from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [WikiEN-l] RE: Corrected

body:
Stan Shebs wrote:

> geni wrote:
>
>>> Perhaps more realistically, we want to be so credible and widely
>>> used that merely publishing the C&D letter on the main page will
>>> cause the foolhardy company to get deluged with hate mail and
>>> backpedal within 24 hours, disavowing any knowledge of the law
>>> firm that sent the letter. We've shown we can raise thousands of
>>> dollars within a few days just by asking; that's a reservoir of
>>> good will that can help us deal with a wide variety of threats.
>>
>> I would suggest against any form of vigilantism. Apart from anything
>> else sooner or latter you run into someone who doesn't care. Then you
>> are in real trouble.
>
> What do you mean, "vigilantism"? We just don't need to tiptoe around
> scared that one mistake by some anon editor will force us to shut
> down. We're not some kind of dubious dotcom with a shady biz model,
> we're as open and truthful as we know how, we're dedicated to facts
> more than agendas, and best of all, we're giving away stuff for free.
>
> That's a very powerful story, and we should be making everybody
> aware of it, not chewing our fingernails in fear of corporate
> lawyers. Suing WP should come to be regarded as worse than suing nuns.

I strongly agree with Stan that when it comes to allegations of copyvio
we should not be in so much of a hurry to plead guilty that we trip on
our own feet as we enter the courtroom.  I suppose tha "vigilntism"
refers to the immediate publishing of the C&D letter on the front page
as soon as it arrives.  Such an act would be a bit over the top and
childish, especially when the complainer is troll in different clothing;
no troll would be better nourished than by having his letter appear on
our front page. :-)   If and when we receive such a letter we should be
prepared to give each letter a thorough review based on its own merits.
There is a wide range of options available at that time, going from
abject apology when we realize we're wrong to daring idiotic assholes to
sue us.  We can save our reliance on ninja lawyers for the situations
when some point of principle is involved.

Those who shrink from fair use really should review the four criteria
for fair use found in U.S. law.  Copyright paranoids should also review
the process that takes place when there is a claim of copyright
infringement, beginning with the requiremts for having a valid take-down
order.  One of the most important is that the person making the claim
must have standing; in other words, an off-the-street do-gooder has no
standing to make such claims about a stranger's works.  In most cases
there are plenty of inexpensive opportunities to retract tryly
infringing material before the issue gets out of hand.

Ec


list: wikien-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Tony Sidaway

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: RE: Corrected

body:
Phil Boswell said:
>
> So why does he insist on appending his full name, address and contact
> details to everything he posts?

Wollmann's emails to this list have included his WWW URLs and the
telephone number for his business, Astrological Consulting (SAN 299-5603).
 His Usenet postings have the same signature or a similar one.
Someone once found his actual address and posted it repeatedly on Usenet
in mid-1999, alongside blood-curdling but extremely inaccurate
descriptions of Wollmann.  As far as I'm aware Wollmann has not posted his
address himself.  His business and personal internet domains are
registered under a P.O. Box.


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Timwi

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Proposal for deprecation of syntax features for 1.5

body:
Patrick Collison wrote:
> There's a partial overnight. See http://wikimedia.org/stats/live/
> org.wikimedia.all.squid.requests-hits-day.png.
>
> If there is a decision to change the syntax in a major way, locking  the
> database for 12 hours is hardly a huge price to pay. How could  syntax
> versions work? Can you mix syntax versions in the same  article? If so,
> does the parser know what regions use what syntax? If  not, can only new
> articles use the new syntax? I don't think a hack  is the solution to a
> hack-ish syntax.

I think the idea was that old articles would be flagged as "old syntax",
and then a conversion bot can be run *while the site remains up*. As
soon as the bot has converted an article, it will be flagged as "new
syntax" and can henceforth be edited in the new syntax.

I don't agree to the proposal, though.


subject: [WikiEN-l] RE: Corrected

body:
Bryan Derksen said:
>
> If the Wollmann article gets undeleted, NPOV policy would demand that
> the sort of caveats you just listed off about Wollmann's notoriety
> should be mentioned in there. If NPOV is done right then all sides of
> an  argument should theoretically be satisfied with the results.

Oh yes, I agree.  I think the article when it was deleted was admirably
NPOV.  I did that myself. I was still relieved to see it go.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Corrected (Wollmann)

body:
David Gerard said:
>
> Because that isn't really what it's for, per the decorative policy.
> It's there to keep out the *irredeemable* crap that makes it past
> speedy. (And I'm painfully aware that new articles can at times run up
> to thirtyish percent shoot-on-sight speedyable. Anyone doubting this
> should do
> Special:Newpages patrol; if it doesn't turn you into a bloodthirsty
> axewielding deletionist, it'll certainly give you a strong
> understanding of them.)

Doing newpages patrol is the nearest thing a childless person can get to
being the parent of teenagers.


body:
Karl Eichwalder wrote:
> Lee Daniel Crocker <lee at piclab.com> writes:
>
>
>>On Thu, 2005-05-12 at 09:33 +0200, Karl Eichwalder wrote:
>>
>>
>>>I do not ask for HTML, I vote for XML.  Our all-time-morphing
>>>wiki-syntax is not user-friendly.
>>
>>Yes, The current wiki syntax is dreadful, and getting worse with
>>every release.  But using XML doesn't solve the problem, it just
>>puts up a big barrier to entry for newcomers.
>
> I think different.  Those who don't know or don't like XML can write
>
simple paragraphs
 without any markup at all.  After editing some
> article the markup is self-explaining:
>
>

>      <row>
>       <entry>...</entry>
>      </row>
>      <row>
>       <entry>...</entry>
>      </row>
>

>
> I never edit table boxes, too complicate,

Haha! LOL! That was a really good one. Just so you know, the current
table syntax is *waaaay* easier for non-techies than the XML-based
syntax you have mentioned above. When you say you find it easier, what
you really mean is just that you're used to it, or that it is similar to
something you're used to (namely, HTML), or that you came up with it
(and therefore naturally understand it). Unfortunately that doesn't
speak for non-technically-minded people!

Timwi


from_name: Richard Rabinowitz

subject: [WikiEN-l] When do deletions become vandalism

body:
We could always use some more money.

On Sat, 14 May 2005, Alphax wrote:

> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
>
> Stacey Greenstein wrote:
> > Which articles are you referring to?
> >
> > Stacey
> > [[User:UtherSRG]]
> >
>
> I don't think it matters ATM, according to OpenFacts:
>
> Speed   Availability
> SLOW    MOSTLY UNAVAILABLE
>
> Is it time for another fundraising drive?
>
> - --
> Alphax
> GnuPG key: 0xF874C613 - http://tinyurl.com/8mpg9
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax
> There are two kinds of people: those who say to God, 'Thy will be done,'
> and those to whom God says, 'All right, then, have it your way.' - C. S.
> Lewis
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
> Version: GnuPG v1.4.1 (MingW32)
> Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://enigmail.mozdev.org
>
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> SPy7sZPmjDdSp5AGz3Hl6bw=
> =51l8
> -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


from_name: Alphax

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Corrected (Wollmann)

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

Tony Sidaway wrote:
> Ray Saintonge said:
>
>>If Mr. Wollmann thinks that he has a case let him go ahead with it, and
>> show us that he means more than simply to intimidate.  We can easily
>>promise that when we receive the court documents in the case we will
>>reconsider our position in the matter.  This may or may not result in a
>> removal of what he finds offensive from the site.  Meanwhile it will
>>have been very costly for him to mount his case with no prospects of
>>recovering those costs.
>
>
>
> Well, Wikipedia probably wouldn't be vulnerable, but where individuals are
> involved he could get a default judgement in a plaintiff-friendly UK court
> for a no-show defendant in the US, with costs awarded (which is very
> common in UK cases), and then use that as leverage in the US.  This
> technique has been tried against Usenet posters and worked well.  Since
> Wikipedia content is produced by individuals who are often identifiable it
> would probably work as well on Wikipedia.
> He may have to demonstrate standing to sue in UK courts, but that could be
> as simple as selling books through Amazon.co.uk--which Wollmann does, as
> it happens.
>

By the same token, why hasn't Wikipedia been sued by the Church of
Scientology for revealing its top secret information, which church
members can only access after a certain degree of financial support of
the church? Couldn't they sue Wikipedia for lost income?

- --
Alphax
GnuPG key: 0xF874C613 - http://tinyurl.com/8mpg9
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax
There are two kinds of people: those who say to God, 'Thy will be done,'
and those to whom God says, 'All right, then, have it your way.' - C. S.
Lewis
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subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Corrected (Wollmann)

body:
But, then again, Wikipedia is a new kind of encyclopedia, so it may wind
up having new kinds of encyclopedia articles.

On Fri, 13 May 2005, Rick wrote:

>
> --- Phil Boswell <phil.boswell at gmail.com> wrote:
> > The attitude of "well I've never heard of him so he
> > can't deserve an
> > article" is entirely too prevalent and needs to be
> > addressed before we turn
> > into just a list of people *everybody* knows about
> > already.
> > --
> > Phil
> > [[en:User:Phil Boswell]]
>
> Straw man.  Not the prevalent idea at VfD at all, but
> then, it seems to be common argument of the radical
> inclusionist that things like [[List of pizza parlors
> in New York City]] is somehow an encylopedia article.
> It has nothing to do with "I've never heard of him"
> and everything to do with "He doesn't merit an
> article."
>
> RickK
>
>
>
>
> __________________________________
> Yahoo! Mail Mobile
> Take Yahoo! Mail with you! Check email on your mobile phone.
> http://mobile.yahoo.com/learn/mail
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Corrected (Wollmann)

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

JAY JG wrote:
>> From: David Gerard <fun at thingy.apana.org.au>
>>
>> "Notability" STILL isn't a deletion criterion.
>
>
> There are a number of policies which make notability a deletion
> criterion, even if they don't use the word "notability". It's certainly
> used as a criterion often enough; it may be the single most popular
> reason given for deletion.
>
> Jay.
>
>

Like "potential for expansion". Given Mr. W's recent activities, I'd say
there's plenty of room for expansion. Also, Mr. W appears to be more
notable than other people whose articles survived VfD (and set
precedents for doing so).

I think there should be a request for undeletion on this.

- --
Alphax
GnuPG key: 0xF874C613 - http://tinyurl.com/8mpg9
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax
There are two kinds of people: those who say to God, 'Thy will be done,'
and those to whom God says, 'All right, then, have it your way.' - C. S.
Lewis
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subject: [WikiEN-l] Speed (was Re: When do deletions become vandalism)

body:
We should ALWAYS make sure there is a backup server for servers with a
particular purpose (i.e., there should not be just ONE photo-related
server, there should be a second photo-related server as well).

On Sat, 14 May 2005, Tim Starling wrote:

> Alphax wrote:
> > I don't think it matters ATM, according to OpenFacts:
> >
> > Speed   Availability
> > SLOW    MOSTLY UNAVAILABLE
> >
> > Is it time for another fundraising drive?
>
> When you have 50 servers and only one of them is an image server, you're
> bound to have problems. The image server problem is 99% due to
> developer/sysadmin time constraints. It will be partly fixed with
> MediaWiki 1.5.
>
> -- Tim Starling
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


from_name: Bryan Derksen

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Corrected (Wollmann)

body:
Rick wrote:

>--- "Poor, Edmund W" <Edmund.W.Poor at abc.com> wrote:
>
>
>>Why not write a Wikipedia about Wollman, if he's
>>that fascinating? If it
>>survives the VFD process, than that might give us an
>>excuse to mention
>>him via a link from kooks newsgroup. But if it fails
>>a vfd vote, that's
>>pretty conclusive evidence that he's "non-notable".
>>
>>Ed
>>
>>
>
>He's already been deleted following a VfD vote.
>
>
>
If we were to follow both the policy that if something is deleted via a
VfD then a new article about it should never be created, and also the
policy that VfD is a quality-control mechanism (as you suggest in your
other posting sent around the same time as this one), this would lead to
some articles being declared forever uncreatable simply because the
first attempt to make it was unmitigatedly bad even if there's a
legitimate interest in having an article on that subject. Since deletion
removes old versions from history entirely I don't see what the point
would be, they're gone either way.

In this specific case the old deleted Wollmann article was already
pretty good IMO. I think the issue is whether the VfD came to the wrong
conclusion about it in the first place.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Corrected (Wollmann)

body:
Oooooooh, a Wikipedian version of the [[Congregation for the Doctrine of
the Faith]]. Sounds interesting....

On Fri, 13 May 2005, Tony Sidaway wrote:

> David Gerard said:
> >
> > Because that isn't really what it's for, per the decorative policy.
> > It's there to keep out the *irredeemable* crap that makes it past
> > speedy. (And I'm painfully aware that new articles can at times run up
> > to thirtyish percent shoot-on-sight speedyable. Anyone doubting this
> > should do
> > Special:Newpages patrol; if it doesn't turn you into a bloodthirsty
> > axewielding deletionist, it'll certainly give you a strong
> > understanding of them.)
>
> Doing newpages patrol is the nearest thing a childless person can get to
> being the parent of teenagers.
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


from_name: Skyring

subject: [WikiEN-l] RE: Corrected

body:
On 5/6/05, slimvirgin at gmail.com <slimvirgin at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 5/5/05, Stan Shebs <shebs at apple.com> wrote:
> > I would say anybody who posts to Usenet automatically becomes
> > a "public figure"; you can hardly spew your thoughts and opinions
> > into a million computers around the world, then try to claim
> > "privacy". If you want to be private, start by keeping your
> > mouth shut, eh?
> >
> It's an interesting point, whether sitting in your own home typing
> material onto the Web should in and of itself make you a public
> figure. I'm not aware of any relevant case law. Using your real name
> would certainly make it harder to argue that you'd intended to retain
> your privacy.

Another factor is the ease of access to the same audience. If a
newspaper libels you, it is difficult to present counter-claims to
everyone who read the original libel. But on Usenet, and arguably on
Wikipedia, you have the same access to the same audience.

--
Peter in Canberra


subject: [WikiEN-l] RE: Corrected

body:
On 5/6/05, Sean Barrett <sean at epoptic.org> wrote:

> Truth is an absolute defense against charges of libel.

Maybe it is where you live, but certainly not everywhere. If I was
mounting a lawsuit, I'd go for the jurisdiction with my best chance of
success. Wouldn't you?

--
Peter in Canberra


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Corrected (Wollmann)

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

Tony Sidaway wrote:
> Alphax said:
>
>>I think there should be a request for undeletion on this.
>
>
> I could reluctantly see that--if he's the first person to get into this
> kind of situation with Wikipedia, for instance.  However I'm not sure it
> would be very ethical to undelete on those grounds.  It seems too trollish
> to me (though I don't think you are proposing it for trollish reasons).
>
>

Did you read the pages...

David Gerard wrote:
> Anthere (anthere9 at yahoo.com) [050512 15:34]:
>
>
>>Just for the record, Mr Wollmann is still requesting removal of that
>>information. I am not exactly sure what we should answer him now...
>
>
>
> Probably not at all. Read these:
>
>     http://www.smbtech.com/ed/index.html
>     http://www.smbtech.com/ed/whyed.html
>
>
> - d.
>
>

In the context of his relevance in the AUK article: not only has he won
AUK's "kook of the month" award many times, and "kook of the millenium",
he has also had an award named after him.

It is well known that he has threatened everyone who disagrees with him
with legal action; it is alleged on the site mentioned above that he has
caused *hundreds* of people's ISPs to cancel their accounts, based
solely on the fact that he asked them to.

If the latter is true, it makes him one of the most influential people
on the Internet (usenet anyway), comparable to Kibo and Sollog.

As for the undeletion, maybe wait until the court papers come :)

- --
Alphax
GnuPG key: 0xF874C613 - http://tinyurl.com/8mpg9
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax
There are two kinds of people: those who say to God, 'Thy will be done,'
and those to whom God says, 'All right, then, have it your way.' - C. S.
Lewis
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list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Lars Aronsson

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Massive photography

body:
The month of May is in Sweden a time when all snow has finally
melted and we start to see flowers and green leaves on trees.
This is why its a good month for outdoor photography.

What if I could use a GPS navigator to connect geo coordinates (as
well as timestamps) to all my photos, and then arrange a photo
album with a geographic (and temporal) search.  If the album was
an international collaborative effort, we could photograph every
street corner and get a global view.  All it would take, really,
is to input geo coordinates to the photos at Wikimedia Commons,
perhaps with a metadata template similar to the one that the
German Wikipedia uses for {{Personendaten}}. The geo search can be
added later, just like Google search indexes the text. So far I
have uploaded a few dozen pictures to Wikimedia Commons, but a
project like this could make that a few thousand.  Different
technical solutions than today might become necessary.

It turns out I'm not the first to think like this.  Let's see
what's out there:

GEOsnapper (www.geosnapper.com) is a website created two years ago
by uLocate, Inc., a company headquartered in Farningham,
Massachusetts.  I don't know how or if they make money from this,
but they seem to have a contract with Nextel, a U.S. cell phone
company, and have a special service for owners of the Motorola
i860 GPS-enabled camera cell phone. The site uses maps from
MapQuest.  It's a commercial company and users are "allowed" to
upload their images for free (gee, thanks), but there is no
Creative Commons licensing and no "right to fork".  Users cannot
easily communicate with each other, and cannot correct each
other's mistakes (it's not a wiki).  Some people are uploading
pictures of individual animals, that could have been taken
anywhere, and I don't know if anybody is weeding out that kind of
"vandalism".  I cannot know how many pictures are in there, but
the dozen or so that I uploaded from California, Manhattan,
Germany and Sweden seem to have added significantly to the
coverage of these areas.  I think that many good ideas can be
borrowed from this site, but in its current form it has not been
able to attract a sufficient amount of contributors. It might be
"the Nupedia of geosnapping".  Why don't you try it out.  You can
find all of my photos at
http://www.geosnapper.com/list.php?op=1;user=aronsson

The Degree Confluence Project (www.confluence.org) collects photos
from every integral crossing of latitudes and longitudes around
the globe.  This is a hobby similar to Geocaching, attracting a
few fanatics who visit obscure places just because they own a GPS.
It is a fascinating concept, but really not very useful.

A9.com is the web search engine of Amazon.com.  Its Yellow Pages
(yp.a9.com) features photos of every store front in ten U.S.
cities, including New York City and San Francisco.  They call this
system Block View and a technical description can be found at
http://yp.a9.com/-/company/YellowPages.jsp

There is still an open gap between Google Maps' satellite images
and the store front photos of yp.a9.com.  How could that gap be
closed?  Flying around with a helicopter to photograph every
street and city block from above?  :-)

GeoURL (www.geourl.org) connects web pages (mostly blogs) to geo
coordinates and offers a proximity search.  No maps or photos are
involved.  GeoURL was gone for some time during 2004, but is now
back in version 2.0.

There are some collaborative mapping projects in Britain
(Geowiki.co.uk, Knowhere.co.uk, OpenGuides.org, UpMyStreet.com)
where cities are geographically documented, similar to
Wikitravel.org, but I think that a successful project needs to be
global.

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


from_name: Karl Eichwalder

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Watchlist: Making parts invisible

in_reply_to:
<d62d8k$sua$1@sea.gmane.org> (timwi@gmx.net's message of "Fri, 13
	May 2005 15:31:16 +0100")

body:
Timwi <timwi at gmx.net> writes:

>> "<body>" has class="ns--1" - is this reserved for Watchlist pages only?
>
> No, all "Special" pages will have this. If you're bold, you can figure
> out a way to change this, too; but this is probably a bit less easy
> because this isn't in SpecialWatchlist.php.

Thanks, that's good enough for me--I don't use other Special pages.  My
CSS solution is a little bit simple minded but works thus far (user
"keichwa", German WP).

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


from_name: Anthere

subject: [Wikitech-l] grant wiki

body:
Hi

I know it is a minor preoccupation basically, but it is important for us
to have a private wiki on which we can prepare some paper stuff.

We sometimes do so on the grant wiki, but this one is half broken. For
10 edits you make on it, 9 result in a 404. This has been going on for a
long time now.

I would really really really appreciate if someone could have a look one
day and fix it. It would really be helpful.

Thanks

Ant


from_name: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason

subject: [Wikitech-l] Special variable

body: No.


list: foundation-l

subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Calendar

body:
Imho, feel free to do anything you think will improve it.

I do not know what squidged mean anyway :-) (but I can guess)

Ant

Phil Boswell a ?crit:
> "Anthere" <anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote in
> message news:4283BF0A.8020102 at yahoo.com...
>
>>Hiya
>>Would anyone have the time to update the calendar ?
>>http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Calendar
>>It would be great to help here.
>
>
>
> Is the format set in stone? because it does look rather squidged up...


list: wikimedia-l

subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Calendar


from_name: David 'DJ' Hedley

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Massive photography

body:
You missed multimap.com, which is scarily accurate in that it can show you
postcodes to the accuracy of circling your house on a map. Operates for US
and UK although other countries are in development. Aerial photos are also
given there - Its the best map source for the UK, especially (Geography
lessons use it).
----- Original Message -----
From: "Lars Aronsson" <lars at aronsson.se>
To: <wikipedia-l at wikimedia.org>
Sent: Friday, May 13, 2005 6:33 PM
Subject: [Wikipedia-l] Massive photography

>
> The month of May is in Sweden a time when all snow has finally
> melted and we start to see flowers and green leaves on trees.
> This is why its a good month for outdoor photography.
>
> What if I could use a GPS navigator to connect geo coordinates (as
> well as timestamps) to all my photos, and then arrange a photo
> album with a geographic (and temporal) search.  If the album was
> an international collaborative effort, we could photograph every
> street corner and get a global view.  All it would take, really,
> is to input geo coordinates to the photos at Wikimedia Commons,
> perhaps with a metadata template similar to the one that the
> German Wikipedia uses for {{Personendaten}}. The geo search can be
> added later, just like Google search indexes the text. So far I
> have uploaded a few dozen pictures to Wikimedia Commons, but a
> project like this could make that a few thousand.  Different
> technical solutions than today might become necessary.
>
> It turns out I'm not the first to think like this.  Let's see
> what's out there:
>
> GEOsnapper (www.geosnapper.com) is a website created two years ago
> by uLocate, Inc., a company headquartered in Farningham,
> Massachusetts.  I don't know how or if they make money from this,
> but they seem to have a contract with Nextel, a U.S. cell phone
> company, and have a special service for owners of the Motorola
> i860 GPS-enabled camera cell phone. The site uses maps from
> MapQuest.  It's a commercial company and users are "allowed" to
> upload their images for free (gee, thanks), but there is no
> Creative Commons licensing and no "right to fork".  Users cannot
> easily communicate with each other, and cannot correct each
> other's mistakes (it's not a wiki).  Some people are uploading
> pictures of individual animals, that could have been taken
> anywhere, and I don't know if anybody is weeding out that kind of
> "vandalism".  I cannot know how many pictures are in there, but
> the dozen or so that I uploaded from California, Manhattan,
> Germany and Sweden seem to have added significantly to the
> coverage of these areas.  I think that many good ideas can be
> borrowed from this site, but in its current form it has not been
> able to attract a sufficient amount of contributors. It might be
> "the Nupedia of geosnapping".  Why don't you try it out.  You can
> find all of my photos at
> http://www.geosnapper.com/list.php?op=1;user=aronsson
>
> The Degree Confluence Project (www.confluence.org) collects photos
> from every integral crossing of latitudes and longitudes around
> the globe.  This is a hobby similar to Geocaching, attracting a
> few fanatics who visit obscure places just because they own a GPS.
> It is a fascinating concept, but really not very useful.
>
> A9.com is the web search engine of Amazon.com.  Its Yellow Pages
> (yp.a9.com) features photos of every store front in ten U.S.
> cities, including New York City and San Francisco.  They call this
> system Block View and a technical description can be found at
> http://yp.a9.com/-/company/YellowPages.jsp
>
> There is still an open gap between Google Maps' satellite images
> and the store front photos of yp.a9.com.  How could that gap be
> closed?  Flying around with a helicopter to photograph every
> street and city block from above?  :-)
>
> GeoURL (www.geourl.org) connects web pages (mostly blogs) to geo
> coordinates and offers a proximity search.  No maps or photos are
> involved.  GeoURL was gone for some time during 2004, but is now
> back in version 2.0.
>
> There are some collaborative mapping projects in Britain
> (Geowiki.co.uk, Knowhere.co.uk, OpenGuides.org, UpMyStreet.com)
> where cities are geographically documented, similar to
> Wikitravel.org, but I think that a successful project needs to be
> global.
>
>
>
> --
>   Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
>   Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Corrected (Wollmann)

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

Tony Sidaway wrote:
> Alphax said:
>
>>Did you read the pages...
>
>
> I *contributed* a considerable amount of material to them, although I do
> not endorse them.
> [...]
>
>>It is well known that he has threatened everyone who disagrees with him
>>with legal action; it is alleged on the site mentioned above that he
>>has caused *hundreds* of people's ISPs to cancel their accounts, based
>>solely on the fact that he asked them to.
>
>
> One of my reasons for utterly repudiating the Wollmann fan club, prior to
> their compilation of that site, was their propensity for wild
> exaggeration, not to mention their tendency to unconsciously ape Wollmann
> himself.
> Wollmann claims to have persuaded ISP's to pull many accounts, because it
> is his intention to intimidate--he credits me with teaching him how to do
> this because I once reported him for spamming and his two accounts of that
> time were pulled.
> His fan club agrees that he has been successful, partly because it enables
> them to explain away the few times they've had their own accounts pulled
> for misbehaving, and partly because it serves their interests to make
> their own misbehavior look less serious in its consequences than his.
> I was for a considerable period of time, and may well still be, one of
> Wollmann's prime targets--my ISP told me they had received hundreds of
> complaint emails from Wollmann, and he inadvertently sent a number of the
> early complaints to me.  ISP's do not pull the accounts of people who
> aren't misbehaving.  None of the complaints ever resulted in any official
> or unofficial complaint or disciplinary action against me by my ISP.  One
> ISP that received telephone complaints from Wollmann made an unprecedented
> post on Usenet detailing his bogus complaints.  This is typical of
> Wollmann and his detractors. They exaggerate flagrantly.
>

Even though I said "alleged", I still feel like a victim of Pierre
Salinger syndrome.

"It must be true - I saw it on the Interweb!"

IHBT. IHL. DAMN.

- --
Alphax
GnuPG key: 0xF874C613 - http://tinyurl.com/8mpg9
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax
There are two kinds of people: those who say to God, 'Thy will be done,'
and those to whom God says, 'All right, then, have it your way.' - C. S.
Lewis
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subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: grant wiki

body:
Brion Vibber a ?crit:

> Should be working now, I've fixed the misplaced directory. I wish we'd
> heard about the problem sooner!
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

Thanks a lot brion.
It was very embarassing while editing the yahoo press release, but I
think we forgot to push the issue afterwards ;-)

ant


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Corrected (Wollmann)

body:
Bryan Derksen a ?crit:
> Tony Sidaway wrote:
>
>> Alphax said:
>>
>>
>>> I think there should be a request for undeletion on this.
>>>
>>
>>
>> I could reluctantly see that--if he's the first person to get into this
>> kind of situation with Wikipedia, for instance.  However I'm not sure it
>> would be very ethical to undelete on those grounds.  It seems too trollish
>> to me (though I don't think you are proposing it for trollish reasons).
>>
>>
> A few days back I removed an external link Sj had added to the
> alt.usenet.kooks article that led to one of Wollmann's pages with his
> photographic art on display. The reason this link was added was to give
> Wollmann some context information since he was the only unlinked person
> in the list of award winners. This suggests to me that there's some
> legitimate interest in having a Wollman article, and I suggested moving
> that external link to it should one be created.

Oh ! This was probably *the* link he was referring to.... He talked
about a link leading to material copyrighted by him...which he wanted
removed.

Ant


from_name: Rick

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Corrected (Wollmann)

body:
--- Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen at shaw.ca> wrote:
> Rick wrote:
>
> >--- "Poor, Edmund W" <Edmund.W.Poor at abc.com> wrote:
> >
> >
> >>Why not write a Wikipedia about Wollman, if he's
> >>that fascinating? If it
> >>survives the VFD process, than that might give us
> an
> >>excuse to mention
> >>him via a link from kooks newsgroup. But if it
> fails
> >>a vfd vote, that's
> >>pretty conclusive evidence that he's
> "non-notable".
> >>
> >>Ed
> >>
> >>
> >
> >He's already been deleted following a VfD vote.
> >
> >
> >
> If we were to follow both the policy that if
> something is deleted via a
> VfD then a new article about it should never be
> created, and also the
> policy that VfD is a quality-control mechanism (as
> you suggest in your
> other posting sent around the same time as this
> one), this would lead to
> some articles being declared forever uncreatable
> simply because the
> first attempt to make it was unmitigatedly bad even
> if there's a
> legitimate interest in having an article on that
> subject. Since deletion
> removes old versions from history entirely I don't
> see what the point
> would be, they're gone either way.

I never advocated that no article should be created on
this person.  I merely reported the situation as it
now stands.

RickK

Discover Yahoo!
Have fun online with music videos, cool games, IM and more. Check it out!
http://discover.yahoo.com/online.html


subject: [Wikitech-l] my favorite nightmare...

body:
OTRS

Right.

When I want to forward or send back a mail on OTRS (infoen queue, since
Sannse is not there right now, the queue keeps growing...), I get an error

Software error:

Wide character in subroutine entry at
/opt/otrs/Kernel/cpan-lib/MIME/Decoder/QuotedPrint.pm line 74.

For help, please send mail to the webmaster (noc at wikimedia.org), giving
this error message and the time and date of the error

------

So, it is not possible anymore to forward mails.

Idea ?

Thanks

Anthere


from_name: Tomer Chachamu

subject: [Wikitech-l] Images download

body:
On 13/05/05, ?var Arnfj?r? Bjarmason <avarab at gmail.com> wrote:
> They aren't offered anymore.

What happened to the RightToFork?

http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?RightToFork


from_name: James D. Forrester

subject: [Wikipedia-l] a proposal

body:
On Friday, May 13, 2005 9:21 PM, David Monniaux <David.Monniaux at ens.fr>
wrote:

> Mark Williamson wrote:
>
> > Say yes!!! Such a skeleton could be of much use to the Wikimedia
> > Foundation. I say we change our logo to the
> > possibly-older-than-5000-years-skeleton.
>
> Just ask them for GFDL+CC-BY-SA hires photographs of the skeleton.

CC-BY, please. -SA is overly restrictive (as bad as the GFDL).

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

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


from_name: Alfio Puglisi

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re: Proposal for deprecation of syntax features
	for 1.5

body:
On Fri, 13 May 2005, Timwi wrote:

>Andrew Rodland wrote:
>>
>> I'd also like to suggest the removal of the workaround (occupying most
>> of the first half of parser.php doQuotes) dealing with confusion of
>> quotes-as-text and quotes-as-markup within words. In other words, the
>> workaround provides that "l'''italic''plain" renders as
>> "litalicplain".
>
>This is incorrect -- it renders as "l'italicplain", and this is
>intended. As has already been mentioned, this is used extremely often on
>French wikis.

I'm sorry but I have been out for some days, and I missed this discussion.
The "l'''italic'' plain" syntax is *extensively* used in - guess it - the
Italian wikipedia, Actually, the most common use is probably
"l''''italic''' plain", which renders as "l'italic plain".

Putting in <nowiki> tags, or whatever XML-complaint tag, is NOT an option,
even if it's "simpler" in technical terms.

<title>On XML wikipedia syntax</title>

It is really hard to write proper XML or HTML, don't you think?

This is exactly why a wikisyntax was developed.

So...
No, we can't force people to learn XML in order to write a wikipedia
article.

The current mediawiki syntax is a hack, but it's doing a nice job of
making things simpler for the majority of editors, which aren't
technically-oriented. While changing it to allow better future
developments is good, it's not worth it if we scare away 90% of our users.

Alfio


body:
On Fri, 13 May 2005, [ISO-8859-1] ?var Arnfj?r? Bjarmason wrote:

>> And we'd also need to *fix* all pages with this syntax, and we can't really fix automatically, need to check on a case-by-case basis.
>
>Why not? The current parser manages just fine with it, you could write
>a bot that changes everything with the same rule.
>
>The proposed change is just that ''' always opens a bold tag and ''
>always opens an italic tag, not having to check *the entire wikitext*
>for context (as is done currently)

I'm pretty sure that only the current line of text is checked, not the
entire article.

Alfio


subject: [Wikipedia-l] a proposal

body:
Read on OTRS...

De :
xxx(anonymised) <xxx(anonymised)@yahoo.co.uk>
?:board at wikimedia.org
Sujet:E

Are you interested from a skeleton 5000 years old
(maybe,not sure,very possible to be older), 5 meters
high?

Yf "yes" contact me as soon is possible!


from_name: David Gerard

subject: [WikiEN-l] RE: Corrected

body:
Tony Sidaway (minorityreport at bluebottle.com) [050513 17:26]:
> geni said:

> >> Perhaps more realistically, we want to be so credible and widely used
> >> that merely publishing the C&D letter on the main page will cause the
> >> foolhardy company to get deluged with hate mail and
> >> backpedal within 24 hours, disavowing any knowledge of the law
> >> firm that sent the letter. We've shown we can raise thousands of
> >> dollars within a few days just by asking; that's a reservoir of
> >> good will that can help us deal with a wide variety of threats.

> > I would suggest against any form of vigilantism. Apart from anything
> > else sooner or latter you run into someone who doesn't care. Then you
> > are in real trouble.

> Indeed. The first sniff of endorsement of that kind of thuggery and I'll
> be gone, for one.

Publishing a takedown notice is vigilantism?

- d.


from_name: Anders Wegge Jakobsen

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re: Proposal for deprecation of syntax features for
	1.5

references:
<51dd1af805051106093d6161c0@mail.gmail.com>
	<428206C8.2090000@presroi.de> <m3vf5pq3t6.fsf@obelix.wegge.dk>
	<d62jjr$lig$1@sea.gmane.org>

body:
"Timwi" == Timwi  <timwi at gmx.net> writes:

> Anders Wegge Jakobsen wrote:
>>
 is pretty damm usefull when there's
>> more
>> than one floated image on a page.

> No, not at all. Such br's often break floating images, especially
> when there is more than one on a page.

 Why say break, when it's the intended purpose?

> Remember that the *right*-floating images (left-floating on LTR
> wikis) have a "clear:right" (resp. clear:left) attribute
> themselves. This means that right-floating images will display
> underneath each other and never next to each other.

 I'm talking about pages like
<http://da.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonde_%28skak%29>, which would look
quite broken if the text could not be aligned where it's supposed to
be.

 ...

> If you add a
, you will cause not only
> other images, but also text and headings to move below existing
> right-floating images.

 Often, that's the point of doing so.

> This usually generates a lot of unnecessary vertical space. I really
> really hate it when people do that when they should have added the
> "clear:right" to a table that was missing it.

 That's a whole other matter than the practice of bringing floating
pictures into the vicinity of the text describing them.

--
/Wegge
Min holdning til Usenet - <http://wiki.wegge.dk/Usenet>
Min weblog - <http://blog.wegge.dk/>


from_name: David Monniaux

subject: [Wikipedia-l] a proposal

body:
Mark Williamson wrote:

>Say yes!!! Such a skeleton could be of much use to the Wikimedia
>Foundation. I say we change our logo to the
>possibly-older-than-5000-years-skeleton.
>
>
Just ask them for GFDL+CC-BY-SA hires photographs of the skeleton.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Corrected (Wollmann)

body:
Phil Boswell (phil.boswell at gmail.com) [050513 18:42]:

> Unless I'm very much mistaken, the idea of constructing an encyclopaedia is
> to gather together crumbs of information that individually are not
> particularly helpful to construct a whole which is.
> There seems to be a group of people who are intent on pulling out the centre
> of the loaf, leaving just the crust which will then implode under its own
> weight.
> The attitude of "well I've never heard of him so he can't deserve an
> article" is entirely too prevalent and needs to be addressed before we turn
> into just a list of people *everybody* knows about already.

That's what I mean by "immune system turning into autoimmune disease".

I also find the argument that Wollmann's article was VFDed therefore we
must purge all mention of him to be utterly unconvincing.

- d.


from_name: Dori

subject: [Wikitech-l] Images download

body:
On 5/13/05, Tomer Chachamu <the.r3m0t at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 13/05/05, ?var Arnfj?r? Bjarmason <avarab at gmail.com> wrote:
> > They aren't offered anymore.
>
> What happened to the RightToFork?
>
> http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?RightToFork
got forked into
RightToForkTheEasyWayAsLongAsItDoesntKillTheProductionServers and
RightToForkButItDoesntMeanWeHaveToBuildTheForkForYouHeresASpoon


subject: [WikiEN-l] RE: Corrected

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

Tony Sidaway wrote:
> David Gerard said:
>
>>Tony Sidaway (minorityreport at bluebottle.com) [050513 17:26]:
>>
>>
>>>Indeed. The first sniff of endorsement of that kind of thuggery and
>>>I'll be gone, for one.
>>
>>
>>Publishing a takedown notice is vigilantism?
>>
>
>
> No.  But soliciting or endorsing a hate mail campaign is, in my opinion.
>
>
> This touches on my main beef with the reaction to Wollmann here.
>
> For all his grandiose threats, Wollmann is a puny, harmless self-deluding
> individual with no supporters, but a group of dedicated, obsessed enemies
> who have repeatedly demonstrated themselves to be without scruples or
> pity.  I know these people intimately, I watched aghast as they built the
> legend, and I did my best to gently tear away the artifice and reconcile
> them with their bete noir.  I misjudged badly.
> Hatred of Wollmann led to active email mailbombing/spamming campaigns
> against him (to his credit one Usenet administrator helped Wollmann to
> deal with and stop these--not that he showed any gratitude).  It led to a
> campaign of denigration in the San Diego University newsgroups, with the
> result that crossposts from astrology groups, or posts discussing any
> aspect of the Edmond Wollmann flame war, are now forbidden in those
> newsgroups.
> Somewhere in there is a private individual, someone like you and me.
> Though he is not particularly likeable he is entitled to his privacy.  He
> is trying in his typically misguided, futile, inept way to ask for
> privacy.
>

May others learn from his example that you should be very careful what
you say on the Internet, because once it's there, it won't go away, no
matter how hard you try.

- --
Alphax
GnuPG key: 0xF874C613 - http://tinyurl.com/8mpg9
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax
There are two kinds of people: those who say to God, 'Thy will be done,'
and those to whom God says, 'All right, then, have it your way.' - C. S.
Lewis
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from_name: Brent 'Dax' Royal-Gordon

body:
Fredrik Johansson <fredrik.johansson at gmail.com> wrote:
> Why not the intuitive /italicized text/ and *bold text*?

For any big change in syntax, there would be a cost to translate the
various wikis to the new syntax, but that only happens once.  Perhaps
more importantly, there would be a significant cognitive change
involved--people (and bots) would have to get used to the new syntax.

As for the specific characters you proposed, * at the begining of a
line already means bullet; however, there is arguably a more accurate
heuristic for this than the ones people are currently
defending--basically, "does the rest of this paragraph contain an odd
or even number of stars?"  Italicized text is somewhat more difficult;
sequences like foo/bar/baz aren't uncommon, and would be rendered
unintelligible by a transformation to italics.

One thing worth looking at is Kwid, the markup language of Kwiki.  In
Kwid, the canonical forms of the inline formatting commands are
{*bold*}, {/italics/}, {`code`} and so on, but when it's unambiguous
(whitespace or punctuation before the leading character and after the
trailing character), the curly brackets can be omitted: *bold*,
/italics/, `code`.  I don't really like a lot of things about Kwid,
but this one might be worth stealing--*if* we're really contemplating
a large syntax change.

I had a copy of Meta's cur table from 6 April 2005 lying around, so I
loaded it into MySQL for a little analysis:

SELECT COUNT(*) FROM cur WHERE NOT cur_is_redirect;
    -> 12782
SELECT COUNT(*) FROM cur WHERE cur_text REGEXP " \\*[^\n]*\\*[ \n]";
    -> 289
SELECT COUNT(*) FROM cur WHERE cur_text REGEXP " /[^\n]*/[ \n]";
    -> 291

So these sequences certainly aren't unheard of in wikitext, but
they're not terribly common.  (I'd love to see somebody run this
against a few Wikipedias, btw--as I said, I only used Meta because
that's what I had handy.)

--
Brent 'Dax' Royal-Gordon <brent at brentdax.com>
Perl and Parrot hacker


from_name: Alphax

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

Stacey Greenstein wrote:
> Which articles are you referring to?
>
> Stacey
> [[User:UtherSRG]]
>

I don't think it matters ATM, according to OpenFacts:

Speed   Availability
SLOW    MOSTLY UNAVAILABLE

Is it time for another fundraising drive?

- --
Alphax
GnuPG key: 0xF874C613 - http://tinyurl.com/8mpg9
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax
There are two kinds of people: those who say to God, 'Thy will be done,'
and those to whom God says, 'All right, then, have it your way.' - C. S.
Lewis
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from_name: Mark Williamson

subject: [Wikipedia-l] a proposal

body:
Sounds like a good idea! I'm donating my firstborn.

Mark

On 14/05/05, Alphax <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
>
> Mark Williamson wrote:
> > Say yes!!! Such a skeleton could be of much use to the Wikimedia
> > Foundation. I say we change our logo to the
> > possibly-older-than-5000-years-skeleton.
> >
> > It could also help us improve wikipedia somehow.
> >
> > Can skeletons edit??
> >
> > Mark
> >
> > On 13/05/05, Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> >
> >>Read on OTRS...
> >>
> >>De :
> >>xxx(anonymised) <xxx(anonymised)@yahoo.co.uk>
> >>?:board at wikimedia.org
> >>Sujet:E
> >>
> >>Are you interested from a skeleton 5000 years old
> >>(maybe,not sure,very possible to be older), 5 meters
> >>high?
> >>
> >>Yf "yes" contact me as soon is possible!
> >>
> >
>
> How long before someone donates their child to the Wikimedia foundation
> (or alternatively, licenses them under the GFDL/CC-SA)?
>
> How many generations would GFDL apply for?
>
> Would organ donations be covered by the GFDL?
>
> - --
> Alphax
> GnuPG key: 0xF874C613 - http://tinyurl.com/8mpg9
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax
> There are two kinds of people: those who say to God, 'Thy will be done,'
> and those to whom God says, 'All right, then, have it your way.' - C. S.
> Lewis
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
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>
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> =9F2h
> -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
>

--
SI HOC LEGERE SCIS NIMIVM ERVDITIONIS HABES
QVANTVM MATERIAE MATERIETVR MARMOTA MONAX SI MARMOTA MONAX MATERIAM
POSSIT MATERIARI
ESTNE VOLVMEN IN TOGA AN SOLVM TIBI LIBET ME VIDERE


from_name: Tony Sidaway

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Corrected (Wollmann)

body:
Bryan Derksen said:
>>
> If we were to follow both the policy that if something is deleted via a
>  VfD then a new article about it should never be created, and also the
> policy that VfD is a quality-control mechanism (as you suggest in your
> other posting sent around the same time as this one), this would lead
> to  some articles being declared forever uncreatable simply because the
>  first attempt to make it was unmitigatedly bad even if there's a
> legitimate interest in having an article on that subject. Since
> deletion  removes old versions from history entirely I don't see what
> the point  would be, they're gone either way.

A capital concussion of the nail has been detected.

>
> In this specific case the old deleted Wollmann article was already
> pretty good IMO. I think the issue is whether the VfD came to the wrong
>  conclusion about it in the first place.

It was a case of a new editor (me, at the time) ameliorating a poor
article that had been posted for malicious purposes (so they could claim
that Wikipedia, a respected encyclopedia, was against their enemy).  Yes,
it's well written.  No, Wollmann is not a public person (unless we
undelete the article and make him one).  The public/private distinction is
in any case much less relevant outside the USA.


from_name: Tim Starling

body:
Alphax wrote:
> I don't think it matters ATM, according to OpenFacts:
>
> Speed   Availability
> SLOW    MOSTLY UNAVAILABLE
>
> Is it time for another fundraising drive?

When you have 50 servers and only one of them is an image server, you're
bound to have problems. The image server problem is 99% due to
developer/sysadmin time constraints. It will be partly fixed with
MediaWiki 1.5.

-- Tim Starling


subject: [WikiEN-l] RE: Corrected

body:
Ray Saintonge said:
> should review the four criteria
> for fair use found in U.S. law.

Why?  I live outside the USA and Wikipedia publishes worldwide.


from_name: Timwi

body:
Tels wrote:
>
> Yes, I agree on the "simple" solution. However, the current situation
> isn't "simple" for things like l'''italic'' because it is unclear what
> exactly that should mean. Maybe it means
>
> 	l'italic
>
> or it means
>
> 	l'italic
>
> How is the computer (and the human writing it) to know which is which? You
> need at least one more bit information to distinguish between these two
> variants.

The computer knows which to output because it's been programmed a
certain way.

The human can reasonably expect to get the behaviour that would clearly
be more useful. We keep talking about French, but actually a great deal
of languages is affected in the same way. All you need is an
apostrophised contraction before a word that can potentially be
italicised or bolded.

Therefore, l'''italic'' should always output l'italic, and the
"one more bit of information" you talked about should only be added in
the unusual case. The only language I have come across where you will
commonly want the apostrophe to be italicised or bolded is Klingon,
though I could imagine that Hawaiian may also be affected, as a word can
begin with an apostrophe in both of these languages.

Greetings,
Timwi


body:
Andrew Rodland wrote:
>
> Exactly. Now add to that the complication that ''' supposedly means
> something completely different from _both_ of those when it's not in
> the middle of a word, and that (as with much of the syntax) there has
>  never been any well-defined rule governing this behavior,

Just because you don't understand the rule doesn't mean it's not
well-defined. It's perfectly well-defined: If there is another ''' in
the same line, it means bold. If there isn't, but there's a '', it means
apostrophe-plus-italics. If neither, it means three apostrophes. Normal
editors don't have to know about or understand this rule in detail as
long as the behaviour is what they expect, which apparently on the
French Wikipedia it is.

> only a last-resort hack in PHP code. It's not simple conceptually,

I think you're expecting a simple solution to a complex problem.

> and it's far from simple for the computer, and it's bad for parsing.

It's perfectly easy for the computer, just as long as it's programmed
right. I have demonstrated this both in the current MediaWiki parser and
in flexbisonparse by replicating the same behaviour without trouble.

Timwi


body:
Karl Eichwalder wrote:
> Tels <nospam-abuse at bloodgate.com> writes:
>
>>? "\" escaping is used a lot elsewhere and "\" would be the first char
>>that springs to my mind.
>
> Only on hacker keyboards (US flavor) the backslash is easy to enter...

That is a moot argument, because there is no single character that is
"easy to type" on every official national keyboard layout. Indeed, we
already have a lot of characters ([[]], {{}} and ~~~~) that are a
nightmare on German keyboards.


body:
?var Arnfj?r? Bjarmason wrote:
>
> The proposed change is just that ''' always opens a bold tag and ''
> always opens an italic tag, not having to check *the entire wikitext*
>  for context (as is done currently)

This is not true, neither in MediaWiki's current parser, nor flexbisonparse.

> would make things a lot easier, not just for machines but for people
> to, the only way to tell currently if ''' is really opening a whole
> lot of bold text or just opening some italic text is to find the
> matching '' or ''', that's not intuitive at all.

I can't follow this argumentation at all. The current behaviour is
extremely easy for our human editors because it does *what they expect*.
The construction "l'''homme''" should *not* open a bold because this is
*not what they expect*. It is *way* easier for them than having to type
absolutely *anything* extra (even if it's just a "\").


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Corrected (Wollmann)

body:
Rick (giantsrick13 at yahoo.com) [050514 01:56]:
> --- David Gerard <fun at thingy.apana.org.au> wrote:

> > You haven't been around VFD much lately, I take it.
> > It's not just an immune
> > system but an autoimmune disease; people appear to
> > be trying to use it as
> > Wikipedia's quality control system.

> And this is bad because ...?

Because that isn't really what it's for, per the decorative policy. It's
there to keep out the *irredeemable* crap that makes it past speedy. (And
I'm painfully aware that new articles can at times run up to thirtyish
percent shoot-on-sight speedyable. Anyone doubting this should do
Special:Newpages patrol; if it doesn't turn you into a bloodthirsty
axewielding deletionist, it'll certainly give you a strong understanding of
them.)

I'm hoping the rating system will help with this, then those wanting a
higher-quality Wikipedia (e.g. me) will eventually be able to extract one
at will and not feel they have to clear out the marginal but verifiable.

- d.


body:
Timwi (timwi at gmx.net) [050514 02:29]:

> Remember that the *right*-floating images (left-floating on LTR wikis)
> have a "clear:right" (resp. clear:left) attribute themselves. This means
> that right-floating images will display underneath each other and never
> next to each other.

Er, this appears not to be the case at all in 1.4, at least. I frequently
end up having to kludge this with tables.

- d.


references:
<51dd1af805051106093d6161c0@mail.gmail.com>	<428206C8.2090000@presroi.de>
	<m3vf5pq3t6.fsf@obelix.wegge.dk>	<d62jjr$lig$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<m3psvunbbm.fsf@obelix.wegge.dk>

body:
Anders Wegge Jakobsen wrote:
> "Timwi" == Timwi  <timwi at gmx.net> writes:
>
>>No, not at all. Such br's often break floating images, especially
>>when there is more than one on a page.
>
> Why say break, when it's the intended purpose?

When I say "break" I mean it's *NOT* the intended purpose. 99% of all

s I have seen on en did *NOT* accomplish the intended purpose and
instead "broke" things.

> I'm talking about pages like
> <http://da.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonde_%28skak%29>, which would look
> quite broken if the text could not be aligned where it's supposed to
> be.

This is a good example of the rare page where the
 tags are useful
and used correctly.

>>If you add a
, you will cause not only
>>other images, but also text and headings to move below existing
>>right-floating images.
>
> Often, that's the point of doing so.

That's not what the examples I saw were trying to accomplish (or when
they were, they were doing it in a place where it was inappropriate,
such as forcing the See Also section underneath a lengthy taxobox; why
do you want to do that?).

Timwi


body:
Andrew Rodland wrote:
>
> It's nice in the human-usability sense that you can say exactly what
>  you mean,

You can. You *can* use <nowiki> or ' or any other kludge you like.
The point is that you shouldn't have to do this when what you're trying
to do is something that occurs frequently in half of all articles!

> How does "a side-effect of the way regular expressions match text"
> turn the markup for bold into an apostrophe and the markup for
> italic?

If you had read my message, you might have noticed that I've been trying
to tell you that ''' needn't always be "bold" because it's frequently
not what the user meant (especially when there's no matching close-bold).

>> The second assumption you are making (explicitly, even) is that it
>> is more difficult to implement, when in fact you really just mean
>> that you found it harder because it is not the way regular
>> expressions normally work (and because you find the behaviour
>> confusing because you don't normally think of French). I didn't
>> find this particularly difficult to do -- neither in the current
>> parser, nor in flexbisonparse.
>
> If you had read my messages, you might have noticed that my reasoning
> was based neither on anything to do with regexes at all, nor on
> linguistic prejudice, but on a simple consideration. It is
> impossible, at the time that the parser sees a ''', to resolve what
> type of token it is, without looking ahead to the end of the line (an
> unbounded and unknown distance away).

Right, so *this* is what you're on about. I'm afraid there's another
false assumption you're making, namely inefficiency or otherwise
inherent evil of what you call "look-ahead". You're forgetting that the
same applies to [[ and {{ and {| and || and a whole host of other
things. *This is not a problem.* Neither for the current parser (because
it passes the entire text several times anyway) nor for a proper parser
like flexbisonparse (simply because of the way LALR parsers work). If
you want me to elaborate on the latter, please feel free to ask and I'll
explain.

> The alternative is that '' means '', and ''' means '''.

And indeed, they do.

> The existing code in doQuotes() simply operates by logically
> _separating_ the consecutive quotes, so automatic conversion wouldn't
>  be overly taxing, nor time-critical.

... nor required.

> And it's still, I think, a violation of expectations.

What you're saying essentially amounts to saying that this:

	On trouve l'''homme'' sur la Terre.

should be rendered as:

	On trouve lhomme sur la Terre.

even though that is clearly not what the user meant.

Timwi


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Special variable

body:
Phil Boswell wrote:
> Is there a variable, related to {{PAGENAME}} which can strip off a
> parenthesised suffix? I'm after the result of doing the pipe-trick IYSWIM.

?var already answered "no", presumably saying that you can't do this,
but I'd like to add:

> The main reason I was thinking of this was for a variation on {{otheruses}}
> which could be added to these parenthesised articles automagically.

Please don't do this. We do not want these links. The links are supposed
to be a navigational help for people who were looking for something
other than what they are looking at; but nobody looking at a
parenthesised page could have got there without explicitly looking for it.

Timwi


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Calling a spade a spade

body:
Poor, Edmund W wrote:
>
> If the person is not notable enough to have his own article, and we VOTE
> to delete that article on those grounds, then how can we say that it's
> crucial to Wikipedia's editorial independence to mention a "fact" about
> him in another article? Especially when it's merely the FACT that
> someone has called him a nasty name?

There are loads and loads and loads of articles that talk about people
who don't have their own articles.


from_name: Fredrik Johansson

body:
Why not the intuitive /italicized text/ and *bold text*?

Fredrik


from_name: Karl Eichwalder

in_reply_to:
<d63l52$jtn$1@sea.gmane.org> (timwi@gmx.net's message of "Sat, 14
	May 2005 02:44:08 +0100")

references:
<IGDNJK$C4D5C27B9BDCDD144AB133967D7C0605@laposte.net>
	<83368362050512085882a3a8a@mail.gmail.com>
	<200505122020.20436@bloodgate.com> <shvf5nagbe.fsf@tux.gnu.franken.de>
	<d63l52$jtn$1@sea.gmane.org>

body:
Timwi <timwi at gmx.net> writes:

> That is a moot argument, because there is no single character that is
> "easy to type" on every official national keyboard layout. Indeed, we
> already have a lot of characters ([[]], {{}} and ~~~~) that are a
> nightmare on German keyboards.

This does not mean it does not hurt to add even more strange
characters.  On the contrary, think again about a sane markup language
like XML.

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


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Corrected (Wollmann)

body:
Alphax wrote:

>Tony Sidaway wrote:
>
>
>>Ray Saintonge said:
>>
>>
>>>If Mr. Wollmann thinks that he has a case let him go ahead with it, and
>>>show us that he means more than simply to intimidate.  We can easily
>>>promise that when we receive the court documents in the case we will
>>>reconsider our position in the matter.  This may or may not result in a
>>>removal of what he finds offensive from the site.  Meanwhile it will
>>>have been very costly for him to mount his case with no prospects of
>>>recovering those costs.
>>>
>>>
>>Well, Wikipedia probably wouldn't be vulnerable, but where individuals are
>>involved he could get a default judgement in a plaintiff-friendly UK court
>>for a no-show defendant in the US, with costs awarded (which is very
>>common in UK cases), and then use that as leverage in the US.  This
>>technique has been tried against Usenet posters and worked well.  Since
>>Wikipedia content is produced by individuals who are often identifiable it
>>would probably work as well on Wikipedia.
>>He may have to demonstrate standing to sue in UK courts, but that could be
>>as simple as selling books through Amazon.co.uk--which Wollmann does, as
>>it happens.
>>
>>
>By the same token, why hasn't Wikipedia been sued by the Church of
>Scientology for revealing its top secret information, which church
>members can only access after a certain degree of financial support of
>the church? Couldn't they sue Wikipedia for lost income?
>
>
Interesting observation.  Whatever the merits of their cases Scientology
is probably in a much better position than Wollmann when it comes to the
experience and funding needed to carry on a suit.  Maybe that experience
has also taught them when not to sue. ;-)

Ec


subject: [WikiEN-l] RE: Corrected

body:
Skyring wrote:

>On 5/6/05, Sean Barrett <sean at epoptic.org> wrote:
>
>
>>Truth is an absolute defense against charges of libel.
>>
>>
>Maybe it is where you live, but certainly not everywhere. If I was
>mounting a lawsuit, I'd go for the jurisdiction with my best chance of
>success. Wouldn't you?
>
Jurisdiction shopping is not always productive.  Unless there is a lot
at stake the additional cost of fighting your case far from home may
exceed what you can recover.

Ec


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Corrected (Wollmann)

body:
Tony Sidaway wrote:

>Ray Saintonge said:
>
>
>>Correct me if I'm wrong on this, but I thought that Wohlmann was a UK
>>resident.
>>
>>
>He lives in Southern California.
>
Thanks.

>>Defaulting would not be a preferred option, but that too would depend
>>on  just what he is asking.  Assuming that the defendant is a US
>>person, he  too should be able to receive an award of costs including
>>travel costs.   Perhaps he could be asked to pay conduct money or post
>>a bond for costs  of attending.  It would be refundable to him if he
>>wins the case.
>>
>>
>I'm not in charge of the British legal system, so I have no authority to
>mandate any of the above.
>
I can't see the British courts taking too kindly to one U.S. resident
using them to sue another U.S. resident, even when some technicality
could give them jurisdiction.  The plaintiff would also need to appear
in court to present his case.  If both parties fail to appear the case
would be dismissed for lack of prosecution.

Ec


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Corrected (Wollmann)

body:
David Gerard wrote:

>Phil Boswell (phil.boswell at gmail.com) [050513 18:42]:
>
>
>>Unless I'm very much mistaken, the idea of constructing an encyclopaedia is
>>to gather together crumbs of information that individually are not
>>particularly helpful to construct a whole which is.
>>There seems to be a group of people who are intent on pulling out the centre
>>of the loaf, leaving just the crust which will then implode under its own
>>weight.
>>The attitude of "well I've never heard of him so he can't deserve an
>>article" is entirely too prevalent and needs to be addressed before we turn
>>into just a list of people *everybody* knows about already.
>>
>>
>That's what I mean by "immune system turning into autoimmune disease".
>
>I also find the argument that Wollmann's article was VFDed therefore we
>must purge all mention of him to be utterly unconvincing.
>
>
The add thing about this is that the article about Wollmann could be a
vehicle for some objective facts in the matter.  That's better than
finding things piecemeal on the mailing list.

Ec


subject: [WikiEN-l] RE: Corrected

body:
Tony Sidaway wrote:

>Ray Saintonge said:
>
>
>>should review the four criteria
>>for fair use found in U.S. law.
>>
>>
>Why?  I live outside the USA and Wikipedia publishes worldwide.
>
The four criteria  provide an objective and accessible framework for
evaluating fair use.  This does not mean that we are imposing US law.
If you can point to criteria from elsewhere that accomplish the same
thing, that would be fine too.

Ec


subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re: Proposal for deprecation of syntax features
	for	1.5

body:
Fredrik Johansson wrote:

>Why not the intuitive /italicized text/ and *bold text*?
>
>
What's intuitive about that?

Ec


from_name: Gabriel Wicke

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Longterm software strategy

body:
On Tue, 2005-05-10 at 22:06 +0200, Fredrik Johansson wrote:
> On 5/10/05, Tim Starling <t.starling at physics.unimelb.edu.au> wrote:
> > So don't tell me interpreted languages
> > are getting faster, they're as slow as the day they were invented. If
> > you need to execute large numbers of calls to short-running functions,
> > you're sunk.
>
> I've had some good experience with Python+Psyco. Psyco can deliver
> excellent performance boosts for tight loops doing simple operations
> on numbers and strings, and does a good job with function calls.
>
> Using your example, I just timed incrementing an integer variable 10^9
> times to 113 seconds with plain Python and 2.35 seconds with Psyco.
>
> In the benchmarks at The Great Computer Language Shootout [1],
> Python+Psyco is about 5x faster than PHP. It is within 1/10x the speed
> of C/gcc for most benchmarks. (The worst case, n-body simulation, is
> 85 times slower than C. However, I tried a trivial optimization for
> the inner loop and it got twice as fast :-)

I did a small benchmark based on fibonacci(40) recently- Java 1.5 won
with 3.95 seconds over C with 4.1 seconds, python/psyco took 9.3
seconds, php 1.5 with eaccelerator didn't finish within two minutes. The
Java number is probably the result of some clever caching of previous
results within the JVM.

For what it's worth- i'd strongly support a MediaWiki rewrite in Python.
I've played with Twisted recently which seems to be particularly well
suited to the task of a distributed wiki system with many supported
interfaces and protocols, a long-running process and better performance
than LAMP. Even MoinMoin on Twisted beats MediaWiki: MediaWiki1.4/PHP5
4.7req/sec, MediaWiki1.4/PHP5/Eaccelerator: 16.2req/sec, Moin 1.3 on
Twisted: 34.6req/sec. This is without any use of Psyco, Pyrex or
Tisted's new c modules. A simple DB interface app using Nevow on Twisted
does 230req/sec on my laptop.
--
Gabriel Wicke
MediaWiki hosting, support and development
http://wikidev.net wicke at wikidev.net
Phone +49 (0)431-2095311, Mob +49 (0)177 2065127
Eckernf?rder Str.58, 24116 Kiel


from_name: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason

subject: [Wikitech-l] articles showing up

body: Did you mean to send this to wikien-l ?


from_name: Austin Hair

subject: [Wikitech-l] Crazy idea (was:Longterm software strategy)

body:
[[m4 (computer language)|]]

-- Austin


from_name: Chad Perrin

body:
On Sat, May 14, 2005 at 03:10:50PM +0300, Yaroslav Fedevych wrote:
> Hmmm, think Lisp macros...

Actually, if I had to pick a language to use as an ur-language (I always
thought the term was "ur", not "er"), I'd probably go with either Perl
or some Lisp variant.  I'm not the world's greatest programmer (yet),
though, so I might think this for all the wrong reasons.

I sure as heck wouldn't do it in XML, though.

It seems to me that a problem with using some meta-language like this
for writing code that can be exported/translated to many languages would
be that you could only effectively produce a limited subset of each of
those other languages.  The characteristics of various languages are
different enough from one another that you'd never have enough time to
write any kind of translation routines to produce the full range of
possible code in other languages.  If, by some miracle, you actually DID
manage to do such a thing, the resulting meta-language would be better
used as a primary language itself: write stuff in that language, then
compile or interpret it as needed, and skip the intermediate step of
translating into some other programming language.

. . . and we arrive back at the question of how to create the "perfect"
programming language, which most reasonable people seem to have
discarded as a useless debate.  Feel free to prove me wrong, though.  If
you can create such an all-powerful meta-language that will allow
writing code in C, Perl, PHP, Python, and Smalltalk, all without knowing
any of those languages, I really think you should.  I'd love to see such
a thing, and would happily learn it, especially if it means people will
stop trying to convince me to learn Python.

Of course, for our purposes, a meta-language might not need to do that
much.  I guess the trick would be in figuring out what we actually DO
need it to do.

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


from_name: Neil Barsema

body:
Brent 'Dax' Royal-Gordon wrote:

>Fredrik Johansson <fredrik.johansson at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>>Why not the intuitive /italicized text/ and *bold text*?
>>
>>
I like this syntax.

>As for the specific characters you proposed, * at the begining of a
>line already means bullet; however, there is arguably a more accurate
>heuristic for this than the ones people are currently
>defending--basically, "does the rest of this paragraph contain an odd
>or even number of stars?"  Italicized text is somewhat more difficult;
>sequences like foo/bar/baz aren't uncommon, and would be rendered
>unintelligible by a transformation to italics.
>
>
>
The funny thing is my Thunderbird mailclient has *no* trouble
rendering  all  the *bold* /italicized/ and
possible/troubling/combinations you mention in your mail.... ;-)

Neil


from_name: James D. Forrester

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Special variable

body:
On Saturday, May 14, 2005 4:25 AM, Timwi <timwi at gmx.net> wrote:

> Phil Boswell wrote:
> > Is there a variable, related to {{PAGENAME}} which can strip off a
> > parenthesised suffix? I'm after the result of doing the pipe-trick
> > IYSWIM.
>
> ?var already answered "no", presumably saying that you can't do this, but
> I'd like to add:
>
> > The main reason I was thinking of this was for a variation on
> > {{otheruses}} which could be added to these parenthesised articles
> > automagically.
>
> Please don't do this. We do not want these links. The links are
> supposed to be a navigational help for people who were looking for
> something other than what they are looking at; but nobody looking at
> a parenthesised page could have got there without explicitly
> looking for it.

Interesting. I had assumed that Phil wanted to link to
[[{{PAGENAMENOPARANTHESES}} (disambiguation)]], which could be mildly useful
in primary topic disambiguation cases.

Shows how we all think differently, I suppose. :-)

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

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


from_name: Anthere

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: a proposal

body:
Mark Williamson a ?crit:
> Sounds like a good idea! I'm donating my firstborn.
>
> Mark

That sounds like a very unreasonable idea Mark :-)

By the way, we have not much mail from him these days... is Christopher
baby born yet ?

Ant


subject: [Wikitech-l] articles showing up

body:
The board received a request today from a person complaining there was
an article about him on wikipedia and it was showing up in google. He
asked that all references to him be removed.

I informed him the article had been recently deleted.

However, I wonder if the vote for deletion/nameOfTheGuy will not go up
showing in google as well ?

Are the pages vote for delection/foo visible to Google or not ? If they
are, should they not be deleted after a while or in certain situations ?

Anthere


from_name: Patrick Collison

body:
Apologies, I certainly got the wrong end of the stick there.

Le 13 mai 05 ? 17:59, Timwi a ?crit :

> Patrick Collison wrote:
>
>> There's a partial overnight. See http://wikimedia.org/stats/live/
>> org.wikimedia.all.squid.requests-hits-day.png.
>> If there is a decision to change the syntax in a major way,
>> locking  the database for 12 hours is hardly a huge price to pay.
>> How could  syntax versions work? Can you mix syntax versions in
>> the same  article? If so, does the parser know what regions use
>> what syntax? If  not, can only new articles use the new syntax? I
>> don't think a hack  is the solution to a hack-ish syntax.
>>
>
> I think the idea was that old articles would be flagged as "old
> syntax", and then a conversion bot can be run *while the site
> remains up*. As soon as the bot has converted an article, it will
> be flagged as "new syntax" and can henceforth be edited in the new
> syntax.
>
> I don't agree to the proposal, though.
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>
>


from_name: Tomer Chachamu

body:
On 14/05/05, Domas Mituzas <Domas.Mituzas at microlink.lt> wrote:
> Hey,
>
> > But, what about some "?ber-language"? A rather abstract code that
> > can be automatically converted to C++, PHP, Python, Java and-what-not.
>
> I'm not sure of such language, but combined with Wikidata (you know,
> free-form database, which would have any database in it, built on top
> of any database), it would make ultimate software.

How about some "?ber-cake"? Whatever flavour you want it in!

It's a nice idea, probably thought of before. I don't think anybody's
seriously taken up the challenge of making it.


body:
Le 14 mai 05 ? 11:58, Magnus Manske a ?crit :

> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
>
> I didn't have a chance to look at my mail all week (work and technical
> problems with my mail service), and just waded throught that long
> thread. I would like to share a rather insane idea I had some time ago
> concerning MediaWiki rewrite/different languages.
>
> Setting database/filesystem/etc. storage issues aside, we basically
> want
> * a nice fast parser, maybe in C++
> * a MediaWiki that runs on most platforms, which likely would mean PHP
> * keep the work we put in the current version
>
> These points are somehow excluding each other :-)
>
> But, we could have *some* of it if we had a way to automatically
> convert
> PHP to, say, C++. As far as I know, there is no such thing, and
> even if
> it were, it would either break on PHP things like "$a=$$b", or become
> slow again.
>
> But, what about some "?ber-language"? A rather abstract code that
> can be
> automatically converted to C++, PHP, Python, Java and-what-not.
>
> That would
> * solve the speed problem
> * give a PHP version to the poor souls who need it
> * give everyone else nice C++ and Java classes, Python modules, etc.
> * keep them all in sync with each new version
>
> The slight problem is, I'm not sure such a language exists :-(

Such a thing exists. MetaL is an open-source project and lives at
http://www.meta-language.net. You code in XML, and the compiler
(written in PHP, surprisingly enough) can output Java, PHP and Perl
(support for more languages is planned, as far as I know). There're
some samples at http://www.meta-language.net/sample.html.

To be honest, though, using XML as a programming language seems like
a bad joke.

I'm not sure about your third point ("keep the work we put in the
current version"): would you intend to convert the existing PHP
codebase into this ?ber language as a starting point?

> Also, it it would exists, I am aware that it would not generate the
> most
> efficient code around. But, the generated code doesn't need to be
> human-readable, and I believe a PHP version would do for small sites
> (internal wikis, for example), while the larger sites surely can
> find a
> way to get the C++ version running.

Does MediaWiki have (or should it have) any obligation to support
small sites, like internal wikis? To the extend that it would
dictate, or at least impact, our choice of language?

Patrick

>
>
> Does anyone have information about such a really-high-level language?
>
> Magnus
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> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>
>


from_name: Magnus Manske

body:
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Hash: SHA1

I didn't have a chance to look at my mail all week (work and technical
problems with my mail service), and just waded throught that long
thread. I would like to share a rather insane idea I had some time ago
concerning MediaWiki rewrite/different languages.

Setting database/filesystem/etc. storage issues aside, we basically want
* a nice fast parser, maybe in C++
* a MediaWiki that runs on most platforms, which likely would mean PHP
* keep the work we put in the current version

These points are somehow excluding each other :-)

But, we could have *some* of it if we had a way to automatically convert
PHP to, say, C++. As far as I know, there is no such thing, and even if
it were, it would either break on PHP things like "$a=$$b", or become
slow again.

But, what about some "?ber-language"? A rather abstract code that can be
automatically converted to C++, PHP, Python, Java and-what-not.

That would
* solve the speed problem
* give a PHP version to the poor souls who need it
* give everyone else nice C++ and Java classes, Python modules, etc.
* keep them all in sync with each new version

The slight problem is, I'm not sure such a language exists :-(

Also, it it would exists, I am aware that it would not generate the most
efficient code around. But, the generated code doesn't need to be
human-readable, and I believe a PHP version would do for small sites
(internal wikis, for example), while the larger sites surely can find a
way to get the C++ version running.

Does anyone have information about such a really-high-level language?

Magnus
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p54nQmwbugI1iqKiYPgpx8I=
=Iefi
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from_name: Domas Mituzas

body:
Hey,

> But, what about some "?ber-language"? A rather abstract code that
> can be automatically converted to C++, PHP, Python, Java and-what-not.

I'm not sure of such language, but combined with Wikidata (you know,
free-form database, which would have any database in it, built on top
of any database), it would make ultimate software.

Domas


from_name: geni

subject: [WikiEN-l] RE: Corrected

body:
On 5/14/05, Tony Sidaway <minorityreport at bluebottle.com> wrote:
> Ray Saintonge said:
> > should review the four criteria
> > for fair use found in U.S. law.
>
> Why?  I live outside the USA and Wikipedia publishes worldwide.

The servers are in florida as such we are subject to the law of that
state and the laws of the US federal goverment.

--
geni


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: a proposal

body:
Delphine M?nard wrote:

 >What about tags?
>

This child is a [[Wikipedia:The perfect small human|stub]]. Please help
Wikipedia by making expanding it

?


from_name: Anders Wegge Jakobsen

references:
<51dd1af805051106093d6161c0@mail.gmail.com>
	<428206C8.2090000@presroi.de> <m3vf5pq3t6.fsf@obelix.wegge.dk>
	<d62jjr$lig$1@sea.gmane.org> <m3psvunbbm.fsf@obelix.wegge.dk>
	<d63oaq$rk3$1@sea.gmane.org>

body:
"Timwi" == Timwi  <timwi at gmx.net> writes:

> Anders Wegge Jakobsen wrote:
>> "Timwi" == Timwi  <timwi at gmx.net> writes:
>>
>>> No, not at all. Such br's often break floating images, especially
>>> when there is more than one on a page.
>> Why say break, when it's the intended purpose?

> When I say "break" I mean it's *NOT* the intended purpose. 99% of
> all
s I have seen on en did *NOT* accomplish the intended
> purpose and instead "broke" things.

 Your point may be correct as far as en is concerned. Many other wikis
have so few contributors that there are simply not enough text in a
given article, as to take up the slack induced by pictures.

>> I'm talking about pages like
>> <http://da.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonde_%28skak%29>, which would look
>> quite broken if the text could not be aligned where it's supposed
>> to be.

> This is a good example of the rare page where the
 tags are
> useful and used correctly.

 Belive me or not, we have many similar pages on dawiki.

>>> If you add a
, you will cause not only
>>> other images, but also text and headings to move below existing
>>> right-floating images.

>> Often, that's the point of doing so.

> That's not what the examples I saw were trying to accomplish (or when
> they were, they were doing it in a place where it was inappropriate,
> such as forcing the See Also section underneath a lengthy taxobox; why
> do you want to do that?).

 Typographic conventions perhaps? I'm just guessing here.

--
/Wegge
Min holdning til Usenet - <http://wiki.wegge.dk/Usenet>
Min weblog - <http://blog.wegge.dk/>


from_name: Tomasz Wegrzanowski

body:
On Sat, May 14, 2005 at 12:58:00PM +0200, Magnus Manske wrote:
> But, what about some "?ber-language"? A rather abstract code that can be
> automatically converted to C++, PHP, Python, Java and-what-not.
>
> That would
> * solve the speed problem
> * give a PHP version to the poor souls who need it
> * give everyone else nice C++ and Java classes, Python modules, etc.
> * keep them all in sync with each new version
>
> The slight problem is, I'm not sure such a language exists :-(
>
> Also, it it would exists, I am aware that it would not generate the most
> efficient code around. But, the generated code doesn't need to be
> human-readable, and I believe a PHP version would do for small sites
> (internal wikis, for example), while the larger sites surely can find a
> way to get the C++ version running.
>
> Does anyone have information about such a really-high-level language?

Converting something Pascal-ish (lobotomized common subset of all high level languages)
to all other languages is almost trivial, but you wouldn't want to program in it.

I haven't used it for anything non-toyish, so it's possible that I'm leading you astray,
but check OpenC++ - it's a toolkit for writing parsers for C++-like languages.
This way we can:
* With OpenC++ add language-level support for things like regular expressions, hashtables etc.
  to something that's mostly C++
* Use only easily convertible subset of C++ (no templates abuse or non-trivial
  memory management) and these magic constructs we just defined.
  This won't be an ideal language, but it should be reasonable.
* Write OpenC++ converters from parse tree to a few common languages.
  Because what you get is mostly Pascal-level stuff + things you defined,
  that shouldn't be too difficult.

OpenC++ seems reasonably powerful, things like closures and for-X-in-Y loops
are in standard documentations.

Package: openc++
Description: extensible C++ compiler
 OpenC++ is a tool for source-code translation for C++.
 Programmers can easily implement various kinds of
 translation so that they can define new syntax,
 new annotation, and new object behavior.
 .
 http://opencxx.sf.net/


from_name: Andrew Rodland

body:
I think it's not so much "intuitive" as "people have been using it for
so long that it just seems natural". And // certainly conveys a notion
of slantiness, while ** has a history of making things stand out. Not
that I would ever support such a change, but it certainly makes more
sense than '' and ''' :)

On 5/14/05, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> Fredrik Johansson wrote:
>
> >Why not the intuitive /italicized text/ and *bold text*?
> >
> >
> What's intuitive about that?
>
> Ec
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>


from_name: Delphine Ménard

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: a proposal

body:
On 5/14/05, Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>
> Mark Williamson a ?crit:
> > Sounds like a good idea! I'm donating my firstborn.
> >
> > Mark
>
> That sounds like a very unreasonable idea Mark :-)

I wonder what derivative works of a child could look like. And I am
asking myself one question. Does the child have to go around with the
GFDL in their pocket at all times? And what about tags?

Delphine
--
~notafish


from_name: Yaroslav Fedevych

body:
Hmmm, think Lisp macros...

--
X windows: A new level of software disintegration.


from_name: Fastfission

subject: Fwd: [WikiEN-l] RE: Corrected

body:
On 5/13/05, Stan Shebs <shebs at apple.com> wrote:
> Like how exactly? How would a picture of Mickey be used in any
> other way than to illustrate an article about animated characters
> or Disney?

Fair use is for commentary and criticism. In an ideal form, a
Wikipedia article with photos of Mickey might count as "commentary".
There is also the question of whether or not we would be using it in a
way which deprives Disney of any income, which is more open to
interpretation, and the question of whether or not someone visiting
Wikipedia would be confused as to whether or not it was affiliated
with Disney ("Sure," the lawyers say, "it says Wikipedia up in the
corner. But it says 'Mickey Mouse' at the top of the page, and then
goes on to describe it in an authoratative manner, with copyrighted
images all over the place!"). Are we using it as a commentary on
Mickey Mouse or just using it to illustrate and describe Mickey Mouse?
As I understand it, "fair use" does not necessarily apply if you just
want to illustrate an encyclopedia article on a subject, whether you
charge for it or not.

Images are a much more difficult media to deal with than is text. Text
can be easily re-written or paraphrased and be a legally distinct new
form. Images are more difficult, and the way the courts rule can be
highly arbitrary (viz. the cases at
http://fairuse.stanford.edu/Copyright_and_Fair_Use_Overview/chapter9/9-c.html#3).

Let's move beyond Disney and to another pet peeve of mine: historical
images by news corporations. For example, the wonderful image of Bryan
and Darrow at [[Scopes Trial]]. Iconic image, very famous! But also
likely owned by a stock photography company, i.e. Corbis or Getty
Images. These guys make their entire income on licensing pictures and
asserting their copyright on them -- Wikipedia "giving them away for
free" seems like it would definitely fall into a questionable
category. Is it "commentary" on the copyrighted work itself, or are we
just using it to illustrate an article?

 > One of WP's most useful defenses is to become even more popular
> and respected. We want to be in a position where all the judges
> in the building have to recuse themselves because they and their
> clerks consult WP on a daily basis, or have them find lawyers in
> contempt for merely suggesting that WP has any evil intentions. :-)

Evil need not be intended -- if a company makes its money by the
selling of copyrighted material and we "give it away", that's
problematic. Robin Hood wasn't evil, but he certainly broke the law.

> Perhaps more realistically, we want to be so credible and widely
> used that merely publishing the C&D letter on the main page will
> cause the foolhardy company to get deluged with hate mail and
> backpedal within 24 hours, disavowing any knowledge of the law
> firm that sent the letter. We've shown we can raise thousands of
> dollars within a few days just by asking; that's a reservoir of
> good will that can help us deal with a wide variety of threats.

I don't think this will cut it -- some of these companies (RIAA, MPAA)
don't seem to have any problems with negative PR. At least, that's
what I took away from Lawrence Lessig's book on copyright law ("Free
Culture", available at http://free-culture.org/freecontent/) which I
found quite interesting thought a bit scary.

Personally I think the best approach would be to have a much stricter
rule about "fair use" for pictoral and sound content (the latter
doesn't seem to be as much of an issue, yet). Again, the effects of
"fair use" and the reach of copyright seems to vary widely by the
media in question: it is easy to make text "free", it is hard to make
images (especially historical or commercial) "free". This might mean
sacrificing some of our aesthetic appearances and make us look a bit
different from the standard "encyclopedia" in many respects -- we
don't pay the sorts of licensing fees that EB pays for this sort of
content.

I think this is one of the things WP is going to get bit on the butt
about at some point, but hopefully I'm wrong!

FF


body:
Le 14 mai 05 ? 14:47, Chad Perrin a ?crit :

> On Sat, May 14, 2005 at 03:10:50PM +0300, Yaroslav Fedevych wrote:
>
>> Hmmm, think Lisp macros...
>>
>
> Actually, if I had to pick a language to use as an ur-language (I
> always
> thought the term was "ur", not "er"), I'd probably go with either Perl
> or some Lisp variant.

There's quite a bit of interesting web-development work happening in
the Smalltalk[1] and Lisp[2] camps at the moment.

[1] http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/userblogs/mls/blogView?
showComments=true&entry=3261069762
[2] http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html, http://common-lisp.net/
project/ucw/


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Corrected (Wollmann)

body:
Tony Sidaway wrote:

>Ray Saintonge said:
>
>
>>If both parties fail to appear the case
>>would be dismissed for lack of prosecution.
>>
>>
>Yes, he'd need to retain and brief counsel to prepare and present a pro
>forma complaint alongside evidence to satisfy the court. He'd have to
>ensure that the defendant was served.  He wouldn't have to show up in
>court.
>
Presumably in those circumstances copies of the paper "evidence" would
also be delivered to the defendant, who would have the right to
cross-examine, or raise objections that some of the evidence is
inadmissible.  Many Wikipedians do not edit under their own names.  What
standards of evidence do the British courts follow when the defence is
simply, "It wasn't I who said that."  The burden of proof lies with the
plaintiff, and someone needs to accept responsibility for the costs to a
defendant who has been misidentified.

Ec


from_name: Skyring

subject: [WikiEN-l] RE: Corrected

body:
On 5/13/05, Tony Sidaway <minorityreport at bluebottle.com> wrote:
> Skyring said:
> >
> > Another factor is the ease of access to the same audience. If a
> > newspaper libels you, it is difficult to present counter-claims to
> > everyone who read the original libel. But on Usenet, and arguably on
> > Wikipedia, you have the same access to the same audience.
>
> This argument hasn't featured as a serious legal argument in any internet
> cases that I'm aware of.  The damage is done by the original defamation;
> the plaintiff's attempts to control the damage (which are notoriously
> counter-productive even where the damaged party is utterly above reproof)
> do not make the original damage any less serious.

What sort of payouts have been involved?
--
Peter in Canberra


from_name: Alphax

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Corrected (Wollmann)

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

Before I realised I had been trolled, I wrote:
> I think there should be a request for undeletion on this.

I was wrong. Anyone is welcome to request undeletion, if they follow the
correct procedure, but I will not be supporting it.

Leave Mr. Wollmann in peace, and remove his name from the AUK article.
Add the fact that some users of the newsgroup are extremely disliked by
other rabid fanatical users, to the extent of spreading false
information on the internet about them. Names not required.

- --
Alphax
GnuPG key: 0xF874C613 - http://tinyurl.com/8mpg9
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax
There are two kinds of people: those who say to God, 'Thy will be done,'
and those to whom God says, 'All right, then, have it your way.' - C. S.
Lewis
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subject: [Wikipedia-l] a proposal

body:
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Mark Williamson wrote:
> Why not licence the skeleton itself? I would definitely like to be
> able to freely distribute copies.
>
> Mark

Error: replication matrix not initialised
Cause: replication matrix not invented yet

Damn.

- --
Alphax
GnuPG key: 0xF874C613 - http://tinyurl.com/8mpg9
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax
There are two kinds of people: those who say to God, 'Thy will be done,'
and those to whom God says, 'All right, then, have it your way.' - C. S.
Lewis
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subject: [Wikipedia-l] a proposal

body:
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Hash: SHA1

Mark Williamson wrote:
> Say yes!!! Such a skeleton could be of much use to the Wikimedia
> Foundation. I say we change our logo to the
> possibly-older-than-5000-years-skeleton.
>
> It could also help us improve wikipedia somehow.
>
> Can skeletons edit??
>
> Mark
>
> On 13/05/05, Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>>Read on OTRS...
>>
>>De :
>>xxx(anonymised) <xxx(anonymised)@yahoo.co.uk>
>>?:board at wikimedia.org
>>Sujet:E
>>
>>Are you interested from a skeleton 5000 years old
>>(maybe,not sure,very possible to be older), 5 meters
>>high?
>>
>>Yf "yes" contact me as soon is possible!
>>
>

How long before someone donates their child to the Wikimedia foundation
(or alternatively, licenses them under the GFDL/CC-SA)?

How many generations would GFDL apply for?

Would organ donations be covered by the GFDL?

- --
Alphax
GnuPG key: 0xF874C613 - http://tinyurl.com/8mpg9
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax
There are two kinds of people: those who say to God, 'Thy will be done,'
and those to whom God says, 'All right, then, have it your way.' - C. S.
Lewis
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