts.
>
> There are some interesting points made on [[COM:VP]] as well. I like
> the idea of splitting by reason - Nilfanion suggested reasons such as
> "problem user" and "mass request" (for category/template request).
>
> To Gregory Maxwell - you mentioned the toolserver supplies "filtered
> links" to show what is up for deletion on "your wiki" - can you
> provide a link?
>
You all know about my "tasks" extension, do you? Where each task (e.g.,
a deletion request) gets automatically assigned a task talk page,
besides tons of other goodies? ;-)

Magnus

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from_name: Aphaia

subject:
[Foundation-l] Notice from Election Officials;
	2nd stage of confirmation process now begins

body:
Dear candidates,
thank you for your cooperation, we the Election Officials are now
going to the next step; your candidacy confirmation.

As the way to reach you most surely and confidentially, we have chosen
e-mail, precisely via wikimedia meta mail. Please make it sure for now
if your mail address preferences on meta has been already properly
authenticated. Further information about confirmation will be provided
to you by email from one of us via meta e-mail.

If you have no contact from us until the next Monday, please mail us.
In that case, we recommend you to use the same confirmation you set
for your meta mail for avoiding confusion, we'll try to reach you in
our all efforts though.

Sincerely,
--
Kizu Naoko
Wikimedia Election Committee, 2006.


from_name: Austin Hair

body:
I'm personally of the opinion that Wikimania should remain very much a
community event, and in fact bring it back to something closer to a
retreat than anything else.

Venue is obviously a big factor, here: more people will drop in off
the street for a well-publicized conference at Harvard than at a youth
hostel somewhere in Europe.  We were mindful of this when we chose the
location for Wikimania 2006, of course, and felt that the various
other benefits outweighed that drawback, but I was still disappointed
to see less community interaction this year than at Wikimania 2005.

A bigger factor, however, and a somewhat controversial one, is the
ability to buy conference passes for a single day only?especially the
day of the conference, on-site.  This year we did very well with
preregistration, and actually booked over our numbers for catering and
room capacity.  We closed registration altogether a few days before
the conference, and although I made a number of exceptions, only one
of them was for a Wikimedian.

In the last two weeks before the conference, the ratio of those paying
the "outsider" rate to those paying the community rate was running
just under 3:1.  Although I don't yet have the final numbers, total
attendance was split roughly 50/50 community/outsider.  (This is a
point in itself.)

For community members, the ratio of full conference passes to day
passes was roughly 6:1.  Outside the community, that ratio is 1.4:1.

These numbers should come as no surprise to anyone.  It's common sense
that Wikimedians don't wait until the last minute to decide whether or
not they're coming, and that they're interested in the whole
conference, not just seeing Larry Lessig.  I wanted to be perfectly
clear that the facts actually reflect that, however.

Day passes are fine for trade expos, but this is Wikimedia?our goal
should be the opposite end of the conference spectrum.  This isn't to
say that a Wikimedian whose circumstances suddenly change three days
before the conference can't buy a pass, or that someone who can only
get out of school for a day has to pay the full rate, but I don't see
the single-day pass coming back next year; neither can registration
continue in full force up until the day the conference opens.

I think we need to market Wikimania very differently in the future,
but the way we do that depends entirely on what form it takes, whether
it's split up into alternate/sub-conferences, and how.  This is where
Delphine's "real question" comes in, and I'm glad it's being
discussed.  I have my own thoughts on the matter, but I'd like to see
what people's initial thoughts are first.

Austin


subject: [Wikitech-l] Dajoo: a Java-based offline editor/viewer

body:
On 8/17/06, Simetrical <Simetrical+wikitech at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 8/17/06, Steve Bennett <stevage at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Is this not the sort of "backwards compatibility" that we could safely
> > do without? Does anyone intentionally use that kind of construct?
>
> Maybe, maybe not, but people expect that if there's a ''' open, then
> ''' will close it.  They won't expect an intervening '' (or [[ or ] or
> anything else) to affect matters.  Besides, what would you suggest
> they type, '''hi''''''''hello'''hi'''hello''''''''hi'''?  God only
> knows what that would do.

I don't think anyone would feel confident predicting what happens in
any of these cases. Mostly it comes down to "try it and see".

In the case of '''fooo''boooo'''.... well clearly something has gone
wrong somewhere. However we choose to interpret after that should be
undefined.

Seriously though, whoever came up with ''..'' for italics and
'''...''' for bold was, um, making life difficult!

> Well, I don't think it's so much a downside as something that's
> impossible to work into a formal grammar.  I'm guessing the issue is

Is it? Can't the formal grammar simply apply *after* all
transclusions? Like in C you have the "preprocessor grammar" and then
the actual grammar of the rest of the language (or am I dreaming)?

> A URL-like thing that was typed without any particular surrounding
> syntax (it gets autolinked).  Similar lookahead would presumably be
> necessary for RFCs, ISBNs, and PMIDs (okay, that's enough to convince
> me to agree that they should be ditched :) ).  In general, a lookahead
> of no more than one character is considered desirable.

What can I say, I don't like these "freelinks". They just don't seem
clean. Normal text which spontaneously turns into a link without any
special punctuation or anything. Hmm.

> He *seems* to be saying that you'd have to make special rules for each
> allowed HTML tag, and presumably each allowed attribute and property
> thereof, and maybe even every combination of them (!).  Would there be
> any advantage in leaving those out of the grammar and keeping Parser
> and Sanitizer separate as they are now?

I don't get why we even allow HTML tags, other than convenience. It's
not like the final output of the encyclopaedia is guaranteed to bear
any resemblance to a web page...

For instance, why do we support <b>? We have '''... It's just not
clean. (I dare someone to reply that ''' is semantic markup...heh.)

Steve


from_name: geni

body:
On 8/17/06, Delphine M?nard <notafishz at gmail.com> wrote:
> On the subject of size. I am personally not in favour of an
> *international Wikimedia conference* (keywords international and
> Wikimedia) that will hold more than 500 people, ever. The reason for
> this were clear last year, but even clearer this year, ie. opening the
> conference to 1000 people makes it, in my opinion, lose the
> "Wikimedia" touch, by bringing many people in who have in the end
> nothing to do with Wikimedia.

With the number of contributers we have (heck we have well over 1000
admins across the various project) 1000 does not seem to be an
illogicaly high number in future.

--
geni


body:
On 8/17/06, Simetrical <Simetrical+wikitech at gmail.com> wrote:
> It's at the bottom of the English [[Flag Day]] article:

My bad. I should make it a separate article - the two concepts are
only coincidentally related.

Steve


from_name: Alexandre NOUVEL

subject: [Commons-l] Rethinking [[COM:DEL]]

body:
Hi list,

---Brianna Laugher <brianna.laugher at gmail.com> wrote:
> requirements:
> * The requests still have to be on the [[template:deletion
> requests]].
> This is because the 'Commons-level' page is actually a 'shell' or
> 'wrapper' with some instructions, and these instructions can be
> translated, while the actual requests themselves are not.

Actually this can also be done by including a sub page of [[COM:DEL]]
that would contain the request list. Each item of this list may also be
a sub page of the list page itself.

> * Want to keep adding new items simple (possibly we can use tricks
> with an input box similar to
> http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/COM:FPC#Nomination to keep it
> outwardly simple)
> * Want to be able to archive individual items - archiving a day at a
> time is not appropriate because some debates drag on interminably
> (sometime while we wait for more information, replies from other
> people etc), and the system has to allow for these.
(...)

I've started some tests on my user page:
  http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Alno

Best regards from France,
--
Alexandre.NOUVEL at alnoprods.net
|-> http://www.alnoprods.net
|-> La copie priv?e et l'auto-diffusion menac?es : http://eucd.info
\ I hate spam. I kill spammers. Non mais.


from_name: Lars Aronsson

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Neapolitan double apostrophe (was Apple's Wiki
 Server brings WYSIWYG to wiki)

body:
Andrew Dunbar wrote:

> No problem. Linguists create grammars by interviewing people who

So instead of YACC, we should try Babelfish?

--
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se


subject: [Foundation-l] Foundation's position on non-free images

body:
On 8/17/06, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:

> 1) Thou shall not upload content which will place the foundation in legal peril.

Where does it say that and what sort of legal peril are we talking about?

Or in short is this a problem:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:American_McGee_Strawberry_Shortcake.jpg

A bit har to delete under current en rules.

--
geni


from_name: Florian Straub

subject: [Commons-l] Rethinking [[COM:DEL]]

body:
Hi List,

 "Brianna Laugher" <brianna.laugher at gmail.com> wrote on Thursday, August 17,
2006 9:00 AM:

>> What about simple daily pages like we use at
>> http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:LKB?
>
> There's nothing inherently wrong with that approach... except there
> are currently 48 days listed on [[COM:DEL]].... instead of the 7-10
> you might expect. I don't know that making those ancient debates (back
> to June 25, what is that, 7 weeks?) less visible is going to make them
> more likely to be resolved.

Since we have the chance to restore deleted images where should be the
problem in deleting everything that isn't clear after 7 or 14 days?

Regards,

Flo


from_name: GerardM

body:
Hoi,
It is the Wikimedia Foundation that will be the one that will be served with
a notice of intent to go to court. It is also really nice when individual
contributors do not have to face this type of music.

All in all, I am not impressed with people who do not consider these things.

Then again, I am also on record that I do not agree that we cannot have
pictures that are trademarked and can be freely used with our content but
are not Free in that we are allowed to change these images.. Having logos in
Commons, would make the special position of the Wikimedia Foundation logos
not special anymore; it would make it a standard way of having logos and
have it in a legal way. The current paractie is imho not really defencible
as it is not consistent. Given that some insist that there should be no
exceptions to the notion of that at Commons everything should be "FREE",
these people are what makes progress on this impossible.

Thanks,
     GerardM

On 8/17/06, Anthony <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:
>
> On 8/16/06, Erik Moeller <eloquence at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On 8/16/06, Anthere <Anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> > > I think the projects are not (should not be) managed by the
> Foundation.
> > > The Foundation supports the projects, which is very different. Jimbo
> or
> > > others may provide some guidance, but it is not the role of the
> > > Foundation to say "fair use is allowed" or "fair use is not allowed".
> >
> > I'll state for the record my disagreement with that. I think copyright
> > policy should be made on the Foundation level in cooperation with the
> > projects. The current situation is an unsustainable mess.
> >
> FWIW, I don't think the Foundation should come along and say "fair use
> is allowed" or "fair use is not allowed", but mainly because that's
> such a ridiculous statement - it would be like saying "free speech is
> allowed" or "free speech is not allowed".
>
> I do think it is the role of the foundation to work with the community
> to come up with an a consensus agreement on what is and isn't allowed,
> on a very high level basis.  The basis of the definition should be
> freedom, and the definition should answer the question "what is free
> enough" on a high level basis, without referring to laws of specific
> nations.  IOW, it'd answer the question of what to do with certain
> content which is copyrighted, not licensed under a free license, but
> could be used quite liberally without permission under certain
> conditions, such as fair use - without actually mentioning fair use.
>
> Anthony
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>


body:
Sabine Cretella wrote:

>>Then why was the name of the translator removed along with the website?
>>You removed not only the website, but the name of the translator
>>as well (both entries were removed and were unrelated to one another). I
>>really could care less if the website is there or not. I get massive
>>traffic and search engine scraping on the site and it matters little if
>>its listed on your translators page or not.
>>
>>Do you have an explanation for this as well?
>>
>>quote:
>>
>>"...we very much welcome Cherokee translators if they give us a direct contact..."
>>
>>Jeff
>>
>>
>>
>>
>Hi Jeff,
>
>sorry I did not note this - I suppose because the Cherokee wiki is not a
>wikimedia project  - I'll talk to Aphaia as soon as I meet her online
>and will let you know.
>
>Best wishes,
>
>Sabine
>Chiacchiera con i tuoi amici in tempo reale!
> http://it.yahoo.com/mail_it/foot/*http://it.messenger.yahoo.com
>
>

chr.wikimedia.org

I think it is a wikimedia project.

Jeff

>_______________________________________________
>foundation-l mailing list
>foundation-l at wikimedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>
>
>


body:
Jeff V. Merkey wrote:

>Sabine Cretella wrote:
>
>
>
>>>Then why was the name of the translator removed along with the website?
>>>You removed not only the website, but the name of the translator
>>>as well (both entries were removed and were unrelated to one another). I
>>>really could care less if the website is there or not. I get massive
>>>traffic and search engine scraping on the site and it matters little if
>>>its listed on your translators page or not.
>>>
>>>Do you have an explanation for this as well?
>>>
>>>quote:
>>>
>>>"...we very much welcome Cherokee translators if they give us a direct contact..."
>>>
>>>Jeff
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>Hi Jeff,
>>
>>sorry I did not note this - I suppose because the Cherokee wiki is not a
>>wikimedia project  - I'll talk to Aphaia as soon as I meet her online
>>and will let you know.
>>
>>Best wishes,
>>
>>Sabine
>>Chiacchiera con i tuoi amici in tempo reale!
>>http://it.yahoo.com/mail_it/foot/*http://it.messenger.yahoo.com
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
>chr.wikimedia.org
>
>

Sorry,

I don't edit on the english wikipedia at present nor do I plan to
anytime soon.

here's the URL.

chr.wikipedia.org

Jeff

>I think it is a wikimedia project.
>
>Jeff
>
>
>
>>_______________________________________________
>>foundation-l mailing list
>>foundation-l at wikimedia.org
>>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
>_______________________________________________
>foundation-l mailing list
>foundation-l at wikimedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>
>
>


subject: [Commons-l] Rethinking [[COM:DEL]]

body:
"Brianna Laugher" <brianna.laugher at gmail.com> wrote on Thursday, August 17,
2006 9:00 AM:

>> > What do you mean, "within the image"?
>> Discussing the matter withing the image description. The problem would be
>> the missing documentation when the picture is deleted.
>
> I would prefer to discuss on the talk page, it should be separated so
> that if the result is 'keep' the debate is still around without diving
> into the history.

What about collecting the talk pages of deleted images in a category
afterwards?

Regards,

Flo


from_name: Delphine Ménard

subject:
[Foundation-l] WG: Wikimania 2007 - get ready for the third
	edition.

body:
On 8/17/06, valdelli at bluemail.ch <valdelli at bluemail.ch> wrote:
> IMHO in Official requirements for bidding cities should be
> specified
> that town in country with local Wikimedia chapter are "strongly"
> supported in the final choice.
>
> IMHO the first problem is an organizational problem and if the
> Wikimedia's town is supported by a local chapter and other
> external
> chapters it means that WMF could confide in a group already
> present
> and organized.

Actually, allow me to disagree. I believe that Wikimania city ideas
should come from whoever feels like supporting them, whether or not
they are from a chapter. Of course, in a country with a chapter, help
from the chapter is appreciated, but not *needed*.

For the record, Frankfurt last year, as far as I can remember, was a
bid springing out from three individuals and was supported by
Wikimedia Deutschland *after* the city was chosen, not before.

> At moment I could read a lot of proposed towns without connection
> with local chapters (i.e. Geneva) which are only a "nice to have".
> In
> this moment these proposals seems to be only a brainstorming.

Yes, but brainstorming are gooooooood! I don't think the chapters
should try to take the bids into their stride or phagocytize them, but
rather allow for individuals to come with fresh ideas and help them
along the way if their ideas make sense, or not help them if they
don't want to.

Wikimania is a an international conference, not a national one...

Delphne
--
~notafish


from_name: valdelli at bluemail.ch

subject:
[Foundation-l] WG: Wikimania 2007 - get ready for the
	third	edition.

body:
>> present
>> and organized.

>Actually, allow me to disagree. I believe that Wikimania city
ideas
>should come from whoever feels like supporting them, whether or
not
>they are from a chapter. Of course, in a country with a chapter,
help
>from the chapter is appreciated, but not *needed*.

I agree. I said "strongly" support not "must".

>For the record, Frankfurt last year, as far as I can remember, was
a
>bid springing out from three individuals and was supported by
>Wikimedia Deutschland *after* the city was chosen, not before.

Yes, but in 2005 there were few possibilities.

In 2006 Toronto said that there was no Chapter in Canada to support
the initiative.

>> At moment I could read a lot of proposed towns without
connection
>> with local chapters (i.e. Geneva) which are only a "nice to
have".
>> In
>> this moment these proposals seems to be only a brainstorming.

>Yes, but brainstorming are gooooooood! I don't think the chapters
>should try to take the bids into their stride or phagocytize them,
but
>rather allow for individuals to come with fresh ideas and help
them
>along the way if their ideas make sense, or not help them if they
>don't want to.

>Wikimania is a an international conference, not a national one...

Brainstorming is brainstorming and people know that in the
brainstorming all is possible ("Wikimania on the moon? OK, it's
brainstorming"). I think that we should be in the first step (after
brainstorming) and we should be more concrete (at least following the
requirements).

Ilario


from_name: Andrew Dunbar

body:
On 8/17/06, Steve Bennett <stevage at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 8/17/06, Andrew Dunbar <hippytrail at gmail.com> wrote:
> > 99% clear so thanks very much. My advice then is to adpot a policy of
> > "use straight apostrophes for markup and curly apostrophes for words".
> > Where d''o and d''a will break formatting or require ugly workarounds,
> > d''o and d''a will always "just work". (And look better too).
>
> That would be practical if keyboards had a "curly apostrophe" key. How
> do you propose that editors type it?

All of the wikis I've used for the past couple of years have some sort of
character insert menu. Look in MediaWiki:Edittools
For an advanced implementation look at the English Wiktionary.

Maybe not compatible with touch-typing but 100% compatible with wikitext
, italics, and wiki linking.

Andrew Dunbar (hippietrail)

> Steve
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>

--
http://linguaphile.sf.net


from_name: Nick Jenkins

subject: [Wikitech-l] Wikipedia Suggest

body:
> In the meantime, can anyone think of how to make this work as a
> javascript hack?

Sure, and I can even show you screenshots of me using it. Like the saying goes, "the future is already here, it's just not widely
distributed yet" :-)

You can check out the experimental screenshots, and an explanation of how it was done, here:
http://nickj.org/Experiment_with_Suggestion_Searching_on_Wikipedia

As you can see, it definitely has rough edges, but the basic concept works well. The main obstacles to normal people using it are
the JavaScript cross-domain restrictions (details below), and updating the current MediaWiki search area to have the option of using
suggestion searching.

>> I was talking about integration in *wikipedia*, but if I understand
>> correctly, you
>> are talking about doing query on my web site from wikipedia search box ?
>> If yes, it will probably be a little bit difficult because of browser
>> protection, you can
>> not use http request in javascript to another host.
>
> Ok, so that rules out integrating via a user script until the search
> database is hosted at wikipedia?

Yes, that is a problem, and to get around it I configured my proxy to silently rewrite certain requests so that they look like they
come from en.wikipedia.org, but in reality they come from Julien's site. That allows me to get around this restriction (and probably
GreaseMonkey would let you do something similar), but it won't be a viable option for 99.9% of people. For them, the suggestions
need to come from the wikipedia (even if it's just a temporary two line script which bounces the request straight off to Julien's
site).

All the best,
Nick.


list: wikien-l

from_name: stevertigo

subject: [WikiEN-l] CITE

body:
--- "Daniel P. B. Smith" <wikipedia2006 at dpbsmith.com> wrote:

> >  Calls to CITE are too often just smokescreen for a weak
> > or incivil or POV argument,
>
> And objections to CITE are sometimes just smokescreens for
> disagreement with the verifiability policy itself.

Indeed. And calls for verifiability are themselves sometimes
just a smokescreen for pushing a POV.

-Stevertigo

__________________________________________________
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from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [WikiEN-l] CITE nazis

body:
stevertigo wrote:

>As I said before sources are often just claims and interpretations, and
>virtually none of it is "facts." So why should Wikipedia expect to be a higher
>standard? And of we want to introduce some value judgements about who's
>interpretations are more correct, we need to understand that such is often too
>close to POV to deal with without some broader editorial policy (and heirarchy).
>
In a higher standard one honours bullshit for what it is no matter who
says it.  That's better than deleting it and pretending it was never said.

Ec


from_name: Ben Garney

body:
On 8/17/06, Jay R. Ashworth <jra at baylink.com> wrote:
>
>
> I don't think that a Flag Day for some exceedingly esoteric
> construction which needs to be cleaned up to make a formal parser
> necessary is completely impossible, but it would have to be pretty
> negligible, pretty important, or both... it goes back to that circle I
> mentioned.

So what if we had a "lossless" wikisyntax to XML converter? It seems like
that wouldn't be an impossibility (given we're already parsing wikisyntax to
_HTML_).

What are the reactions to e.g. converting the backend to use that XML
storage, then enforcing it on the editor side, as well?

Obviously we'd have to be clever on the conversion (like making VERY sure
it's a "lossless" switch, and finding a computationally feasible way to get
it done - maybe update every article as it's touched?).

To my way of thinking, if we had an XML backend store and a reliable
conversion path, then we could:
   a) Provide wikisyntax editing to those who want it (by filtering through
the converter)
   b) Develop meaningful wysiwyg editing tools without having to first
reimplement the wikisyntax parser in javascript and every other language we
want to touch.
   c) Allow direct access to the XML, making all kinds of researchers happy.
   d) Incrementally roll out changes to bring things more in line with
Semantic Web, again with conversion paths.

Engineering wise, a "lossless" path to me could be developed by developing
these components:
1. Wikisyntax <-> WikiXML converters.
2. WikiXML -> HTML renderer.

Determing that it is working properly can be done by testing against the
Wikipedia corpus. If we can go from WikiXML to Wikisyntax and back,
byte-exact, we've acheived our goal. Maybe it's ok to relax that restriction
(especially if we can determine in some other way the page is corrupt or
invalid - or maybe we have a list of exceptions), but I think it's one
that's both acheivable and reasonable.

We may also want to do validation on the HTML render path; if we want to be
really strict we can require that the conversion path gives identical output
(perhaps sans whitespace?) to the current parser & renderer.

Once we have everything in XML, there are a number of good tools and
standards to enable us to be Unicode compliant, to do various kinds of
conversions and updates on the XML, and otherwise process our data, so we
can evolve it forward to meet our needs.

In any case - if we find that having a lossless path would satisfy the
constraints, then those who are interested can focus on writing a validation
framework... and then they can go implement it. :)

--
Ben Garney
Torque Technologies Director
GarageGames.Com, Inc.


from_name: Thomas Pedersen

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Translate gnu text

body:
If I want to use a GFDL text (which I have edited a bit) on my site I have
to
* Link to the original aricle
* Use the same license GFDL

But if I want to translate a original GFDL text to my language and use it,
is it enough to do the same as above ?


body:
Erik Moeller wrote:

>On 8/16/06, Anthere <Anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>
>>I think the projects are not (should not be) managed by the Foundation.
>>The Foundation supports the projects, which is very different. Jimbo or
>>others may provide some guidance, but it is not the role of the
>>Foundation to say "fair use is allowed" or "fair use is not allowed".
>>
>>
>I'll state for the record my disagreement with that. I think copyright
>policy should be made on the Foundation level in cooperation with the
>projects. The current situation is an unsustainable mess.
>
Having this set at the Foundation level would create just as much of a
mess.  Fair use is only one part of the problem.  There are other
matters that cannot be resolved with a single policy.  The merger
principle is of great concern to Wiktionary, and it is not unusual to
find publications that include copyright notices on material that is
essentially uncopyrightable.

It's useful for the Foundation to have a broadly worded policy
supporting the principle of respect for copyright.  It's also useful for
the Foundation to establish protocols for dealing with formal requests
to take down copyright violating material.  Beyond that projects need to
learn how to deal with such matters responsibly.

Ec


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Translate gnu text

body:
Yes. I want to write an article in danish based on an article in english
(from wikipedia).
Whats the GFDL correct procedure if
* The article in danish is an almost word for word translation of the
original english article
* The article in danish just use SOME of the information in the original
english article

In this case there is no danish article on that subject on wikipedia.

> The Foundation's interpretation of the GFDL has been that the two
> critical elements of compliance with the license are as you say. You
> must have a link to the "live" original article so the history can be
> viewed (which allows authorship to be determined) and the link to the
> GFDL license itself.
>
> I don't quite follow how the second part of your question is different.
> Do you mean "language" as in your choice of words, or as in Spanish,
> Swahili, etc.?
>
> Thomas Pedersen wrote:
>> If I want to use a GFDL text (which I have edited a bit) on my site I
>> have
>> to
>> * Link to the original aricle
>> * Use the same license GFDL
>>
>>
>> But if I want to translate a original GFDL text to my language and use
>> it,
>> is it enough to do the same as above ?
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Wikipedia-l mailing list
>> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
>> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>>
>>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l


from_name: Steve Bennett

body:
On 8/17/06, Simetrical <Simetrical+wikitech at gmail.com> wrote:
> content.  If you aren't adding meaning, you shouldn't use semantic
> tags, and in practice, '' and ''' are not used in any way exclusively
> to denote emphasis, but rather to denote all sorts of things.

In particular, I don't think ''' is *ever* used to add emphasis. It's
used to highlight key words, or occasionally to point out that a
linked article has Lots Of Good Stuff, but due to those meanings, we
tend to avoid using it for emphasis. Italics ('') are probably 50/50
emphasis or album titles....

Steve


subject: [WikiEN-l] CITE nazis

body:
On 8/17/06, Mark Gallagher <m.g.gallagher at student.canberra.edu.au> wrote:
> The cruft (and I *do* mean cruft) that fills many policy pages,
> including for a time [[WP:IAR]][0], is not the sort of reasoning I mean.
>  It's not "this is why we made this rule".  It is instead, "here's some
> musings on how I'd interpret the exact wording of the rule, combined
> with the musings of a dozen other people, all of whom wouldn't give a
> rats about the real reasoning here but have conflicting views about what
> the best loopholes are".

Yeah you're probably right about all this. Most of the "cruft" is
probably written by the half-clueful. Those who are grasping to
understand what the policy is really about, and have to put it in more
concrete terms, which may not really be true in all instances.

Though I don't really know how to bridge the gap from a purely
abstract ideal like "verifiability" to a useful set of guidelines,
without coming up with bullshit rules like "don't quote from blogs".

Steve


from_name: SJ

subject: [Foundation-l] board, babysitting, speaking engagements, etc.

body:
It is a pity that a discussion about how to get people talking about
Wikipedia and its sibling projects, something that all of us might do
more of, was sidetracked into a discussion about who gets money, or on
how much financial contribution a talk "brings in".

All of us might do more talking about Wikipedia -- casually and
formally -- to increase awareness, editing, and use of the projects.
The most important result of a great speech, considering its impact on
the projects, their editing communities, their user communities, and
the foundation, is rarely going to be its financial influence on the
foundation.

As later replies in the thread noted : honoraria for most speakers are
the exception, not the rule; and people are usually asked to talk
about the development of Wikipedia and its siblings, not about the
Foundation itself.  Working to vastly increase the # of speaking
opportunities out there seems as important, if not moreso, than
finding ways to regulate who can speak where under what conditions.

SJ

On 8/12/06, Delphine M?nard <notafishz at gmail.com> wrote:

> This return on investment could be on an "assume good faith" basis,
> ie. if a speaker is offered XXX dollars per year to give speeches,
> they might want to make a donation to the Foundation one day or the
> other, or at least be in a position where they can attest their talk
> has brought something to the Foundation, may it be contacts (and hence
> potential sponsors that turn into real sponsors), a great press
> coverage (and hence an increase in donations) etc.
>
> Another thing is also, that although I agree with Danny that we should
> be in a position where we can refuse to send a speaker, this should
> only be keeping in mind the return on investment. We should never find
> ourselves in a position where we refuse to send a speaker *because*
> there is no money involved. One speech that might cost us money to
> arrange can bring millions of dollars in, another that costs nothing
> and brings money to one person (the speaker) might bring the
> Foundation absolutely nothing. There is a balance to be found.

I hope the 'return on investment' here attends to the benefit accruing
to the projects -- their content, their editing and user and reuse
communities -- something rarely expressable in terms of money given to
the foundation.


body:
On 8/17/06, Edward Z. Yang <edwardzyang at thewritingpot.com> wrote:
> In terms of italics, they should be used for emphasis, though the
> tags are more suited for the task. Although most major style guides
> (such as MLA) recommend the use of italics for book titles, it is
> technically improper to mark them with  since this precludes a simple
> CSS change to change the style from one format to another. Ideally, it
> would probably be .
>
> Now, if any editor actually wants to type that all out...

I guess the smallest we could do it would be {{t|Gone with the Wind}}
- it's not inconceivable.

Steve


body:
On 8/17/06, Steve Bennett <stevage at gmail.com> wrote:
> I guess the smallest we could do it would be {{t|Gone with the Wind}}
> - it's not inconceivable.

Heh, it's actually only 2 characters longer than the corresponding raw
wikitext: ''Gone with the Wind''. But so much uglier.

Steve


from_name: David Gerard

subject: [WikiEN-l] wikipedia interview (Respekt, Czech Republic)

body:
On 16/08/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:

> For your interest - answers I just gave a journalist. Corrections welcomed.
> Do we have a Czech Wikipedia press contact? If so, they should get in
> touch with the journalist too - something about these questions leads
> me to think the writer is thinking of Wikipedia is just the English
> Wikipedia.

User:Darwinek spoke to the journalist for half an hour, which will
hopefully give the Czech Wikipedia a bit of a push:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:David_Gerard&diff=next&oldid=70076637

- d.


from_name: Jeffrey V. Merkey

body:
Sabine Cretella wrote:

>>Sorry,
>>
>>I don't edit on the english wikipedia at present nor do I plan to
>>anytime soon.
>>
>>here's the URL.
>>
>>chr.wikipedia.org
>>
>>Jeff
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>>I think it is a wikimedia project.
>>>
>>>Jeff
>>>
>>>
>>>
>Yes, this is a wikimedia project, but has less than 10,000 articles.
>Therefore your entry does not go into the first part of the list but
>under "other languages". And that is where I now moved your entry.
>
>I hope you understand that we understand well how relevant Cherokee for
>the regional languages is (please don't understand the term regional).
>Nonetheless all of us have to follow these rules and many languages are
>still below the 10,000 hurdle. I hope to see the number 1000 soon - let
>me know when you reach it ... it is hard work for a small community.
>Once you have 1000 the step to reach 5000 is much faster and from there
>to 10,000 is faster again.
>
>I know you are doing loads of work with machine translation on the
>non-wikimedia wiki - unfortunately, up to now I did not manage to
>install a proper font to be able to read that wiki - I tried more than
>once, but for some reason my computer refuses to install the font :-(
>
>Best wishes from Italy,
>
>Sabine
>Chiacchiera con i tuoi amici in tempo reale!
> http://it.yahoo.com/mail_it/foot/*http://it.messenger.yahoo.com
>_______________________________________________
>foundation-l mailing list
>foundation-l at wikimedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>
>
>
Sabine,

Thanks for putting the entry in the right place.

download the font CODE2000.zip from www.wikigadugi.org and unzip it. Go
to control panel and select "fonts" then "install new font". After
installing it activate your web browser and select UTF-8 for "view" and
under the font selector select "Code 2000" as the default font for
webbrowsing. Then it will work (you may have to exit the browser and
reload to get it working). Cherokee fonts work by default on Linux, MS
Windows is a little harder. MS Arial Unicode Font also will work (if you
have MS Office installed).

Jeff


body:
On 8/17/06, Ron Hall <ron.hall at mcgill.ca> wrote:
>     But think of the power that you can potentially bring
>     {{u|Gone With the Wind}} - underline it
>     {{uc|Gone With the Wind}} - Uppercase it
>     {{r|Gone With the Wind}} - Reverse it
>     {{sup|Gone With the Wind}} - Super script it
>     {{r,sup|Gone With the Wind}} - Reverse and Superscript it
>     {{s|Gone WIth teh Wind}} - Sub-Title

Dunno about the others, {{sup|...}} behaves exactly as you describe,
on en at least.

One possible benefit of such templates is that they become documented
in a predictable place. Simply search for template:sup and you'll find
what it does, and when to and not to use it. How would you find out
what <sup> did?

Steve


subject: [Foundation-l] bylaws (second call)

body:
Lars Aronsson wrote:

>Ray Saintonge wrote:
>
>
>>I have yet to see a clear rationale for a memberless Foundation.
>>In some jurisdictions such a concept is unthinkable.
>>
>>
>Really?  Exactly which jurisdictions don't provide for memberless
>foundations?  This news should be added to the article
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_%28charity%29
>
>If I could think of a single property that is unique for
>foundations, it is exactly this, that they don't have (or need)
>members.
>
The one characteristic that is unique to a charitable foundation is that
it distributes funds to others, and does not primarily perform the
charitable works itself.  In Canada charitable designation is a federal
matter, and is in addition to whatever is done to constitute the
organization.  It may be based on formal incorporation, an irrevocable
trust or an unincorporated organization.  Unincorporated organizations
will normally only be practical for the smallest of charities, but even
there there is a provision that the benefits of the organization may not
accrue to the "members" See
http://www.cra-arc.gc.ca/E/pub/tg/t4063/t4063eq.html

Incorporation may be either Federal or Provincial but the law generally
requires that provision for members must be included in the by-laws.
For the British Columbia situation see
http://www.qp.gov.bc.ca/statreg/stat/S/96433_01.htm#section6

Ec


subject: [Foundation-l] bylaws (second call)


from_name: Any File

body:
Brad Patrick  wrote
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Wikimania 2008 and reflecting on what
> >> On the subject of size. I am personally not in favour of an
> >> *international Wikimedia conference* (keywords international and
> >> Wikimedia) that will hold more than 500 people, ever. The reason for

> >
> The barrier to entry to edit in your pajamas is far different from the
> barrier to entry of international travel for many, if not most,
> contributors or admins.  We also skew heavily towards students.  The
> difference among people from our different pockets of interest was
> obvious from this year's conference, and our international delegations
> were tiny.  We must do a much better job of international visitation,
> scholarships, and the like.

It would be a good idea to think to do, as well the annual internation
(that is worldwide) wikimania edition, some continental or
subcontinental edition. My idea is not to think at these continental
wikimania as a local meeting, but as addictional editions where can go
people who can not go to the main international edition. Of course the
will be somehow smaller than the "big" one, but I would like to still
call (and consider) them international.

Of course it is not an easy thing to do.

AnyFile


from_name: Daniel P. B. Smith

subject: [WikiEN-l] CITE

body:
>  Calls to CITE are too often just smokescreen for a weak
> or incivil or POV argument,

And objections to CITE are sometimes just smokescreens for
disagreement with the verifiability policy itself.


subject: [WikiEN-l] CITE nazis

body:
--- Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:

> In a higher standard one honours bullshit for what it is no matter who
> says it.  That's better than deleting it and pretending it was never said.

Youre such an Inclusionazi Ray,

;)

-SV

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subject: [WikiEN-l] rationale behind policy (was: CITE nazis)

body:
On 8/17/06, Steve Summit <scs at eskimo.com> wrote:
> But this reminds me of an idea I had yesterday for ordinary
> pages, which might apply to policy and other project-space pages
> too.  Right now, for every page, there's an associated talk page.
> What if every page had *two* associated pages, "Talk" and
> "Rationale"?  Talk would be as it is now, but Rationale would
> be a mostly-static (or at any rate as static as the main page)
> description of *why* the main page says what it says, and why
> it does not say the things it does not say.  That is, it would
> contain the distilled consensus of everything you'd want a
> would-be editor of the article to see, but which mere readers
> would have no need for.

Doesn't a <!-- comment --> up the top of the page serve that purpose
very well? I'm always impressed when I see good ones, that explain
"No, point X does not need to be made, it's linked in paragraph 3"
etc.

> Today, talk pages sort of perform this function, but they're
> so free-wheeling, and so subject to various ad-hoc kinds of
> archiving, that it's an arbitrarily hard problem for a new editor
> (who's trying to be responsible) to discover whether there's any
> precedent or prior argument behind a change he's about to make,
> that might be controversial or have been tried before and decided
> against.

You can also segregate that kind of long term standing agreement to a
special section up the top of the talk page.

Steve


subject: [Foundation-l] WikiTrans Support for All Languages

body:
Sabine Cretella wrote:

>Yes, this is a wikimedia project, but has less than 10,000 articles.
>Therefore your entry does not go into the first part of the list but
>under "other languages". And that is where I now moved your entry.
>
>I hope you understand that we understand well how relevant Cherokee for
>the regional languages is (please don't understand the term regional).
>Nonetheless all of us have to follow these rules and many languages are
>still below the 10,000 hurdle. I hope to see the number 1000 soon - let
>me know when you reach it ... it is hard work for a small community.
>Once you have 1000 the step to reach 5000 is much faster and from there
>to 10,000 is faster again.
>
>I know you are doing loads of work with machine translation on the
>non-wikimedia wiki - unfortunately, up to now I did not manage to
>install a proper font to be able to read that wiki - I tried more than
>once, but for some reason my computer refuses to install the font :-(
>
>Best wishes from Italy,
>
>Sabine
>Chiacchiera con i tuoi amici in tempo reale!
> http://it.yahoo.com/mail_it/foot/*http://it.messenger.yahoo.com
>
>

Sabine,

I think it's time to approach this subject based on your explanation of
language evolution. I make you an offer
to speed italian translation (and any other language) for your Wiki.

At present, I have wikitrans adapted to read XML dumps from the English
Wikipedia, dissect english using the CMU
lnk grammar parser, performing a lexicon word by word translation, then
running a conjugator and verb constructor
over the translated sentences and reordering noun-verb pairs and
morpheme and outputing into a target langauge with proper,
person, tense, and plurality. WikiTrans is setup to use hierarchical
lexicons and hierarchical thesarauses for English.
I can convert over 98% of English at present. The lexicon, thesaurus,
conjugators, and inference engine are language
neutral by design -- I can use it on any language.

I also have an AI inference engine which can tune the output to specific
dialects. It works as follows:

After I output into the target language in order to "teach" the
inference engine a set of rules, I take a dozen or so articles
and go through them by hand and correct them then run the inference
engine comparing and recording tensing and minor
corrections -- in other words it "learns" how to properly construct for
a unique dialect. I currently can tune it to output
into Giduwa or Otali in Cherokee by altering the lexicon hierarchy for a
target dialect.

I can parse and translate the entire Wikipedia 7GB XML dump in about 15
minutes. What can be done here is for me to
output into say -- italian and speed up the process of editing for a
target language and inputing articles by a proofreader.

In the current version, every 5th article or so in Cherokee requires me
to proofread them and correct very subtle errors in
tense or noun disambiguation, so its not perfect, but its better then
writing them by hand, and most of it is over 95% correct.

If you are interested, download the lexicons and roget thesauraus from
the FTP server at ftp.wikigadugi.org/wiki and replace
the cherokee words with italian or whatever and let me know where to get
them. will then post runs for any target language
and you can correct a dozen or so long articles and send me the files
back and I will run the inference engine and create table
rules that would give you close to 98% accuracy when compared against
the English Wikipedia. It will rapidly speed translations
to other languages and allow the non-english wiki's a better chance of
catching up. After we build the syntax rule databases
for each language, I'll give them back to you with an additional
extension that will allow you not only to translate wikipedia, but
also put a front end on a proxy server and allow web browsers to access
websites and translate pages and web content real time
similair to what google is doing now.

If you and the other non-english editors are interested, download and
populate the lexicons (I am at 230,000 words and phrases at present)
and everytime Wikipedia posts an XML dump, I'll machine translate them
and you can download them and use them to populate the
other Wiki's. We will need a system to exclude articles already reviewed
and translated.

My wife and son in law are going to help me get the German lexicons and
rule sets created for Deutch, the other languages are wide open.

Jeff


from_name: Phoebe Ayers

body:
On 8/17/06, Austin Hair <adhair at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm personally of the opinion that Wikimania should remain very much a
> community event, and in fact bring it back to something closer to a
> retreat than anything else.

One of the biggest questions -- problems? opportunities? -- planning
the program this year was that the question of "what Wikimania is" was
and is largely unanswered (we came up with a working definition, which
is reflected in the CfP; perhaps another definition was carried in by
participants in Wikimania '05). One of my biggest regrets with the
program this year was that there were not more community
(Wikimedia)-centered presentations and events; in fact, not that many
(comparatively) were submitted -- despite the advertising on the
projects that we did do -- and we had to push for more. This is only
one part of the community atmosphere at the conference, of course --
the lack of community space at the physical venue is an unrelated
question that none of us anticipated well enough.

But don't forget that this is an inclusive and fluid community, and
what counts as part of that 'community' is subject to interpretation.
Is research about wikis relevant? Is a presentation by lawyers on laws
that absolutely affect the continued operations of the projects? Is
talking about free culture, generically, at a gathering of people who
are intimately involved in the biggest free culture project in the
world relevant? What about education? Reference publishing? It seems
to me that to restrict the conference to a very literal set of topics
revolving around Wikimedia/pedia would in turn lessen the value of the
conference, and lessen the potential chance for new and great ideas to
come out of it that would benefit the projects. Let's not be insular,
as a community. Not everyone who has good and relevant ideas has
worked their way through editing, mailing lists, Foundation business,
etc. and become a Wikip/media "community member" according to some
entirely vague set of criteria which seem to come down to "I recognize
their username." Honestly, folks, I think it's fair to say that none
of you knew who I was before I came to Wikimania the first time; I
certainly wasn't a "person who counted" in the Foundation or even
Wikipedia.... and for better or worse, without attending Wikimania '05
I certainly wouldn't have been as heavily involved in Wikimania '06 as
I was.

If Wikimania is determined to be *simply* a social gathering -- or
simply a policy-making and direction-setting gathering for the
projects and the Foundation -- then that is another question, and if
so, next year let's not waste time and energy inviting the Larry
Lessigs of the world, since they are surely not community members in
that sense (unless he actually edits, of course).

On a practical level: I agree that restricting day admissions, or
having just one day that's open to day registration, is a good idea,
and I agree with Austin about aiming towards a "retreat" feel.
Probably having more topical preconferences besides just hacking days
is also a good idea. There's been talk about something similar for
social science research/wiki research; having a full day just to talk
about Foundation issues in an open but not-entirely-public forum would
also be useful. Finally, of course there must be more international
visitors; this is a goal that no one who helped organize disagrees
with, and we all would have liked to have done better. For those of
you playing along at home, we did hand out a few dozen scholarships to
people from all over the world -- fairly remarkable for a non-profit
organization and a non-profit conference that just started real
planning 9 months in advance. And I think the final count on the
countries that attendees were from was just under 100? Whatever it
was, next year and the years after should strive to be even more
internationally diverse, whether that means linguistically,
culturally, geographically, or otherwise. (Although, having the
conference in a particular area does mean -- and should mean -- that
more people from that area show up in that particular year; otherwise,
why move the conference at all? We'll just have it in St. Pete's every
year...)

What else? What *is* Wikimania? As Delphine says, 2006 was only the
second conference, and there's no reason the tone of the event can't
change radically for next year.

best,
phoebe/brassratgirl

--
phoebe s. ayers
http://wikimania2006.wikimedia.org


references:
<44E4AA84.7090105@wolfmountaingroup.com>	<2A080EDA-D759-4579-B76E-B9C0922BAC9D@saewyc.net>	<44E4CCB2.6030205@yahoo.it>	<44E4D853.50406@wolfmountaingroup.com>	<44E4F7C5.3040302@yahoo.it>	<44E50534.6070207@wolfmountaingroup.com>	<44E505C4.9090905@wolfmountaingroup.com>	<44E506BA.5040503@yahoo.it>
	<44E53AB7.2010906@wolfmountaingroup.com>

body:
Jeffrey V. Merkey wrote:

>Sabine Cretella wrote:
>
>
>
>
>
>>Yes, this is a wikimedia project, but has less than 10,000 articles.
>>Therefore your entry does not go into the first part of the list but
>>under "other languages". And that is where I now moved your entry.
>>
>>I hope you understand that we understand well how relevant Cherokee for
>>the regional languages is (please don't understand the term regional).
>>Nonetheless all of us have to follow these rules and many languages are
>>still below the 10,000 hurdle. I hope to see the number 1000 soon - let
>>me know when you reach it ... it is hard work for a small community.
>>Once you have 1000 the step to reach 5000 is much faster and from there
>>to 10,000 is faster again.
>>
>>I know you are doing loads of work with machine translation on the
>>non-wikimedia wiki - unfortunately, up to now I did not manage to
>>install a proper font to be able to read that wiki - I tried more than
>>once, but for some reason my computer refuses to install the font :-(
>>
>>Best wishes from Italy,
>>
>>Sabine
>>Chiacchiera con i tuoi amici in tempo reale!
>>http://it.yahoo.com/mail_it/foot/*http://it.messenger.yahoo.com
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
>Sabine,
>
>I think it's time to approach this subject based on your explanation of
>language evolution. I make you an offer
>to speed italian translation (and any other language) for your Wiki.
>
>At present, I have wikitrans adapted to read XML dumps from the English
>Wikipedia, dissect english using the CMU
>lnk grammar parser, performing a lexicon word by word translation, then
>running a conjugator and verb constructor
>over the translated sentences and reordering noun-verb pairs and
>morpheme and outputing into a target langauge with proper,
>person, tense, and plurality. WikiTrans is setup to use hierarchical
>lexicons and hierarchical thesarauses for English.
>I can convert over 98% of English at present. The lexicon, thesaurus,
>conjugators, and inference engine are language
>neutral by design -- I can use it on any language.
>
>I also have an AI inference engine which can tune the output to specific
>dialects. It works as follows:
>
>After I output into the target language in order to "teach" the
>inference engine a set of rules, I take a dozen or so articles
>and go through them by hand and correct them then run the inference
>engine comparing and recording tensing and minor
>corrections -- in other words it "learns" how to properly construct for
>a unique dialect. I currently can tune it to output
>into Giduwa or Otali in Cherokee by altering the lexicon hierarchy for a
>target dialect.
>
>I can parse and translate the entire Wikipedia 7GB XML dump in about 15
>minutes. What can be done here is for me to
>output into say -- italian and speed up the process of editing for a
>target language and inputing articles by a proofreader.
>
>In the current version, every 5th article or so in Cherokee requires me
>to proofread them and correct very subtle errors in
>tense or noun disambiguation, so its not perfect, but its better then
>writing them by hand, and most of it is over 95% correct.
>
>If you are interested, download the lexicons and roget thesauraus from
>the FTP server at ftp.wikigadugi.org/wiki and replace
>the cherokee words with italian or whatever and let me know where to get
>them. will then post runs for any target language
>and you can correct a dozen or so long articles and send me the files
>back and I will run the inference engine and create table
>rules that would give you close to 98% accuracy when compared against
>the English Wikipedia. It will rapidly speed translations
>to other languages and allow the non-english wiki's a better chance of
>catching up. After we build the syntax rule databases
>for each language, I'll give them back to you with an additional
>extension that will allow you not only to translate wikipedia, but
>also put a front end on a proxy server and allow web browsers to access
>websites and translate pages and web content real time
>similair to what google is doing now.
>
>

I want to use this with MediaWiki for external links from articles that
will allow real time translation
of linked content from other sites wikipedia refers to if they are
english. I have not addressed going from
non-english to other languages, but these extensions could be developed
and I am not oppposed to
opening up the translator. I want to get further along with language
neutral abstraction layers
in WikiTrans before we open it up.

Jeff

>If you and the other non-english editors are interested, download and
>populate the lexicons (I am at 230,000 words and phrases at present)
>and everytime Wikipedia posts an XML dump, I'll machine translate them
>and you can download them and use them to populate the
>other Wiki's. We will need a system to exclude articles already reviewed
>and translated.
>
>My wife and son in law are going to help me get the German lexicons and
>rule sets created for Deutch, the other languages are wide open.
>
>Jeff
>_______________________________________________
>foundation-l mailing list
>foundation-l at wikimedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>
>
>


from_name: Sabine Cretella

body:
Amgine schrieb:
>
> On 17-Aug-06, at 10:42 AM, Jeff V. Merkey wrote:
>
>> Concensus from whom?   a triumverate of three?
>>
>> At any rate, discussion is open on the topic.   If having a Cherokee
>> based community website is so offensive, I'll maintain it off site and
>> the ANA and Federal Government finanacial contributors are welcome to
>> help us with the program.
>
> The promotions and translations subcommittee is an element of the
> Communications Committee. It's open to *individuals* to be involved,
> and they have a discussion list.
>
> Your translators are undoubtedly welcome to be involved in group, as
> people. But websites are not people.
>
>
> Amgine
>
Thank you Amgine! I talked with Aphaia yesterday about this. Fact is: if
we allow one website to be there we also have to allow others - we very
much welcome Cherokee translators if they give us a direct contact. Now
that on meta enotif is enabled they could simply create an account and
activate notification and just set up a translator's profile. They will
then get an e-mail if their discussion page is changed.

Imagine what would happen if we allowed for websites to be there - links
like:
http://translatorscafe.com/
http://proz.com
http://gotranslators.com/

would appear sooner or later - and their reasoning would be: "well there
are so many translators who would like to help for free". There of
course we can find translators if we ask them - but it is not the case
to put links to any website into a list of translators only because
there are many translators to be found ... well I could also add my own
translator's portal - there are plenty of people who helped with
Wikimania 2005 - I always kept this apart because my portal has nothing
to do with the foundation. The only thing these translators have is a
tag "Translator for Wikimania 2005" that allows me to find them
immediately if I have to ask someone for help.

Jeff, please don't understand this wrong - we really talked quite some
time about that. It was not "just a decision taken because of some kind
of a strange mood".

Best,

Sabine
Chiacchiera con i tuoi amici in tempo reale!
 http://it.yahoo.com/mail_it/foot/*http://it.messenger.yahoo.com


from_name: Austin Hair

body:
On 8/17/06, valdelli at bluemail.ch <valdelli at bluemail.ch> wrote:
> If you upload images in Commons you follow rules established for
> Commons and used in any countries. If you upload images in Hungarian
> Wikipedia you use hungarian law and these images could be used only
> for hungarian side of Wikipedia.

Unfortunately, that's not at all how it works.  The Hungarian
Wikipedia is not even remotely tied to the nation of Hungary, and
likewise for the many languages of our various projects.  You may as
well say that the Italian Wikipedia follows the laws of Italy,
although as a Swiss contributor you should know better.

The operative laws are those of the United States and of the nations
of the individual contributors involved, along with those of anyone
who might use the resulting material.  Currently, projects (and even
individual languages of those projects) are allowed to set their own
copyright policies, and while the trouble arising from that has thus
far amounted to a relative nuisance, the issue is something that
should be discussed and?fingers crossed?resolved very soon.

This is not to say that I expect it will happen, but at least it's
being discussed.

Austin


from_name: Michael Snow

body:
Delphine M?nard wrote:

> On 8/17/06, George Herbert <george.herbert at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> And yet all those US people whose involvement in en.wikipedia.org is
>> significant and who should be allowed to come to a conference, if they
>> are interested.
>>
>> The foundation has competing interests with the conference: one
>> predominantly huge-sized project, and the whole of everything
>> including the much smaller ones and the global picture.
>>
>> If the interests of the two collide to some degree, there are
>> solutions: split the conference into World and US conferences,
>> dual-track the conference, etc.
>
> I am not sure I understand you correctly, but I seem to read that you
> are hinting at the fact that the English Wikipedia is predominantely
> US contributors. If that is the case, and although I am not a
> contributor there myself, I believe this is forgetting the diversity
> of our biggest project. My take is there are enough international
> contributors who contribute to the English Wikipedia to never fall
> into a US/rest of the world kind of split, which at any rate, would
> seem to be an ultimate failure of Wikimedia ever pretending to any
> kind of international scope.

Actually, I think the confusion here might be because George may not
have fully understood your earlier point to which he was responding. Not
because of language issues, but experience. Specifically I mean that
George didn't experience the people at Wikimania (at least I don't
believe he was there, correct me if I'm wrong) and may have missed your
point.

Which was not, as I understood, a comment about competing interests
between people involved in Wikimedia projects in the US and people
involved in the same projects elsewhere. If I may restate it, the point
was that for this year's Wikimania, as opposed to last year, many US
attendees had no real personal connection to the projects. They were
there for academics, or curiosity, or networking, or various other
motivations. Nearly all of the international attendees were legitimate
project participants. Meanwhile, many project participants *from the US*
who might have wanted to attend undoubtedly could not, due to the same
time/travel/cost difficulties that hinder international attendance.

Regardless of the numerical distribution by country, I'm confident that
enough US contributors are committed to all projects, including the
English Wikipedia, remaining *international* projects, that they would
reject attempts to create such a split. Similarly, I believe that the
international contributors to the English Wikipedia would reject it. We
have to work together, or our mission will not succeed, in no small part
because it would undermine our commitment to neutrality.

--Michael Snow


subject: [Foundation-l] bylaws (second call)

body:
Ray Saintonge wrote:

>Lars Aronsson wrote:
>
>
>
>>Ray Saintonge wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>>I have yet to see a clear rationale for a memberless Foundation.
>>>In some jurisdictions such a concept is unthinkable.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>Really?  Exactly which jurisdictions don't provide for memberless
>>foundations?  This news should be added to the article
>>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_%28charity%29
>>
>>If I could think of a single property that is unique for
>>foundations, it is exactly this, that they don't have (or need)
>>members.
>>
>>
>>
>The one characteristic that is unique to a charitable foundation is that
>it distributes funds to others, and does not primarily perform the
>charitable works itself.  In Canada charitable designation is a federal
>matter, and is in addition to whatever is done to constitute the
>organization.  It may be based on formal incorporation, an irrevocable
>trust or an unincorporated organization.  Unincorporated organizations
>will normally only be practical for the smallest of charities, but even
>there there is a provision that the benefits of the organization may not
>accrue to the "members" See
>http://www.cra-arc.gc.ca/E/pub/tg/t4063/t4063eq.html
>
>Incorporation may be either Federal or Provincial but the law generally
>requires that provision for members must be included in the by-laws.
>For the British Columbia situation see
>http://www.qp.gov.bc.ca/statreg/stat/S/96433_01.htm#section6
>
>Ec
>
>_______________________________________________
>foundation-l mailing list
>foundation-l at wikimedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>
>
>
Churches are non-profits in the US as well and can use the funds for
internal expenses. In fact, most religious organizations don't
distribute monies at all
and they are all consumed in-house in programs supporting their
organizations . They have whatever rules they wish for members and they
are not regulated. Our Corporation Sole by laws are a single page and
simply state the corporation has the rights to acquire assets and real
property
and receive funds and dispose of them how it wishes. It varies state by
state, but Utah is pretty open on how non-profits can operate. There just
cannot be and co-mingling of personal funds with non-profit monies.

Jeff


subject: [Foundation-l] bylaws (second call)


subject: [Foundation-l] bylaws (second call)

body:
Elisabeth Bauer wrote:

>Ray Saintonge wrote:
>
>
>>I have yet to see a clear rationale for a memberless Foundation.
>>
>>
>and I have yet to see a clear rationale for a foundation with members.
>
>For not having members, I see several reasons:
>* adds one more organisational burden on the already strained office
>resources of the foundation (it would need a membership management then,
>letters to the members, lots of paperwork)
>
Not if the bulk of the membership is handled electronically.  Being an
editor of a WMF project would be a major criterion in determining
membership.

>* what about the chapters? Should their members become automatically
>members of the Foundation? How do you deal with the injustice of
>different membership fees then (polish chapter has no fees, germans
>pay)? Or should they have to choose between single memberships and
>double memberships? What would be the incentive for becoming a member of
>a local chapter then?
>
Chapters can run their own show, and membership (if any) in a chapter is
determined by that chapter independently of membership in WMF.  Charging
fees is an option available to a chapter.  The incentive for a local
chapter is based on activities related to the geographic area in which
it is situated.

>* How do you deal with the injustice of membership fees in general? One
>dollar is much more money in Pakistan than in the US...
>
I have never suggested that the payment of fees should be a significant
basis for membership.

>* Would people in Pakistan even think of becoming members in an US based
>foundation? Or would it turn into a totally US centric organization,
>contrary to its international and multilingual goals?
>
Ideally I would like to see a jurisdiction for international foundations
coming under UNESCO, but I can't realistically expect to see that any
time soon.  The current fact is that we are incorporated in the United
States, and 60% of our current Board members are United States
citizens.  What suggestions do you have for making it less US centric?
At least having a membership base with a majority outside of the US
could be a beginning.

>and last but not least, what would be the relation between the countless
>members of the projects and the paying foundation members? Should only
>the latter have the right to vote for board members and influence
>foundation decisions?
>
I think that those who become members by paying a fee will always be a
minority in relation to those who become members through their editing.
One member, one vote.

>Originally, I was undecided about the membership issue, but more and
>more I have the feeling that it would not work well with the
>organizational structure we developped over the last years.
>
With due respect, it seems to me that guiding one's actions by the sole
prospect a being administratively overwhelmed is somewhat defeatist.

>We have a large community from all over the world and they constitute
>the members of the foundation.
>
Under the existing by-laws yes.  I can't see where putting everyone
under some undefined notion of "Community" will help that.

>If the next board elections show that the
>community is unable to fullfill this role (by electing someone
>unsuitable), we can think about a different setup, but honestly, I trust
>the people to elect a responsible new board member.
>
We need to have that trust, but occasionally people do screw up.

>In the future, we'd
>have to think about how to make sure that the smaller projects get
>adequate influence and that the foundation is not dominated by the
>english wikipedia. But even this, I think, is better accomplished by
>letting members of all projects have their say instead of just those who
>   bothered to mail a membership form to the foundation and pay 100$.
>
At this stage it would be enough to ensure that all members as
individuals are treated equally.  Ensuring the rights of each small
projects is a different challenge when there are so many of them.

Ec


subject: [Foundation-l] bylaws (second call)


from_name: Kelly Martin

body:
On 8/17/06, Delphine M?nard <notafishz at gmail.com> wrote:
> I am not sure I understand you correctly, but I seem to read that you
> are hinting at the fact that the English Wikipedia is predominantely
> US contributors. If that is the case, and although I am not a
> contributor there myself, I believe this is forgetting the diversity
> of our biggest project. My take is there are enough international
> contributors who contribute to the English Wikipedia to never fall
> into a US/rest of the world kind of split, which at any rate, would
> seem to be an ultimate failure of Wikimedia ever pretending to any
> kind of international scope.

For the record:

Contributors to enwiki:
53% US
15% GB
7% CA
4% AU
2% DE
1% NL, FR, SE, IE, NZ, JP
11% everywhere else.

This is based on geolocated IP addresses from a few months back.  Note
that these are based on number of EDITS, not on number of EDITORS
(which is harder to evaluate).  A slim majority of edits to enwiki
come from the US.

I hope to talk Greg into running the same numbers for some of the
other larger projects.

Kelly


subject: [Foundation-l] bylaws (second call)

body:
Jeffrey V. Merkey wrote:

>Ray Saintonge wrote:
>
>
>>The one characteristic that is unique to a charitable foundation is that
>>it distributes funds to others, and does not primarily perform the
>>charitable works itself.  In Canada charitable designation is a federal
>>matter, and is in addition to whatever is done to constitute the
>>organization.  It may be based on formal incorporation, an irrevocable
>>trust or an unincorporated organization.
>>
>Churches are non-profits in the US as well and can use the funds for
>internal expenses. In fact, most religious organizations don't
>distribute monies at all
>and they are all consumed in-house in programs supporting their
>organizations . They have whatever rules they wish for members and they
>are not regulated. Our Corporation Sole by laws are a single page and
>simply state the corporation has the rights to acquire assets and real
>property
>and receive funds and dispose of them how it wishes. It varies state by
>state, but Utah is pretty open on how non-profits can operate. There just
>cannot be and co-mingling of personal funds with non-profit monies.
>
To avoid a misunderstanding there is a distinction made in Canadian law
between charitable foundation and charitable organization.  What you
describe is more characteristic of a charitable organization.

Ec


subject: [Foundation-l] bylaws (second call)


from_name: Cathy Ma

subject: [Foundation-l] Wikimania 2007 - get ready for the third edition.

body:
I assume you mean "english as a foreign language" / "english as a second
language".  Perhaps those on this list who have experience with events
that cater to multilingual (and ESL/EFL) audiences can suggest how other
groups reach these goals.

I had the experience of doing conferences in Shanghai and Hong Kong as a
spotaneous translator and blogger - not sure if you guys noticed, there are
Chinese Wikipedians who translated the conference sessions through Skype
chatroom in real time this year.  Completely grassroot and self-initiated.
And the users (20-40 of them) were very excited.

Although I find a ratio of 50% international / 50% local interesting,
I believe a higher ratio of local people makes Wikimania lose its
"international" meaning altogether.

On the other hand irc-based (less costly, well, and less organized)
translation worked wonder last time when Rebecca
McKinnon<http://rconversation.blogs.com/>and I were translating on
#irc in English for the Chinese Blogger
Conference, so that people from knows what's going on even when (1) they
don't speak Chinese (2) they are not in the conference.  There were even
blogger from Bahrain writing up the final blog for us reporting all the
events and photos from flickr.

But key question is - are people *that* that interested in Wikimania?  This
year the conference is different in a sense I feel less international
presence was on the IRC, but it could be me.  I wonder, like what Delphine
said, how interested people are in coming for Wikimania?  It is a bit loose
this time, when compared to some other academic conferences, or even last
year's atmosphere.  Do we have themes like certain (academic) conferences*?
Even like O'reilly conferences they do post a big question and people
collectively answer that during and after the conference.  Or First Monday
conference that focused on the importance of open content publishing and its
future.  If we have something like that, will it lift the conference spirits
a bit?

Just random ideas.  :p  Feel free to coment.

*note:  I know!  Academic conferences are boring, and not sponteneous, but I
mean more like First Monday's or O'Reilly's Conferences though

-cathy

On 8/17/06, Delphine M?nard <notafishz at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 8/17/06, Aphaia <aphaia at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Sorry interception, but I prefer to say "have taken", "have been
> > taking" or just "is ongoing" ... because I have now many things to
> > discuss about its linguistic aspects ... I am now strongly hesitant to
> > call it an intenational event in its full meaning. I know most of
> > "int'l" computer related conf. are monolingual but Wikimania is not
> > only a specific-computer science-related-topic- oriented conference
> > but also aiming to a community event? And as a humanist who studies
> > philosophy, an int'l conf or session I have attended and first imagine
> > is at least bilingual. So, you won't be realized the monolinguality of
> > Wikimania beaten me heavily. It was really a shock when I learned not
> > only the ongoing conference at Boston but also Frankfurterkonferenz
> > had been also monolingual (de facto English), since I have read
> > possible interpretation and translation were discussed by mailinglist
>
> For the record, simultaneous translation is an enormous budget,
> especially when it comes to many languages. The question is always,
> which of the chicken or the egg comes first. ie. Would providing
> translation in say 5 languages actually bring enough people who speak
> those languages to make it worthwhile? Or would the so many people
> speaking one language present at the conference would make it
> worthwhile to have translation in that language? It is a tough call.
> In an ideal world, we'd be very very rich and could provide audio
> guides for every single language represented.
>
> Although I find a ratio of 50% international / 50% local interesting,
> I believe a higher ratio of local people makes Wikimania lose its
> "international" meaning altogether.
>
> > Besides my personal impression, as English speaker as
> > a foreign language, I found many "it would be much greater if ..."
> > like sorts at conference. Like transription providing for at least
> > keynotes (planeries). Due to the current workload, currently I have no
> > enough time to summarize my proposal for universal access to Wikimedia
> > things for "ESAFL/ESASL", so I expect you as those to input your
> > opinion frankly, and also expect the next year conf. is greatly
> > progressing at this point.
>
> I believe I can be hardly taxed of monolinguism activism myself, but I
> still believe that Wikimania in English, wherever it happens, makes
> perfect sense. That we facilitate the coming of speakers who do not
> speak English, and make sure they can express themselves in their own
> language, sure. That we provide translation for the language of the
> country that hosts the conference, why not. But in the end, English
> should remain the main language, even if we need to make sure that it
> is never an obstacle for people to come.
>
>
> Delphine
> --
> ~notafish
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>

--
MPhil Candidate,
Department of Sociology,
The University of Hong Kong
http://cathyma.com


from_name: Mark Gallagher

subject: [WikiEN-l] CITE nazis

body:
G'day Steve,

> On 8/16/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>I believe I tried rewriting WP:LIVING in that manner, but it seems to
>>have become long-winded and didactic - and hence bloody useless -
>>since then. Could people please hack at it with a guide to *ease of
>>use*? Thanks ever so much.
>
> Maybe our policy pages need to be divided into "policy" and
> "discussion". The policy bit, which should never be more than a page,
> should say "do this, and don't do that". The discussion can have the
> reasoning why, the special cases, and all that other crap that always
> gets in there.

The reasoning is the most important *part* of any policy.  This is
because rules only exist to make you think before you break them; when
you know the reasoning behind a particular rule, it's so much easier to
think along the right lines, so you don't needlessly break an
appropriate rule or needlessly uphold an inappropriate one.

The cruft (and I *do* mean cruft) that fills many policy pages,
including for a time [[WP:IAR]][0], is not the sort of reasoning I mean.
  It's not "this is why we made this rule".  It is instead, "here's some
musings on how I'd interpret the exact wording of the rule, combined
with the musings of a dozen other people, all of whom wouldn't give a
rats about the real reasoning here but have conflicting views about what
the best loopholes are".

For the potentially Clueful searching our policy pages, this sort of
thing only acts to obscure the truth about how Wikipedia works.  For the
eager newbie trying to learn how to behave according to what he's heard
about Wikipedia's arcane lore, this cruft is confusing and harmful to
his education.  For the seasoned newbie who thinks he's not a newbie
anymore, the cruft provides a valuable weapon for the beating up of more
Clueful individuals while screaming ancient and evil spells corrupted,
as many things are, by the Chinese Whispers Effect.

The cruft that builds up on policy pages is a terrible thing, and I can
fully understand why David wants to take a machete to it.  However, I'm
not sure that restriction policy pages to: "the rule" and "a short piece
where the long-winded discussion used to go" would be helpful.  I dare
say if we did that, the reasoning would vanish completely[1] and be
replaced by the useless cruft.

[0] Fair dinks!  There was a longish discussion about the rules which
     applied when one wanted to invoke IAR.

[1] Rather than being, like the reasoning behind Gratiano's wayward
     tongue, "as two grains of wheat hidden in two bushels of chaff".

--
Mark Gallagher
"What?  I can't hear you, I've got a banana on my head!"
- Danger Mouse


from_name: Tels

body:
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Hash: SHA1

Moin,

On Thursday 17 August 2006 20:51, Ron Hall wrote:
> Steve Bennett wrote:
> > On 8/17/06, Steve Bennett <stevage at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > I guess the smallest we could do it would be {{t|Gone with the Wind}}
> > > - it's not inconceivable.
> >
> > Heh, it's actually only 2 characters longer than the corresponding raw
> > wikitext: ''Gone with the Wind''. But so much uglier.
>
>     But think of the power that you can potentially bring
>     {{u|Gone With the Wind}} - underline it
>     {{uc|Gone With the Wind}} - Uppercase it
>     {{r|Gone With the Wind}} - Reverse it
>     {{sup|Gone With the Wind}} - Super script it
>     {{r,sup|Gone With the Wind}} - Reverse and Superscript it
>     {{s|Gone WIth teh Wind}} - Sub-Title

POD is a I<fun> B<language>, C<widely> used, but L<hated|see hated> by some.

:)

Best wishes,

Tels

- --
 Signed on Thu Aug 17 23:41:41 2006 with key 0x93B84C15.
 Visit my photo gallery at http://bloodgate.com/photos/
 PGP key on http://bloodgate.com/tels.asc or per email.

 "People who are rather more than six feet tall and nearly as broad
 across the shoulders often have uneventful journeys. People jump out at
 them from behind rocks then say things like, 'Oh. Sorry. I thought you
 were someone else.'" -- Terry Pratchett

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from_name: Jay R. Ashworth

body:
On Thu, Aug 17, 2006 at 07:17:11PM -0700, Ben Garney wrote:
> On 8/17/06, Jay R. Ashworth <jra at baylink.com> wrote:
> > I don't think that a Flag Day for some exceedingly esoteric
> > construction which needs to be cleaned up to make a formal parser
> > necessary is completely impossible, but it would have to be pretty
> > negligible, pretty important, or both... it goes back to that circle I
> > mentioned.
>
> So what if we had a "lossless" wikisyntax to XML converter? It seems like
> that wouldn't be an impossibility (given we're already parsing wikisyntax to
> _HTML_).
>
> What are the reactions to e.g. converting the backend to use that XML
> storage, then enforcing it on the editor side, as well?

I Am Not A Wikimedia Foundation Employee.

That said, there are two sorts of Flag Days: those which affect users
and those which don't.

What you're suggesting here (and Simetrical has suggested before) would
-- assuming that conversion is *really* lossless, which I don't know
can be guaranteed at the moment -- only flag programs, not hundreds of
thousands of heads.

That makes it just a tad liklier to ever happen.

> Obviously we'd have to be clever on the conversion (like making VERY sure
> it's a "lossless" switch, and finding a computationally feasible way to get
> it done - maybe update every article as it's touched?).

Yeah; and which processor that XML<->WT conversion happened on would be
critical for load reasons...

> To my way of thinking, if we had an XML backend store and a reliable
> conversion path, then we could:
>    a) Provide wikisyntax editing to those who want it (by filtering through
> the converter)
>    b) Develop meaningful wysiwyg editing tools without having to first
> reimplement the wikisyntax parser in javascript and every other language we
> want to touch.
>    c) Allow direct access to the XML, making all kinds of researchers happy.
>    d) Incrementally roll out changes to bring things more in line with
> Semantic Web, again with conversion paths.
>
> Engineering wise, a "lossless" path to me could be developed by developing
> these components:
> 1. Wikisyntax <-> WikiXML converters.
> 2. WikiXML -> HTML renderer.
>
> Determing that it is working properly can be done by testing against the
> Wikipedia corpus. If we can go from WikiXML to Wikisyntax and back,
> byte-exact, we've acheived our goal. Maybe it's ok to relax that restriction
> (especially if we can determine in some other way the page is corrupt or
> invalid - or maybe we have a list of exceptions), but I think it's one
> that's both acheivable and reasonable.

Hmmm...

> We may also want to do validation on the HTML render path; if we want to be
> really strict we can require that the conversion path gives identical output
> (perhaps sans whitespace?) to the current parser & renderer.

I, personally, am a bit less concerned there: it's like advertising
photography (where the printed ad in the magazine actually has to match
the PMS color of the object) vs color pictures of the local parade in
the newspaper (where you only care that the clown's face is 'pretty').

> Once we have everything in XML, there are a number of good tools and
> standards to enable us to be Unicode compliant, to do various kinds of
> conversions and updates on the XML, and otherwise process our data, so we
> can evolve it forward to meet our needs.
>
> In any case - if we find that having a lossless path would satisfy the
> constraints, then those who are interested can focus on writing a validation
> framework... and then they can go implement it. :)

Aw, *ick*.

Y'all are talking me into it.

Quick!  Somebody talk me back out of it! :-)

Cheers,
-- jr "isn't it a good thing it doesn't matter what I think?" a
--
Jay R. Ashworth                                                jra at baylink.com
Designer                          Baylink                             RFC 2100
Ashworth & Associates        The Things I Think                        '87 e24
St Petersburg FL USA      http://baylink.pitas.com             +1 727 647 1274

	The Internet: We paved paradise, and put up a snarking lot.


from_name: brion at pobox.com

subject: [Wikitech-l] MediaWiki automated test run failure 2006-08-18

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

Running test TODO: Table security: embedded pipes (http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2006-April/034637.html)... FAILED!
Running test TODO: Link containing double-single-quotes '' (bug 4598)... FAILED!
Running test TODO: Template with thumb image (with link in description)... FAILED!
Running test Template infinite loop... FAILED!
Running test TODO: message transform: <noinclude> in transcluded template (bug 4926)... FAILED!
Running test TODO: message transform: <onlyinclude> in transcluded template (bug 4926)... FAILED!
Running test BUG 1887, part 2: A <math> with a thumbnail- math enabled... FAILED!
Running test TODO: HTML bullet list, unclosed tags (bug 5497)... FAILED!
Running test TODO: HTML ordered list, unclosed tags (bug 5497)... FAILED!
Running test TODO: HTML nested bullet list, open tags (bug 5497)... FAILED!
Running test TODO: HTML nested ordered list, open tags (bug 5497)... FAILED!
Running test TODO: Parsing optional HTML elements (Bug 6171)... FAILED!
Running test TODO: Inline HTML vs wiki block nesting... FAILED!
Running test TODO: Mixing markup for italics and bold... FAILED!
Running test TODO: 5 quotes, code coverage +1 line... FAILED!
Running test TODO: HTML Hex character encoding.... FAILED!
Running test TODO: dt/dd/dl test... FAILED!

Passed 412 of 429 tests (96.04%) FAILED!


subject: [Foundation-l] bylaws (second call)

body:
Ray Saintonge wrote:

>Jeffrey V. Merkey wrote:
>
>
>
>>Ray Saintonge wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>>The one characteristic that is unique to a charitable foundation is that
>>>it distributes funds to others, and does not primarily perform the
>>>charitable works itself.  In Canada charitable designation is a federal
>>>matter, and is in addition to whatever is done to constitute the
>>>organization.  It may be based on formal incorporation, an irrevocable
>>>trust or an unincorporated organization.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>Churches are non-profits in the US as well and can use the funds for
>>internal expenses. In fact, most religious organizations don't
>>distribute monies at all
>>and they are all consumed in-house in programs supporting their
>>organizations . They have whatever rules they wish for members and they
>>are not regulated. Our Corporation Sole by laws are a single page and
>>simply state the corporation has the rights to acquire assets and real
>>property
>>and receive funds and dispose of them how it wishes. It varies state by
>>state, but Utah is pretty open on how non-profits can operate. There just
>>cannot be and co-mingling of personal funds with non-profit monies.
>>
>>
>>
>To avoid a misunderstanding there is a distinction made in Canadian law
>between charitable foundation and charitable organization.  What you
>describe is more characteristic of a charitable organization.
>
>Ec
>
>_______________________________________________
>foundation-l mailing list
>foundation-l at wikimedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>
>
>
In most US States, they can operate just about any way they want (except
they cannot divert or co-mingle personal monies). There are Corporation
Soles and Non-Profit Corporations. What you name them doesn't matter.
The IRS and most states stopped granting Corporation Sole status to new
entities about 2004 due to a wave of tax fraud that swept the US with
individuals creating Corporation Soles and diverting personal assets to
dodge Income Tax, but some states still allow them for legitimate
organizations. Utah banned any new ones after 2004. Ours was formed in
2001 so we still have it. One nice thing about a Corporation Sole is you
are not required to ever file an annual report in Utah -- ever.

Jeff


subject: [Foundation-l] bylaws (second call)