body:
On Sunday 09 January 2005 06:27, Jens Ropers wrote:
> Quite true, however for most (if not all) languages, there is a flag
> that is commonly understood to symbolize the language as well
> (depending on context).

Using flags to represent languages is stupid and discriminatory.

> No other symbols exist that so clearly and
> graphically identify the respective languages. And I thing it having

Language maps.

--
NSK
The Wikinerds Community Federation of Science Wikis
Owner of the Wikinerds Portal http://portal.wikinerds.org
Owner of the NerdyPC IT Wiki http://www.nerdypc.org


list: wikitech-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Robert Dodier

subject: [Wikitech-l] Random page bias

body:
Hello,

If I'm not mistaken, the random page scheme makes some pages
much more likely to be retrieved than others. If I understand
correctly, each page is assigned a random number (cur_random)
when it's created. To retrieve a random page, a random number x
is generated and the page with cur_random > x and lower than
any other cur_random is returned.

The probability of retrieving a page is proportional to the
gap between its cur_random and the next lower cur_random.
If cur_random is generated uniformly, the gaps have an
exponential distribution. This implies there will be some
gaps that are much larger than others. I guess that we could
directly test this by dumping out cur_random and computing
the gaps.

Since the bias (if it exists) is independent of everything
else (category, age, size, authors, etc etc) I think it
would be no more than a curiosity, except for people who
are doing some kind of comprehensive statistical stuff.

Sorry if this is just a rerun of some earlier discussion.
I did look but couldn't find anything.

best,
Robert Dodier


list: wikien-l

from_name: Anthere

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Re: www.wikipedia.org no longer redirects to the en main
	page

body:
I'd like to all what has been said that there will be redir

Mark Pellegrini a ?crit:
> I'd like to start out by noting that www.wikipedia.org no longer redirects
> to the english
> wikipedia's main page. Instead, it's been turned into a replica of the
> language template.
> Deeper links ( www.wikipedia.org/wiki/name_of_article ) still work, but the
> main page
> does not.
>
> First of all, this is a MAJOR, MAJOR change and was totally unannounced. Nor
> did anyone in the community get a chance to object before it was put into
> place.
> (Because I suspect there would have been a major outcry)

Hello.

If you are interested in any international matters, please register to
wikipedia-l mailing list and check in http://meta.wikimedia.org where
these topics are discussed.

Actually, this has been going on for more than two years, and was
recently discussed on wikitech as well.

I invite to see that mail from Brion Vibber :
http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2002-October/023565.html
Which lead to a huge discussion.

See :
http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2002-October/thread.html

This discussion revived from time to time :-)

> Second of all, I cannot fathom why the this was changed. By now, there's a
> huge
> inertia behind the fact that www.wikipeda.org links to the english main
> page.
> This is going to break *MANY* links, bookmarks, etc. We (the english
> Wikipedia) are
> goings to lose significant number of potential contributors because of this.

Do not worry about this Mark. Articles are redirected.

Please check for example http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/agriculture

You will notice it is redirected to the english article, so no links
will break. No bookmark will be entirely lost.

The best thing english reader will get to know in seing the page from
now is that other languages exist, and this, many people just do not
know yet. It is good they discover it.

> Why the hell was this changed? Why was no one told before hand, or even
> afterward?
>
> --Mark

It was changed because the english is not a sphere around which
everything gravitates anymore. The children grew up and they are getting
recognition in the adult world. A parent should always be happy of this :-)

Anthere


list: foundation-l

subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Quarto II Apologies - sort of

body:
rose.parks at att.net a ?crit:
> Sj-
>
>      I do apologize for claiming that Quarto II was on the foundation website.
>      I did find it on meta. There is a lot more content here now.

Most content is set now. The content under work is on meta so that
everyone can work on it.
Quarto will be moved there only when the issue is done as few people can
edit over there. Only minor corrections such as typo should be done on
foundation. All the work should be on meta.

Report of what is still under work may be found here :
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WQ/Draft
Roughly, what is still missing is essentially Jimbo's letter, a little
bit of board report, and some update about stats and similar. Plus fancy
  things like pictures and all this, which does not need to be copyedited.
The interview is not yet included either.

All what is currently on http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WQ/2 is
basically final, but for the stats things I am not sure of.

>      I have been copyediting a paper copy of an earlier version.
  Do you want me to continue or not. For this amount of content some
assistance would help.

Absolutely. I would be very pleased that you help.

>      As I said earlier, if you are going to move it to foundation,
I have to confirm my password. I am listed there as an editor.
Also, I could really use an update on what has been going on.

Do not worry, it is not time yet for moving it there.

>
>                     As Ever,
>
>                          Ruth Ifcher

Thanks for your help Ruth.


list: wikimedia-l


list: wikipedia-l

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: [Note: Obscene language on Tsunami Article]

body:
Gerard Meijssen a ?crit:
> Anthere wrote:
>
>> Everything approved at some point on en, ultimately is applied on
>> other projects...
>
>
> This is exactly the reason why it is correct that things to do with
> en:wikipedia only should be discussed on the en:wikipedia mailing list.
>
> This mailing list is to deal with all things wikipedia. When the
> en:wikipedia decides for all projects, it is hardly NPOV. I am sure that
> many feel ill at ease with the systemic bias that gives us everything
> what is decided in the en:wikipedia context. I believe that with the
> growth of the other projects it becomes less acceptable that the English
> language wikipedia decides how things will pan out. Yes, people could
> vote on en:wikipeda but do not, because it is not their project.
>
> Thanks,
>    GerardM

You know...

Given the complaints we sometimes can read now about "why was this
decision taken and we never heard about it" from english editors, I
think we can basically say that most decisions are now not taken any
more by english wikipedia.

Though, it still is the case for software features. Typically, a feature
such as the one suggested by Jimbo, will mostly interest english
editors, because the english wikipedia is basically the one project
really suffering vandalism on its most famous current event articles.
Since other pedias do not have yet this problem, they are hardly
motivated to discuss it yet. When this will happen, the decision will
already have been taken. This is a systematic bias we can not really do
anything against ;-)


from_name: Karl Eichwalder

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Bibliography

references:
<200501062354.AAA23339@germaine.webtechnologies.lu>
	<shhdlsh22l.fsf@tux.gnu.franken.de> <41E03792.8040605@telus.net>

body:
Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> writes:

> From the beginning one of the purposes of the "Author" pages in
> Wikisource has been bibliographic.

I consider Wikisource as superfluous.  We should join forces with the
"Project Gutenberg" (that's what I do).

Please, re-read this thread.  Author pages are not good enough.  We need
a database system that you can query with well define protocols like
[[de:Z39.50]]

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


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: www portal: "The Free Encyclopedia" in Japanese?

body:
Mark Williamson a ?crit:

> One prediction I have is that somebody will suggest adding flags to
> make it easier to choose languages. This is a BAD idea because there
> are speakers of French in Japan, speakers of Thai in Malta, speakers
> of Catalan in Greece, etc; also some languages are indigenous to more
> than one country, or they don't have a corresponding flag (for
> diaspora languages such as Yiddish and Ladino), or it's not
> recognizable to most speakers of the language.

Not a prediction. It was already done. And reverted.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Www.wikipedia.org_portal&oldid=88466

Opinions ?

Anthere


subject: [Foundation-l] wikinews

body:
I may have missed something entirely...

Onymous just mentionned on #wikimedia that wikinews was now in public
domain.

Is that so ?

http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Main_Page


subject: [Foundation-l] wikinews


body:
I forgot...
In any cases, we could not move it to wikimediafoundation website now,
because the site editing is broken. I filled a bug about this.

Anthere

Anthere a ?crit:
>
>
> rose.parks at att.net a ?crit:
>
>> Sj-
>>
>>      I do apologize for claiming that Quarto II was on the foundation
>> website.
>>      I did find it on meta. There is a lot more content here now.
>
>
> Most content is set now. The content under work is on meta so that
> everyone can work on it.
> Quarto will be moved there only when the issue is done as few people can
> edit over there. Only minor corrections such as typo should be done on
> foundation. All the work should be on meta.
>
> Report of what is still under work may be found here :
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WQ/Draft
> Roughly, what is still missing is essentially Jimbo's letter, a little
> bit of board report, and some update about stats and similar. Plus fancy
>  things like pictures and all this, which does not need to be copyedited.
> The interview is not yet included either.
>
> All what is currently on http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WQ/2 is
> basically final, but for the stats things I am not sure of.
>
>
>>      I have been copyediting a paper copy of an earlier version.
>
>  Do you want me to continue or not. For this amount of content some
> assistance would help.
>
> Absolutely. I would be very pleased that you help.
>
>>      As I said earlier, if you are going to move it to foundation,
>
> I have to confirm my password. I am listed there as an editor.
> Also, I could really use an update on what has been going on.
>
> Do not worry, it is not time yet for moving it there.
>
>>
>>                     As Ever,
>>
>>                          Ruth Ifcher
>
>
> Thanks for your help Ruth
> .


subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Re: A portal page for www.wikipedia.org (was Re:
 Whywww.wikipedia.org => en.wikipedia.org ?)

body:
NSK a ?crit:
> On Sunday 09 January 2005 06:27, Jens Ropers wrote:
>
>>Quite true, however for most (if not all) languages, there is a flag
>>that is commonly understood to symbolize the language as well
>>(depending on context).
>
>
> Using flags to represent languages is stupid and discriminatory.

Now... whatever your opinion NSK, please respect Jens work. He took time
to set these flags, many websites use such a mean, and it has the merit
of being visual, so easier to navigate. I wish that no flame war begins
over the topic, so choose your words more carefully.

PLEASE

Anthere


from_name: Gerard Meijssen

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Bibliography

references:
<200501062354.AAA23339@germaine.webtechnologies.lu>	<shhdlsh22l.fsf@tux.gnu.franken.de>
	<41E03792.8040605@telus.net> <shbrbzw07r.fsf@tux.gnu.franken.de>

body:
Karl Eichwalder wrote:

>Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> writes:
>
>
>
>>From the beginning one of the purposes of the "Author" pages in
>>Wikisource has been bibliographic.
>>
>>
>
>I consider Wikisource as superfluous.  We should join forces with the
>"Project Gutenberg" (that's what I do).
>
>Please, re-read this thread.  Author pages are not good enough.  We need
>a database system that you can query with well define protocols like
>[[de:Z39.50]]
>
>
>
If a database system is called for, Wikidata is the ticket. As databases
are projects in their own right, there should be a positive nod from the
board before we implement these. At the moment we do not have Wikidata
and two projects with a need for the functionality (Wiktionary and
Wikispecies). Obviously if you want to make a project for a Bibliography
system you need people to work on this.

Thanks,
    GerardM


subject: [Wikipedia-l] wikipadia

body:
Reported by Arnaudus on fr : http://www (dot) wikipadia (dot) org/

Anthere


from_name: David Gerard

subject: [Wikipedia-l] www portal: "The Free Encyclopedia" in Japanese?

body:
Mark Williamson (node.ue at gmail.com) [050109 06:40]:

> I think that's a moot point, as the ideal portal should just have
> names of languages to choose from - nothing to be translated.

That must be some sort of absolute minimalist portal, then ... which I'm
*not* sure is the best portal.

I'm thinking of the stuff that's presently in English on the portal page.

Also, it could do with a multilingual 'search' or 'go' function (as on
wikipedia.ch) - though en: search is off at present.

- d.


from_name: NSK

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Re: A portal page for www.wikipedia.org (was Re:
	Whywww.wikipedia.org => en.wikipedia.org ?)

body:
On Sunday 09 January 2005 08:34, Sean Barrett wrote:
> What language do I get if I click on Switzerland?

It depends on which part of Switzerland you click.

> Where do I click to get Esperanto?

Esperanto could be represented by a world map with green points on the places
where Esperanto conventions held. There can be a larger green point on the
birthplace of Esperanto founder, along with a small picture of his face. An
Esperanto flag can also be included near the picture, if all Esperantists can
recognise their flag.

And, by the way, I am about to learn Esperanto soon!

--
NSK
The Wikinerds Community Federation of Science Wikis
Owner of the Wikinerds Portal http://portal.wikinerds.org
Owner of the NerdyPC IT Wiki http://www.nerdypc.org


subject: [Foundation-l] wiktionary

body:
While we are at it, it seem http://www.wiktionary.org redirect to the
english wiktionary.

And well, most of our other projects as well.

Actually, once we set a nice display for www.wikipedia.org, could we
reuse it for all our project portal page ?

Ant


subject: [Foundation-l] wiktionary


from_name: Paweł 'Ausir' Dembowski

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: com

body:
MW> No specific
MW> country URL should redirect to a specific Wikipedia.

What if a country is monolingual?

--
Ausir
Wikipedia, wolna encyklopedia
http://pl.wikipedia.org


from_name: Ian Barwick

subject: [Wikitech-l] PostgreSQL support?

body:
On Sunday 09 January 2005 01:36, Brion Vibber wrote:
> On Jan 8, 2005, at 3:53 PM, Ian Barwick wrote:
> > is anyone actively working on PostgreSQL support for MediaWiki?
> > I`ve just managed to get the latest 1.4beta working after a fashion,
> > but I'm coming across many minor problems I'd be able to provide
> > patches for.
>
> Domas has been working on this off and on; his installation
> instructions: http://ph3.defau.lt/index.php/Install
>
> If you can catch him in #mediawiki on irc.freenode.net, he usually goes
> by the nick 'dammit'.
>
> If you file any PostgreSQL-related problems or patches in bugzilla,
> please mark them as blocking this tracking bug:
> http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=384

Is this correct?
  http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1295

Thanks for the reply.

Ian Barwick
barwick at gmx.net


from_name: shantanu oak

subject: [WikiEN-l] Registered users stats

body:
Hi,
I am studying the wikipedia phenomenon in detail.
I need some more information about wikipedia growth.

Number of registered users at the end of every year:
At the end of 2001 :
At the end of 2002 :
At the end of 2003 :
At the end of 2004 : 165,000
I got the last (approx) figure from the page...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Statistics

Please let me know the statistics for the other 3 years.

Thanks,
Shantanu Oak


from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [Foundation-l] donate to Wikimedia Deutschland

body:
--- Walter Vermeir <walter at wikipedia.be> wrote:
> I suggest to give much more attension to this donation channel. For the
> English version of the fundraising page put it where there is now "Donate
> via postal mail". Include the information that a transfer inside de
> euro-zone is the same price like a normal national payment and that this is
> the cheapst way for you and Wikimedia.

But that begs the question about what the German association *does* with the
money donated to it. IIRC about 4000 Euro was donated directly to that
organization and yet have not seen nor heard about any of that being
transferred to the Wikimedia Foundation for any purpose (such as buying servers
or pay for bandwidth). If this is not correct, then please tell me (I'm still
missing some bank statements, so could have missed it).

> Many Wikipedias do not have a translation of the donation page. The is not
> helpful to get mony.
>
> If there not translation yet you can make one. You need a account for the
> foundation wiki;

That is not absolutely necessary. All you minimally need to do is translate it
and post it on meta. Somebody else could then post it to the foundation wiki.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Translation_requests/WMF/Fundraising

-- mav

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail - Easier than ever with enhanced search. Learn more.
http://info.mail.yahoo.com/mail_250


from_name: Jens Ropers

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Bibliography

references:
<200501062354.AAA23339@germaine.webtechnologies.lu>
	<shhdlsh22l.fsf@tux.gnu.franken.de> <41E03792.8040605@telus.net>
	<shbrbzw07r.fsf@tux.gnu.franken.de>

body:
On 9 Jan 2005, at 08:06, Karl Eichwalder wrote:

> I consider Wikisource as superfluous.  We should join forces with the
> "Project Gutenberg" (that's what I do).
>

In theory I'd be inclined to agree. Yet Project Gutenberg does not
anywhere near have the "instant editability" that Wikisource has. (Of
course a "Gutenbergian" can do anything they like anytime they please
-- but AFAIK the only way to avoid duplication of another Gutenberg
contributor's past or present efforts is to go through some red tape --
Contacting people, asking writing emails...) So, yes, maybe we should
merge. Of course they are established, have "brand recognition" and
have already completed lots of work, so "us *joining* them" would maybe
be the better (more polite and palatable to them) way of putting it.
But if were to merge/join, we should bring the wiki concept along.

Just thoughts though.

-- ropers [[en:User:Ropers]]
     www.ropersonline.com


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: com

body:
RC> Are there countries which outlaw any speakers of *any other language*,
RC> from residing in that country?
RC> -Bop

Maybe, but I'm talking about countries where there is only one
language native to that country.

--
Ausir
Wikipedia, wolna encyklopedia
http://pl.wikipedia.org


from_name: Jake Waskett

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: The irritation of a server being blocked throughthe	actions of another

body:
That proxy resolves to ctb-cache1-vif1.saix.net.

Hope this helps.
Jake.

On Sunday 09 January 2005 02:40, Arwel Parry wrote:
> In message <20050108165903.93737.qmail at web30104.mail.mud.yahoo.com>,
> Robert Brookes
> <the_robert_brookes-/E1597aS9LQAvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org> writes
> >IP 198.54.202.242. Sadly that is the IP of a server and thus will

> It would be helpful if you could supply ranges of any server IP
> addresses you know, so they could be added to the list displayed on the
> "block user" screen so we know to go easy on the perpetrators. As it
> happens, David had unblocked the address about 10 minutes before I got
> your email, but I couldn't find this address on "whois" when I used Sam
> Spade, so I still don't know which ISP the address belongs to.


body:
On 9 Jan 2005, at 08:24, Anthere wrote:

> Now... whatever your opinion NSK, please respect Jens work. He took
> time to set these flags, many websites use such a mean, and it has the
> merit of being visual, so easier to navigate. I wish that no flame war
> begins over the topic, so choose your words more carefully.
>

Thanks :)

And while you may disagree with my proposal, I'd still like to bolster
the case for flags and add that images are easier click targets. Try a
speed test -- from loading http://www.wikipedia.org , how long does it
take to click on Japanese? Then try
http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?
title=Www.wikipedia.org_portal&oldid=88466 , how long does it take you
there? (I would have offered Hebrew, but the metric's horribly biased,
because there's only one inline flag -- added just before the reverting
started.)

I still think flags/images are a generally preferable solution. Yes,
there would be fights over, say, Chinese and the flag of the PR of
China. Or over English and using a US flag. But I think the entire
Wikipedia concept shows that risking it, doing it anyway and letting
the wiki process do its magic can solve these issues -- and it's better
than having a dull text-only page forever.

-- ropers [[en:User:Ropers]]
     www.ropersonline.com


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Bibliography

references:
<200501062354.AAA23339@germaine.webtechnologies.lu>
	<shhdlsh22l.fsf@tux.gnu.franken.de> <41E03792.8040605@telus.net>
	<shbrbzw07r.fsf@tux.gnu.franken.de>
	<FD7EBF48-6220-11D9-A2D7-0003931DCE20@ropersonline.com>

body:
Jens Ropers <ropers at ropersonline.com> writes:

> In theory I'd be inclined to agree. Yet Project Gutenberg does not
> anywhere near have the "instant editability" that Wikisource has.

That's agood thing - sources do not change ;)  Of course, sticking
comments to sources is another issue and that's an area where the wiki
way comes in.

> So, yes, maybe we should merge.

I forgot to mention, we already merged - I know more than one person who
contributes to both projects.

> Of course they are established, have "brand recognition" and
> have already completed lots of work, so "us *joining* them" would maybe
> be the better (more polite and palatable to them) way of putting it.

Yes, thanks for getting these things right.

> But if were to merge/join, we should bring the wiki concept along.

Yes, from time to time annoting systems are discussed on the PG
mailinglist and, of course, someone mentions WP resp. wiki*.

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


subject: [Wikitech-l] stewards

body:
At least Fantasy and I have no more any sysop, or bureaucrat or steward
power on meta. Maybe others. It has been at least a month now since we
first noticed it before holidays.

Could someone check what the problem is ?

Anthere


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Bibliography

in_reply_to:
<41E0DC7B.9030604@myrealbox.com> (Gerard Meijssen's message of
	"Sun, 09 Jan 2005 08:25:47 +0100")

references:
<200501062354.AAA23339@germaine.webtechnologies.lu>
	<shhdlsh22l.fsf@tux.gnu.franken.de> <41E03792.8040605@telus.net>
	<shbrbzw07r.fsf@tux.gnu.franken.de> <41E0DC7B.9030604@myrealbox.com>

body:
Gerard Meijssen <gerardm at myrealbox.com> writes:

> Obviously if you want to make a project for a Bibliography system you
> need people to work on this.

Sure.  It looks as if soem hackers are interested in a biblio system and
I want to prevent them from re-inventing the wheel.  Once a propers
system is in place, I will add my data to it, as I do with commons.

But I usually do no coding :)

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


body:
Jens Ropers a ?crit:
>
> On 9 Jan 2005, at 08:24, Anthere wrote:
>
>> Now... whatever your opinion NSK, please respect Jens work. He took
>> time to set these flags, many websites use such a mean, and it has
>> the  merit of being visual, so easier to navigate. I wish that no
>> flame war  begins over the topic, so choose your words more carefully.
>>
>
> Thanks :)
>
> And while you may disagree with my proposal, I'd still like to bolster
> the case for flags and add that images are easier click targets. Try a
> speed test -- from loading http://www.wikipedia.org , how long does it
> take to click on Japanese? Then try
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?
> title=Www.wikipedia.org_portal&oldid=88466 , how long does it take you
> there? (I would have offered Hebrew, but the metric's horribly biased,
> because there's only one inline flag -- added just before the reverting
> started.)
>
> I still think flags/images are a generally preferable solution. Yes,
> there would be fights over, say, Chinese and the flag of the PR of
> China. Or over English and using a US flag. But I think the entire
> Wikipedia concept shows that risking it, doing it anyway and letting
> the wiki process do its magic can solve these issues -- and it's better
> than having a dull text-only page forever.
>
> -- ropers [[en:User:Ropers]]
>     www.ropersonline.com

I agree it is easier. But most languages are spoken in several countries.

For example, it is quite difficult to convince outsider that the
wikipedia in french is NOT the wikipedia france, but wikipedia francophone.
I think this is relevant, because while french is spoken in France,
while we have this academy trying to decide for us how french should be
properly spoken, la francophonie is MUCH much bigger than just my
country. And the countries where the language is spoken own the language
just as we do. We are already an overbearing lot in the wikipedia, we
should not do anything that might suggest we own this wikipedia in some way.

Look at this
http://qatarfrancophonie.free.fr/cartfranc.html

And this is true for many other languages as well. We just can't ignore
this and take the risk to imply there is a sort of national relationship
between our projects and countries.

This is very important Jens. We are not nations. And flags are symbols
of nations.

Anthere


from_name: Nikola Smolenski

subject: [Wikitech-l] Why www.wikipedia.org => en.wikipedia.org ?

body:
On Friday 7. January 2005. 07:35, Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote:
> What google does is actually even more annoying than this.  When I
> travel in Europe, Google redirects me to the site they think I want
> based on my *geographical location*.  So when I'm in Germany, they
> assume I speak German, when I'm in Italy, they assume I speak Italian,
> etc.
>
> This is disconcerting and unpleasant for me.
>
> Better by far would be for them to combine information from my default
> browser language and my location to offer me options that are likely
> to make the most sense.
>
> If I'm in Germany, but with English as my default language, why not
> offer me a German/English hybrid page?

I worked on this, and can tell that the problem lies in the fact that most
people don't have default language set (even though they prefer it or even if
it is the only language they know). So, if a user has default language other
than English, it could be assumed that the user really wants content in that
language; but if default language is English, it doesn't tell much.

I agree however that selecting the language by geographic location is not very
good idea. It may help some people, probably even most people, but it will
hinder other. In addition to your problem, it does not always give correct
results - for example my provider was connected to the Internet via a
provider in The Netherlands, and sure enough, Google was giving me its front
page in Dutch. And it is much better to get a page in a known foreign
language than in an unknown foreign language.

And if you think that you have some problems with Google, try visiting
http://www.google.com/intl/sr/ from Lynx  and you will see :((

                                   Google

                    ????????    ?????    ?????    ??????

     _______________________________________________________
   Google ???????? ?? ???? ????   ???????? ????????????
     ??????????
     ??????? ?????
   (*) ???????? ???????? ( ) ???????? ?????? ?? ???????

          ???????? ??????? - ??? ? Google - Google.com in English

        ?2005 Google - ???????????? 8,058,044,651 ???????? ????????

> Instead of a link to *either* 'Images' *or* 'Bilder' they could say:
> "Hmm, his browser wants English, but he's in Germany, so let's give
> him: 'Images (Bilder)'.

That's probably the best solution, but could be somewhat complicated to
make...

> In our case, we don't have (to my knowledge) the technical ability to
> make a good guess of where people are in a timely fashion.  So we can

An excellent tool that I know of is http://www.geobytes.com/iplocator.htm but
it would cost quite some money for a site of Wikipedia's size
(https://secure.geobytes.com/buy.htm#MapBytes).


from_name: Jakob Voss

subject: [Wikitech-l] wikistat not accesible

body:
Hi!

I do some statistics of Wikipedia growth - unfortunately the directory
with the original cvs-files of Wikistat is not accesible anymore:

http://www.wikipedia.org/wikistats/csv/

Can anybody unprotect the directory, please?

Thanks a lot!

Jakob aka Nichtich


from_name: Till Westermayer

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: com

body:
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . till we *) . . .

Hi Ronald,

>Another point:
>If an english tourist is traveling in Poland or the Ukraine, but
>chooses to write wikipedia articles on the road, should they be
>compelled to see a website that they cannot understand, before
>they can get to a website that they do understand? While some
>countries may have an official "native" language, it does not
>follow that all people who are writing articles from a given
>country prefer to (or can) speak the local language.

True. But why should an english tourist traveling in Poland use
wikipedia.pl instead of wikipedia.co.uk (or even en.wikipedia.org) he or
she uses to open up wikipedia at home?

I thing our international domains (that is .com, even if the US doesn't
see it so, .org, .net and maybe an .edu) should link to the portal, and
all geographic top level domains (co.uk, pl, de, ...) should link to
either a specific portal if the political entity is strongly
multilingual (.ch) or to TLD.wikipedia.org.

I also would like to say I like Magnus proposal to highlight the browser
preference language in some way.
 __ .
 / / / /                            ... Till Westermayer - till we *)
. .
  . mailto:till at tillwe.de . www.westermayer.de/till/ . icq 320393072
  . Hirschstra?e 5. 79100 Freiburg . 0761 55697152 . 0160 96619179
  . . . . .


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: A portal page for www.wikipedia.org

body:
--- Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> The decision to make a poll or the decision to have this portal ?
> For the decision to have this portal, well, I guess the majority if not
> all of those above agree with a portal. I think.
>
> If you want a poll, this is fine by me.

Ugh. We *already* had one over a year ago.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/What_to_do_with_www.wikipedia.org#Voting

The results of that, plus the general consensus on the mailing list was
strongly in favor of a multilingual portal. The sticking point was that noone
come up with a specific solution that most people liked.

I still favor my idea.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/What_to_do_with_www.wikipedia.org-mav's_Prop

Basically the top 25 or so languages would have boxes with the below message
translated:

---------------
Welcome to Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia!

We are working on {{xx_NUMBEROFARTICLES}} articles at the:

[X Wikipedia]

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

xx would be a language code and X would be the language name.

The appropriate language would be highlighted based on whatever language the
visitor's browser is in. The intro text (with project-wide stats) would also be
based on browser language. After arriving a user could select "[Welcome]" in
one of a host of different languages to get to whatever translation they want.

-- mav

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail - now with 250MB free storage. Learn more.
http://info.mail.yahoo.com/mail_250


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: com

body:
TW> True. But why should an english tourist traveling in Poland use
TW> wikipedia.pl instead of wikipedia.co.uk (or even en.wikipedia.org) he or
TW> she uses to open up wikipedia at home?
TW> I thing our international domains (that is .com, even if the US doesn't
TW> see it so, .org, .net and maybe an .edu) should link to the portal, and
TW> all geographic top level domains (co.uk, pl, de, ...) should link to
TW> either a specific portal if the political entity is strongly
TW> multilingual (.ch) or to TLD.wikipedia.org.
TW> I also would like to say I like Magnus proposal to highlight the browser
TW> preference language in some way.

Polish might link to a portal, though, as we have a minority language
with a Wikipedia in Poland - Cashubian (csb.wikipedia.org), although
it's not very active...

--
Ausir
Wikipedia, wolna encyklopedia
http://pl.wikipedia.org


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Proposal to show pdf icon for external and media:
	links to PDF files (having fileexternsion .pdf)

body:
On Jan 9, 2005, at 11:55 AM, Gerard Meijssen wrote:
> Gabriel Wicke wrote:
>> The implementation is simply following the CSS standards, but browsers
>> unfortunately tend to be more broken in RTL languages. The solution
>> usually is to hide the style from known-as-broken browsers while
>> allowing more standard-conform ones to render the extra hint. This is
>> called forward compatibility.
>>
> I use Firefox 1.0, that one is broken ??

Yes, Mozilla/Firefox are known to have some bad problems with RTL.
Please report the bug at http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/, and it might get
fixed!

>  IE is broken and does not show it in the first place.

"The solution usually is to hide the style from known-as-broken
browsers while allowing more standard-conform ones to render the extra
hint."

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Yann Forget

subject: [Wikitech-l] Portal for Wiktionary

body:
Hi,

I created a portal for Wiktionary on the model of Wikipedia.
Please, can someone create put it on http://www.wiktionary.org ?

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Www.wikitionary.org_portal

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


list: wiktionary-l

subject: [Wiktionary-l] Portal for Wiktionary


body:
Andy Rabagliati a ?crit:

> What flag for English ? The crusty old country, or the defender of democracy ?

<trolling mood> The idea of a flag is to go quickly. A symbol that most
readers will recognise as representing a language. A concept obvious for
everyone. Do you think everyone will naturally click on this flag to go
to english language ? </trolling mood>

/me running away and not commenting any more on this slippery issue


from_name: Andy Rabagliati

body:
On Sun, 09 Jan 2005, Anthere wrote:

> Mark Williamson a ?crit:
>
> >One prediction I have is that somebody will suggest adding flags to
> >make it easier to choose languages.

Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com> a ?crit:

> Not a prediction. It was already done. And reverted.
>
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Www.wikipedia.org_portal&oldid=88466
>
> Opinions ?

I have read the discussion here on the con's, and have not seen any of the pro's.

I like it. We should get past the supposed political incorrectness and
see it as /easy/, /visual/, and /obvious/.

I live in South Africa - predominantly English, but with significant
other languages, and (for example) a nascent Afrikaans encyclopedia.

What flag for Afrikaans ? Maybe the beautiful new South African Flag ?

Sigh - visions of panties getting into a knot.

What flag for English ? The crusty old country, or the defender of democracy ?

I do not think North Americans mind it being the British flag.

It is just a portal - moving you quickly on to your destination.

Cheers,    Andy!

~~~~ :wq

[[en:User:Wikiwizzy]]


subject: [Wiktionary-l] Study on Wiktionary (in French)/ Étude sur le Wiktionnaire

body:
(en fran?ais ci-dessous)

Hi,

Serge Bibauw wrote a very interesting study on Wiktionary in the framwork of a
lexicology class (in French).

http://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/Utilisateur:SergeBibauw/?tude

Thanks to him for sharing his work.

Yann
=============
Bonjour,

Serge Bibauw a r?dig? une ?tude tr?s int?ressante sur le Wiktionnaire dans le
cadre d'un cours de lexicologie.

http://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/Utilisateur:SergeBibauw/?tude

Merci ? lui de nous la faire partager.

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


from_name: Nicholas Knight

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Re: www.wikipedia.org no longer redirects to the en
	main	page

body:
csherlock at ljh.com.au wrote:
> .org is a US domain, a country that speaks primarily English. Those who
> visit it are reasonably expected to speak English.

No, it's really not. All countries, including the US, have their own
top-level domain reflective of their name and/or country code (the US,
unsurprisingly, is .us). The others, including .net, .org, .com, and
newer ones like .info and .biz, are not associated with any particular
nation or language. They're intended for certain classes of
organizations, but even this is rarely *enforced*, with a couple exceptions.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top-level_domain
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_top-level_domain
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Country_code_top-level_domain
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_TLDs


from_name: Tim Starling

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: com

body:
NSK wrote:
> wikipedia.com still redirects to en
>

Fixed, here are some of the redirects now set up:

wikipedia.com -> www.wikipedia.org
www.wikipedia.com -> www.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.com -> en.wikipedia.org
wikipaedia.net -> www.wikipedia.org
wikipedia.net -> www.wikipedia.org
www.wikipedia.net -> www.wikipedia.org
wikipedia.co.uk -> en.wikipedia.org

www.wikipedia.org redirects the index page to the PHP script
extract2.php, and everything else to the corresponding page in
en.wikipedia.org. So for example the legacy URL
http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Wikipedia would find its way to the
correct page via two redirects.

As always, you can view the redirector configuration at

http://wikimedia.org/conf/redirects.conf

The new www.wikipedia.org special case is at:

http://wikimedia.org/conf/www.wikipedia.conf

-- Tim Starling


from_name: Walter Vermeir

body:
Since the start of the donations I have find it a waste for using a system like
paypall. This because you need a credit card and for the transaction fees that
are high, specialy for small ammounts.

 1 $ - 0,33 $ for paypall = 0,67 $ Wikimedia
 5 $ - 0,45 $ for paypall = 4,55 $ Wikimedia

The normal way of paying something in europa is whit a bank transfer. The cost
of a banktransfer inside the euro-zone is mostly zero or very very small.

Now, whit Wikimedia Deutschland, there is a European bank account.
http://www.wikimedia.de/spenden.html

Only the german translation of the fundraising page gives the option to donate
to that bank account.

http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Fundraising

I suggest to give much more attension to this donation channel. For the English
version of the fundraising page put it where there is now "Donate via postal
mail". Include the information that a transfer inside de euro-zone is the same
price like a normal national payment and that this is the cheapst way for you
and Wikimedia.

The fundraising pages in the languages that are members of the euro-zone should
make this the first option of payment.

Many Wikipedias do not have a translation of the donation page. The is not
helpful to get mony.

If there not translation yet you can make one. You need a account for the
foundation wiki;
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_site_feedback/request_for_an_account

Since the start of the donations I have find it a waste for using a system like
paypall. This because you need a credit card and for the transaction fees that
are high, specially for small amounts.

 1 $ - 0,33 $ for paypall = 0,67 $ Wikimedia
 5 $ - 0,45 $ for paypall = 4,55 $ Wikimedia

The normal way of paying something in Europa is whit a bank transfer. The cost
of a bank transfer inside the euro-zone is mostly zero or very very small
depending of your bank.

Now, whit Wikimedia Deutschland, there is a European bank account.
http://www.wikimedia.de/spenden.html

Only the German translation of the fund raising page gives the option to donate
to that bank account.

http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Fundraising

I suggest to give much more attention to this donation channel. For the English
version of the fund raising page put it where there is now "Donate via postal
mail". Include the information that a transfer inside the euro-zone is the same
price like a normal national payment and that this is the cheapest way for you
and Wikimedia.

The fund raising pages in the languages that are members of the euro-zone
should make this the first option of payment.

Many Wikipedias do not have a translation of the donation page. That is not
helpful to get money.

If there not translation yet you can make one. You need a account for the
foundation wiki;
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_site_feedback/request_for_an_account

[[w:nl:gebruiker:walter]]


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: donate to Wikimedia Deutschland

body:
Walter Vermeir <walter at ...> writes:

>
> Since the start of the donations I have find it a waste for using a system
like
[oeps]

Sorry. I have forgotten to remove draft version of that email.

[[w:nl:gebruiker:walter]]


subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Re: A portal page for www.wikipedia.org (was Re:
	Why www.wikipedia.org => en.wikipedia.org ?)

body:
On Jan 9, 2005, at 8:26 AM, Walter Vermeir wrote:
> The English Wikipedia have used the domain www.wikipedia.com but never
> www.wikipedia.org.

www.wikipedia.com was moved to www.wikipedia.org in August 2002:
http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2002-August/021615.html

www.wikipedia.org was moved to en.wikipedia.org in October 2002:
http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2002-October/023565.html

We then spent two years on and off bickering about portal designs.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Kate Turner

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Why www.wikipedia.org => en.wikipedia.org ?

body:
Gr?goire Colbert wrote in gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical:
> Frank v Waveren a ?crit :
>> This would be a horrible abuse of HTTP. You should only present the
>> same content in different languages based on the Accept-Language
>> field, never to different content. Having links point to different
>> things based on browser settings would be a nightmare.
> The fact that www.wikipedia.com does not care about the visitor's
> language does not seem an "horrible abuse" to you? Only HTTP matters? If
> so, you've got a strange vision of what a website is made for.

    The issue is not that the portal should "not care" about the user's
language, but rather that different content should not be presented based
on the language; the same content should be presented in different
languages.

    Since en.wikipedia.org and de.wikipedia.org do not have the same
content, it would not make sense to automatically redirect a user to either
one based on their preferred language.  What should be done is, for
example, to highlight the Wikipedia(s) that exist in the user's language on
the portal page, and to display the portal's interface in their preferred
language.

> Gr?goire

Kate.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: com

body:
NSK wrote:
> On Sunday 09 January 2005 05:57, Tim Starling wrote:
>
>>wikipedia.co.uk -> en.wikipedia.org
>
>
> There is no reason to have co.uk redirect to .org because English is not the
> only language spoken in the United Kingdom.

There's a very good reason for having that redirect set up. It's been
like that forever, we don't have a portal, and I couldn't be bothered
making one. Write one yourself if it concerns you so much.

-- Tim Starling.


subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Re: A portal page for www.wikipedia.org (was Re: Why
 www.wikipedia.org => en.wikipedia.org ?)

body:
Anthere wrote:

> I do not think there were be links broken now.

It is very strange that no-one seems to have picked up on this.
There are clearly many many more links to http://www.wikipedia.org
(expecting to link to an English language encyclopedia) than ever
before. The decision has been taken to break these links.

Whether the cost of breaking those links is worth the gain of getting a
international portal is debatable.

More interesting to me is how this episode shows how what really matters
is in getting something changed is what a tiny number of people think,
not what the unwashed masses (who a: can't programme a computer and b:
aren't on the board) think.

Pete/pcb21


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Bibliography

body:
Karl Eichwalder wrote:

>Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> writes:
>
>
>>From the beginning one of the purposes of the "Author" pages in
>>Wikisource has been bibliographic.
>>
>>
>I consider Wikisource as superfluous.  We should join forces with the
>"Project Gutenberg" (that's what I do).
>
That can wait until Project Gutenberg includes Wiki links.

>Please, re-read this thread.  Author pages are not good enough.  We need
>a database system that you can query with well define protocols like
>[[de:Z39.50]]
>
And what does [[de:Z39.50]] mean?  Users, will be most comfortable with
plain language categories.  Although formal classification systems have
their place, they are best in conjunction with plain language references.

Ec


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: [personal] Wikipedia-l Digest, Vol 18, Issue 28

body:
Craig Franklin wrote:

>Scr?obh Jens Ropers:
>
>
>>Quite true, however for most (if not all) languages, there is a flag
>>that is commonly understood to symbolize the language as well
>>(depending on context). No other symbols exist that so clearly and
>>graphically identify the respective languages. And I thing it having
>>the instant visual indentification that you can get with images is
>>worthwhile. That said, someone has removed the flags now (without
>>explanatory comment) and I'm taking my time about reverting, because I
>>believe community consensus will decide this one.
>>
>>
>I agree that the flags look pretty, but there are just too many languages
>and countries where they don't sync.  What flag do you put to Afrikaans,
>Tibetan, Breton, or Navajo?  Either you end up repeating flags, or some
>entries don't have one at all, which looks very ugly.
>
>Nice idea, and it looks visually agreeable, but it's just not practical.
>
Although I don't support the idea of relating a language to a flag it's
not because these flags don't exist.

See http://www.crwflags.com/fotw/flags/fr-bz.html  and
http://www.crwflags.com/fotw/flags/us-navjo.html

Ec


subject: [Foundation-l] legal question

body:
Robin Shannon wrote:

>I suggest Wikinerds should use exactly the same policies as wikimedia
>in all respects because obviously there could never be two sets of
>different but equally good polices (note: the sarcasm). I also suggest
>that you use words like 'we' in your suggestions , as, i am sure, it
>will make your suggestions more likely to be considered by
>wikimedians.
>
>
That depends on just what you are making policies about.  The principles
of NPOV, respect for copyright and respect for each other are quite
fundamental and should apply across the board.  Each project still needs
to apply them in a way consistent with its own circumstances.  Naming
conventions are very much project dependent.  The Esperanto Wikipedia
has chosen to put surnames in all capitals.  Others have chosen not to
follow that convention, but such an argument should not be used to make
the Esperantists comply.

Ec


subject: [Foundation-l] legal question


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: A work on data

body:
NSK wrote:

> On Thursday 06 January 2005 19:27, j.levrel at free.fr wrote:
>
>>My name is Julien Levrel and I'm studying sociology in France. I started a
>>PhD on cooperation and collaboration using wiki for leading project.
>
> Hey :) I am also doing dissertation research on wikis! I mainly work on the
> software and theoretical aspects of it, but I also pay some attention to
> sociological implications.

I added you at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research
Please add or link interesting stuff there. The most comprehensive
Bibliography is propably
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedistik/Bibliographie
I will move this and my other literature to meta when I finished my
first english paper by the end of this month.

Greetings, Jakob aka Nichtich


subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Re: A portal page for www.wikipedia.org (was Re: Why
	www.wikipedia.org => en.wikipedia.org ?)

body:
Pete/Pcb21 <pete_pcb21_wpmail at ...> writes:

>
> Anthere wrote:
>
> > I do not think there were be links broken now.
>
> It is very strange that no-one seems to have picked up on this.
> There are clearly many many more links to http://www.wikipedia.org
> (expecting to link to an English language encyclopedia) than ever
> before. The decision has been taken to break these links.
>
> Whether the cost of breaking those links is worth the gain of getting a
> international portal is debatable.

It is true what you say. There are links to www.wikipedia.org whit the idea
that it is the English Wikipedia. There are probably even more to
www.wikipedia.com.

The English Wikipedia have used the domain www.wikipedia.com but never
www.wikipedia.org. And the time that Wikipedia EN was using www.wikipedia.com
is before Wikipedia became famous.

I read almost every article about Wikipedia the you find whit google News.
Those articles are about the English Wikipedia. I happens a lot that the write
about www.wikipedia.com or www.wikipedia.org in the article.

The fact that many persons, even journalist who write about websites, are so
incompetent that the can not even get the url correct is very sad but is not
the problem of Wikipdia. Wikipedia is not responsible for the stupidity of the
humans.

[[w:nl:gebruiker:walter]]


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Bibliography

references:
<200501062354.AAA23339@germaine.webtechnologies.lu>	<shhdlsh22l.fsf@tux.gnu.franken.de>
	<41E03792.8040605@telus.net>	<shbrbzw07r.fsf@tux.gnu.franken.de>
	<FD7EBF48-6220-11D9-A2D7-0003931DCE20@ropersonline.com>

body:
Jens Ropers wrote:

> On 9 Jan 2005, at 08:06, Karl Eichwalder wrote:
>
>> I consider Wikisource as superfluous.  We should join forces with the
>> "Project Gutenberg" (that's what I do).
>
> In theory I'd be inclined to agree. Yet Project Gutenberg does not
> anywhere near have the "instant editability" that Wikisource has. (Of
> course a "Gutenbergian" can do anything they like anytime they please
> -- but AFAIK the only way to avoid duplication of another Gutenberg
> contributor's past or present efforts is to go through some red tape
> -- Contacting people, asking writing emails...) So, yes, maybe we
> should merge. Of course they are established, have "brand recognition"
> and have already completed lots of work, so "us *joining* them" would
> maybe be the better (more polite and palatable to them) way of putting
> it. But if were to merge/join, we should bring the wiki concept along.

I think there would be even more than that to merging the two cultures.
They take the idea of the plain vanilla text to an extreme to the point
where their English site does not allow for accented characters,
italics, etc.  We are much more open to the idea of adding illustrations
if someone wants to do that.  In legal terms simply duplicating a
Gutenbergian's work may be perfectly acceptable, but it does not advance
our cause very much.  If Wikisource is to develop a reputation and
character of its own it's going to depend on what originality we can
bring to the table to make our product superior.

Ec


from_name: Mark Williamson

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: com

body:
Name me a monolingual country, and I will show you a flying pig.

Mark

On Sun, 9 Jan 2005 09:45:08 +0100, Pawe? 'Ausir' Dembowski
<fallout at lexx.eu.org> wrote:
> MW> No specific
> MW> country URL should redirect to a specific Wikipedia.
>
> What if a country is monolingual?
>
> --
> Ausir
> Wikipedia, wolna encyklopedia
> http://pl.wikipedia.org
>
>


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: com

body:
He said that there's a "very good reason" that it redirects. He stated none.

As for Scots, this is something I have thought about often. I think
your best bet would be to ask a developer directly because it will
create a fair amount of debate although it will probably be created in
the end anyways.

Mark

On Mon, 10 Jan 2005 03:06:12 +1100, David Gerard
<fun at thingy.apana.org.au> wrote:
> Mark Williamson (node.ue at gmail.com) [050109 16:01]:
>
> > What's the very good reason? That it's been like that forever? That's
> > not a reason.
>
>
> The bit where he suggested someone write one if they want to fix it is
> probably a reason ;-)
>
> (I'm surprised there isn't a [[en:Scots language]] wikipedia yet. I'll see
> if I can interest Juthware from scotstext.org ...)
>
> - d.
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


body:
See, as far as the flag issue goes, what can I say but "I told you
so"? How's that for predicting the future? And before it even became
an issue, I made my feelings well-known so I don't need to state them
again (and since nobody had worked hard when I made my post, or even
mentioned it, my use of "stupid" can't be considered offensive).

Mark

On Sun, 09 Jan 2005 08:24:46 +0100, Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>
> NSK a ?crit:
> > On Sunday 09 January 2005 06:27, Jens Ropers wrote:
> >
> >>Quite true, however for most (if not all) languages, there is a flag
> >>that is commonly understood to symbolize the language as well
> >>(depending on context).
> >
> >
> > Using flags to represent languages is stupid and discriminatory.
>
> Now... whatever your opinion NSK, please respect Jens work. He took time
> to set these flags, many websites use such a mean, and it has the merit
> of being visual, so easier to navigate. I wish that no flame war begins
> over the topic, so choose your words more carefully.
>
> PLEASE
>
> Anthere
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


from_name: AndyL

subject: [WikiEN-l] Collaboration of the Week

body:
Hi,

Could someone contact all the wikipedians who voted for this week's
Collaboration of the week winner, [[Military history of France]] and
encourage them to participate in editing the article? I'm having trouble
with my computer so I can't.

here's the list of voters:

Hi,

As you nominated this week's COTW winner I'm wondering if you could contact
all those who voted for [[Military history of France]] to encourage them to
participate in this week's project? See list below:

===[[Military history of France]]===
:''Nominated [[December 21]] [[2004]]; needs 25 votes by [[January 25]]
[[2005]]''

'''Support:'''
#[[User talk:Jiang|Jia]][[User talk:Jiang|ng]] 08:11, 21 Dec 2004 (UTC)
#[[User talk:McMullen|McMullen]] 19:07, 21 Dec 2004 (UTC)
#[[User talk:Wonderfool|Wonderfool]] 23:55, 21 Dec 2004 (UTC)
#[[User talk:The King Of Gondor|The KoG]] | [[User talk:The King Of
Gondor|Talk]] 00:40, Dec 22, 2004 (UTC)
#[[User talk:Snipre|Snipre]] 00:50, 22 Dec 2004 (UTC)
#[[User talk:Ambi|Ambi]] 01:55, 22 Dec 2004 (UTC)
#[[User talk:RoboAction|RoboAction]] 10:56, 22 Dec 2004 (UTC)
#[[User talk:Geni|Geni]] 14:10, 22 Dec 2004 (UTC)
#[[User talk:SimonP|SimonP]] 16:13, Dec 22, 2004 (UTC)
#[[User talkr:ExplorerCDT|ExplorerCDT]] 18:21, 22 Dec 2004 (UTC)
#[[User talk:Bogdangiusca|Bogdan]] | [[User talk:Bogdangiusca|Talk]] 22:13,
22 Dec 2004 (UTC)
#[[User talk:Golbez|Golbez]] 03:06, Dec 24, 2004 (UTC)
#[[User talk:PZFUN|P?ll]] 20:11, 26 Dec 2004 (UTC)
#[[User talk:Brian0918|brian0918]][[User talk:Brian0918|™]] 12:51, 27
Dec 2004 (UTC)
#[[User talk:Smedley Hirkum|Smedley Hirkum]] 04:25, 29 Dec 2004 (UTC)
#[[User talk:Neutrality|Neutrality]]<sup>[[User talk:Neutrality|talk]]</sup>
18:28, Dec 29, 2004 (UTC)
# [[User talkDmcdevit|Dmcdevit]] 08:37, 31 Dec 2004 (UTC)
# [[User talk:Burgundavia|Burgundavia]] 00:02, Jan 5, 2005 (UTC)
#[[User talk:Julius.kusuma|Julius.kusuma]] 01:59, 5 Jan 2005 (UTC)
#[[User talk:Kaal|kaal]] 22:04, 5 Jan 2005 (UTC)
# --[[User talk:Onefool|Onefool]] 01:54, 8 Jan 2005 (UTC)
# [[User talk:Pmeisel|Pmeisel]] 16:18, 8 Jan 2005 (UTC)


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Yet another portal page

body:
We have already discussed why outright auto-selection is a BAD idea.
It's horrible for usability. I used to have my auto-accept language
set as Japanese, but my preferred language is English. I would not
appreciate being sent to ja.wikipedia.

Mark

On Sun, 9 Jan 2005 20:25:13 +0100 (MET), Alfio Puglisi
<puglisi at arcetri.astro.it> wrote:
>
> I took the current www.wikipedia.org page and added an auto-selection
> based on the browser language settings. This example recognizes all the
> languages with 10.000+ articles:
>
> http://www.tommasoconforti.com/portal2.php
>
> Try to set your browser to Russian or Esperanto and see what happens :-)
> If the language preference is not recognized, no selection appear.
>
> It's basically the same page at www.wikipedia.org, with a few lines of php
> inserted. I copied over wikimedia's stylesheets and images since hitting
> wikipedia servers was too slow. Japanese and Chinese characters might be
> incorrect since I don't have them installed and I have no idea of what I
> put on the page :-))
>
> Source on http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Portal_code
>
> Alfio
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


from_name: Paweł 'Ausir' Dembowski

body:
PP> It is very strange that no-one seems to have picked up on this.
PP> There are clearly many many more links to http://www.wikipedia.org
PP> (expecting to link to an English language encyclopedia) than ever
PP> before. The decision has been taken to break these links.

What kind of broken links are you talking about? If they are to the
main page, then whoever goes there can simply click on the "English"
link with no confusion whatsoever. And if you're talking about the
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/something links, they all redirect to
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/something.

--
Ausir
Wikipedia, wolna encyklopedia
http://pl.wikipedia.org


subject: [Wikipedia-l] wikipadia

body:
I think the creativity of the domain squatter at work there should be
applauded. It also exemplifies the wonderful freedom of the internet
and how it applies to EVERYBODY. I think we should let it be rather
than harassing somebody trying to make a living by screwing others.

Mark

On Sun, 09 Jan 2005 08:29:43 +0100, Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Reported by Arnaudus on fr : http://www (dot) wikipadia (dot) org/
>
> Anthere
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


from_name: Alfio Puglisi

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: com

body:
On Sun, 9 Jan 2005, Till Westermayer wrote:

>I also would like to say I like Magnus proposal to highlight the browser
>preference language in some way.

Instead of highlighting one language, one can waste a bit of screen real
estate duplicating information: what about a prominently displayed box
with something like this:

"Wikipedia in your language:  Portugu?s"

if I have pt: as my browser language? (maybe translating also the "in your
language", if a translation is available).

After this box, the usual wikipedia listing of languages in reverse
article count order, like www.wikipedia.org right now.

In this way, if one has a language preference he can find it quickly,
without searching in 100s of languages. If you speak Spanish and you
instead want to edit the Kurdish wikipedia, search for Kurd? in the big
list.

Alfio


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: www portal: "The Free Encyclopedia" in Japanese?

body:
But what about the Anglo-Saxon Wikipedia!?!?!!??!!!?

Anyhow, what flag should we use for French? The flag of France? That
is very discriminatory. French is the first language of Quebec, and
the only official language of plenty of countries on multiple
continents (though mostly in Africa).

What about Portuguese? Or Spanish? Or English?

What about Chinese? Taiwanese people will be very offended by the
communist flag, and displaying the nationalist flag might even get us
blocked by Chinese proxies, not to mention the fact that it is also
the official language in Singapore.

What about Hindi? The Indian flag is a bit offensive because that
implies that Hindi is *the* language of the union, which it is not. It
also excludes Fijian speakers of Hindi.

What about Dutch? The Netherlands, Belgium, Surinam, and a couple of
other places speak Dutch.

What about German? or Arabic?

Mark

On Sun, 9 Jan 2005 22:57:01 +0000, Arwel Parry
<arwel at cartref.demon.co.uk> wrote:
> In message <20050109155648.GI21075 at thingy.apana.org.au>, David Gerard
> <fun-e016Bj8cE8tLBo1qDEOMRrpzq4S04n8Q at public.gmane.org> writes
> >Anthere (anthere9-/E1597aS9LQAvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org) [050109 18:05]:
> >> Mark Williamson a ?crit:
> >
> >> >One prediction I have is that somebody will suggest adding flags to
> >> >make it easier to choose languages. This is a BAD idea because there
> >> >are speakers of French in Japan, speakers of Thai in Malta, speakers
> >> >of Catalan in Greece, etc; also some languages are indigenous to more
> >> >than one country, or they don't have a corresponding flag (for
> >> >diaspora languages such as Yiddish and Ladino), or it's not
> >> >recognizable to most speakers of the language.
> >
> >> Not a prediction. It was already done. And reverted.
> >> Opinions ?
> >
> >
> >I dislike the flag idea, because it's supposed to be languages, not
> >countries. (Bosian, Croation and Srpski having separate wikis
> >notwithstanding.)
> >
> >Furthermore, you just *know* some idiot will change the UK flag to a US
> >flag. Then another will revert it. Then someone will put both on. Then
> >someone else will object to a language having *two* flags. Then soeone else
> >will use that horrible split US/UK flag I've seen on some multilingual
> >portals. Then someone will protect the page. I suspect flags will provide
> >too much material for idiocy.
>
> Well, we /could/ use the English flag (Cross of St George)..... the only
> problem would then be that most English-speakers wouldn't recognise it!
>
> --
> Arwel Parry
> http://www.cartref.demon.co.uk/
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


body:
Anthere wrote:

>
>
> Pete/Pcb21 a ?crit:
>
>> Anthere wrote:
>>
>>> I do not think there were be links broken now.
>>
>>
>>
>> It is very strange that no-one seems to have picked up on this.
>> There are clearly many many more links to http://www.wikipedia.org
>> (expecting to link to an English language encyclopedia) than ever
>> before. The decision has been taken to break these links.
>
>
> 1) The address www.wikipedia.org become obsolete 2 years ago.
> On the net, 2 years is a life-time.
>
> 2) Besides, 2 years ago, the english wikipedia was far smaller than
> today, so most of the pages just never existed at the address in www.
>
> 3) Finally, unless I really misunderstood something, all pages ARE
> redirected, so there are NO links broken. The only thing the reader
> could notice is the change of url (tiny change). Honestly, most sites
> just do not pay so much attention to their readers.
>
> Let me give you another example :
>
> Please, type the following url in your browser
>
> http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/incivility.
>
> Where does it go ? Broken or english wikipedia article explaining what
> uncivility is ?

Firstly let me say that I wrote my comment not knowing about many of the
mails that had been posted in the last 24 hours on this list as I had
failed to refresh my newsgroup list properly. Apologies for that. (and
see also further down)

But nevertheless, I was solely talking about the single page
http://www.wikipedia.org/ not the article pages. I am pleased that the
latter continue to redirect as they have done for months.

I would hazard a guess that there as many external links going to the
single page www.wikipedia.org as they are links coming into specific
articles. As Walter points out, virtually no articles mentioning
Wikipedia mention en. but prefer www. (so as not surprise their readers
who are used to seeing www. for internet addresses, I suppose)

>> Whether the cost of breaking those links is worth the gain of getting
>> a international portal is debatable.

> I am ready to listen arguments in favor of keeping www.wikipedia.org the
> adresse for the english wikipedia. I know of no arguments for now. What
> are those ?

I think having www.wikipedia.org go to an international portal rather
than the English page is at least a broken expectation if not a broken
link if the formal sense of a 404 that Tim explained.

The other posts that I've now looked at indicate that this might be
mitigated quite a lot by using some funky browser settings to provide a
single page in lots of languages.

I know that I instinctly prefer websites that show me English pages.
Many portal pages look messy. It will be interesting to see how the
Wikipedia one develops.

>> More interesting to me is how this episode shows how what really
>> matters is in getting something changed is what a tiny number of
>> people think, not what the unwashed masses (who a: can't programme a
>> computer and b: aren't on the board) think.
>
>
> You are free to organise a poll on meta for the "unwashed masses" with
> the following choices (while not forgetting to mention no links will be
> broken)
>
> a) keep www.wikipedia.org a redirect to the english wikipedia
> b) change it, for example to have www.wikipedia.org a portal mentioning
> all wikipedia languages (or a similar type of solution)
>
> I expect an absolutely unprecedented support for our project, of at
> least 80%. I would be happy of a 90% of support. I am quite confident
> that any non english wikipedia will disapprove keeping the
> www.wikipedia.org the adresse of the english wikipedia only. And I am
> confident many english editors will not support it either, as most
> understand the importance of us being a multilingual project.
>
> May I remind you that today the number of pages in a language which is
> not english is superior to the number of pages in english, and that the
> german language is getting a very significant proportion of the english
> wikipedia as well ?
>
> For this reason, I will not even take the time to do it. I invite you to
> do this poll if you feel that "unwashed masses" are not taken into
> consideration (which truely amaze me given the amount of discussion I
> have seen in 3 years on that topic). But PLEASE, if you feel left out,
> DO make that poll. This should be a very simple poll which will not
> require a lot of time to you.
>
> There is a doctrine on Wikipedia which is "be bold", but any true
> wikipedian knows very well that being bold against community wish
> generally brings no good. However, it is good to be bold, because this
> is how things progress. Just need to wait the right moment to do it.
>
> I think this is now :-)

I am sure we could have a poll. We've had three years-worth of polls and
talk. But that's all it is talk, a decision would require the backing of
a significant selection of { Jimbo , Angela , Anthere , Brion , Tim ,
Mav , Erik }. 'Tis the truth :)

PEte


body:
Andy Rabagliati wrote:

>What flag for English ? The crusty old country, or the defender of democracy ?
>
>I do not think North Americans mind it being the British flag.
>
The Canadian part of North America would likely prefer the British flag
(or cross of St. George)  I plead ignorance about the defender of
democracy.  Iceland and San Marino have long standing traditions in that
direction, but neither are English speaking countries. :-)

Ec


from_name: Anthere

body:
Pete/Pcb21 a ?crit:
> Anthere wrote:
>
>> I do not think there were be links broken now.
>
>
> It is very strange that no-one seems to have picked up on this.
> There are clearly many many more links to http://www.wikipedia.org
> (expecting to link to an English language encyclopedia) than ever
> before. The decision has been taken to break these links.

1) The address www.wikipedia.org become obsolete 2 years ago.
On the net, 2 years is a life-time.

2) Besides, 2 years ago, the english wikipedia was far smaller than
today, so most of the pages just never existed at the address in www.

3) Finally, unless I really misunderstood something, all pages ARE
redirected, so there are NO links broken. The only thing the reader
could notice is the change of url (tiny change). Honestly, most sites
just do not pay so much attention to their readers.

Let me give you another example :

Please, type the following url in your browser

http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/incivility.

Where does it go ? Broken or english wikipedia article explaining what
uncivility is ?

> Whether the cost of breaking those links is worth the gain of getting a
> international portal is debatable.

I am ready to listen arguments in favor of keeping www.wikipedia.org the
adresse for the english wikipedia. I know of no arguments for now. What
are those ?

> More interesting to me is how this episode shows how what really matters
> is in getting something changed is what a tiny number of people think,
> not what the unwashed masses (who a: can't programme a computer and b:
> aren't on the board) think.

You are free to organise a poll on meta for the "unwashed masses" with
the following choices (while not forgetting to mention no links will be
broken)

a) keep www.wikipedia.org a redirect to the english wikipedia
b) change it, for example to have www.wikipedia.org a portal mentioning
all wikipedia languages (or a similar type of solution)

I expect an absolutely unprecedented support for our project, of at
least 80%. I would be happy of a 90% of support. I am quite confident
that any non english wikipedia will disapprove keeping the
www.wikipedia.org the adresse of the english wikipedia only. And I am
confident many english editors will not support it either, as most
understand the importance of us being a multilingual project.

May I remind you that today the number of pages in a language which is
not english is superior to the number of pages in english, and that the
german language is getting a very significant proportion of the english
wikipedia as well ?

For this reason, I will not even take the time to do it. I invite you to
do this poll if you feel that "unwashed masses" are not taken into
consideration (which truely amaze me given the amount of discussion I
have seen in 3 years on that topic). But PLEASE, if you feel left out,
DO make that poll. This should be a very simple poll which will not
require a lot of time to you.

There is a doctrine on Wikipedia which is "be bold", but any true
wikipedian knows very well that being bold against community wish
generally brings no good. However, it is good to be bold, because this
is how things progress. Just need to wait the right moment to do it.

I think this is now :-)

> Pete/pcb21


from_name: Karl Eichwalder

body:
David Gerard <fun at thingy.apana.org.au> writes:

> I dislike the flag idea, because it's supposed to be languages, not
> countries.

Yes, flags are national symbols.  Let's stay away from them as much as
possible.  If you think a webpage without pictures does not work, use
portraits for speakers of these languages (and change them monthly...).

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


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Yet another portal page

body:
As noted before, it will minimize the other options. If Dutch is
featured prominently because it is set as the auto-accept language,
somebody is less likely to notice that W. Frisian, Limburgish,
Afrikaans, etc. are also available.

As Ant noted in another thread on the same topic (really, this is
getting out of hand), the French reporters who didn't know that fr:
existed... this would be similar, and potentially millions of users
could be inconvenienced by it. Some Wikipedias link prominently (or at
least somewhat prominently) to other languages spoken in the same
region: Afrikaans links to other South African languages, Hindi links
to other Indian languages, Chinese links to the other languages of
China, etc. But some languages, for example English, cannot afford
this because there are just too many languages (English has Inuktitut,
French, Spanish, Navajo, Maori, Welsh, Irish, Scottish, Cornish,
Chinese, Malay, Hebrew, Yiddish, Afrikaans, and plenty of other
languages).

Mark

On Mon, 10 Jan 2005 01:21:21 +0100, Walter Vermeir <walter at wikipedia.be> wrote:
> Alfio Puglisi schreef:
> > I took the current www.wikipedia.org page and added an auto-selection
> > based on the browser language settings. This example recognizes all the
> > languages with 10.000+ articles:
> >
> > http://www.tommasoconforti.com/portal2.php
>
> I like this. Auto redirect; NO. But this type of use of the browser
> languages settings is good.
>
> --
> [[w:nl:gebruiker:walter]]
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


from_name: Ashar Voultoiz

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: wikipadia

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

Anthere wrote:
> Reported by Arnaudus on fr : http://www (dot) wikipadia (dot) org/
>
> Anthere

And ? Just looks like a domain squatting, owner expecting users to make
typos when accessing wikipedia.

What do you want us to do with it ? :o)

- --
Ashar Voultoiz - WP++++
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Hashar
Servers in trouble ? noc (at) wikimedia (dot) org
"This signature is a virus. Copy me in yours to spread it."
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Version: GnuPG v1.2.4 (GNU/Linux)

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from_name: Olve Utne

body:
Hello Andy R.,

You wrote:
 >I have read the discussion here on the con's, and have not seen any of
the pro's.
 >
 >I like it. We should get past the supposed political incorrectness and
see it as /easy/, /visual/, and /obvious/.

I am not as worried about the degree of "political correctness" as the
actual practicalities involved. My problem with it is that while it
certainly would be "visual", it would not be "easy" -- let alone
"obvious"...! Please feel free to convince me through showing what flags
would be easy and obvious for Anglo-Saxon, Arabic, Ladino, Sanskrit and
Yiddish -- to name a few...

Only some of the languages have ONE flag "attached" to them and not all
that many flags have only one language "attached" to them. Examples in
addition to the ones mentioned above, include:
Alemannish, English (UK, Eire, USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, etc.),
Dutch (mainly Netherlands and Belgium), Esperanto, French (France, Quebec,
Belgium, etc.), German (Germany, Austria, Switzerland, etc.), Latin,
Portuguese, Sanskrit... Even flags of ethnicities rather than political
entities, such as the Roma and S?mi flags, often represent groups of
languages rather than a single language each.

I do support the notion of having some kind of graphic representation for
spiffing up the www.wikipedia.org portal -- I'm just concerned that flags
will run us into unnecessary difficulties.

-Olve

___________________

Olve Utne
http://utne.nvg.org


from_name: NSK

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: A work on data

body:
On Sunday 09 January 2005 17:18, Jakob Voss wrote:
> I added you at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research

great!

--
NSK
The Wikinerds Community Federation of Science Wikis
Owner of the Wikinerds Portal http://portal.wikinerds.org
Owner of the NerdyPC IT Wiki http://www.nerdypc.org


from_name: Elisabeth Bauer

subject: [Foundation-l] wikinews

body:
David Gerard wrote:
> Anthere (anthere9 at yahoo.com) [050109 18:20]:
>
>> I may have missed something entirely...
>> Onymous just mentionned on #wikimedia that wikinews was now in public
>> domain.
>> Is that so ?
>> http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Main_Page

> I believe the idea is that while it's being trialled, public domain is the
> least restrictive possible open content license [*], so it can be made more
> restrictive later if needed - but it would be difficult retrospectively
> making it *less* restrictive.

There is a poll on meta about which license to use:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikinews/License_straw_poll

IMO we should end it soon and decide on a license.

greetings,
elian


subject: [Foundation-l] wikinews


from_name: Delirium

subject:
[WikiEN-l] www.wikipedia.org no longer redirects to the en main
	page

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:

>Making www.wikipedia.org a multilingual portal has been suggested by many
>different people ever since the creation of new languages besides English.
>I point you, for example, to this summary by Elian written in October
>2002, where a large number of people favored a multilingual portal:
>
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2002-October/024522.html
>
>
It's been discussed, but there's never been a clear consensus that we
should actually make the chnage.

-Mark


from_name: Craig Franklin

body:
Scr?obh Jens Ropers:

>Quite true, however for most (if not all) languages, there is a flag
>that is commonly understood to symbolize the language as well
>(depending on context). No other symbols exist that so clearly and
>graphically identify the respective languages. And I thing it having
>the instant visual indentification that you can get with images is
>worthwhile. That said, someone has removed the flags now (without
>explanatory comment) and I'm taking my time about reverting, because I
>believe community consensus will decide this one.

I agree that the flags look pretty, but there are just too many languages
and countries where they don't sync.  What flag do you put to Afrikaans,
Tibetan, Breton, or Navajo?  Either you end up repeating flags, or some
entries don't have one at all, which looks very ugly.

Nice idea, and it looks visually agreeable, but it's just not practical.

Regards,
- Craig Franklin

-------------------
Craig Franklin
PO Box 764
Ashgrove, Q, 4060
Australia
http://www.halo-17.net - Australia's Favourite Source of Indie Music, Art,
and Culture.


subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Re: A portal page for www.wikipedia.org (was Re:
	Whywww.wikipedia.org => en.wikipedia.org ?)

body:
On Sunday 09 January 2005 11:46, Jens Ropers wrote:
> On 9 Jan 2005, at 08:24, Anthere wrote:
> > Now... whatever your opinion NSK, please respect Jens work. He took
> > time to set these flags, many websites use such a mean, and it has the
> > merit of being visual, so easier to navigate. I wish that no flame war
> > begins over the topic, so choose your words more carefully.
>
> Thanks :)

What I meant actually was "using flags to represent languages is ineffective
and discriminatory" but I hit send a bit early, probably because I had little
sleep as usual. Of course Jens work is respected.

--
NSK
The Wikinerds Community Federation of Science Wikis
Owner of the Wikinerds Portal http://portal.wikinerds.org
Owner of the NerdyPC IT Wiki http://www.nerdypc.org


body:
Pete/Pcb21 a ?crit:

> Firstly let me say that I wrote my comment not knowing about many of the
> mails that had been posted in the last 24 hours on this list as I had
> failed to refresh my newsgroup list properly. Apologies for that. (and
> see also further down)

ya, I know, and the messages seem to be arriving in packs rather than
one by one. Probably the servers trying to consider what is more
important to display :-)

> But nevertheless, I was solely talking about the single page
> http://www.wikipedia.org/ not the article pages. I am pleased that the
> latter continue to redirect as they have done for months.

Okay

> I would hazard a guess that there as many external links going to the
> single page www.wikipedia.org as they are links coming into specific
> articles. As Walter points out, virtually no articles mentioning
> Wikipedia mention en. but prefer www. (so as not surprise their readers
> who are used to seeing www. for internet addresses, I suppose)

True. I might even mention that french press articles writing on the
french wikipedia mostly, often use the www.wikipedia.org adress :-(

A comment most journalists I answered to in the past months make is "I
have known about wikipedia for a long time, but I thought it was only
english; I discovered about french only xx months ago".

They used wikipedia for their information. They typed www.wikipedia.org
They saw only english.
They discovered fr only recently, because it has only been for the past
6 months or so that fr really started to make a difference on google
search and they started to see french articles popping up.

So, while what you say is very true, I see www becoming a portal a real
mean for smaller languages to develop.

Now, readers won't find a 404, they will still be on wikipedia, they
will just marvel at the discovery there is MORE than english. Maybe it
will be ONE MORE click (which is bad), but there will possibly be
amazement from them.

I'd like to share with you the reason why I opposed the portal 2 years ago.
Only the english wikipedia was decent. All the other projects were
infants. I felt it would more be detrimental to Wikipedia to show some
so ridiculous little starting blurbs.
Now, we have great (the english), we have good (such as de of course,
and ja, fr etc...)
And we have truely interesting next ones.
And we have the smaller languages, to amaze people over our vitality.

What was detrimental 2 years ago imho should now be very beneficial.

>>> Whether the cost of breaking those links is worth the gain of getting
>>> a international portal is debatable.
>>
>
>> I am ready to listen arguments in favor of keeping www.wikipedia.org
>> the adresse for the english wikipedia. I know of no arguments for now.
>> What are those ?
>
>
> I think having www.wikipedia.org go to an international portal rather
> than the English page is at least a broken expectation if not a broken
> link if the formal sense of a 404 that Tim explained.

Agreed. It is a broken expectation for english readers used to call
wikipedia; You are correct.

> The other posts that I've now looked at indicate that this might be
> mitigated quite a lot by using some funky browser settings to provide a
> single page in lots of languages.
>
> I know that I instinctly prefer websites that show me English pages.
> Many portal pages look messy. It will be interesting to see how the
> Wikipedia one develops.

Agreed. It will be interesting. I am interested because I do not want an
ugly page. I would also support a page with content. Though this is
technically and politically not so easy to do a multilingual one.
The other option is to do something very very simple.

I think many readers in the world like to see websites in languages they
can understand though :-)

> I am sure we could have a poll. We've had three years-worth of polls and
> talk. But that's all it is talk, a decision would require the backing of
> a significant selection of { Jimbo , Angela , Anthere , Brion , Tim ,
> Mav , Erik }. 'Tis the truth :)
>
> PEt
> e

The decision to make a poll or the decision to have this portal ?
For the decision to have this portal, well, I guess the majority if not
all of those above agree with a portal. I think.

If you want a poll, this is fine by me.


from_name: Thomas Gries

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Proposal to show pdf icon for external and media:
 links to PDF files (having fileexternsion .pdf)

body:
I propose to show in general a small ***pdf icon*** for such links
pointing to a PDF file. This would be similar to small icon
external.png, which is already shown after every _external_ link. It
could be handled in monobook.css.

Tom


from_name: Yann Forget

body:
Hi,

Le Sunday 9 January 2005 16:45, Pete/Pcb21 a ?crit :
> Anthere wrote:
> > I do not think there were be links broken now.
>
> It is very strange that no-one seems to have picked up on this.
> There are clearly many many more links to http://www.wikipedia.org
> (expecting to link to an English language encyclopedia) than ever
> before. The decision has been taken to break these links.
>
> Whether the cost of breaking those links is worth the gain of getting a
> international portal is debatable.
>
> More interesting to me is how this episode shows how what really matters
> is in getting something changed is what a tiny number of people think,
> not what the unwashed masses (who a: can't programme a computer and b:
> aren't on the board) think.

I think you have it wrong.
This multilingual portal is long overdue seeing the multilingual nature of our
project. However a redirect to the English was kept for various reason (see
Anthere's mail). As she said, usually people refer to the whole multilingual
project as http://www.wikipedia.org, not to the English Wikipedia only.

> Pete/pcb21

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


from_name: Tim Starling

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Random page bias

body:
Robert Dodier wrote:
> Hello,
>
> If I'm not mistaken, the random page scheme makes some pages
> much more likely to be retrieved than others. If I understand
> correctly, each page is assigned a random number (cur_random)
> when it's created. To retrieve a random page, a random number x
> is generated and the page with cur_random > x and lower than
> any other cur_random is returned.
>
> The probability of retrieving a page is proportional to the
> gap between its cur_random and the next lower cur_random.
> If cur_random is generated uniformly, the gaps have an
> exponential distribution. This implies there will be some
> gaps that are much larger than others. I guess that we could
> directly test this by dumping out cur_random and computing
> the gaps.

If you like that one, you might be interested in a bug we had with
Special:Randompage back in 2002 and early 2003. Pages were selected by
taking the next article with a cur_random value greater than some
randomly selected value on [0,1). Then, the cur_random value was
updated, set to another random value. If this new random value was close
to zero, the chance of it being selected again is small. Hence, the net
effect is to cause the cur_random of all articles to drift towards zero.
Eventually, there were only a few hundred articles out of 100,000 which
had a cur_random value greater than 0.01.

I plotted the distribution of cur_random at the time, and it seemed to
make a nice curve. I've been interested since then in whether there is
an analytic form for that distribution. I suspect it tends to a delta
function as t->infinity, but is there some normalised distribution which
describes the shape?

-- Tim Starling


from_name: Stephan Walter

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Re: www.wikipedia.org no longer redirects to the en main
	page

body:
NSK wrote:
> The order is chosen with Western-American values. According to what I see on
> my screen when I access wikipedia.ch, the Japanese and Greek languages are
> not emphasised at all. The German language is emphasised more than Spanish.
> The languages are not in alphabetic order. It is discriminatory and should
> not be applied on wikipedia.org

I designed wikipedia.ch. The reason that some languages are more
prominently displayed is that these are the official languages in
Switzerland (german, french, italian, rumantsch) and english is the
lingua franca in the western world.

It is true that not all languages are shown, this is because I didn't
want to overload the page.

Regards,
Stephan

[[en:User:Stw]]
[[de:Benutzer:Stw]]


body:
Hello Mark W.,

At 23:46 09/01/2005 +0000, you wrote:
>Name me a monolingual country, and I will show you a flying pig.

OK: The Faeroe Islands. :-D      Now, amidst those flying pigs fluttering
around, I will certainly have to admit that the Faeroese situation is
highly unusual in that respect.... :]   But coming to think about it --
there are of course plenty of Danish- and English-speakers there too; along
with Norwegian- and Tagalog-speakers etc.

(Message fading out to sound of pigs dropping to the ground...)

-Olve

___________________

Olve Utne
http://utne.nvg.org


from_name: Stirling Newberry

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Bibliography

references:
<200501062354.AAA23339@germaine.webtechnologies.lu>	<shhdlsh22l.fsf@tux.gnu.franken.de>
	<41E03792.8040605@telus.net> <shbrbzw07r.fsf@tux.gnu.franken.de>
	<41E1C2B6.5050600@telus.net>

body:
On Jan 9, 2005, at 6:48 PM, Ray Saintonge wrote:

> Karl Eichwalder wrote:
>
>> Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> writes:
>>
>>> From the beginning one of the purposes of the "Author" pages in
>>> Wikisource has been bibliographic.
>>>
>> I consider Wikisource as superfluous.  We should join forces with the
>> "Project Gutenberg" (that's what I do).
>>
> That can wait until Project Gutenberg includes Wiki links.
>
>> Please, re-read this thread.  Author pages are not good enough.  We
>> need
>> a database system that you can query with well define protocols like
>> [[de:Z39.50]]
>>
> And what does [[de:Z39.50]] mean?  Users, will be most comfortable
> with plain language categories.  Although formal classification
> systems have their place, they are best in conjunction with plain
> language references.
>
> Ec
>

It is a protocol for querying catalog information, it returns MARC
records. Wiki should set up a system for querying this information, and
placing it into wikicite cards, which can then be annotated by our
editors.

Remember, it isn't just the source, it is the reliability of the source
that is important - just as Amazon and most other commercial outlets
have rating systems to let you know what other people think - and even
try to match you to people who share your tastes - wiki needs a
credibility mechanism which is "live" rather than "dead".


subject: [Foundation-l] donate to Wikimedia Deutschland

body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:
> But that begs the question about what the German association *does* with the
> money donated to it. IIRC about 4000 Euro was donated directly to that
> organization and yet have not seen nor heard about any of that being
> transferred to the Wikimedia Foundation for any purpose (such as buying servers
> or pay for bandwidth). If this is not correct, then please tell me (I'm still
> missing some bank statements, so could have missed it).

We are finding out how to best transfer the donations (i.e. buying
servers directly or sending the money to the foundation) without getting
in trouble with german association law. Henriette, our treasurer, was
busy with organizing the 21C3 lately, so I hope there is some progress
soon. The decision to buy servers has been taken already, the open
question is now how to do this.

Other things we did with the donations:
* Wikimedia Deutschland pays half of the plane tickets for Brion and Tim
to Berlin
* the second big sum is the legal expertise we ordered
(see http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Urheberrechtsfragen/Sammlung)
* some promotion material...

My proposal would be that you contact henriette (Henriette.Fiebig (at)
snafu.de) directly and establish ways to transfer the money, maybe
involve also one of the developers to tell us which hardware is needed.

greetings,
elian


from_name: Robin Shannon

subject: [Foundation-l] legal question

body:
I suggest Wikinerds should use exactly the same policies as wikimedia
in all respects because obviously there could never be two sets of
different but equally good polices (note: the sarcasm). I also suggest
that you use words like 'we' in your suggestions , as, i am sure, it
will make your suggestions more likely to be considered by
wikimedians.

-rjs

On Sat, 8 Jan 2005 16:06:21 +0200, NSK <nsk2 at wikinerds.org> wrote:
> For these reasons I discourage interpersonal communication in my wikis and I
> have set up mailing lists and a web forum, as well as a special web-based
> collaboration platform with phpcollab. I suggest Wikipedia to do the same:
> All talk pages should redirect to a phpbb thread.
>
> --
> NSK
> The Wikinerds Community Federation of Science Wikis
> Owner of the Wikinerds Portal http://portal.wikinerds.org
> Owner of the NerdyPC IT Wiki http://www.nerdypc.org

--
hit me: robin.shannon.id.au
jab me: saudade at jabber.zim.net.au

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons
Recombo Plus License. To view a copy of this license, visit
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/sampling+/1.0/


subject: [Foundation-l] legal question


from_name: Jens Ropers

body:
Leaving aside Daniel's concerns over how Wikimedia Deutschland
currently uses the dough (somebody from Wikimedia Deutschland should
answer that), Walter's email is an important reminder that we really
should get going about offering the EU standard bank transfer to EU
donors.

What we need to provide so people can do these transactions:

* our BIC (Bank Identification Code)
* our IBAN (International Bank Account Number)
* the full international postal address of our bank (because some banks
want this data as a fallback mechanism, in case there's probs w/ the
BIC/IBAN data.

Note that the full postal address is currently missing from
http://www.wikimedia.de/spenden.html.

EU donors (even if they are totally unfamiliar w/ EU standard
transactions) can then take that info to their bank and get going
sending the money.

The donation page should explain a bit about EU standard bank transfers
-- because EU standard transactions are still fairly new and not even
all EU citizens know about them. (I think I was one of the first people
to do them at my bank, but I now do one every one or two months -- easy
peasy.) It should be made clear that these transactions CANNOT, by EU
law, cost more than national transactions and that every EU bank has to
offer them. In other words, for anyone with an EU current account, an
an EU transaction is probably the cheapest way. (Admittedly, in terms
of convenience credit cards still have an edge, because EU standard
transactions require the user to do the transaction through their bank
(instead of punching in a few numbers on our site) and not all banks
let their customers do EU standard transactions online yet.

Pretty redundant info, just in case:
EU standard transactions are bank transfers between two EU banks. The
donor needs an EU bank account and we need one. They're cheap, they're
''relatively'' fast (still can take up to a few days till funds fully
register in the recipient's account) and once you've got the above
data, EU transactions are quite painless (as opposed to any other
international transaction).
It really, truly does not matter what EU bank account we use for
accepting EU standard transactions. It could be a current account in
any EU country and we DON'T need an account in each EU country from
that perspective. The only advantage to having multiple EU current
accounts would be that donors from a respective country could then also
use their "old" national bank transfer mechanism to donate, and they
might be more familiar with that. So maybe to offer separate accounts
for the bigger countries would be good -- and, yes, it's especially
good to have/offer a bank account with Germany, because German's mostly
just don't get^W, sorry, do credit cards and the country's the most
populous of the EU.

-- ropers [[en:User:Ropers]]
     www.ropersonline.com