subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Wikipedia:Vandal bots

body:
Neil Harris wrote:
> This looks like something nasty waiting to happen (see the enclosed
> HTML page).
>
> Note the apparently bogus user name, and the fact that the article
> title text does not match the link. In addition, recent changes says
> that this was created from IP 194.117.133.196

That's just what you get when you try to look at the history of a
nonexistent page; it was deleted after you loaded Recentchanges but
before you loaded the page.

For the curious, the text of [[Wikipedia:Vandal bots]] was:

(-------------
Vandal bots are malicous programs which deliberatley vandalise wiki
based websites, these bots can wreck websites at an amazing rate. To
imfamous vandal bots include

Ram-Man Bot, This bot autogenerated 50,000+ articles about EVERY
settlement in the united states, using us census data. The articles are
nothing but complete nonsence, and it DDOSed Wikipedia for several
weeks.

Sciplius, this bot automaticly deletes articles at random..

Vandal bots are very malicous, but blocking them is almost impossible,
it is up to the community to keep the wikipedia free from vandal bots,
there could be new attacks in the future.
-------------)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


list: wikipedia-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: koyaanisqatsi at nupedia.com

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia:Vandal bots

body:
You Wrote:
>This looks like something nasty waiting to happen (see the enclosed HTML
>page).
>
>Note the apparently bogus user name, and the fact that the article title
>text does not match the link.
>In addition, recent changes says that this was created from IP
>194.117.133.196
><http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Contributions&target=194.117.133.196>,

>
>which is used by a couple of real users and a persistent vandal.
>
>A nasty thought: is this a rehearsal for an automated attack?
>
>Neil

I don't understand what I'm supposed to make of that.  what
attachment?  what page?

kq


from_name: tarquin

subject: [Wikipedia-l] RE: performance tweak

body:
Erik Zachte wrote:

>Follow up suggestion: make Wikipedia block all MS Explorer users. It
>will probably reduce traffic by 90%.
>
I'd vote for that. We'd be blocking a lot of junk edits :-)

> Get real. This is the world we live
>in: web designers will have to adjust to their user base not vice versa.
>

Nope. The W3C sets standards and websites and browsers follow them.

If the people who program web browsers *don't* follow them, then it's
unfortunate that the end-user gets caught in the crossfire. But there
are now plenty of free, (fairly) compliant browsers out there, such as
Mozilla: not that big a download on a modem & easy to install. Ditch IE
and be free :-)

Most browsers open a link in a new window with a *modifier key*+click --
even IE -- though I would say that tabbed browsing is a necessity for
RecentChanges weeding.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia:Vandal bots

body:
>>Note the apparently bogus user name, and the fact that the article
title
>>text does not match the link.
>>In addition, recent changes says that this was created from IP
>>194.117.133.196
>><http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Contributions&target=194.117.133.196>,

I did visit the contributions link, found just garbage since the last
ban, & rebanned the vandal.  s/he is right, though, that it bans
innocent people also.  Unban if you wish; I won't complain.  something
more accurate needs to be done for bannings IMHO.  I have little faith
this 'contributor' will turn around.

kq


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia:Vandal bots

body:
>>I don't understand what I'm supposed to make of that.  what
>>attachment?  what page?
>>
>>kq
>>
>>
>>
>Here's the attachment.  Brion has explained it as a race condition in
>the code, rather than anything suspicious.
>
>Neil

Here's what I get when I click on it (after a few error messages at
the bottom of the email):

----
Sorry! 404 error!
Probably, you should log in!

The page you clicked on or typed in is not (currently) available.
----

Anyway, I just reblocked the IP, and its pseudonym (pseudoaddress?).

kq


from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Spinoff "newspedia" project?

body:
On Wednesday 06 November 2002 04:00 am, Anthere wrote:
> hum...maybe you should help for the main list to
> really become the main list one day, rather than the
> en.list. Then you would have another list to register
> to :-)). Seriously, IntList is just a partial copy of
> this one...

I agree. What would seem logical to me is this:
  wikipedia-l : concerns the whole project (all languages)
  enwiki-l : only concerns en.wiki
  xxwiki-l: only concerns xx.wiki (replace xx with a language code)
  wikitech-l : all about the software and performance issues
  intlwiki-l : discussion that concerns the internal matters of any wikipedia
language that doesn't have its own mailing list yet or who are trying to
establish themselves as a wiki.

This still means that wikipedia-l gets a lot of traffic so we may further
break that up in the future;
 wikilegal-l : Legal stuff

Other ideas welcome.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


from_name: Dayton, Nick APX

subject: [Wikipedia-l] (no subject)

body:
Dear Dr. Clasquin,

I see from your web page that you got your D.Litt et Phil from Unisa.  I am
writing because I recently began the Unisa D.Litt et Phil program in
Classics and was wondering what you thought of the school and your program.
So far, I believe that it will be both intensive and enjoyable.  What was
the extent of your on-campus time and how frequent was your contact with
your research supervisor?   How long did it take you to complete the
program, and was your dissertation/thesis an iterative process - with many
rounds?   I am not certain at this point whether an oral defense is
required.   Actually, I would appreciate anything that you can tell me about
your program and your interaction with the university.   Any hints or
suggestions as to how best to navigate the system would be very much
appreciated.  Thanks in advance for your time and help.

Best regards,

Nick A. Dayton, Ph.D.
Director QA Operations - Devices
Hospital Products Division
Abbott Laboratories
(847)938-8052, (847)937-1795 (fax)

An organization's ability to learn faster than
its competition may be its only sustainable
competitive advantage.  Peter M. Senge


from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [Wikipedia-l] RE: performance tweak

body:
> How silly of me to suggest to someone who is clearly looking for a
> better browsing experience a way to achieve it.

I agree with Brion here: enforcing new windows is not a good way to deal
with this issue, especially since forced new windows are very annoying for users
who use tabbed browsing (myself included). It could be a preference, but a
smarter solution would be to suppress the no-cache header (which is necessary
for a good editing experience in some browsers)  on the RecentChanges page.

If anyone wants to do this, the code is open to you and fairly easy to
understand [1]. It's probably not very high on anyone's priority list. The main
problems with RC performance are being addressed by a change that loads the
changes from an individual small table, instead of fetching them from the much
larger article table. There are many other queries that generate high load on
the DB server which need to be located and optimized. These are our real
performance bottlenecks.

And if anyone has a lot of time to waste, a client side application that
maintains a local RC table and fetches new changes (diffs) within regular
intervals would be very neat, and a nice building block for the dedicated WP editor
that some people are thinking about. We could help you by exporting our RCs
as an XML-based web service ..

Regards,

Erik

[1] Feel free to contact me if you want to delve into it and I'll try to
help as much as I can. I can help more if you're using a real OS (Linux,BSD
etc.) though, as web development on Win32 is a PITA.

--
+++ GMX - Mail, Messaging & more  http://www.gmx.net +++
NEU: Mit GMX ins Internet. Rund um die Uhr f?r 1 ct/ Min. surfen!


from_name: Toby Bartels

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Name-calling and hair-pulling

body:
Ed Poor wrote:

>Why are you so cantankerous? You, you -- you CURMUDGEON!

Comparing our personalities:
Is Ed calling somebody "curmudgeon"
equivalent to me calling somebody "asshole"?
Remember, it's all relative to what we normally say.
^_^

-- Toby


from_name: Jonathan Walther

body:
On Wed, Nov 06, 2002 at 03:05:44PM -0500, Tom Parmenter wrote:
>No, it's relative to civility and incivility; "darn" is not as
>offensive as "damn" no matter who says it.

That's because you've never heard an elderly Englishman swear.  My
grandpa could turn the most innocuous of words into the deadliest and
most insulting of swears entirely by the tone of his voice

Jonathan.

--
                     Geek House Productions, Ltd.

  Providing Unix & Internet Contracting and Consulting,
  QA Testing, Technical Documentation, Systems Design & Implementation,
  General Programming, E-commerce, Web & Mail Services since 1998

Phone:   604-435-1205
Email:   djw at reactor-core.org
Webpage: http://reactor-core.org
Address: 2459 E 41st Ave, Vancouver, BC  V5R2W2
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subject: [Wikipedia-l] Just blocked someone

body:
The Cunctator wrote:

>Toby Bartels wrote:

>>And why, Cunctator, if you're such an asshole,
>>do you continue to infect the world with your existence?

>That's a leading question. Why do you assert I'm such an asshole?

I like how you copied down even the word "such".
It contributes to the impression that you're a bot.
(Eliza would have copied down the word "such" just like that.
Actually, Eliza would have refused to talk about herself,
but switch pronouns and then it works.)

Anyway, I didn't support the statement,
because it was based directly on the content that I provided.
And it's a subjective judgement, I can't argue for it rationally.
(Also, I doubt that they would want to read such an argument.)
Let each person that read that context make up their own mind.

Of course, if your subjective judgement is different from mine,
then how can I expect you to answer my question?
But I don't expect that at all; it was a rhetorical question.
No response is required of you (the less the better, in fact).

-- Toby


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [Wikitech-l] H1

body:
Toby Bartels wrote:

>>The auto-number preference is still there, but doesn't work, it
>>seems. As an old tech writer I can easily imagine situations where it
>>might be useful, or at least I can imagine readers who would prefer
>>it.  But I don't think it's all that important.
>>
>Why do you say that it doesn't work?
>It has one bug (IMO), in that it doesn't turn itself on
>unless there are headers of different sizes in the same article.
>Otherwise it works for me.
>
Thanks.  I keep it on in my options, and wondered why it only worked
some of the time.
Eclecticology


from_name: Karen AKA Kajikit

subject: [Wikipedia-l] performance tweak

body:
Brion VIBBER wrote:
>
> Erik Zachte wrote:
> > This is a repost in plain readable ascii.
> >
> > I wonder how much web bandwidth and server processing power is consumed
> > by diligent wikipedians browing the list of 'recent changes', checking
> > an article and returning to the list by pressing the back button, thus
> > generating a new request to the database, over and over again.
>
> They should use a browser that's not so brain-dead that it can't tell
> that the forward and back buttons are for zipping through pages that are
> already open and should not be loaded all over again.

not true.

The recent changes page used to remain the same when you went back to it
unless you manually told it to reload, but now if you use the back
button to go back to a list page it reloads it from the server even if
you don't particularly want it to. If I want to save time I have to
right-click and say 'open in new window' all the time and it wastes my
time and energy. I would be VERY much in favour of that change being
made.

And don't tell me that my browser is braindead. It didn't used to do
this. The wikipedia was changed, not netscape.

--

Karen AKA Kajikit

To err is human... to really foul things up add kitten and stir.

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


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikipedia-l] re: Performance tweak  (once more)

body:
I guess you didn't read the message where I noted the cache-related
headers that the software put out which the idiot browsers (the browsers
are the idiots, not the users) are using to annoy users, and implicitly
suggested that the person responsible for putting them in in the first
place should explain their exact purpose so that a cleaner way to do the
same without causing other problems for users can be found.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

On Wed, 6 Nov 2002, Erik Zachte wrote:

>
> >> Get real. This is the world we live
> >> in: web designers will have to adjust to their user base not vice
> versa.
> >> Erik Zachte
>
> ---
>
> >How silly of me to suggest to someone who is clearly looking for a
> >better browsing experience a way to achieve it.
> > brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
>
> ---
>
> >Nope. The W3C sets standards and websites and browsers follow them.
> >If the people who program web browsers *don't* follow them, then it's
> >unfortunate that the end-user gets caught in the crossfire. But there
> >are now plenty of free, (fairly) compliant browsers out there, such as
> >Mozilla: not that big a download on a modem & easy to install. Ditch IE
> >and be free :-) Tarquin.
>
> ---
>
> Vibber, Tarquin, my final reaction on this. I'll try to explain the
> problem once more. It should sink in finally. What good is it gonna do
> for database congestion when I adopt lets say Opera and 3000 others
> don't ? Will that give me faster article retrievals and less timeouts on
> article updates? Your 'solution' reminds me of the old days when Mac's
> and PC's did not cooperate too well on e.g. data sharing, and Apple fans
> said: "This problem is easy to solve: everyone should buy a Mac."
>
> MS Explorer is not perfect by any means, just a de facto standard for
> years to come, that is all.
>
> There are probably better ways to solve the performance problems than my
> suggestion. I do not count starry-eyed idealism among those. Erik Zachte
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
> http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>
>
>


from_name: The Cunctator

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Just blocked someone

body:
On Wed, 2002-11-06 at 11:11, Toby Bartels wrote:
<snip>
> And why, Cunctator, if you're such an asshole,
> do you continue to infect the world with your existence?

That's a leading question. Why do you assert I'm such an asshole?


from_name: Anthere

body:
--- Brion Vibber <vibber at lvl-sun697.usc.edu> wrote:
> I guess you didn't read the message where I noted
> the cache-related
> headers that the software put out which the idiot
> browsers (the browsers
> are the idiots, not the users) are using to annoy
> users, and implicitly
> suggested that the person responsible for putting
> them in in the first
> place should explain their exact purpose so that a
> cleaner way to do the
> same without causing other problems for users can be
> found.
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

I understood you better the first time :-))

thanks for the server...

hum...and do you know rebol ???

__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Y! Web Hosting - Let the expert host your web site
http://webhosting.yahoo.com/


from_name: Zoe

subject: [Wikipedia-l] performance tweak

body:
It has nothing to do with how brain dead your browser is, but how its preferences are set.  I can set IE to refresh a page every time I come to it, to only refresh once in a session, or to refresh whenever content is change.
Zoe
 Brion VIBBER <brion at pobox.com> wrote:
Erik Zachte wrote:
> This is a repost in plain readable ascii.
>
> I wonder how much web bandwidth and server processing power is consumed
> by diligent wikipedians browing the list of 'recent changes', checking
> an article and returning to the list by pressing the back button, thus
> generating a new request to the database, over and over again.

They should use a browser that's not so brain-dead that it can't tell
that the forward and back buttons are for zipping through pages that are
already open and should not be loaded all over again.

---------------------------------
Do you Yahoo!?
HotJobs - Search new jobs daily now
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subject: [Wikipedia-l] Just blocked someone

body:
Y'know what?  I was just about to ask if Cunctator was a Turing device.  His responses sound just like a bot parroting back questions.
Zoe
 Toby Bartels <toby+wikipedia at math.ucr.edu> wrote:
The Cunctator wrote:

>Toby Bartels wrote:

>>And why, Cunctator, if you're such an asshole,
>>do you continue to infect the world with your existence?

>That's a leading question. Why do you assert I'm such an asshole?

I like how you copied down even the word "such".
It contributes to the impression that you're a bot.
(Eliza would have copied down the word "such" just like that.
Actually, Eliza would have refused to talk about herself,
but switch pronouns and then it works.)

---------------------------------
Do you Yahoo!?
HotJobs - Search new jobs daily now
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from_name: Poor, Edmund W

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Just blocked someone

body:
Toby, that was a smelly thing to say.

And Cunct, please stop being such a prick.

(signed) a man with a "poor" sense of humor


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Name-calling and hair-pulling (was: Feature Proposal: Certification)

body:
What's nice about Wikipedia is that noone *can* rip pages out of the books.
They can put salt in the sugar dispenser.
______________________________________________

Actually, *anyone* can rip out a page. Then the library staff have to (A) detect and (B) revert the rip.

And I don't want salt in sugar dispenser when I'm preparing cafe au lait.

Why are you so cantankerous? You, you -- you CURMUDGEON!

Eddie Spaghetti   <------   in a saucy mood


from_name: Tom Parmenter

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Just blocked someone

body:
Now, now.  Cunctator, Toby.  Both of you have used the word "asshole".
You're even now, so cut the crap.

Tom Parmenter
Ortolan88


body:
|From: Toby Bartels <toby+wikipedia at math.ucr.edu>
|Content-Disposition: inline
|Sender: wikipedia-l-admin at wikipedia.org
|Reply-To: wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
|Date: Wed, 6 Nov 2002 12:02:37 -0800
|
|Ed Poor wrote:
|
|>Why are you so cantankerous? You, you -- you CURMUDGEON!
|
|Comparing our personalities:
|Is Ed calling somebody "curmudgeon"
|equivalent to me calling somebody "asshole"?
|Remember, it's all relative to what we normally say.
|^_^
|
|
|-- Toby

No, it's relative to civility and incivility; "darn" is not as
offensive as "damn" no matter who says it.

Tom P.
O88


body:
On Wed, 2002-11-06 at 13:46, Tom Parmenter wrote:
> Brion,
>
> Instead of vague and angry anonymous allusions, how about a list of
> browsers, annotated vis-a-vis Wikipedia suitability?  With an extra
> column for those of us in the Macwater if you know how the Mac might
> differ.

Sounds wonderful, Tom, thank you for volunteering! You can set up shop
at the old http://meta.wikipedia.org/Browser_issues_with_Wikipedia or
elsewhere if it suits you.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


body:
Britisher: Sir, I take the utmost exception to your farting before my
wife!

Second Britisher: Sorry, I didn't know it was her turn!

Sir Edmund
--
That's because you've never heard an elderly Englishman swear.  My
grandpa could turn the most innocuous of words into the deadliest and
most insulting of swears entirely by the tone of his voice

Jonathan.


body:
Brion,

Instead of vague and angry anonymous allusions, how about a list of
browsers, annotated vis-a-vis Wikipedia suitability?  With an extra
column for those of us in the Macwater if you know how the Mac might
differ.

Or, we could collect the information here.

I know that Opera has buffer-loss problems and also won't stay logged
in.  Omniweb sometimes suffers from irregularity, but is my favorite
on its good days.

Tom Parmenter
Ortolan88


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Rebol ?

body:
On Wed, 2002-11-06 at 09:35, Anthere wrote:
> > What's nice about Wikipedia is that noone *can* rip
> > pages out of the books.
> > They can put salt in the sugar dispenser.
>
> Since we are at it, is that Rebol stuff about bots
> generation true ??
>
> http://www.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikifr-l/2002-November/000084.html
>
> Brion ???

Hmm, I'm not sure I understand the question.

That it's easy to write bots that can post to the wiki using Rebol? My
impression is that this is true, but I'm not very familiar with that
language. Of course there's a potential for abuse, but that's not
specific to Rebol;it's inherent in allowing random people to edit our
site over the network.

Of course, if we ever do get massive spamming from a script, we can
massively roll back the spam. (ie, we can take the salt back out of our
coffee after some joker got us to pour it in.)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikitech-l] Quickbar patch

body:
Hi,

attached is a patch for the navigation sidebar. It changes the link
names as described in my previous message, and it fixes two problems:
	- The "Protected page" text was shown twice
	- The Watchlist link was shown for users who were not logged in,
although only logged in users can use it.

Regards,

Erik
--
FOKUS - Fraunhofer Insitute for Open Communication Systems
Project BerliOS - http://www.berlios.de
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subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Name-calling and hair-pulling (was: Feature
	Proposal: Certification)

body:
On Wed, 2002-11-06 at 14:21, Poor, Edmund W wrote:
> What's nice about Wikipedia is that noone *can* rip pages out of the books.
> They can put salt in the sugar dispenser.
> ______________________________________________
>
> Actually, *anyone* can rip out a page. Then the library staff have
> to (A) detect and (B) revert the rip.

A better analogy (since torn pages are not perfectly reversible) is that
people can go in and insert their own books on the shelves, as well as
stick their own propaganda and pamphlets into the books--most of the
time the additions are valuable, but sometimes they're juvenile
pornography, or inflammatory tracts, etc.

And in this library everybody is staff.

> And I don't want salt in sugar dispenser when I'm preparing cafe au lait.

Certainly.


from_name: Neil Harris

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia:Vandal bots

body:
This looks like something nasty waiting to happen (see the enclosed HTML
page).

Note the apparently bogus user name, and the fact that the article title
text does not match the link.
In addition, recent changes says that this was created from IP
194.117.133.196
<http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Contributions&target=194.117.133.196>,

which is used by a couple of real users and a persistent vandal.

A nasty thought: is this a rehearsal for an automated attack?

Neil

http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Wikipedia:Vandal_bots&action=history
<http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Wikipedia:Vandal_bots&action=history>
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from_name: daniwo59 at aol.com

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Is this a waste of time?

body:
I've been going back and forth on this Minoa/Minoan civilization thing with
Lir. Obviously, she is wrong. I have consulted with several people, including
a respected archeologist, though I don't know why I bother. She seems intent
on bringing a mad array of proofs, almost all of them web-based, including
computer games (though she is now excited that she found a proof in the Book
of Mormon). I can go back and forth in an edit war, but frankly, I've got a
lot better things to do. Nor is this the first time she has inserted
questionable information: Columbus and Iowa State are two examples. Frankly,
it's frustrating, especially when I actually go to the trouble to research
the subject. It seems like a huge waste of time, but I don't want to see
Wikipedia transformed into a joke either or have baseless "facts" empowered
just because of a user's bullying. Any suggestions?

Danny


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia:Vandal bots

body:
koyaanisqatsi at nupedia.com wrote:

>You Wrote:
>
>
>>This looks like something nasty waiting to happen (see the enclosed HTML
>>page).
>>
>>Note the apparently bogus user name, and the fact that the article title
>>text does not match the link.
>>In addition, recent changes says that this was created from IP
>>194.117.133.196
>><http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Contributions&target=194.117.133.196>,
>>
>>
>
>
>
>>which is used by a couple of real users and a persistent vandal.
>>
>>A nasty thought: is this a rehearsal for an automated attack?
>>
>>Neil
>>
>>
>
>I don't understand what I'm supposed to make of that.  what
>attachment?  what page?
>
>kq
>
>
>
Here's the attachment.  Brion has explained it as a race condition in
the code, rather than anything suspicious.

Neil

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from_name: Rob Brewer

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia:Vandal bots

body:
At 11:38 06/11/02 -0800, koyaanisqatsi at nupedia.com wrote:

>Anyway, I just reblocked the IP, and its pseudonym (pseudoaddress?).

Yes. Let's see if he really knows how to get another IP address.
Blueyonder (the ISP that he and I share) forcibly proxies all port 80
traffic, so he'll most likely reappear on another Blueyonder proxy
server (a list is at http://www.proxyinfo.co.uk/proxies.htm ; I'm
using cache-wit at the moment).

Rob
user:rbrwr


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Just blocked someone

body:
On Wed, 2002-11-06 at 14:23, Tom Parmenter wrote:
>
> Now, now.  Cunctator, Toby.  Both of you have used the word "asshole".
> You're even now, so cut the crap.

There's a slight difference in how we used the words. Toby called me an
asshole. I asked him why.

If person A says "We should kill bunny rabbits" and person B says "We
should not kill bunny rabbits", even though they both said "kill bunny
rabbits", they're not even.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Just blocked someone

body:
On Wed, 2002-11-06 at 17:16, Zoe wrote:
>
> Y'know what?  I was just about to ask if Cunctator was a Turing device.
>  His responses sound just like a bot parroting back questions.
> Zoe

You're confusing [[Turing machine]] and [[Turing test]].

But to prove that I'm no mere program, let me say that my hair is
shingled, and the longest strands are about nine inches long.


from_name: Larry Sanger

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Just blocked someone

body:
Cunctator, it seems to me that you don't care that you have alienated, put
off, not just Toby and Gareth but a large number of people on the project.
This is upsetting people on the list, and for good humor among these key
project participants, I'd like to ask you publicly to *start* caring, and
to *stop* taking yourself so damn (sorry) seriously.

Larry (who I'm *sure* Cunc will listen to on this)
--
"We have now sunk to a depth at which the re-statement of the obvious is
the first duty of intelligent men." --George Orwell


from_name: Erik Zachte

body:
>> Get real. This is the world we live
>> in: web designers will have to adjust to their user base not vice
versa.
>> Erik Zachte

---

>How silly of me to suggest to someone who is clearly looking for a
>better browsing experience a way to achieve it.
> brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

---

>Nope. The W3C sets standards and websites and browsers follow them.
>If the people who program web browsers *don't* follow them, then it's
>unfortunate that the end-user gets caught in the crossfire. But there
>are now plenty of free, (fairly) compliant browsers out there, such as
>Mozilla: not that big a download on a modem & easy to install. Ditch IE
>and be free :-) Tarquin.

---

Vibber, Tarquin, my final reaction on this. I'll try to explain the
problem once more. It should sink in finally. What good is it gonna do
for database congestion when I adopt lets say Opera and 3000 others
don't ? Will that give me faster article retrievals and less timeouts on
article updates? Your 'solution' reminds me of the old days when Mac's
and PC's did not cooperate too well on e.g. data sharing, and Apple fans
said: "This problem is easy to solve: everyone should buy a Mac."

MS Explorer is not perfect by any means, just a de facto standard for
years to come, that is all.

There are probably better ways to solve the performance problems than my
suggestion. I do not count starry-eyed idealism among those. Erik Zachte


from_name: koyaanisqatsi at nupedia.com

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Just blocked someone

body:
Cunctator, you make me want to hedge every bet.  I say you're the
"conscience of the project" because of your concern about abuse of
authority; you extend that concern to question nearly every action,
dissent without explanation, and strike up drama and confrontation.
Perhaps you're under a lot of stress.

kq


from_name: Krzysztof P. Jasiutowicz

subject: [Wikipedia-l] United Wikipedias Forum

body:
Hello all,

Interested Wikipedians are invited to comment on a new proposal for
cooperation between Wikipedias.
The outline of the proposal is published on Meta Wikipedia
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Wikipedias_Forum

Regards,
Kpjas.


from_name: elian

subject: [Wikipedia-l] United Wikipedias Forum

body:
"Krzysztof P. Jasiutowicz" <kpj at gower.pl> writes:

> Interested Wikipedians are invited to comment on a new proposal for
> cooperation between Wikipedias.
> The outline of the proposal is published on Meta Wikipedia
> http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Wikipedias_Forum

I like this idea, but I think we should use the embassies for this
purpose, i.e. making the "Main embassy" on www.wikipedia.org the "English
embassy" and creating on meta wikipedia a "United Wikipedias Council" or
something like that with links to all local embassies. The council and its
subpages could serve as a discussion space and results and current events
could be posted in local language in the embassies.

BTW, who is the english ambassador?

Another thing: I created a [[requested pictures]] page on the German
wikipedia and linked it together with the English. I also put a list of user
galleries on it (I couldn't find the photographer's project in the English)
This is intended to serve especially the Wikipedias in other languages (as
the pictures are already included in our articles). Maybe we could create
a ring for exchanging pictures?

greetings,
elian


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Just blocked someone

body:
On Thu, 2002-11-07 at 00:05, Larry Sanger wrote:
> Cunctator, it seems to me that you don't care that you have alienated, put
> off, not just Toby and Gareth but a large number of people on the project.
> This is upsetting people on the list, and for good humor among these key
> project participants, I'd like to ask you publicly to *start* caring, and
> to *stop* taking yourself so damn (sorry) seriously.
>
> Larry (who I'm *sure* Cunc will listen to on this)

Okay.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Just blocked someone

body:
On Thu, 2002-11-07 at 00:52, koyaanisqatsi at nupedia.com wrote:
> Cunctator, you make me want to hedge every bet.  I say you're the
> "conscience of the project" because of your concern about abuse of
> authority; you extend that concern to question nearly every action,
> dissent without explanation, and strike up drama and confrontation.
> Perhaps you're under a lot of stress.

Probably, what with Bole, Pataki, Romney, Sununu, Coleman, etc. raring
to help Bush drive this nation into the ground, bomb for oil, and cook
the planet, without even the token opposition of a largely ineffectual
Democratic Party, hamstrung by its desperation to compete for the
shrinking middle.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Is this a waste of time?

body:
On Wed, 2002-11-06 at 19:00, daniwo59 at aol.com wrote:
> I've been going back and forth on this Minoa/Minoan civilization thing with
> Lir. Obviously, she is wrong. I have consulted with several people, including
> a respected archeologist, though I don't know why I bother. She seems intent
> on bringing a mad array of proofs, almost all of them web-based, including
> computer games (though she is now excited that she found a proof in the Book
> of Mormon). I can go back and forth in an edit war, but frankly, I've got a
> lot better things to do. Nor is this the first time she has inserted
> questionable information: Columbus and Iowa State are two examples. Frankly,
> it's frustrating, especially when I actually go to the trouble to research
> the subject. It seems like a huge waste of time, but I don't want to see
> Wikipedia transformed into a joke either or have baseless "facts" empowered
> just because of a user's bullying. Any suggestions?

I recommend either adding in the new information you've learned (which
is why we bother--learning is fun), making a copy of the article and
adding the new information to that copy (make a page in the User space
or on Meta), and/or sticking the article on your watchlist and waiting a
week. Then put in the article you think is right. Do this once a week.
Or once a month.

Actually, that's not the most effective technique of dealing with the
issue, but the above methods take minimal effort.

Just don't let yourself get upset.

--tc


subject: [Wikitech-l] Watchlist checkbox patch

body:
On Thu, 2002-11-07 at 06:49, Erik Moeller wrote:
> Hi,
>
> the attached patch adds a checkbox to the edit page that says "Watch
> this page", and a preference to have this checkbox active by default.
> It can be used both to add and remove watches from articles, which
> should make it more convenient to maintain an up-to-date watchlist for
> people who want to watch all articles they work on.
>
> As always, all feedback appreciated.
>
I definitely agree with that functionality. It might make more sense to
have it be a configurable option on the Watch list page: such as

<List pages I've edited> (<including minor edits>)

That would keep the interface much simpler. It would be slightly less
configurable, but I suspect it wouldn't be to any great detriment. (If
so, more complicated solutions could be implemented.)


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Is this a waste of time?

body:
Ever try to win an argument with a 14-year-old girl?

Just revert Lir's changes, if they're wrong.

Ed Poor


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Our stratified society

body:
It's really a simple matter of social dynamics.

If a community is small enough, it doesn't need "government". People know each other, talk about things, see what everyone else does. Cooperation is easy and informal.

When a community gets too big for this easy-going camaraderie, it must institute standards or disintegrate.

I do not know what the "magic number" is for on-line communities, but I've been in several and I've seen how the absence of standards, combined with (A) too many people or (B) people with too much time on their hands, can bring a group down to its lowest common denominator -- sometimes called "mob rule".

Wikipedia has already had to create rules (no "graffiti") and get up a police force (sysops, who can protect articles and block IP's).

Thus, we have a stratified society with 5 levels of citizens.

(1) Jimbo is a truly benevolent monarch, subsidizing the kingdom from his own pocket. He can veto any decision of the developers, although he rarely does; he rules much more by sharing his wisdom. (I use the words "benevolence" and "wisdom" literally, without any irony or humor.)

(2) The developers (3 at last count) have more clout than the sysops, although like Jimbo they are scrupulous about not imposing their editorial will on any article. They are truly a noble class (again, no irony intended), donating their time to serve and protect the community like the knights of yore.

(3) The sysops (42 and rising) can protect or delete any article, and block an IP. They're supposed to do this only for "vandalism", narrowly defined as (a) inexplicable page deletion, (b) silly, foul or obscene graffiti; or possibly copyright violations. Of the last several dozen blocks that I've reviewed, practically all were for graffiti or deletion.

(4) Signed-in users. There are over 1,000 -- although only around 10% contribute much. They can be blocked by a developer, although this would "cause talk" and might even elicit a comment from Jimbo about exceeding authority, so it rarely happens. They get a user page and a user talk page, which by tradition they can pretty much post or delete whatever they want. For example, Lir keeps what Zoe calls a "nice clean page" (often deleting negative comments -- although she kept my "please don't tease Zoe" request :-)

(5) Anonymous users are the lowest class of our society, yet they have tremendous power. Like users at the higher levels, they can change any page any time in any way, except for a few protected pages. Moreover, since all users have this "any change...any time" power, every "decision" is subject to veto: anyone can revert any change. (Sometimes this balance of power leads to edit wars, but these still occur rarely enough to be tolerable.) An anonymous user who abuses their privileges can be blocked by a user with sysop or higher rights. At this point, they become refugees or exiles; they can apply for unblocking via e-mail.

A related difficulty arises when a signed-in user and an anonymous user share the same IP address, e.g., 2 patrons at a library or 2 customers of a cable system. Blocking the IP also blocks the signed-in user. This is a technical problem, and solving it will not materially change the social dynamics of our stratified society.

Ed Poor


from_name: bderksen

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Is this a waste of time?

body:
>===== Original Message From "Poor, Edmund W" <Edmund.W.Poor at abc.com> =====
>Tarquin suggested:
>
>> Ban Lir.
>> Or flood the page -- recruit enough sysops & old hands to watch that
>> page (subject AND talk) around the clock  simply wipe everything Lir adds.
>>
>> Whenever this sort of stupid edit war happens, the outcome is that we
>> lose an old hand and keep the moron -- let's not make that mistake again.
>
>I might protect some of the pages that Empress Lir is mangling, if it gets
out of hand. But I think SLR is more than a match for her.
>
>If he puts in an "Archaeologists say" thing, but she deletes that, we can
just revert her deletion. What's all the fuss?

The fuss is that once again contributors are spending their time banging their
head against a wall instead of writing new material. I have myself spent some
of my meagre wikipedia time this week reverting or correcting most of the
stuff Lir has done to articles on my watchlist, so I'm painfully aware of how
frustrating it is. Unfortunately I haven't had the time to exhaustively check
over Lir's recent changes, so I won't give any opinions on whether she's worth
the effort, but if people are complaining then the complaints should be taken
seriously.

If people are making a fuss, then there _is_ a fuss. Don't assume that the
people who are cleaning up after Lir are happy to continue doing that
indefinitely.

Really, if we're going around and manually reverting every change that a
particular user makes, how is that any different from simply banning that user
(other than that it takes way more effort and causes way more frustration to
those who do the work)?


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Just blocked someone

body:
>Probably, what with Bole, Pataki, Romney, Sununu, Coleman, etc. raring
>to help Bush drive this nation into the ground, bomb for oil, and cook
>the planet, without even the token opposition of a largely ineffectual
>Democratic Party, hamstrung by its desperation to compete for the
>shrinking middle.

Yes, I'm concerned about all that too.

kq


from_name: Brion VIBBER

subject: [Wikitech-l] encoding problems in russian wikipedia

body:
Russian wiki is now set up at http://ru.wikipedia.org/ with UTF-8
encoding (as are all our non-Latin1 wikis on the new software).

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

elian wrote:
> Hello,
>
> this message showed up at the talkpage of [[Wikipedia:Multilingual
> coordination]]:
>
> Somebody! Please help russian Wikipedia! There must be one line inserted
> in config for ru.wikipedia.com for it to function properly!
>
> ...
> $HttpCharset = "Windows-1251";       # Charset for pages, like "iso 8859-2"
> ...
>
> Will You please, contact the Admin, or help me find him!!!
> see also [1]
> Andrew Vovk 18:10 Nov 7, 2002 (MSK)
>
> maybe someone can fix this.
>
> greetings,
> elian


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Is this a waste of time?

body:
Tarquin suggested:

> Ban Lir.
> Or flood the page -- recruit enough sysops & old hands to watch that
> page (subject AND talk) around the clock  simply wipe everything Lir adds.
>
> Whenever this sort of stupid edit war happens, the outcome is that we
> lose an old hand and keep the moron -- let's not make that mistake again.

I might protect some of the pages that Empress Lir is mangling, if it gets out of hand. But I think SLR is more than a match for her.

If he puts in an "Archaeologists say" thing, but she deletes that, we can just revert her deletion. What's all the fuss?

Ed Poor


from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Why voting is good

body:
Because I got sick of the constant references to "VotingIsEvil" on
MeatballWiki (a pretty good wiki about many aspects of communities, even though it
uses the despicable CamelCase syntax), and because I believe we *really* need
voting functionality in Wikipedia, quite possibly before we get certification
functionality (in order to approve user groups by voting), I have summarized
my thoughts on voting here:

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

I also believe that the S/N ratio on this mailing list is declining for the
very specific reason I point out in the above article, mainly that the
potential for conflict between two or more individuals grows exponentially as the
list grows. Voting, if accepted as a conflict resolution mechanism, could help
us here as well as on the wiki itself. I have seen many mailing lists become
either unusable or strictly moderated as they grew larger -- we should try
to avoid both.

Ironically, ultimately we will have to make a decision on whether we want to
use voting at all, and if so, another decision about the cases in which we
want to use it. The first decision can not be obtained by consensus because
there is no consensus -- it has to be made and enforced by the benevolent
dictator because those who disagree will not accept a vote. The second decision,
however, could very well be our first poll. I believe that once we have made a
decision on whether we want to use voting at all, there is probably a
consensus that it should be minimized to cases where no consensus can be obtained.

Any and all feedback is appreciated, here or on the above wiki. Please,
let's not get lost in semantics. I don't care if you call it voting or polling or
surveying, what I mean when I say voting is a list of options of which one
is chosen through a to be chosen mechanism (technically, if I implement this,
I plan to support both preferential voting and first past the post, i.e.
most-votes, voting).

Thanks for your time,

Erik

--
+++ GMX - Mail, Messaging & more  http://www.gmx.net +++
NEU: Mit GMX ins Internet. Rund um die Uhr f?r 1 ct/ Min. surfen!


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Our stratified society

body:
--- "Poor, Edmund W" <Edmund.W.Poor at abc.com> wrote:
> It's really a simple matter of social dynamics.
>
> If a community is small enough, it doesn't need
> "government". People know each other, talk about
> things, see what everyone else does. Cooperation is
> easy and informal.
>
> When a community gets too big for this easy-going
> camaraderie, it must institute standards or
> disintegrate.
>
> I do not know what the "magic number" is for on-line
> communities, but I've been in several and I've seen
> how the absence of standards, combined with (A) too
> many people or (B) people with too much time on
> their hands, can bring a group down to its lowest
> common denominator -- sometimes called "mob rule".
>
> Wikipedia has already had to create rules (no
> "graffiti") and get up a police force (sysops, who
> can protect articles and block IP's).
>
> Thus, we have a stratified society with 5 levels of
> citizens.
>
> (1) Jimbo is a truly benevolent monarch, subsidizing
> the kingdom from his own pocket. He can veto any
> decision of the developers, although he rarely does;
> he rules much more by sharing his wisdom. (I use the
> words "benevolence" and "wisdom" literally, without
> any irony or humor.)
>
> (2) The developers (3 at last count) have more clout
> than the sysops, although like Jimbo they are
> scrupulous about not imposing their editorial will
> on any article. They are truly a noble class (again,
> no irony intended), donating their time to serve and
> protect the community like the knights of yore.
>
> (3) The sysops (42 and rising) can protect or delete
> any article, and block an IP. They're supposed to do
> this only for "vandalism", narrowly defined as (a)
> inexplicable page deletion, (b) silly, foul or
> obscene graffiti; or possibly copyright violations.
> Of the last several dozen blocks that I've reviewed,
> practically all were for graffiti or deletion.
>
> (4) Signed-in users. There are over 1,000 --
> although only around 10% contribute much. They can
> be blocked by a developer, although this would
> "cause talk" and might even elicit a comment from
> Jimbo about exceeding authority, so it rarely
> happens. They get a user page and a user talk page,
> which by tradition they can pretty much post or
> delete whatever they want. For example, Lir keeps
> what Zoe calls a "nice clean page" (often deleting
> negative comments -- although she kept my "please
> don't tease Zoe" request :-)
>
> (5) Anonymous users are the lowest class of our
> society, yet they have tremendous power. Like users
> at the higher levels, they can change any page any
> time in any way, except for a few protected pages.
> Moreover, since all users have this "any
> change...any time" power, every "decision" is
> subject to veto: anyone can revert any change.
> (Sometimes this balance of power leads to edit wars,
> but these still occur rarely enough to be
> tolerable.) An anonymous user who abuses their
> privileges can be blocked by a user with sysop or
> higher rights. At this point, they become refugees
> or exiles; they can apply for unblocking via e-mail.
>
> A related difficulty arises when a signed-in user
> and an anonymous user share the same IP address,
> e.g., 2 patrons at a library or 2 customers of a
> cable system. Blocking the IP also blocks the
> signed-in user. This is a technical problem, and
> solving it will not materially change the social
> dynamics of our stratified society.
>
> Ed Poor

That's an interesting classification Ed. Really. But.

I am a 4 in YOUR stratified society. Sometimes a 5. I
don't really know any of you except a bit from this
list.

On the fr.wiki, I usually am a 3. But, of course, I am
not one of THE 42 sysops.

Sometimes, it seems I have to deal with a 100mb
message that I cannot really understand on a remote
french speaking mailing list. But, of course, it is
not really one of the THREE wikipedia mailing lists,
isn't it ?

http://www.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2002-November/006953.html

Stratified society indeed. Main list indeed.

Today, for reasons I cannot understand, I "downgraded"
to level 5 on the fr.wiki, for my identification is
refused. Weird.

J'ai besoin d'un preux chevalier des temps anciens
(strate 2), qui pourrait voler au secours d'une pauvre
cerve (strate 5)...

__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
U2 on LAUNCH - Exclusive greatest hits videos
http://launch.yahoo.com/u2


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Is this a waste of time?

body:
You'll need to do it in the middle of the night or sometime when she's offline, or she'll immediately re-revert them.
Has anyone been reading her additions to the [[Lir]] page (not [[User:lir]] and to the rantings on her own page?  I think she's in need of counseling.
Zoe
 "Poor, Edmund W" <Edmund.W.Poor at abc.com> wrote:Ever try to win an argument with a 14-year-old girl?

Just revert Lir's changes, if they're wrong.

Ed Poor
_______________________________________________
Wikipedia-l mailing list
Wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l

---------------------------------
Do you Yahoo!?
U2 on LAUNCH - Exclusive medley & videos from Greatest Hits CD
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from_name: Jonathan Walther

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Is this a waste of time?

body:
On Thu, Nov 07, 2002 at 12:38:06PM -0800, Zoe wrote:
>   You'll need to do it in the middle of the night or sometime when she's
>   offline, or she'll immediately re-revert them.
>
>   Has anyone been reading her additions to the [[Lir]] page (not
>   [[User:lir]] and to the rantings on her own page?  I think she's in need
>   of counseling.
>
>   Zoe
>
>    "Poor, Edmund W" <Edmund.W.Poor at abc.com> wrote:
>
>     Ever try to win an argument with a 14-year-old girl?
>
>     Just revert Lir's changes, if they're wrong.

I was operating on the assumption Lir was a 12-year-old girl, but her
edits to "Wealth of the Nations" make me suspect she is actually much
older than that.  It would be easier to take Lir seriously if she would
engage in dialog, and attribute her sources more readily.

Jonathan

--
                     Geek House Productions, Ltd.

  Providing Unix & Internet Contracting and Consulting,
  QA Testing, Technical Documentation, Systems Design & Implementation,
  General Programming, E-commerce, Web & Mail Services since 1998

Phone:   604-435-1205
Email:   djw at reactor-core.org
Webpage: http://reactor-core.org
Address: 2459 E 41st Ave, Vancouver, BC  V5R2W2
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subject: [Wikitech-l] Watchlist checkbox patch

body:
Hi,

the attached patch adds a checkbox to the edit page that says "Watch
this page", and a preference to have this checkbox active by default.
It can be used both to add and remove watches from articles, which
should make it more convenient to maintain an up-to-date watchlist for
people who want to watch all articles they work on.

As always, all feedback appreciated.

Regards,

Erik
--
FOKUS - Fraunhofer Insitute for Open Communication Systems
Project BerliOS - http://www.berlios.de
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from_name: Brandon Faloona

from_email: brandf

subject: [Tech-Coord]RE: Seattle IMC Wiki

body:
Please give me any feedback on how to best use this wiki.
(http://docs.indymedia.org/twiki/bin/view/Local/SeattleIMC)

* Is the "Indymedia Documentation Project" wiki an acceptable
location for all our wiki pages, or is it designed just for
generic/process documentation and forms?

* To make navigation easier, can we make our pages appear in a new
directory under Local? So, instead of this hierarchy:
Indymedia > Local > SeaMediaWiki
Can we have this?:
Indymedia > Local > Seattle > MediaWiki
--- End Quote ---


from_name: Jeroen Heijmans

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Please revoke my sysop status

body:
To those with the power to do so: could you please revoke my sysop status?
I no longer have the will and the time to carry the responsibility that
comes with administratorship. Reading discussions (e.g. on Wikipedia-L) is
taking too much time and bringing too little enjoyment or satisfaction for
me to continue doing it. I'd much rather withdraw myself from that and
focus on writing and editing instead, without being "bothered" by the -
implicit - responsibilities of a sysop.

Jeronimo


subject: [Wikitech-l] Watchlist checkbox patch

body:
Am Don, 2002-11-07 um 13.14 schrieb The Cunctator:

> I definitely agree with that functionality. It might make more sense to
> have it be a configurable option on the Watch list page: such as
>
> <List pages I've edited> (<including minor edits>)

I prefer an approach where I can decide for each page individually
whether I want to watch or not watch it. I probably wouldn't want to
watch all my contributions, not even all non-minor ones, but I would
want the checkbox to be active by default. Both features could coexist,
though.

Regards,

Erik
--
FOKUS - Fraunhofer Insitute for Open Communication Systems
Project BerliOS - http://www.berlios.de


from_name: tarquin

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Is this a waste of time?

body:
Poor, Edmund W wrote:

>Ever try to win an argument with a 14-year-old girl?
>
>Just revert Lir's changes, if they're wrong.
>
Ban Lir.
Or flood the page -- recruit enough sysops & old hands to watch that
page (subject AND talk) around the clock  simply wipe everything Lir adds.

Whenever this sort of stupid edit war happens, the outcome is that we
lose an old hand and keep the moron -- let's not make that mistake again.


from_name: Zoe

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Lir, yet again.

body:
Lir is deleting the contents of the [[Talk:Lir]] page. Not that this is NOT her user talk page but is the talk page about the article [[Lir]], concerning the Celtic god.  Ed Poor and I have both suggested that she not do so, especially since the thing she is deleting is NOT something she wrote, but she insists on doing so.  I will stop the edit war for now, but I will revert it once she's gone to bed for the night.  Her bedtime must be soon, she probably has to go to school in the morning.

Zoe

---------------------------------
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subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: 90000 articles

body:
Hey Magnus,

I think we should implement the greatly-pared-down counting scheme we were
discussing on the list earlier.  We don't have 90K articles.  We have
about 50K articles and about 40K geographical entries automatically
created from a database.

Larry
--
"We have now sunk to a depth at which the re-statement of the obvious is
the first duty of intelligent men." --George Orwell


from_name: Anthere

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Presidential gaffes

body:
--- tarquin <tarquin at planetunreal.com> wrote:
> well, it's been an interesting evening.
> I'm logging off. Try not to kill each other.

Certainly was...

For those of you who can read french, this article is
pretty interesting ...

http://www.lemonde.fr/article/0,5987,3244--296107-,00.html

__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
U2 on LAUNCH - Exclusive greatest hits videos
http://launch.yahoo.com/u2


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Lir, yet again.

body:
Zoe wrote:
> Lir is deleting the contents of the [[Talk:Lir]] page. Not that this is
> NOT her user talk page but is the talk page about the article [[Lir]],
> concerning the Celtic god.  Ed Poor and I have both suggested that she
> not do so, especially since the thing she is deleting is NOT something
> she wrote, but she insists on doing so.

FWIW, this is one of few of Lir's actions that I have no objection to.
She deleted the crap she put into [[Lir]], then cleaned up after herself
by blanking the now-irrelevant cruft in the talk page, most of which was
a duplicate of said crap.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: athymik

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Rebol ?

body:
> On Wed, Nov 06, 2002 at 05:03:04PM -0800, Brion Vibber wrote:
> >?On Wed, 2002-11-06 at 09:35, Anthere wrote:
> >?> > What's nice about Wikipedia is that noone *can* rip
> >?> > pages out of the books.
> >?> > They can put salt in the sugar dispenser.
> >?>
> >?> Since we are at it, is that Rebol stuff about bots
> >?> generation true ??
> >?>
> >?> http://www.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikifr-l/2002-November/000084.html
> >?>
> >?> Brion ???
> >?
> >?Hmm, I'm not sure I understand the question.
> >?
> >?That it's easy to write bots that can post to the wiki using Rebol? My
> >?impression is that this is true, but I'm not very familiar with that
> >?language. Of course there's a potential for abuse, but that's not
> >?specific to Rebol;it's inherent in allowing random people to edit our
> >?site over the network.
>
> Brion is right. ?Rebol is just another language in which people can write
> scripts to spam the wikipedia. ?You can write one in Perl, C, Python,
> Scheme, Haskell, Mercury, or any number of other languages. ?It doesn't
> take much skill either.
>
> >?Of course, if we ever do get massive spamming from a script, we can
> >?massively roll back the spam. (ie, we can take the salt back out of our
> >?coffee after some joker got us to pour it in.)
>
> Correct.

I present myself : I am just the one who wrote the bot Anthere were talking
about.

This bot allows anyone to post anything on Wikipedia (only phase III
Wikipedias).
The bot is under the GPL license so anyone can access to the source. It's a
choice.
Everyone should be able to know how this bot works and how Wikipedia works.
Even if it allows script kiddies to attack Wikipedia's system.

What do you think about it ?

Athymik (http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utilisateur:Athymik)

PS : Sorry for my bad english...


from_name: Matthew Woodcraft

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Rebol ?

body:
On Thu, Nov 07, 2002 at 05:57:12PM +0100, athymik wrote:
> This bot allows anyone to post anything on Wikipedia (only phase III
> Wikipedias). The bot is under the GPL license so anyone can access to
> the source. It's a choice. Everyone should be able to know how this
> bot works and how Wikipedia works. Even if it allows script kiddies
> to attack Wikipedia's system.

> What do you think about it ?

I think it would be nice if everyone who was planning to use a bot on
Wikipedia made the source code (and configuration) available for public
checking. Much better to spot potential problems (and improvements)
before the bot runs.

-M-


body:
Hello,

this message showed up at the talkpage of [[Wikipedia:Multilingual
coordination]]:

Somebody! Please help russian Wikipedia! There must be one line inserted
in config for ru.wikipedia.com for it to function properly!

...
$HttpCharset = "Windows-1251";       # Charset for pages, like "iso 8859-2"
...

Will You please, contact the Admin, or help me find him!!!
see also [1]
Andrew Vovk 18:10 Nov 7, 2002 (MSK)

maybe someone can fix this.

greetings,
elian
--
Experience is directly proportional to the value of equipment destroyed.
- Carolyn Scheppner


from_name: Robert Graham Merkel

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Rebol ?

body:
On Wed, Nov 06, 2002 at 05:03:04PM -0800, Brion Vibber wrote:
> On Wed, 2002-11-06 at 09:35, Anthere wrote:
> > > What's nice about Wikipedia is that noone *can* rip
> > > pages out of the books.
> > > They can put salt in the sugar dispenser.
> >
> > Since we are at it, is that Rebol stuff about bots
> > generation true ??
> >
> > http://www.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikifr-l/2002-November/000084.html
> >
> > Brion ???
>
> Hmm, I'm not sure I understand the question.
>
> That it's easy to write bots that can post to the wiki using Rebol? My
> impression is that this is true, but I'm not very familiar with that
> language. Of course there's a potential for abuse, but that's not
> specific to Rebol;it's inherent in allowing random people to edit our
> site over the network.
>
Brion is right.  Rebol is just another language in which people can write
scripts to spam the wikipedia.  You can write one in Perl, C, Python, Scheme,
Haskell, Mercury, or any number of other languages.  It doesn't take much
skill either.

> Of course, if we ever do get massive spamming from a script, we can
> massively roll back the spam. (ie, we can take the salt back out of our
> coffee after some joker got us to pour it in.)

Correct.

--
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
                                           Robert Merkel
                                          rgmerk at mira.net
But don't let my cynicism fool you: though I called it an "edifice of
bull..., I don't exactly find Postmodernism more edifying. It's more
like a three year old throwing his blocks around the room because he
got frustrated with his failed attempts to stack them higher.
-- "Black Parrot", user #19622 at slashdot.org
--------------------------------------------------------------------------


subject: [Wikitech-l] They log me out of each other

body:
Guillaume Blanchard wrote:
> I have exactly the same problem with French/Japanese wikis.
> I'm disconnected and I my password cookie is lost.

I have never, ever been able to reproduce this problem. Not with Mozilla
1.x, not with IE 5.5, not with Konqueror 2.2.

If you guys want help solving this, I want to see exact step by step
instructions on reproducing it, from creation of a user account on.

> Do all wikis share the same cookie ?

No, each subdomain stores its separate cookies:
   PHPSESSID - Session ID
   wcUserID - the internal id number of your user account
   wcUserName - your user name
   wcUserPassword - a hash of your password. Only stored if you click
the "store password across sessions" checkbox when logging in.

All expire one month after they are set (ie, at logon) except the
session ID, which is set to expire at the end of your browser session.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: James Zitzmann

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Our stratified society

body:
fuck fuck fuck wikipedia
---
Earn free ringtones - go to:
http://www.earnfreeringtones.com/?src=jzcool
James's Domain - Your source for Nintendo, Sega, Playstation, Anime, Manga, and more! http://www.jzcool.net

On Thu, 7 Nov 2002 10:13:06
 Poor, Edmund W wrote:
>It's really a simple matter of social dynamics.
>
>If a community is small enough, it doesn't need "government". People know each other, talk about things, see what everyone else does. Cooperation is easy and informal.
>
>When a community gets too big for this easy-going camaraderie, it must institute standards or disintegrate.
>
>I do not know what the "magic number" is for on-line communities, but I've been in several and I've seen how the absence of standards, combined with (A) too many people or (B) people with too much time on their hands, can bring a group down to its lowest common denominator -- sometimes called "mob rule".
>
>Wikipedia has already had to create rules (no "graffiti") and get up a police force (sysops, who can protect articles and block IP's).
>
>Thus, we have a stratified society with 5 levels of citizens.
>
>(1) Jimbo is a truly benevolent monarch, subsidizing the kingdom from his own pocket. He can veto any decision of the developers, although he rarely does; he rules much more by sharing his wisdom. (I use the words "benevolence" and "wisdom" literally, without any irony or humor.)
>
>(2) The developers (3 at last count) have more clout than the sysops, although like Jimbo they are scrupulous about not imposing their editorial will on any article. They are truly a noble class (again, no irony intended), donating their time to serve and protect the community like the knights of yore.
>
>(3) The sysops (42 and rising) can protect or delete any article, and block an IP. They're supposed to do this only for "vandalism", narrowly defined as (a) inexplicable page deletion, (b) silly, foul or obscene graffiti; or possibly copyright violations. Of the last several dozen blocks that I've reviewed, practically all were for graffiti or deletion.
>
>(4) Signed-in users. There are over 1,000 -- although only around 10% contribute much. They can be blocked by a developer, although this would "cause talk" and might even elicit a comment from Jimbo about exceeding authority, so it rarely happens. They get a user page and a user talk page, which by tradition they can pretty much post or delete whatever they want. For example, Lir keeps what Zoe calls a "nice clean page" (often deleting negative comments -- although she kept my "please don't tease Zoe" request :-)
>
>(5) Anonymous users are the lowest class of our society, yet they have tremendous power. Like users at the higher levels, they can change any page any time in any way, except for a few protected pages. Moreover, since all users have this "any change...any time" power, every "decision" is subject to veto: anyone can revert any change. (Sometimes this balance of power leads to edit wars, but these still occur rarely enough to be tolerable.) An anonymous user who abuses their privileges can be blocked by a user with sysop or higher rights. At this point, they become refugees or exiles; they can apply for unblocking via e-mail.
>
>A related difficulty arises when a signed-in user and an anonymous user share the same IP address, e.g., 2 patrons at a library or 2 customers of a cable system. Blocking the IP also blocks the signed-in user. This is a technical problem, and solving it will not materially change the social dynamics of our stratified society.
>
>Ed Poor
>_______________________________________________
>Wikipedia-l mailing list
>Wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
>http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>

__________________________________________________________
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subject: [Wikipedia-l] Bots...

body:
Hello everybody,

Was everybody ok for using Ram-bot ?

Regards,

Athymik


from_name: Pierre Abbat

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Bots...

body:
On Thursday 07 November 2002 14:15, athymik wrote:
> Hello everybody,
>
> Was everybody ok for using Ram-bot ?

To me (and I know others agree), the main problem about Rambot was that
Recent Changes was useless while it was running - I check it (and the new
pages page) for new pages by IP addresses and red-linked users which are
likely to be garbage. Now that the figures are in, I'd like to know where to
find out how many of the Asians in Charlotte are Gujarati Indians, how many
of the Caucasoids are Russians, etc. I know they're here - the Hindu Center
is within walking distance - but not how many.

phma


from_name: Bridget

from_email: Bridget

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Don't be stupid! Be cool!

body:
Some people seem pretty upset about silly things like

Do Minoans come from Minoa?

Frankly, I think wikipedia should stop having debates about what is the more commonly used term, which results in, apparently, people checking google's amount of returns and thus declaring a winning word, and instead focus on what is the best term.

Of course, who am I to suggest that the American mass media sometimes fails to select the best terminology, certainly it is not wikipedia's job to provide any useful contribution to language, our job is simply to make a encyclopedia, a task which clearly involves improving the language, vocabulary, and terminology, so I guess that is our job... hm

Anyways, the dispute about Minoa was easily resolved! Somebody pointed out that they didn't feel Minoa was ever a kingdom! That's news to me, cuz I know it was, but I can understand how people can wonder whether it was a kingdom or not when they stare at all the crumbling ruins. So of course with that in mind (and the fact that we all know that Minoa will eventually become a disambiguation page for Minoan Civilization, Minoan City, Minoan Colony, New Minoan City, and Minoa New York)...the argument was really not about the name of the page but rather about whether or not the Minoans came from Minoa.

If Minoans were united in a kingdom than all Minoans clearly came from Minoa, if Minoans were in independent city-states than whoooo some Minoans came from Knossos and that means that Minoan refers not to the geo-political entity of Minoa but rather to the culture which existed on Cretica, and was typified by the people of Minoa (the city) but certainly not limited to Minoa alone.

Of course, the page Minoan Civilization doesn't really touch on such points but now that it was finally drug out of the loyal opposition that they think Minoans lived in a bunch of city-states...well how quaint.

But anyways, I digress, what I truly wish to address is that rather hostile nature of certain individuals who feel that I have some sort of hostile nature. If you have some issue with me you should feel free to e-mail me at lapollutionestsimauvaise at yahoo.com or contact me at AIM MarderIII, in fact, you should prefer that over TALK because wikipedia lags like a mofo, and through communication of that manner (rather than Talk's more ship-in-a-bottle technique) Im sure things would be much happier.

I suggest wikipedia add some chatrooms that don't lag.

---------------------------------
Do you Yahoo!?
U2 on LAUNCH - Exclusive medley & videos from Greatest Hits CD
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subject: [Wikipedia-l] russian wikipedia

body:
Hello,

Brion set up Russian wikipedia at http://ru.wikipedia.org/ with UTF-8
encoding.

Everybody who is speaking Russian please help testing the new software and
getting the Russian Wikipedia running!

greetings,
elian


body:
I have become active in the French Wikipedia as well as the English one, and
often when I have been working on one, I find that I am logged out of the
other. I posted a bug report about this (with the German Wiki) some time ago.
I am now somehow logged out of both. Can someone fix this, or do you need
more information?

phma


from_name: Tom Parmenter

in_reply_to:
<1036624207.1077.6.camel@rdaneel.vibber.org> (message from Brion
	Vibber on 06 Nov 2002 15:10:06 -0800)

body:
Please see [[Wikipedia:Browser notes]]

I have listed as many browsers as I could come up with, but of course
I haven't used most of them, so I'm counting on you folks with browser
grudges to come forward with them.  Go to it.

Tom Parmenter
Ortolan88

|From: Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com>
|Sender: wikipedia-l-admin at wikipedia.org
|Reply-To: wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
|Date: 06 Nov 2002 15:10:06 -0800
|
|On Wed, 2002-11-06 at 13:46, Tom Parmenter wrote:
|> Brion,
|>
|> Instead of vague and angry anonymous allusions, how about a list of
|> browsers, annotated vis-a-vis Wikipedia suitability?  With an extra
|> column for those of us in the Macwater if you know how the Mac might
|> differ.
|
|Sounds wonderful, Tom, thank you for volunteering! You can set up shop
|at the old http://meta.wikipedia.org/Browser_issues_with_Wikipedia or
|elsewhere if it suits you.
|
|-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
|
|_______________________________________________
|Wikipedia-l mailing list
|Wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
|http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
|


from_name: Magnus Manske

subject: [Wikipedia-l] 90000 articles

body:
We passed 90000 articles today. While the method of counting articles is
still under debate (or is it?), I thought it might be worth mentioning...

Magnus


body:
On Thursday 07 November 2002 21:28, Guillaume Blanchard wrote:
> I have exactly the same problem with French/Japanese wikis.
> I'm disconnected and I my password cookie is lost.
> Do all wikis share the same cookie ?

I looked at my cookie jar and found four cookies in wikipedia.org. Some were
set by www.wikipedia.org and some by fr.wikipedia.org. The four cookies are
all set by www. I log into fr. Now they are gone. I click on an article in
www. I am logged out. They are now:
wcUserPassword: some hexadecimal gibberish set by www
wcUsedID: 24 set by fr
wcUserName: PierreAbbat set by fr
PHPSESSID: some hexadecimal gibberish set by www
Now I click on an article in fr. I am logged out of both. They are now
vanished again.

I am using Konqueror 2.1.1.

phma


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Don't be stupid! Be cool!

body:
On Thu, Nov 07, 2002 at 08:30:08PM -0800, Bridget [name omitted for privacy reasons] wrote:
>   Of course, the page Minoan Civilization doesn't really touch on such
>   points but now that it was finally drug out of the loyal opposition that
>   they think Minoans lived in a bunch of city-states...well how quaint.

What we have here is a "Lirican standoff".  Maybe, Lir, if you were
quicker to provide your sources, and they weren't JUST google links,
people would accept what you write with less suspicion.

Wouldn't it be nice if people accepted your contributions as if they
were a delicious handcooked meal, instead of poking at them as if not
sure whether you drug them out of the cesspit, compost heap, or, un
mirable, fresh from the vegetable garden?

Jonathan

--
                     Geek House Productions, Ltd.

  Providing Unix & Internet Contracting and Consulting,
  QA Testing, Technical Documentation, Systems Design & Implementation,
  General Programming, E-commerce, Web & Mail Services since 1998

Phone:   604-435-1205
Email:   djw at reactor-core.org
Webpage: http://reactor-core.org
Address: 2459 E 41st Ave, Vancouver, BC  V5R2W2
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subject: [Wikipedia-l] Presidential gaffes

body:
well, it's been an interesting evening.
I'm logging off. Try not to kill each other.


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Wikitech-l digest, Vol 1 #221 - 8 msgs

body:
About the cookies... (the digest was truncated...)

The disconnection between the fr and the en does not
happen all the time. It is usually by rows. For
several days, you navigate pretty well, and all of
sudden, for several days, you are no more recognised
when you connect yourself or jump from one to the
other. Even thought it is checked and rechecked in
your prefs. This is true under Opera on Mac.

I think I have *never* been recognised even once on
the meta. Whatever the browser I use (Opera, Mozilla,
Netscape or IE).

On IE (which i usually use for meta), I have two
cookies, one is called WCUserID and the other WCUserName.

__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
U2 on LAUNCH - Exclusive greatest hits videos
http://launch.yahoo.com/u2


from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Fair use examples

body:
I'm talking to Lawrence Lessig and Richard Stallman about our
questions regarding fair use and the GNU FDL.  It's apparently a more
complex issue than I had previously realized.  Even RMS said that the
answer was more difficult than he first thought.

Lessig is, of course, a very famous and busy person, and he asks that
I come up with a specific example or two of a problematic fair use
example.

Let's discuss this so that I can get some ideas to come up with good
examples.  Please include URLs on wikipedia that we are concerned
about.

-----------

To refresh your memory... the problem has to do with reuse.  We have
the right, as copyright owners, to license our own work under the GNU
FDL.  We also have the right to use certain copyrighted materials
under the "fair use" doctrine.  But we can't be assured that the
people we license our content to also have the right to fair use,
since the right can depend on factors that might differ for others.

So the question is, do we need to disclaim something?  Can we disclaim
something?  Or does the GNU FDL commit us to saying something that is
not true, i.e. that we grant people the right to use and modify even
the fair use components of the work we are distributing?

My rough sense of the answer I'm getting from RMS and Lessig is that
we can simply add a disclaimer in an FAQ on our site, explaining that
*our work* is GNU FDL, but that it includes "fair use" quotations and
illustrations, and that it is the responsibility of the licensee to
make sure that "fair use" of those parts applies to them as well as to
us.

This is similar to GPL issues involving the legal use of code that
might violate crypto export.

Even so, I want to give some good and challenging examples.

My "first pass" would be these three:

1.  A simple and ordinary quote from a primary source.  A quote from a
book by Lawrence Lessig, in an article about Lawrence Lessig.

2.  A quote of poetry.  (Because RMS suggests that there is some
special rule for poetry that makes it especially problematic for fair
use.)

3.  A low-res thumbnail of an album cover or movie box cover, used as
an illustration in an article about the full work in question.

Please help me think of better examples, if they exist.

--Jimbo


from_name: koyaanisqatsi at nupedia.com

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Fair use examples

body:
Jimbo about fair use:
>Even so, I want to give some good and challenging examples.
>
>My "first pass" would be these three:

(to which Imran added other good ones).

I would add http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beatles_(album) which
includes album photos which are *not* the album cover (though they're
certainly well-known as being from _the White Album_).

The page above also includes 'fair use' samples of six of the songs.

kq


from_name: Neil Harris

subject: [Wikipedia-l] [Fwd: Re: Wikipedia article: "Holocaust revisionism"]

body:
I wrote to Ken McVay of the NIzkor project for permission to use the
Nizkor project's copyrighted materials under the GFDL. Here is my
original message, and his reply.

Neil

--- My original message ---

Dear Mr. McVay,

The Wikipedia, an open content collaborative encyclopedia, has an
article on Holocaust revisionism.

The encyclopedia is being written by volunteers, and has an open-access
policy where any member of the public may edit articles. Hence articles
"evolve" by multiple edits and contributions. As the Wikipedia is
growing into one of the largest open-content resources on the Internet,
it is unsuprising that Holocaust-related articles are, as you might
expect, one of the major points of contention.

The Wikipedia policy in controversial matters is to use the "Neutral
point of view" which fairly reports the opinions held by all sides of
the argument, as well as any facts that are not in dispute. This is
similar to your approach in Nizkor, which takes pains to fairly
represent the arguments of Holocaust deniers, whilst refuting their
arguments point by point.

At the moment the Wikipedia article lacks a thorough point-by-point
debunking of the Holocaust revisionists' arguments.

I would like to be able to use material from your Holocaust FAQ in the
article. Unfortunately, I cannot use verbatim content from the Holocaust
FAQ as it covered by copyright, and all content in the Wikipedia needs
to be licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.  This does not
require the original author to give up their copyright, but instead only
grants the right to others to distribute and use the material and to
create derivative works covered by the same license.

If you were to grant permission for the Holocaust FAQ or other Nizkor
material to be included in the Wikipedia under the GFDL, this would be
very useful.

Alternatively, you may want to make your own contributions under the GFDL.

You can see the (evolving) Holocaust revisionism article for yourself at

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

There is also a Wikipedia mailing list which is used to discuss the
organization of the encyclopedia. (see

   http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l

for details)

I invite you, and other Nizkor participants, to contribute to the
Wikipedia.

Yours sincerely,

Neil Harris

-------- Ken McVay's reply  --------
Subject: Re: Wikipedia article: "Holocaust revisionism"
Date: Thu, 7 Nov 2002 16:27:25 -0500 (EST)
From: Kenneth McVay, OBC <kmcvay at vex.net>
Reply-To: kmcvay at nizkor.org
To: Neil Harris <usenet at tonal.clara.co.uk>

You wrote:

Feel free to use any Nizkor FAQs or Nizkor Features you wish - i.e.
those that originated from our staff. That includes the FAQs,
Techniques of Denial, and the 66 QAR sections.

Ken


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Lir, yet again.

body:
what does it matter?
 "Poor, Edmund W" <Edmund.W.Poor at abc.com> wrote:We don't know Lir's real age. She describes herself as a woman, so it's fair to assume we know her sex. But we can only guess at her age. Not only do ladies often not care to reveal such personal info, it's rare for people online to do so either. She acknowledges *acting* like a 14-year-old. Less than 5% of the contributors whose Usernames I recognize go by their real names: Jimbo Wales, Larry Sanger do it because of their positions as founder and shaper. I do it because I don't want anyone saying, "These Moonies always hide behind a facade; see, even BigMetalGuy won't reveal his real name." As one of my favorite New Yorker cartoons points out, "On the Internet no one knows you're a dog." Ed Poor (my real name)"Opinions expressed here are no reflection of my employer's policies." (my official disclaimer)www.edpoor.com (my real boring website)-----Original Message-----
From: Zoe [mailto:zoecomnena at yahoo.com]
Sent: Thursday, November 07, 2002 6:40 PM
To: wikipedia-l at nupedia.com
Subject: [Wikipedia-l] Lir, yet again.

Lir is deleting the contents of the [[Talk:Lir]] page. Not that this is NOT her user talk page but is the talk page about the article [[Lir]], concerning the Celtic god.  Ed Poor and I have both suggested that she not do so, especially since the thing she is deleting is NOT something she wrote, but she insists on doing so.  I will stop the edit war for now, but I will revert it once she's gone to bed for the night.  Her bedtime must be soon, she probably has to go to school in the morning.

Zoe

---------------------------------
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U2 on LAUNCH - Exclusive medley & videos from Greatest Hits CD
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from_name: Poor, Edmund W

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Lir, yet again.

body:
We don't know Lir's real age. She describes herself as a woman, so it's fair to assume we know her sex. But we can only guess at her age. Not only do ladies often not care to reveal such personal info, it's rare for people online to do so either. She acknowledges *acting* like a 14-year-old.

Less than 5% of the contributors whose Usernames I recognize go by their real names: Jimbo Wales, Larry Sanger do it because of their positions as founder and shaper. I do it because I don't want anyone saying, "These Moonies always hide behind a facade; see, even BigMetalGuy won't reveal his real name."

As one of my favorite New Yorker cartoons points out, "On the Internet no one knows you're a dog."

Ed Poor (my real name)
"Opinions expressed here are no reflection of my employer's policies." (my official disclaimer)
www.edpoor.com (my real boring website)

-----Original Message-----
From: Zoe [mailto:zoecomnena at yahoo.com]
Sent: Thursday, November 07, 2002 6:40 PM
To: wikipedia-l at nupedia.com
Subject: [Wikipedia-l] Lir, yet again.

Lir is deleting the contents of the [[Talk:Lir]] page. Not that this is NOT her user talk page but is the talk page about the article [[Lir]], concerning the Celtic god.  Ed Poor and I have both suggested that she not do so, especially since the thing she is deleting is NOT something she wrote, but she insists on doing so.  I will stop the edit war for now, but I will revert it once she's gone to bed for the night.  Her bedtime must be soon, she probably has to go to school in the morning.

Zoe

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from_name: Axel Boldt

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Fair use examples

body:
--- Tom Parmenter <tompar at world.std.com> wrote:
> For poetry fair use:
>
> [[William Butler Yeats]] quotes 8 out of 22 lines from the poem, "The
> Second Coming", which was first published in 1922, but surely has a
> later copyright due to republication in collected works, etc.

No, if it was first published in 1922, then it's in the public domain
period. Later republications of the identical poem don't extend the
copyright (otherwise, that would be a loophole to drive a truck
through).

Axel

__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
U2 on LAUNCH - Exclusive greatest hits videos
http://launch.yahoo.com/u2


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Fair use examples

body:
For poetry fair use:

[[William Butler Yeats]] quotes 8 out of 22 lines from the poem, "The
Second Coming", which was first published in 1922, but surely has a
later copyright due to republication in collected works, etc.  Yeats
died in 1939.

Tom Parmenter
Ortolan88


from_name: Guillaume Blanchard

body:
I have exactly the same problem with French/Japanese wikis.
I'm disconnected and I my password cookie is lost.
Do all wikis share the same cookie ?

Aoineko

----- Original Message -----
From: "Pierre Abbat" <phma at webjockey.net>
To: <wikitech-l at wikipedia.org>
Sent: Friday, November 08, 2002 11:02 AM
Subject: [Wikitech-l] They log me out of each other

> I have become active in the French Wikipedia as well as the English one,
and
> often when I have been working on one, I find that I am logged out of the
> other. I posted a bug report about this (with the German Wiki) some time
ago.
> I am now somehow logged out of both. Can someone fix this, or do you need
> more information?
>
> phma
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikipedia.org
> http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Lir, yet again.

body:
It doesn't. That was my point.

Let's try to get beyond personalities and find ways to work together to build this encyclopedia.

Ed Poor

-----Original Message-----
From: Bridget [name omitted for privacy reasons] [mailto:lapollutionestsimauvaise at yahoo.com]
Sent: Friday, November 08, 2002 12:28 PM
To: wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
Subject: RE: [Wikipedia-l] Lir, yet again.

what does it matter?

 "Poor, Edmund W" <Edmund.W.Poor at abc.com> wrote:

We don't know Lir's real age. She describes herself as a woman, so it's fair to assume we know her sex. But we can only guess at her age. Not only do ladies often not care to reveal such personal info, it's rare for people online to do so either. She acknowledges *acting* like a 14-year-old.

Less than 5% of the contributors whose Usernames I recognize go by their real names: Jimbo Wales, Larry Sanger do it because of their positions as founder and shaper. I do it because I don't want anyone saying, "These Moonies always hide behind a facade; see, even BigMetalGuy won't reveal his real name."

As one of my favorite New Yorker cartoons points out, "On the Internet no one knows you're a dog."

Ed Poor (my real name)
"Opinions expressed here are no reflection of my employer's policies." (my official disclaimer)
 <http://www.edpoor.com/> www.edpoor.com (my real boring website)

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from_name: Imran Ghory

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Fair use examples

body:
On Fri, 8 Nov 2002, Jimmy Wales wrote:

> Even so, I want to give some good and challenging examples.
>
> My "first pass" would be these three:
>
> 1.  A simple and ordinary quote from a primary source.  A quote from a
> book by Lawrence Lessig, in an article about Lawrence Lessig.
>
> 2.  A quote of poetry.  (Because RMS suggests that there is some
> special rule for poetry that makes it especially problematic for fair
> use.)
>
> 3.  A low-res thumbnail of an album cover or movie box cover, used as
> an illustration in an article about the full work in question.

4. Screenshots from TV/movie/computer game.

5. Company/Organization/University Logos.

6. Country national anthem & flag.

Imran
--
http://bits.bris.ac.uk/imran


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Repost: clear guidelines and the power to enforce them

body:
We must have clear guidelines and the power to enforce them, or valuable contributors like Julie, Larry, Maveric, Elian and many more will just quit -- the aggravation is just not worth it.

If the rules are not clear, we have to rely on Jimbo or Lee or Brion to make a decision, inform us and then we have to spend a week or two discussing it.

When I taught Sunday School, I just gave trouble-makers a time-out for:
* hitting another pupil
* grabbing something (a book, a chair) from another pupil
* teasing another pupil

Within a half-dozen classes, I had nearly perfect order -- and, to top it off, my class doubled in size! Kids started calling me Uncle Ed, and everyone wanted to be in my class? Why? Because they liked getting time-outs?

No, because they knew that no one would (1) hit them, (2) grab their things, or (3) tease them.

Let's come up with a set of guidelines and figure out how to give admins the power to enforce them -- in a way that does not curtail the ability of contributors to fulfill the mission of Wikipedia.


body:
Ed Poor is repeating himself, apparently because no one has paid
attention to his sensible remarks, so I will do the same.  Ed talks of
Sunday School, I will speak of my experience moderating open mailing
lists on the Internet.

One of these lists was for a group of non-religous recovering
alcoholics.  The other was a company list for experts in a
software-development tool that, frankly, required serious attention
from experts to be used at its best.  I was neither alcoholic nor
software support.  Both lists had their cranks, and certainly strong
opinions were the norm.

On both lists, I left discussion wide open, but retained for myself
the privilege of chiding and chastening when then conversation got out
of hand.  Inevitably, these interventions of mine were followed by
periods of profound silence, even from those who had not offended in
any way, and then open discussion would slowly resume.  I only banned
one person from the alcoholic list and no one from the company list.

People are confusing the Wikipedia (particularly talk pages) with the
Usenet.  If non-participating "moderators" were willing to jump in,
delete nonsense from talk pages, and enforce civility, even incoherent
or ideological contributors can learn NPOV.

Exactly how this would work, I don't know.  It seems that at least one
Wikipedia elder is trying but sometimes has a chip on his shoulder.
Nonetheless, I know from experience it is possible to foster civility
without hampering discourse.

This is never happening more than a few places at any one time and I
believe it is possible to stop it when it occurs.

Tom Parmenter
Ortolan88

|From: "Poor, Edmund W" <Edmund.W.Poor at abc.com>
|Date: Fri, 8 Nov 2002 15:34:25 -0500
|
|We must have clear guidelines and the power to enforce them, or
|valuable contributors like Julie, Larry, Maveric, Elian and many more
|will just quit -- the aggravation is just not worth it.
|
|If the rules are not clear, we have to rely on Jimbo or Lee or Brion
|to make a decision, inform us and then we have to spend a week or two
|discussing it.
|
|When I taught Sunday School, I just gave trouble-makers a time-out for:
|* hitting another pupil
|* grabbing something (a book, a chair) from another pupil
|* teasing another pupil
|
|Within a half-dozen classes, I had nearly perfect order -- and, to
|top it off, my class doubled in size! Kids started calling me Uncle
|Ed, and everyone wanted to be in my class? Why? Because they liked
|getting time-outs?
|
|No, because they knew that no one would (1) hit them, (2) grab their
|things, or (3) tease them.
|
|Let's come up with a set of guidelines and figure out how to give
|admins the power to enforce them -- in a way that does not curtail
|the ability of contributors to fulfill the mission of Wikipedia.
|_______________________________________________
|Wikipedia-l mailing list
|Wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
|http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
|


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Fair use examples

body:
Axel Boldt wrote:

>--- Tom Parmenter <tompar at world.std.com> wrote:
>
>>For poetry fair use:
>>[[William Butler Yeats]] quotes 8 out of 22 lines from the poem, "The
>>Second Coming", which was first published in 1922, but surely has a
>>later copyright due to republication in collected works, etc.
>>
>No, if it was first published in 1922, then it's in the public domain
>period. Later republications of the identical poem don't extend the
>copyright (otherwise, that would be a loophole to drive a truck
>through).
>

Imran may be right on this.  Yeats died in 1939, so the life + 70 of UK
law should apply unless there was something in that law to prevent
retroactivity of the law, in which case it would be life + 50 and all of
Yeats works would be in the public domain.  See [[Copyright case law]]
where it was ruled that ownership goes by the law of the copyright
owner's country.

Eclecticology


from_name: The Cunctator

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Repost: clear guidelines and the power to enforce
	them

body:
On Fri, 2002-11-08 at 16:22, Tom Parmenter wrote:
>
> Ed Poor is repeating himself, apparently because no one has paid
> attention to his sensible remarks, so I will do the same.  Ed talks of
> Sunday School, I will speak of my experience moderating open mailing
> lists on the Internet.
>
> One of these lists was for a group of non-religous recovering
> alcoholics.  The other was a company list for experts in a
> software-development tool that, frankly, required serious attention
> from experts to be used at its best.  I was neither alcoholic nor
> software support.  Both lists had their cranks, and certainly strong
> opinions were the norm.
>
> On both lists, I left discussion wide open, but retained for myself
> the privilege of chiding and chastening when then conversation got out
> of hand.  Inevitably, these interventions of mine were followed by
> periods of profound silence, even from those who had not offended in
> any way, and then open discussion would slowly resume.  I only banned
> one person from the alcoholic list and no one from the company list.

At first blush, it doesn't seem to be unreasonable to have as a social
norm that text on the article talk pages that is OT or personal,
overheated, etc., can be erased by people who aren't involved in the
topic at hand.

Though I fear that would probably end up not working well unless it's an
all-or-nothing thing. That is, the acceptable thing to do would be to
erase the talk page entirely, or erase it and summarize the topics of
discussion in your own words.

This wouldn't solve everything, but it would certainly help.


body:
On Fri, 2002-11-08 at 15:34, Poor, Edmund W wrote:
> We must have clear guidelines and the power to enforce them, or valuable
> contributors like Julie, Larry, Maveric, Elian and many more will just
> quit -- the aggravation is just not worth it.

That's one opinion. There are a number of assertions there that are not
necessarily valid, nor is the syllogism necessarily valid.

> If the rules are not clear, we have to rely on Jimbo or Lee or Brion
> to make a decision, inform us and then we have to spend a week or two
> discussing it.

I really don't know where you have this idea that Lee or Brion have any
special authority to make decisions about participants. There are 15
developers, including me. None of us have any legitimate authority to
ban users, etc. I'm at a loss as to why you think we should assert
baldly that there is a hierarchy of authority determined not by merit
but simply by accidents of code access.

> When I taught Sunday School, I just gave trouble-makers a time-out for:
> * hitting another pupil
> * grabbing something (a book, a chair) from another pupil
> * teasing another pupil
>
> Within a half-dozen classes, I had nearly perfect order -- and, to top it off,
> my class doubled in size! Kids started calling me Uncle Ed, and
> everyone wanted to be in my class? Why? Because they liked getting
> time-outs?
>
> No, because they knew that no one would (1) hit them, (2) grab their things, or (3) tease them.

This isn't Sunday School. We're not being taught by Uncle Ed. We're not
being forced to do this by our parents. Let's not get carried away by
false analogies...

> Let's come up with a set of guidelines and figure out how to give
> admins the power to enforce them -- in a way that does not curtail
> the ability of contributors to fulfill the mission of Wikipedia.

I really think you're barking up the wrong tree here.

Civility is a laudable goal and a reasonable expectation for Wikipedia.

Civility enforced by a police force is not.

Rather, we should each be able to control our own behavior, and that
goes for the people who feel aggrieved by loonies or robotic
personalities as well.

Again, none of us is being forced to do this. The psychology of the
conflicts that arise in Wikipedia is not complicated, and they can
usually be defused simply, without giving particular groups of people
powers over others.