from_name: Milos Rancic

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Propose for active backup network for Wikipedia
	content

body:
First, I would like to make some introduction (in my not so good English).

1. I am sure that I am not the only person which uses Wikipedia for his/her
own work. When I want to make some article about some part of history of
linguistics (in Serbian), I am using (Serbian) Wikipedia to do so. There are
a number of reasons for doing that, but two of them are crutial: (1) I want
to work inside of GNU FDL corpus and I don't want to make possibility that
my work becomes a propriety of some company or some academic institution.
(2) I want to popularize this kind of work; I want to involve other people
to work on GNU FDL documents.

This situation makes that (some parts of) my work depends on Wikipedia: (a)
I am using MediaWiki wiki syntax for marking text; (b) I am keeping my work
inside of my user-space at sr: ; (c) I am thinking that there si no metter
where I am if I have access to Internet (i.e., to Wikipedia content); etc.
Yes, I can make some "backup system" (and I have it) for that, but it is not
"ultimate solution".

2. We made some community at sr:. I am sure that bigger Wikipedias has not
only one community, but a lot more then one. So, it started do be some kind
of (sub)cultural place for gathering people who like the idea about free
encyclopedia. There is no such place when Wikipedia is down...

...

I am thinking a lot about solutions for that problem; this idea is not my
first idea how to resolve problem, ant it would not be the last.

I think that people around Wikimedia should make some kind of "active backup
network for Wikipedia content".

(For example, I can keep on my server backup for a number of smaller
Wikipedias (i.e., I can do it for Wikipedias from former Yugoslavia); as
well as I am sure that there are a number of people who can keep other
langauge based Wikipedias to his/her/their servers.)

Connection between xx.wikipedia.org and xx.exapmle.org can be made via bots
with some higher privileges (they should syncchronize user data, too).
Initially, xx.example.org would import xx.wikipedia.org via
download.wikimedia.org; and after that bots would start with
synchronization. People would be able to write and read on both
(xx.wikipedia.org and xx.example.org) and (for example) once per day bots
would synchronize xx.wikipedia.org and xx.example.org. Permissions, users,
etc. should be the same.

Of course, it would not be one-day-work. I know that it would make a lot of
job, but I think it is reasonable because it would relax Wikimedia
infrastructure.

As this would be some kind of external support to Wiki(p|m)edia, I think
that content policy should be Wikimedian; also, I think that people who give
"active backup servers" should say that it is their site.

And, of course, this idea is open for suggestions.

What do you think about that?


list: wikipedia-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Stan Shebs

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Image deletion

body:
Michael Snow wrote:

> J.F. de Wolff wrote:
>
>> Perhaps the image uploading page should have a dropdown box that lets
>> the uploader select a copyright format. "Possibly unfree" is NOT an
>> option.
>
>
> Yes, we're long overdue for this, as well as a required field for
> entering source information.
>
                         -------------------------------
Source (required field): | sfsoifjpvoiaf   joey is gay |
                         -------------------------------

:-)

It would actually be craftier to leave in the "possibly unfree"
option as a sort of honeypot, and routinely go through and delete
all the images so marked. Going by edit notes I've seen, lots of
uploaders engage in a sort of wishful thinking process, where they
know in their heart of hearts that they're doing a no-no, but they
don't want to admit it.

Stan


list: wikien-l

from_name: Chad Perrin

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Re: I have unblocked Blair P. Houghton. Re:Unreasonable
	block of user

body:
csherlock at ljh.com.au wrote:
> Jim Cecropia wrote:
>
>> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: Rick <giantsrick13 at yahoo.com>
>>
>>>
>>> --- "Blair P. Houghton" <blair at houghton.net> wrote:
>>>
>>>> One of my favorite parts of the whole debacle was
>>>> when GeorgeStepanek claimed I was a newbie.  His account is dated
>>>> December 10.  Mine is dated January 1, but if I look around I can find
>>>> edits I made over a year ago without having created a login.
>>>>
>>>> Quite the guffaw around my keyboard, I can assure
>>>> you.
>>>
>>>
>>> Jim Cecropia, please note this.  Your apologetics for
>>> him can end now.
>>>
>>> RickK
>>>
>>
>> Well, that's kind of a tepid smoking gun. I thought you were going to
>> catch him admitting he was Usama bin Laden or something.
>>
>> If you've read my posts, I've made two points: (1) I believe in
>> engaging "problem" users, not banning them; I've said much the same
>> about others users (172, GBWR, Rei come to mind) that I've been at
>> polar opposites with; (2) 3RR is a new and abusive procedure in a
>> Wikipedia that is moving to control minority users instead of
>> improving the content.
>>
>> Your post here illustrates part of the problem. If you can "prove"
>> Blair is a bad guy (and assert that I am trying to "prove" him a good
>> guy) you don't have to deal with the substantive issues. I think
>> that's called a straw man, and a sort of convoluted way of begging the
>> question.
>>
>> --C
>>
>
> Did I ever vote "Support" for your adminship? I hope so! Cause then I
> would have been proved correct in my judgement of your suitability as an
> admin.
>

I'm inclined to agree, just based on the fact that it has been about a
year since I've seen/heard anyone use the term "begging the question"
properly.  Considering how many times I've seen/heard it misused, that's
really saying something.

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


subject: [WikiEN-l] Apropos of absolutely nothing whatsoever

body:
Alphax wrote:
> I wrote:
>
>> Should that be "beaten with a *cuestick*"?
>>
>> I've changed it, anyway.
>
>
> No I haven't - the database is locked :(

"Cluestick" is more appropriate, anyway: it's a stick used to imbue clue
upon the clueless, much like a clue-by-four, but less brutal.

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


from_name: Ray Saintonge

body:
Chad Perrin wrote:

> Alphax wrote:
>
>> I wrote:
>>
>>> Should that be "beaten with a *cuestick*"?
>>>
>>> I've changed it, anyway.
>>
>> No I haven't - the database is locked :(
>
> "Cluestick" is more appropriate, anyway: it's a stick used to imbue
> clue upon the clueless, much like a clue-by-four, but less brutal.

Thank-clue for that explanation.

Ec


list: foundation-l

from_name: Angela

subject: [Foundation-l] What is de.wikiversity.org?

body:
On Wed, 16 Mar 2005 06:28:51 -0800 (PST), Daniel Mayer
<maveric149 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> There is also the technical point that the foundation does not yet own the
> Wikiversity name, domain name, or trademark. I will of course transfer all that
> as soon as the project is officially approved.

You already did that:

On Mon, 11 Oct 2004 10:42:26 -0700 (PDT), Daniel Mayer
<maveric149 at yahoo.com> wrote:
[...]
> BTW, I own Wikiversity.org and Wikiversity.com and hereby give those domains to
> the Foundation.
> -- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

We do need to register the trademark though. Is there an up to date
list anywhere of which trademarks are registered (or have at least
been applied for)?

Angela.


list: wikimedia-l


list: wikitech-l

from_name: southdii at onid.orst.edu

subject: [Wikitech-l] Parsing wiki tags inside extension tags

body:
Hi,

I am setting up a Wiki that organizes information on a series of books. I want
the site to still be accessible to those who have not read all the books, so I
am adding a spoiler extension. For example, <book2> Spoilers about book 2
</book>, if the person's cookie says they haven't read book2, the spoilers will
not be in the page.

I still want all the wiki tags within the spoilers to be parsed. How would I use
a Parser object to make sure the stuff inside the tags show up exactly how they
would if the tags weren't there?

Thanks,
Ian


from_name: Mark Dobrowolski

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

csherlock at ljh.com.au wrote:
| Chad Perrin wrote:
|
|> csherlock at ljh.com.au wrote:
|>
|> I'm inclined to agree, just based on the fact that it has been about a
|> year since I've seen/heard anyone use the term "begging the question"
|> properly.  Considering how many times I've seen/heard it misused,
|> that's really saying something.
|>
|
| How can you see someone begging the question?

In a mailing list, for example.

- --
Mark Dobrowolski
User:Markaci
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.2.5 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

iD8DBQFCORVO59vwROae2N0RAkhEAKCFEpVWpxfvCRXFLDmktYh52LcrxACg6V53
CiJmO1D7fwGmUxOTT75f0to=
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from_name: Andrew Lih

subject:
I have unblocked Blair P. Houghton. Re: [WikiEN-l] Unreasonable
	block of user Blair P. Houghton by adminCryptoDerk

body:
On Wed, 16 Mar 2005 11:58:20 +0000, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:

> The 3RR was supported by comunity conmsensus. If you want to change it
> get another consensus

Text that was voted on says:
"If you violate the three revert rule, sysops may block you for up to 24 hours."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Three_revert_rule_enforcement

The policy provides authorization for blocking, but not much wisdom or
guidance on whether to use it. Just wanted to note that page locking
is also a viable (and less drastic) option for admins.

-Andrew (User:Fuzheado)


from_name: Gerard Meijssen

body:
Angela wrote:

>On Wed, 16 Mar 2005 06:28:51 -0800 (PST), Daniel Mayer
><maveric149 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>
>>There is also the technical point that the foundation does not yet own the
>>Wikiversity name, domain name, or trademark. I will of course transfer all that
>>as soon as the project is officially approved.
>>
>>
>
>You already did that:
>
>On Mon, 11 Oct 2004 10:42:26 -0700 (PDT), Daniel Mayer
><maveric149 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>[...]
>
>
>>BTW, I own Wikiversity.org and Wikiversity.com and hereby give those domains to
>>the Foundation.
>>-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
>>
>>
>
>We do need to register the trademark though. Is there an up to date
>list anywhere of which trademarks are registered (or have at least
>been applied for)?
>
>Angela
>
Hoi,
The page you started at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Trademark is
propably the best place. The last edit was on 13-2-2005.
Thanks,
    GerardM


from_name: David Gerard

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: I have unblocked Blair P. Houghton.

body:
Blair P. Houghton wrote:
> David Gerard wrote:

>> What bit of the 3RR is ambiguous?

> Who said it was? Read my rebuttal.  I didn't violate the 3RR.

This turns out not to be the case:

05:22, 15 Mar 2005:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Weight_training&diff=prev&oldid=11159169
(the revert:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Weight_training&diff=11159169&oldid=11090304

06:07, 15 Mar 2005:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Weight_training&diff=prev&oldid=11159654
(the revert:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Weight_training&diff=11159654&oldid=11159169)

15:13, 15 Mar 2005:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Weight_training&diff=prev&oldid=11169234
(the revert:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Weight_training&diff=11169234&oldid=11159654)

17:43, 15 Mar 2005:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Weight_training&diff=prev&oldid=11177874
(the revert:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Weight_training&diff=11177874&oldid=11169234)

00:06, 16 Mar 2005:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Weight_training&diff=prev&oldid=11184398
(the revert:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Weight_training&diff=11184398&oldid=11177874)

That's five reversions in under 19 hours. If you don't think this is a 3RR
violation, you have misunderstood the rule and should read it again.

Part of the lack of sympathy for your position may be due to your aggressive
approach. Personal attacks or apparent personal attacks in edit summaries
are *exceedingly* ill-favoured. Please stop making them:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Weight_training&diff=prev&oldid=11169234
and many examples in
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Weight_training&action=history

Please [[Wikipedia:Assume good faith]]. Thanks.

- d.


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Trail of pages visited

body:
Anthere wrote:
> Alison Russell a ?crit:

>> Has anyone ever implemented a trail of pages visited? I would like to
>> do a floating trail which opens in a new mini window and keeps track
>> of last ten visits a user makes?
>> Any ideas or examples anyone can refer me to?

 > I am not sure at all this is a good idea.
 > It might conflict with our (yet to be born) privacy policy.
 > Why do you want such a feature ?

Presumably for wikis not run by Wikimedia?

Even on Wikipedia it would provide interesting and useful data, if the
user were not identified.

- d.


subject:
[Foundation-l] Re: [Wikitech-l] Re: [Fwd: Kennisnet will
 underwrite/pay for the
 creation of Wikidata and the Ultimate wiktionary]

body:
Hoi,
All discussion on the WikiData proposal is explicitly welcome. When you
are interested in cooperating in the development of WikiData, you are
more than welcome to do so. With the details of the RFC you find the
likely timetable will be. When you are interested in helping in the
development of the project you are more than welcome.

The part where the GEMET database will be implemented in the Mediawiki
software is included because the design and the data of this database
can both be used based on the GEMET data that can be found here:
http://www.eionet.eu.int/GEMET. This is a big important body of work
and already has data in 20 languages, it will allow us to add content in
any and all other languages and it is included because it will give us
the opportunity to experiment with the user interface. The current GEMET
database does have XML data available and we are hopefull that we will
find people willing to help with an XML import and export module.

The development as outlined in the plan is what will be done. With more
people working on the project we will be able to get better
functionality. It is a project that is part of the Mediawiki environment
and as such it is open for colaboration.

By not commenting before the deadline the project will start on the
given date. By commenting before the deadline the project may start a
week later if the comments make this a necessity. At all times comments
are invited.

Thanks,
    GerardM

Jonathan Leybovich wrote:

> Hi All-
>
> I was wondering what the proper channel would be for voicing
> suggestions/comments about the technical design of the WikiData
> project.  I guess this would be the WikiData discussion page on Meta,
> but this has not been updated in a while and I wanted to make a few
> comments before the Ultimate Wiktionary deadline.
>
> Also, how will development work be coordinated?  The Ultimate
> Wiktionary project page implies Eric will be doing all the
> development, and though I am happy to follow his lead (as well as let
> him claim the  contract ;) I would like to help with development as I
> am preparing a project proposal that will have WikiData functionality
> as a prerequisite.  Thanks.
>
>
> Gerard Meijssen wrote:
>
>> Hoi,
>>
>> I am very happy to announce that Kennisnet is willing to
>> underwrite/pay for the creation of wikidata and the ultimate
>> wiktionary. This will allow us to host relational data within a
>> Mediawiki environment. Wikidata will particularly enhance projects
>> like Wikispecies and Wiktionary where a lot of the relevant data is
>> relational in nature. The details of this project can be found here:
>> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/RfP_Wikidata_and_Ultimate_Wiktionary
>>
>> Thanks, :)
>>   GerardM
>


subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re: [Fwd: Kennisnet will underwrite/pay for the
	creation of Wikidata and the Ultimate wiktionary]


list: wiktionary-l

subject:
[Wiktionary-l] Re: [Wikitech-l] Re: [Fwd: Kennisnet will
 underwrite/pay for the
 creation of Wikidata and the Ultimate wiktionary]


body:
Blair P. Houghton wrote:

> No, I didn't violate the 3RR.  I read it right before I made the second
> reversion.  I knew what I was doing.  After a couple of reversions, I
> acquiesced to changes others wanted in the edit.  The following revert
> was to that revision of the edit.  The 3RR kept me from refusing to move
> on the issue.  That I was then accused of "evading" the 3RR is just
> another of GeorgeStepanek's prevarications.  That you're buying into it
> is a shame.

Reverting to different previous versions is reverting.

- d.


from_name: John Lee

subject:
I have unblocked Blair
	P.	Houghton.	Re:	[WikiEN-l]	Unreasonableblock
	of user Blair P. Houghton by adminCryptoDerk

body:
Blair P. Houghton wrote:

>> I look forward to your answers.
>
>
>
> I look forward to a little educated forethought on the part of every
> self-elected
> politician on wikipedia.

Just so you know, David Gerard is an elected arbitrator. I don't think
he's acting in an official capacity, just thought you should know, since
that seems a bit unfair.

John Lee
([[User:Johnleemk]])


body:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/MPOV

Better names welcomed.

- d.


subject:
I have unblocked Blair P. Houghton. Re: [WikiEN-l]
	Unreasonableblock of user Blair P. Houghton by adminCryptoDerk

body:
On Wed, 16 Mar 2005 16:47:54 -0000, Charles Matthews
<charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:
>
> Page protection is unpopular; temp-banning 3RR violaters
> seems to have a good consensus behind it.  This displays
> a rational attitude to the content of the page in question,
> I think.
>
> Edit warring usually stops the development of a page right
> in its tracks, often for the sake of a part of the whole that
> is not that significant.

You have to break eggs to make an omelette, and sometimes you have to
let people see the futility of war. :)

The problem with 3RR as it's being practiced now -- it assigns blame
much too early in the process, without even an attempt to stabilize
the situation and let cooler heads prevail.

-Andrew (User:Fuzheado)


subject:
3RR again (was Re: I have unblocked Blair P. Houghton. Re:
	[WikiEN-l] Unreasonableblock of user Blair P. Houghton by
	adminCryptoDerk)

body:
On Wed, 16 Mar 2005 10:53:44 -0700, Tom Haws <hawstom at sprintmail.com> wrote:
> Fresh thinking and good point against *enforcing* the 3RR.  But I don't
> completely understand the next paragraph.  Can you restate?
>
> >The problem with 3RR as it's being practiced now -- it assigns blame
> >much too early in the process, without even an attempt to stabilize
> >the situation and let cooler heads prevail.

Sure. Before the 3RR, the standard procedure was for an uninvolved
admin to come in and protect a page with an edit war, so no one could
edit it. The parties were forced to go to the Talk page to hash
something out. No one was declared right or wrong, no individuals were
singled out and the admin didn't care about the relative viewpoints.

After an unspecified amount of time the page would be unprotected so
the article could be updated.

-Andrew (User:Fuzheado)


body:
> No one was declared right or wrong, no individuals were
> singled out and the admin didn't care about the relative viewpoints.

I should amend that - obviously the admin would care to make sure the
dispute was about content and not just vandalism.

-Andrew (User:Fuzheado)


from_name: Jay Converse

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Image deletion

body:
I'd like to add something to this: One of the things that I think
causes an image to be either not tagged or mistagged is the sheer
number and variety of tags available.  I avoid uploading images
altogether because there appear to be so many different possibilities
for the images I upload.  As a sort of tangent suggestion, it'd be
nice to have a selection of tags that were a bit easier to
differentiate between for someone like myself who isn't entirely
familiar with copyright.

On Wed, 16 Mar 2005 22:42:48 -0800, Stan Shebs <shebs at apple.com> wrote:
> Michael Snow wrote:
>
> > J.F. de Wolff wrote:
> >
> >> Perhaps the image uploading page should have a dropdown box that lets
> >> the uploader select a copyright format. "Possibly unfree" is NOT an
> >> option.
> >
> >
> > Yes, we're long overdue for this, as well as a required field for
> > entering source information.
> >
>                          -------------------------------
> Source (required field): | sfsoifjpvoiaf   joey is gay |
>                          -------------------------------
>
> :-)
>
> It would actually be craftier to leave in the "possibly unfree"
> option as a sort of honeypot, and routinely go through and delete
> all the images so marked. Going by edit notes I've seen, lots of
> uploaders engage in a sort of wishful thinking process, where they
> know in their heart of hearts that they're doing a no-no, but they
> don't want to admit it.
>
> Stan
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>

--
I'm not stupid, just selectively ignorant.


from_name: Daniel Mayer

body:
--- Angela <beesley at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, 16 Mar 2005 06:28:51 -0800 (PST), Daniel Mayer
> <maveric149 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> > There is also the technical point that the foundation does not yet own the
> > Wikiversity name, domain name, or trademark. I will of course transfer all
> > that  as soon as the project is officially approved.
>
> You already did that:

Ah, forgot about that. Good ? it?s already been done. :)

> We do need to register the trademark though. Is there an up to date
> list anywhere of which trademarks are registered (or have at least
> been applied for)?

You?d have to ask Jimbo.

-- mav

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
http://mail.yahoo.com


from_name: Tom Haws

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Wikipedia hits the big time

body:
Magnus Manske wrote:

>-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
>Hash: SHA1
>
>
>
>Sj schrieb:
>
>
>>>Not enough people were interested in Larry's "Sifter Project". I don't
>>>know if anyone is using Magnus Manke's "tagging" software.
>>>
>>>
>>I'm not sure how forking would help, but we do need to
>>* get simple tagging/rating software to work (neither templates nor
>>categories are scalable substitutes at present)
>>
>>
>
>I'll have to give the voting/validation/tagging software a major
>workover for the upcoming MediaWiki 1.5, as that changes version
>handling (to the better!).
>Other than that, the feature can handle both yes/no and scaled (like
>one-to-five) values for multiple "tags" (suitable for DVD, neutrality,
>completeness, whatever).
>
Magnus, this is phenomenal!  Huge high-fives to you!

Tom Haws


from_name: Blair P. Houghton

subject:
I have unblocked Blair P. Houghton. Re:[WikiEN-l]Unreasonable
	block of user

body:
Rick wrote:

>I think his emails speak for themselves.  He came in
>here with a chip on his shoulder,
>
Being railroaded will do that to a guy, but thanks for understanding.

>he keeps making
>attacks on even the people who are trying to work with
>him,
>
I've attacked nobody here; I am defending myself and correcting
misconceptions.  You, on the other hand, have attacked me several
times, calling me a "supercilious jerk" in the first contact between us.

What's YOUR problem?

>you keep saying, "He's just a newbie that we need
>to make concessions to."  He objects to the idea that
>he's a newbie and claims to have been around for about
>a year and half.  He therefore knows the Wikipedia
>philosophy of Wikiquette and assume good faith, and
>
>
I assumed good faith and it was overwhelmed by evidence.  The offending
party's courtly manners while performing his bad faith is no more mitigating
than saying "please" and "thank you" mitigates rape (yes, I know, that's
another reductio ad absurdum; just assume good faith).

>yet he continues to write these nasty emails in which
>he's the only person right in the entire world.
>
I've read my emails.  Have you? This tautological assertion doesn't seem
to reflect that.

--Blair


body:
David Gerard wrote:

> Alphax wrote:
>
>> I wrote:
>
>
>>> Should that be "beaten with a *cuestick*"?
>>> I've changed it, anyway.
>>
>
>> No I haven't - the database is locked :(
>
>
>
> Definitely a "cluestick".

You'd think someone in this thread would've checked by now

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cluestick

--Blair
"I guess some people just like the meta."


body:
I appreciate your explanation, John, as it reflects what I was starting
to realize overnight.  It's becoming clear to me that by reading the "Ko
rule" into the 3RR I am being led to a different interpretation than
many take from the rule.  The Ko rule allows a repeat of a Ko when
progress is made between repeats.  That's what I focussed on and
believed to be the letter and intent of the law.  Perhaps having the Ko
rule as an analogy in the rule is a mistake.

I will however never hold the Evil Ones blameless for entrapping me.

--Blair

John Lee wrote:

> Blair P. Houghton wrote:
>
>> David Gerard wrote:
>>
>>> Blair P. Houghton wrote:
>>>
>>>> No, I didn't violate the 3RR.  I read it right before I made the
>>>> second reversion.  I knew what I was doing.  After a couple of
>>>> reversions, I acquiesced to changes others wanted in the edit.  The
>>>> following revert was to that revision of the edit.  The 3RR kept me
>>>> from refusing to move on the issue.  That I was then accused of
>>>> "evading" the 3RR is just another of GeorgeStepanek's
>>>> prevarications.  That you're buying into it is a shame.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Reverting to different previous versions is reverting.
>>
>>
>>
>> I'm not going to argue the point of the rule with you.  If you wish
>> to continue being a willing dupe of those who wish to railroad honest
>> people, then just keep on sullying your robes.
>>
>> --Blair
>
>
> I've been trying my best to avoid feeding, but I'm going to make an
> exception for this one. In case you haven't noticed, from the 3RR:
>
> *Don't revert <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Revert> any
> _page_ more than three times within a period of 24 hours.*
> /(This doesn't apply to self-reverts or correction of simple vandalism
> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Vandalism>.)/
>
> That means you have a maximum of three reverts per page for every 24
> hours. It does not matter which revision you choose to revert to; a
> revert is a revert is a revert.
>
> What you must understand is that reverting is bad. It's a slap in the
> face. If you would stop blabbing about Taxman and George for a minute
> to understand this, we might get somewhere. Just because they are the
> aggressors does not give you the right or privilege to go ahead and
> participate in the fight. Instead, follow the steps of dispute
> resolution and/or ask an uninvolved party for help (if you were
> welcomed to Wikipedia by a certain user, asking him/her would probably
> be a good idea).
>
> The problem in a lot of disputes is that one side allows themselves to
> be dragged down to the other's level. Maintain the moral high ground,
> and you'll lose the battle but win the war.
>
> As for the 3RR, I strongly agree with Fuzheado. I do not believe it
> should be applied so drastically, though. Need anyone be reminded, the
> text of the wording voted upon stated that admins *may* block users
> who violate the 3RR. May, not must. If good will can be demonstrated,
> and all parties involved (or at least the one who violated the rule)
> appear to be working towards a solution peacefully, a block shouldn't
> be required. If the revert is part of a larger pattern of MPOV,
> article ownership or simply just being an asshole and using reverting
> as a tool for getting one's way, then, yes, I would support a block.
>
> Now, some personal advice for you, Blair:
>
> Wikipedians strongly believe in assuming good faith and wikiquette (or
> whatever it's called). The tone of your messages to this mailing list
> have certainly been very accusatory and defensive, and reflect more
> badly on you than George and Taxman. Often this damages your point,
> even if it is correct. I advise you to be more conciliatory in your
> manner, and you might get a better hearing from roughnecks like RickK
> as well as others like David Gerard. Accept you made mistakes. Don't
> try to pin the blame on others by accusing George and/or Taxman of
> inciting you into breaking the 3RR. Remember, assume good faith and
> win the moral high ground. Losing the battle but winning the war is a
> far better proposition than vice-versa.
>
> John Lee
> ([[User:Johnleemk]])
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


subject:
[Wiktionary-l] Capitalisation off and why redirects should be
	deleted + organisation

body:
Sabine Cretella wrote:

> I thought a long time about a mail where someone said that redirects
> should not be deleted. It is not logic to me that a wrong writing
> should redirect to a correct form of writing.
>
> Let's take the German word for "German" ? language and adjective.
>
> adjective = deutsch
>
> noun = Deutsch (language)
>
> These two would have two different pages ? so there's no re-direct
> possible ? you can just add deutsch/Deutsch as related word on the page.
>
> if you take the Italian word:
>
> soprattutto
>
> There's only one way to write it "soprattutto" with lower case "s". At
> this stage it would be "Soprattutto" that is going then to be
> redirected to "soprattutto". And the wrong writing should then remain
> as a redirect? This would confuse people ? they could believe that the
> version with the capital "s" is correct.
>
> Another thing: many people, in particular language students, write
> this very particular word wrong ? they write "sopratutto". Since to
> easen search you would also allow redirects from wrong words to the
> right ones this one should then be added? No? this does not make sense.
>
> The only way a wiktionary may be: with correct written words, with
> correct upper and lowercase. All the other, obviously wrong, stuff
> must be deleted ? otherwise the credibility and the work of many
> people will become less credible and important.
>
> I know, this is hard word, but the sooner you do it the better it is.
> All contributors to the English wiktionary should for some days/weeks
> (depending on the number of actively contributing people) concentrate
> on the conversion of upper to lowercase where necessary and the admins
> should concentrate on the deletion of the redirects. When someone sees
> that somebody still adds with uppercase instead of adding a word just
> go on his/her user page and tell him/her what to care about and to
> help with the conversion work. If everyone does this you'll not need
> longer than a month and than have a neat and correct wiktionary.

I generally agree with you.  I've never supported useless redirects.
There is a strong argument that can be made for having entries for
common errors, but I don't believe that they should be redirects.  In
the case of "sopratutto", a text that says "common error for
[[soprattutto]]" would be more useful since it brings the error
immediately to the mistaken person's attention.  The comment that a
redirection has been made is too easily ignored.

There is an perpetual argument on Wiktionary about the prescriptive or
descriptive nature of a dictionary.  A significant segment of the
participants believe that any word that is used in any context should be
in a dictionary.  They would support the inclusion of any outright
error, of "leet" or "1337" words from internet chat lines, of invented
words, and of words from invented languages such as Romanica and
Espresso.  They resent being told that there is a correct way to use
words.  Of course if too much of this kind of material is included the
credibility problem is worse than what you perceive.

Voting on the change has taken place, and the vote in favour this time
was very strong. At [[Wiktionary:Capitalization transition]] I made a
few suggestions about how the change might proceed, including some
procedures that should take place before the change is made.  One of
these tasks is to generate a list of articles containing links that
should be corrected before the change.  Unfortunately we curently have a
shortage of technically savvy editors.  Hippietrail, the one person who
has experience with generating lists like this, is the one regular
contributor who has taken a strong position against the proposed change
in capitalization.  If we have another person who could generate the
desired list, the change could go ahead much more quickly.

Ec


from_name: Andreas Kasenides

subject: [Wikitech-l] Downtime Error messages translation

body:
Would a kind soul direct me to the procedure in translating
the error messages which appear when the Wikipedia servers
have problems. These apparently always start with "We are Sorry"
and are coming from http://wikimedia.org/errors/.
I thought it would be nice if we had some of those errors in Greek.

thankx
Andreas
http://el.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Ank


body:
John Lee wrote:

> Blair P. Houghton wrote:
>
>> Jim Cecropia wrote:
>>
>>> I really don't think this is helpful. I sense that Blair can be a
>>> useful contributor to Wikipedia. He is new and can be engaged. I've
>>> seen those more agreesive than he become valuabled members of the
>>> community. I would like him to calm down and work with the
>>> community, and also for the community to not go out of their way to
>>> bait him or any other honest user.
>>>
>>>
>> One of my favorite parts of the whole debacle was when GeorgeStepanek
>> claimed I was a newbie.  His account is dated December 10.  Mine is
>> dated January 1, but if I look around I can find edits I made over a
>> year ago without having created a login.
>
>
> In all fairness, how could George possibly know that?

So it was a private joke.  The question is, why should it make the
slightest bit of difference? Character is behavior, not attributes.  If
he'd bothered to read my history instead of jerking his knee towards
cognitive closure on the first trivium he could leverage against my
reputation, he'd have reached a different conclusion.  I certainly never
took him to task for that silly suit he's wearing in his profile
picture.  Only for his behavior towards me, Dan100, and the page.

>
>> Oh, and check through my contribution list.  I'm well-engaged, almost
>> whoring myself for barnstars, and not a little peeved that the people
>> railroading me didn't see what they were doing to my reputation.
>
>
> Ignoring the implicit personal attack there, don't be pissed you
> haven't got a barnstar

You keep seeing personal attacks where there are none.  And I'm not
pissed I don't have a barnstar.  They're awarded arbitrarily so I expect
if I ever get one it will be for randomly pleasing someone who knows
what they are and feels inclined that day to throw one across the room.

> I've written two articles featured on the main page, and several more
> that have been voted as featured articles (which makes them eligible
> for featuring on the front page). I don't moan about a lack of
> recognition. Keep up the good work you've been doing, though; some
> day, our work will be acknowledged. Take pride in the fact you're
> contributing to history, and write good articles anyway. Barnstars are
> an important incentive for writing, but shouldn't consume you. Just
> focus on doing a good job, and slowly acclaim will come to you. :-P

"Take pride in the fact you're contributing to history."

Nicely mentioned.  It's the only reason I intend to stick around in this
Lord of the Flies backwater.

I get to remember the feeling of improving the Eddie Merckx page and
fixing a problem on the pages for every member of the group of men who
raised the flag on Iwo Jima.  Barnstars are arbitrary kudos.  Setting
the truth right in places it's desperately needed sets your soul on fire.

--Blair


body:
Blair P. Houghton wrote:
> David Gerard wrote:

>> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/MPOV
>> Better names welcomed.

> Maybe it's apropos of this:
> [[Wikipedia:No personal attacks]]
> See first item under ''Specific examples of personal attack include''.
> But maybe that's not what you wanted.

Indeed not. I know precisely which two examples it was written about,
and neither are you.

- d.


body:
Alphax wrote:
> I wrote:

>> Should that be "beaten with a *cuestick*"?
>> I've changed it, anyway.

> No I haven't - the database is locked :(

Definitely a "cluestick".

- d.


body:
cookfire wrote:

> There is already a policy on the English Wiktionary to redirect words
> that are very often misspelled to their correctly spelled
> counterparts. If somebody asks for such a page, it will say
> 'redirected from ...' at the top. This will teach people who thought
> the wrong spelling was correct, how to properly write those words. I'm
> not in favour or against deleting the redirects, but there was
> somebody who said that there were probably a lot of sites
> (en.wikipedia comes to mind but it certainly isn't the only one)
> linking to the capitalised versions of the words. It would be a very
> bad idea to break all those links. I think it is wise not to take out
> those redirects right away.
>
> Polyglot

As I said in my direct response to Sabine I believe that a statement
like "common error for [[...]]" is more meaningful than a redirect,
because it makes them pause to see that they have made an error.

As a person who would prefer to minimize the number of redirects, I
agree that there is no rush to do this.

The question of inter-project links is an interesting one.  I believe
that each project should be free to develop its own capitalization
policies.  This understandably leads to problems when inter-project
links are desirable.  The fact that the English Wikipedia does not yet
use Unicode also implies an entire range of problems.  When one project
makes a link to another project the link should follow the rules of the
target project rather than its own rules.  To this end there have been
no problems in creating inter-Wikipedia links between languages for
personal names.  Some projects use middle names, but others don't.  The
Esperanto Wikipedia puts surnames in all capitals, and that does not
appear to carry any problems.  My suggestion for links, when there is no
ambiguity, would be for a link from Wikipedia to default to whatever
form exists on Wiktionary.  The ambiguous cases may need further
consideration.

Ec


from_name: Sabine Cretella

body:
I thought a long time about a mail where someone said that redirects
should not be deleted. It is not logic to me that a wrong writing should
redirect to a correct form of writing.

Let's take the German word for "German" ? language and adjective.

adjective = deutsch

noun = Deutsch (language)

These two would have two different pages ? so there's no re-direct
possible ? you can just add deutsch/Deutsch as related word on the page.

if you take the Italian word:

soprattutto

There's only one way to write it "soprattutto" with lower case "s". At
this stage it would be "Soprattutto" that is going then to be redirected
to "soprattutto". And the wrong writing should then remain as a
redirect? This would confuse people ? they could believe that the
version with the capital "s" is correct.

Another thing: many people, in particular language students, write this
very particular word wrong ? they write "sopratutto". Since to easen
search you would also allow redirects from wrong words to the right ones
this one should then be added? No? this does not make sense.

The only way a wiktionary may be: with correct written words, with
correct upper and lowercase. All the other, obviously wrong, stuff must
be deleted ? otherwise the credibility and the work of many people will
become less credible and important.

I know, this is hard word, but the sooner you do it the better it is.
All contributors to the English wiktionary should for some days/weeks
(depending on the number of actively contributing people) concentrate on
the conversion of upper to lowercase where necessary and the admins
should concentrate on the deletion of the redirects. When someone sees
that somebody still adds with uppercase instead of adding a word just go
on his/her user page and tell him/her what to care about and to help
with the conversion work. If everyone does this you'll not need longer
than a month and than have a neat and correct wiktionary.

Ciao, Sabine


subject:
[Wikitech-l] Five points we should be discussion about the
	mediawiki projects

body:
Nicolas Weeger wrote:

>>5. Fancruft and how to cope

> Sure. When the wiki is slow, we should just cut off en:.
> After all, that's a fancruft, and it shouldn't exist.
> Or we should just concatenate all pages in one big page, there wouldn't need to have any page existence checking.
> More seriously: saying that merging articles could (help) solve slowness is a bad social solution to a technical problem. People want to write articles, as many as they want.
> What would be next? "Sorry, you made more than 5 modifications in the last 15 minutes, please wait 15 minutes to that everyone get a chance to edit"?

Indeed. keats appears to be starting from a personal distaste and
then claiming this will be the destruction of Wikipedia. I note a
curious lack of substantiating, ahh, numbers. keats, do you have any?

Fundamentally, taking out the word "fancruft": keats appears to be
claiming that the mere fact of having 500k articles is unsustainable
in MediaWiki. Is this the case? Do we stop all article creation now?
If not, what do we do? Ration them?

- d.


from_name: Kate Turner

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Parsing wiki tags inside extension tags

body:
southdii at onid.orst.edu wrote in
gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical:

> I still want all the wiki tags within the spoilers to be parsed. How would
> I use a Parser object to make sure the stuff inside the tags show up
> exactly how they would if the tags weren't there?

http://mail.wikimedia.org/pipermail/mediawiki-l/2005-February/003580.html

> Thanks,
> Ian

kate.


from_name: Nicolas Weeger

body:
Hello.

Snipped many parts out, only replying to the last 2 paragraphs.

>   I hate committees, and I think it's a bad idea. However, I want to open
> discussion on how to address this problem, because I definitely think if it
> hasn't already, it deserves to be elevated to "problem" status.

I don't have anything against articles in many different flavors & formats. Ok, when i write articles i try to write'em in a certain way, so they have coherence. But apart that, people should do what they want.

I'm not sure we want to standardize everything. Because it means people have to learn that format, to know where to find it in the first place. You have to enforce it. It makes for wars as new users come in, or people don't like the format, and say "hey this format should be changed like that", and people reply "per decision of 2 weeks earlier no, we keep that", and so on and so on.

> 5. Fancruft and how to cope

Sure. When the wiki is slow, we should just cut off en:.
After all, that's a fancruft, and it shouldn't exist.
Or we should just concatenate all pages in one big page, there wouldn't need to have any page existence checking.

More seriously: saying that merging articles could (help) solve slowness is a bad social solution to a technical problem. People want to write articles, as many as they want.
What would be next? "Sorry, you made more than 5 modifications in the last 15 minutes, please wait 15 minutes to that everyone get a chance to edit"?

Site is slow? Make software faster, buy new hardware, optimize, imagine a bewolf cluster of servers on the moon, whatever - do *not* try to restrict the freedom people have.

Sorry if my tone sounds rash. I'm totally against your idea, maybe because I do write "fancruft" articles but also because it's imo totally against the founding ideas of Wikipedia - this doesn't mean i despise you :)

Nicolas Ryo

Acc?dez au courrier ?lectronique de La Poste : www.laposte.net ;
3615 LAPOSTENET (0,34?/mn) ; t?l : 08 92 68 13 50 (0,34?/mn)


body:
> that seems reasonable to me. I have added a site notice to the effect
> that Wikiversity is not yet an official Wikimedia project, with a link
> to your mailing list post.

Hey, glad you're already sysop there! You just discovered it exists, and been elected sysop in one day, pretty fast :)

(unless the mediawiki namespace wasn't protected there, of course)

Nicolas Weeger

Acc?dez au courrier ?lectronique de La Poste : www.laposte.net ;
3615 LAPOSTENET (0,34?/mn) ; t?l : 08 92 68 13 50 (0,34?/mn)


subject: [Foundation-l] From Corante

body:
David Gerard wrote:

> http://www.corante.com/many/archives/2005/03/16/wikipedia_and_the_future_of_social_computing.php
>
>
> I hereby move that we make Jimbo's official title The Queen Of England.

I never realized he was THAT kind of queen. :-)

Ec


subject: [Foundation-l] From Corante


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Re: I have unblocked Blair P. Houghton.

body:
jfdwolff at doctors.org.uk wrote:

>This is getting ridiculous.
>This issue has now generated close to 60 messages. I urge Blair, his detractors and everyone else to stop this discussion. It is a clash between an admin and the 3RR policy, which should be discussed on the wiki and not here.
>Am I the only one who feels that the 3RR is making life harder for admins?
>
>
Perhaps it will do to repeat my previous suggestion.  There should be a
separate mailing list for disciplinary issues.  I can even state now
that I will not subscribe to it.

Ec


from_name: Ivan Popov

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: [Theora-dev] Theora / ogg usage

body:
Hello Sj,

> An old theme just came up on the Wikipedia mailing list again :
> Wikipedia strongly
> encourages[1] using theora encoding, strongly enough that I don't think we
> currently host any other video encodings...[2] however, most users know
> how to make and edit and play mpegs, and find theora hard to work with.

As soon as a content author has got an avi/mpeg/something all she need is to
recode to theora, which is not that hard.

On Linux/FreeBSD I am using the theora-encoder script, directly
runnable from Konvalo.org (given a Coda client, available there as well).

For Windows, I think http://www.illiminable.com/ogg/ contains
the necessary information.

> http://mail.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2005-March/038244.html
>
> Perhaps the theora-dev list can help us overcome our technical problems so
> that we have a reasonable choice in setting policy...

The problem of teaching the browsers to launch a right player is a bit
of out of our control. A wikipedia page telling how to set suitable options
for different browsers possibly would help.

www.theora.org contains links to sites hosting downloadable binaries
which can play theora. Besides, mplayer from Konvalo.org can do it (on
Linux and *BSD) as well.

Best regards,
--
Ivan


from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [Foundation-l] What is de.wikiversity.org?

body:
Nicolas-
> Hey, glad you're already sysop there! You just discovered
 > it exists, and been elected sysop in one day, pretty fast :)

It's just a matter of pushing the right buttons.

Erik


from_name: cookfire

body:
Sabine Cretella wrote:

> I thought a long time about a mail where someone said that redirects
> should not be deleted. It is not logic to me that a wrong writing
> should redirect to a correct form of writing.
>
> Let's take the German word for "German" ? language and adjective.
>
> adjective = deutsch
>
> noun = Deutsch (language)
>
> These two would have two different pages ? so there's no re-direct
> possible ? you can just add deutsch/Deutsch as related word on the page.
>
> if you take the Italian word:
>
> soprattutto
>
> There's only one way to write it "soprattutto" with lower case "s". At
> this stage it would be "Soprattutto" that is going then to be
> redirected to "soprattutto". And the wrong writing should then remain
> as a redirect? This would confuse people ? they could believe that the
> version with the capital "s" is correct.
>
> Another thing: many people, in particular language students, write
> this very particular word wrong ? they write "sopratutto". Since to
> easen search you would also allow redirects from wrong words to the
> right ones this one should then be added? No? this does not make sense.
>
> The only way a wiktionary may be: with correct written words, with
> correct upper and lowercase. All the other, obviously wrong, stuff
> must be deleted ? otherwise the credibility and the work of many
> people will become less credible and important.
>
> I know, this is hard word, but the sooner you do it the better it is.
> All contributors to the English wiktionary should for some days/weeks
> (depending on the number of actively contributing people) concentrate
> on the conversion of upper to lowercase where necessary and the admins
> should concentrate on the deletion of the redirects. When someone sees
> that somebody still adds with uppercase instead of adding a word just
> go on his/her user page and tell him/her what to care about and to
> help with the conversion work. If everyone does this you'll not need
> longer than a month and than have a neat and correct wiktionary.
>
> Ciao, Sabine

Hi Sabine,

There is already a policy on the English Wiktionary to redirect words
that are very often misspelled to their correctly spelled counterparts.
If somebody asks for such a page, it will say 'redirected from ...' at
the top. This will teach people who thought the wrong spelling was
correct, how to properly write those words. I'm not in favour or against
deleting the redirects, but there was somebody who said that there were
probably a lot of sites (en.wikipedia comes to mind but it certainly
isn't the only one) linking to the capitalised versions of the words. It
would be a very bad idea to break all those links. I think it is wise
not to take out those redirects right away.

Polyglot


from_name: Magnus Manske

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

Sj schrieb:
>>Not enough people were interested in Larry's "Sifter Project". I don't
>>know if anyone is using Magnus Manke's "tagging" software.
>
> I'm not sure how forking would help, but we do need to
> * get simple tagging/rating software to work (neither templates nor
> categories are scalable substitutes at present)

I'll have to give the voting/validation/tagging software a major
workover for the upcoming MediaWiki 1.5, as that changes version
handling (to the better!).
Other than that, the feature can handle both yes/no and scaled (like
one-to-five) values for multiple "tags" (suitable for DVD, neutrality,
completeness, whatever).

> * have more explicit metadata [license info, article type, article content
> flags; user licensing info, user flags]

A quick hack I did during 21C3 can separate current "metadata"
(categories, interlanguage links, certain templates) from the article
body for editing, and display them in a second edit box.
I see that as a first step towards a "real" metadata system.

> * encourage the regular production of static, highly-organized subsets of
> our dynamic, somewhat chaotic whole.   (CDs/DVDs and their preparation
> steps; a variety of organizations of the encyclopedia, in online and print
> versions)

Don't forget the Wikipedia Readers! :-)

Magnus
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from_name: James D. Forrester

subject: [WikiEN-l] Apropos of absolutely nothing whatsoever

body:
On Thursday, March 17, 2005 4:20 AM, Chad Perrin <perrin at apotheon.com>
wrote:

> Alphax wrote:
>
> > I wrote:
> >
> > > Should that be "beaten with a *cuestick*"?
> > >
> > > I've changed it, anyway.
> >
> >
> > No I haven't - the database is locked :(
>
> "Cluestick" is more appropriate, anyway: it's a stick used to imbue
> clue upon the clueless, much like a clue-by-four, but less brutal.

Indeed. My software engineering project team had one a couple of years ago.
Very useful.

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

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


body:
> It's just a matter of pushing the right buttons.

What bothers me, actually, is that nothing appears in the logs on the site concerning your changes, so I wonder how you did? With your developer access?

> Erik

Nicolas Weeger

Acc?dez au courrier ?lectronique de La Poste : www.laposte.net ;
3615 LAPOSTENET (0,34?/mn) ; t?l : 08 92 68 13 50 (0,34?/mn)


from_name: Tony Sidaway

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: I have unblocked Blair P. Houghton.

body:
John Lee said:
> Remember, assume good faith and
> win the moral high  ground. Losing the battle but winning the war is a
> far better
> proposition than vice-versa.

The entire email was beautifully put.  My whole-hearted endorsements to
John's comments.


subject: [Foundation-l] From Corante

body:
http://www.corante.com/many/archives/2005/03/16/wikipedia_and_the_future_of_social_computing.php

I hereby move that we make Jimbo's official title The Queen Of England.

- d.


subject: [Foundation-l] From Corante


from_name: Jim Higson

body:
southdii at onid.orst.edu wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I am setting up a Wiki that organizes information on a series of books. I
> want the site to still be accessible to those who have not read all the
> books, so I am adding a spoiler extension. For example, <book2> Spoilers
> about book 2 </book>, if the person's cookie says they haven't read book2,
> the spoilers will not be in the page.

how about instead of an extension allowing something like:
spoil!

Then you could hide it with some quite simple CSS.

> I still want all the wiki tags within the spoilers to be parsed. How would
> I use a Parser object to make sure the stuff inside the tags show up
> exactly how they would if the tags weren't there?
>
> Thanks,
> Ian


body:
JAY JG wrote:

>> From: <jfdwolff at doctors.org.uk>
>>
>> It is a clash between an admin and the 3RR policy, which should be
>> discussed on the wiki and not here.
>
>
> Amen.

For the record, I agree, and if the process hadn't locked me totally out
of the wiki, that's exactly where it'd be.

--Blair


from_name: JAY JG

body:
>From: <jfdwolff at doctors.org.uk>
>This is getting ridiculous.
>This issue has now generated close to 60 messages. I urge Blair, his
>detractors and everyone else
>to stop this discussion. It is a clash between an admin and the 3RR policy,
>which should be discussed on the wiki and not here.

Amen.

>Am I the only one who feels that the 3RR is making life harder for admins?

I'm sure you're not the only one, but I feel quite the opposite.  More
importantly, I think it's made it less likely for regular (i.e. non
edit-warrior) editors to be scared away from Wikipedia.

Jay.


from_name: csherlock at ljh.com.au

body:
Poor, Edmund W wrote:
> The latest issue of Software Development magazine is on-line now:
>
> http://www.sdmagazine.com/documents/sdm0504e/
>
> Their excellent article "The Wiki Way" gives significant attention to
> MediaWiki software and the Wikipedia. There's even a section on Wiki
> Woes (like vandals).
>
> And I found a professor of church history whose students cite Wikipedia
> in papers they write.

Ed, out of interest, this wouldn't be Stuart Coulton from SMBC by any
chance?

TBSDY


body:
Tom Haws wrote:
> David Geerard wrote:
>
>> Nah. A massively distributed rating system seems the only workable idea
>> to me, because it will harness dilettantism. Editorial committees aren't
>> the sort of thing that scales.
>>
>> And I think a ratings system should be worth a try, on the assumption
>> that
>> most of the ratings will be good faith. 'Cos if we can't assume that,
>> then
>> we can't assume good faith for the project in general. And I think we
>> can.
>>
>> If their money can be directed that way, get them to hire a PHP developer
>> for a while to get the rating feature polished up ;-)
>
>
> Right, David.  Don't think fork; think Add-on.  And don't think
> editorial committee; think reputation/rating system.  And always keep
> dilettantism at the front of your cogitations.
>
> To those considering forking Wikipedia, I say why not simply start an
> add-on site where users can register, build reputation, and rate article
> versions.  All their edits originating from the Add-on site
> (credipedia.org or respectipedia.org) go straight into the main
> Wikipedia database, and the add-on site sifts articles for presentation
> to anonymous users according to its added features of user and article
> rating.  Any successful feature are sure to find their way back into
> MediaWiki.
>
> Tom Haws

You should note that before I left the project, I started this with
[[Wikipedia:Baseline revision]]. This was designed to have no noticable
disruptionn of the main article (I directly linked to a proposed
revision, this was done on a subpage that hangs off the article. The
discussion of the revision is done on the talk page.) It was my hope
this could allow for a "stamped" version of a FA page that we could
proudly state is the most reliable version and guaranteed not to be
vandalised.

Regrettably, it looks like my idea has fallen through. I hope that
Wikipedia can find a credible alternative.

TBSDY


subject:
[WikiEN-l] Re: I have unblocked Blair P. Houghton. Re:Unreasonable
 block of user

body:
Jim Cecropia wrote:
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Rick <giantsrick13 at yahoo.com>
>
>>
>>--- "Blair P. Houghton" <blair at houghton.net> wrote:
>>
>>>One of my favorite parts of the whole debacle was
>>>when GeorgeStepanek claimed I was a newbie.  His account is dated
>>>December 10.  Mine is dated January 1, but if I look around I can find
>>>edits I made over a year ago without having created a login.
>>>
>>>Quite the guffaw around my keyboard, I can assure
>>>you.
>>
>>Jim Cecropia, please note this.  Your apologetics for
>>him can end now.
>>
>>RickK
>>
>
> Well, that's kind of a tepid smoking gun. I thought you were going to catch him admitting he was Usama bin Laden or something.
>
> If you've read my posts, I've made two points: (1) I believe in engaging "problem" users, not banning them; I've said much the same about others users (172, GBWR, Rei come to mind) that I've been at polar opposites with; (2) 3RR is a new and abusive procedure in a Wikipedia that is moving to control minority users instead of improving the content.
>
> Your post here illustrates part of the problem. If you can "prove" Blair is a bad guy (and assert that I am trying to "prove" him a good guy) you don't have to deal with the substantive issues. I think that's called a straw man, and a sort of convoluted way of begging the question.
>
> --C
>

Did I ever vote "Support" for your adminship? I hope so! Cause then I
would have been proved correct in my judgement of your suitability as an
admin.

TBSDY


from_name: Alphax

body:
David Gerard wrote:

> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/MPOV
>
> Better names welcomed.
>
>
> - d.
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>
Should that be "beaten with a *cuestick*"?

I've changed it, anyway.

[[en:User:Alphax]]


body:
I wrote:

> Should that be "beaten with a *cuestick*"?
>
> I've changed it, anyway.

No I haven't - the database is locked :(


from_name: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Theora / ogg usage

body:
I just want to respond to this threat to remind everyone that not
everything ending in .ogg that is a video file is an Ogg Theora file,
alot, if not the majority of .ogg video (ogm) files are actually xvid
files with Ogg Vorbis audio.

The file in question however (on Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy) is a theora file.


from_name: Alex J. Avriette

body:
> I don't have anything against articles in many different flavors & formats. Ok, when i write articles i try to write'em in a certain way, so they have coherence. But apart that, people should do what they want.

To quote Rlandmann from my talk page,

"Pointers for aircraft (including helos) are at Wikipedia:WikiProject
Aircraft, where you'll also find links to the category system and
current standard layout for these articles. I standardised your CH-21
Shawnee article as an example.

While there are now some quite evolved standards for warships and
aircraft, standards for weapon systems more generally are all over the
shop. There seems to have been an effort at creating a navigational
template for missiles ( {{Missile types}} ), but it hasn't been widely
rolled out, and perhaps was really only intended for general articles
on categories of missile rather than specific systems anyway.
Similarly, while a standard spec table for small arms was developed,
it hasn't been implemented widely (and WikiProject Weaponry is now
listed as inactive anyway).

There have been at least two attempts to develop a broad-based and
consistent way to categorise weapons, but neither went very far.

Given the mess, at the moment I really only try to make sure that
weapons articles are reasonably well-classified, and that aircraft
weapon systems carry the {{airlistbox}} template. I also list new
aircraft articles here and standardise them when I get the time
(currently bogged down in mid-February).

If you want to have a stab at it, some kind of consistency is
desperately needed for weapons on Wikipedia. At the moment, it's
pretty much a model of the worst aspects of collaborative editing, so
it'll be a long-term project!"

So I am clearly not alone in believing that content standardization is
a good thing. I think there are two very strong arguments for content
standardization (across categories, not across the entire site).
FIrst, is the appearance, one of a cohesive and organized project.
Second, machine parseability. As I mentioned in my original message, I
have written many content scrapers, and it is exceptionally difficult
to do for data which is so irregular. An earlier thread on this very
list, earlier this week (sorry, I've since trashed it), where somebody
said something (I paraphrase here), I am not aware that a parser for
mediawiki exists. Wiki is notoriously hard to parse. Once you pick a
wiki, you're stuck with it, because the data becomes so free-form and
disorganized that a move (say from instiki to mediawiki) becomes an
exercise in the impossible.

To request that we use the:

{
| foo metric
| bar value
|-
| baz metric
| quux value
}

notation is not asking much. Or indeed, to standardize, as Rlandmann
did with my [[CH-21 Shawnee]] article per the guidelines at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Aircraft/page_content,
on that. But when every article you come across is different it is
difficult to obtain the information you have /come to wikipedia to
find/. The wiktionary (which which I have only a passing familiarity,
but I do contribute) is very clear in their "guidelines" that there is
to be consistency, and you /shall/ use templates, rather than "It
would be nice, but don't feel obligated to do so."

The wikipedia is not an exercise in anarchy.

>
> I'm not sure we want to standardize everything. Because it means people have to learn that format, to know where to find it in the first place. You have to enforce it. It makes for wars as new users come in, or people don't like the format, and say "hey this format should be changed like that", and people reply "per decision of 2 weeks earlier no, we keep that", and so on and so on.

I'm real happy to go through and standardize articles. In fact, when I
find an article that looks like it needs help, as I did with [[USS
Bowfin (SS-287)]], I came on IRC to #wikipedia, and got help from
admins who knew the { .. } wiki table format, explained it to me, and
I went around looking at what everything else looked like, and made
sure that "my page" looked just like the rest of them. It presently
looks like it needs a little help (that image/text placement irks me).
Sigh.

>
> > 5. Fancruft and how to cope
>
> Sure. When the wiki is slow, we should just cut off en:.
> After all, that's a fancruft, and it shouldn't exist.
> Or we should just concatenate all pages in one big page, there wouldn't need to have any page existence checking.

You know, I worked really hard to write a concise message to the list,
to address a lot of concerns that I had. I offered myself wholly for
help. I expressed a willingness to work with the community which seems
to support "fancruft networks." I've received a lot of shit about this
on IRC, and here on this list. I really don't appreciate it, and I
don't see how people can be such biased assholes and say things like
"just turn off en." Even as a joke. We are having weekly outages. At
least. THERE IS A PROBLEM. It will require work to fix, and people are
going to get their toes stepped on. Maybe they're yours, maybe they're
mine, but let's not take potshots at eachother.

> More seriously: saying that merging articles could (help) solve slowness is a bad social solution to a technical problem. People want to write articles, as many as they want.

I said I didn't know what the exact benefit or detriment was to
merging many small articles (such as in the case of MMPR). I said that
I'd like to know. A couple people have commented that they'd like to
try the squids on FreeBSD (which has a fancier network stack than
Linux, although 2.6 seems to be about even. But I digress..). People
say that they'd like to beta test with postgres. What I am saying is
there are problems and we are propping up the entire operation with
constant maintenance, but no forward progress is being made. Nobody is
testing whether the wikipedia is faster with many condensed pages
(frankly, how to conduct that test is a mystery to me) or with lots of
smaller pages. Maybe that's something that could be asked of the MySQL
developers.

> What would be next? "Sorry, you made more than 5 modifications in the last 15 minutes, please wait 15 minutes to that everyone get a chance to edit"?

Nobody is saying throttle users. Nobody is saying limit the number of
pages one can create in a given category. There's no need to scream
about the sky falling, that throttling and edit limits are on the
horizon because some fascist asshole is going to impose them on all
the doe-eyed wikipedians. It isn't. We need to work together to find a
solution.

> Site is slow? Make software faster, buy new hardware, optimize, imagine a bewolf cluster of servers on the moon, whatever - do *not* try to restrict the freedom people have.

I AM NOT ADVOCATING THE RESTRICTING OF ANYONES FREEDOM, for the last time.

However, you just fell into the trap that most software development
projects fall into.

"Oh, our software runs slow. Well, buy faster hardware."
"Oh, our software runs slow. Well, make the software faster."

When you find that you have flaws in your ARCHITECTURE (and I pointed
out at least two), you need to fix it from a high level. I wish we
could all sit in a room and draw this out on a whiteboard. You for one
would be a lot less hostile.

> Sorry if my tone sounds rash. I'm totally against your idea, maybe because I do write "fancruft" articles but also because it's imo totally against the founding ideas of Wikipedia - this doesn't mean i despise you :)

You're totally against WHAT idea? This is why I said this should be
discussed in wiki format, on the wiki. Or did you not read that far?

alex

--
Alex Avriette
avriette at gmail.com


body:
On Thu, 17 Mar 2005 10:04:00 +0000, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:

> Indeed. keats appears to be starting from a personal distaste and
> then claiming this will be the destruction of Wikipedia. I note a
> curious lack of substantiating, ahh, numbers. keats, do you have any?

First off, you can call me "Alex". That is my name. If you want to
argue on IRC call me keats or whatever you choose to call me. I am not
John Keats, nor am I a character in a book. A nick is chosen on IRC to
be distinct from others. It could be waerth, jwales, TimStarling, or
whatever. But, we are discussing this on a public mailing list, where
my name is quite apparent, and I have signed my emails as such. Let's
be adults about this.

Second, I do not have any numbers. I said that I felt that we had some
problems. I proposed some solutions, and gave my analysis of said
problems. The first step in solving a problem is to identify the
problem. Then you go and find what might be possible solutions (more
disk on the master db, squids on freebsd, postgres on the backend,
multiply redundant masters, colos on different continents, a BigIP or
two), and you /test them/. The fact that I haven't gone out and built
my own wikipedia cluster and tested every solution I offered is hardly
a fair criticism. I have at my disposal two powerbooks, two ibooks,
and a single 2x 866mhz Linux firewall. I don't have the resources to
do all this testing. Nobody just cut me a check for $86,000, either. I
am offering my time and my expertise, and even some money. But the
testing has to be done by the foundation.

> Fundamentally, taking out the word "fancruft": keats appears to be
> claiming that the mere fact of having 500k articles is unsustainable
> in MediaWiki. Is this the case? Do we stop all article creation now?
> If not, what do we do? Ration them?

Do you not see that we are having weekly outages? So we hit 500k
articles and lo, it holds together. Where do we go from here? With our
one master database server. Somebody goes out and drops $100k on an
8-way 848 opteron. Somebody drops a further $100k on disk. Problem
solved until we hit 100M articles. Right, because every single power
ranger should have their own page, and every single villain, and every
single care bear, and every character from charmed, and every dicdef
that never makes it into the wiktionary, and so on and so forth.

You can't just say "let's just stick with what we're doing, it works
for now, and we'll just grow the architecture we've got by throwing
cubic dollars at it until it works properly."

You're wasting my and the foundation's money by doing so. FIx the
architecture and you reduce the cost of operation.

I mean, have you actually ever designed anything near as complicated
as the wikipedia? Have you actually ever been in a board room with the
program manager, project manager, VP, eight developers, and two
sysadmins when you all realize at the same time that the architecture
you've got just won't scale to the point you need it to?

I've been there. I can draw you two distinct pictures on the
whiteboard I mentioned in my previous email. One will be called
"horribly fucked" and the other will be called "ideal". We can get
from "horribly fucked" to "ideal" (that's what I do for a living), but
we have to stop calling eachother names, and start figuring out what
we can do to fix the problem. Test. Benchmark. I mean, start doing
what it takes. Right now we're doing nothing. We're putting out fires.
Adding more servers is only going to help you until you reach some new
unsustainable point. The current architecture is (let me spell it out
real big for you)

U N S C A L A B L E

period.

--
Alex Avriette
avriette at gmail.com


body:
Chad Perrin wrote:
> csherlock at ljh.com.au wrote:
>
> I'm inclined to agree, just based on the fact that it has been about a
> year since I've seen/heard anyone use the term "begging the question"
> properly.  Considering how many times I've seen/heard it misused, that's
> really saying something.
>

How can you see someone begging the question?

TBSDY


from_name: jfdwolff at doctors.org.uk

body:
This is getting ridiculous.
This issue has now generated close to 60 messages. I urge Blair, his detractors and everyone else to stop this discussion. It is a clash between an admin and the 3RR policy, which should be discussed on the wiki and not here.
Am I the only one who feels that the 3RR is making life harder for admins?

Jfdwolff

____________________________________________________________

This e-mail has been scanned by the StreamShield Protector antivirus system.

Doctors.net.uk is used by over 111,000 UK doctors.

____________________________________________________________


from_name: Charles Matthews

subject: [WikiEN-l] 500k press release

body:
Sj wrote

> I've put up a draft press release to celebrate the English WP's
> 500,000th article here:
>  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Press_releases/March_2005

> It is not quite like our previous press releases; see what you think,
> edit and improve on it.

The current version looks pretty good to me - not a great deal I could see
to add, and it seems tightly and professionally written (I've done a few
press releases that have got into national newspapers).

Just one aspect, and perhaps not so newsworthy.  There is not much emphasis
given to the scholarly side.

It could say a little more about WP's stature as a reference site.

Charles


subject: [WikiEN-l] 500k press release

body:
Charles Matthews said:
> Sj wrote
>
>
>> I've put up a draft press release to celebrate the English WP's
>> 500,000th article here:
>>  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Press_releases/March_2005
>
>> It is not quite like our previous press releases; see what you think,
>> edit and improve on it.
>
> The current version looks pretty good to me - not a great deal I could
> see  to add, and it seems tightly and professionally written (I've done
> a few  press releases that have got into national newspapers).

The press release should make at least one reference to the fact that this
is a multilingual, cross-referenced encyclopedia, which alone makes
Wikipedia unique.


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re:WikiIndex (idea)

body:
Marc O'Morain wrote:
> After thinking some more about the merits of the augmenting the
> category system or creating a new system, I thought of the following:
>
> The Category tag can only ever represent an "is a" relationship.

Actually, the [[category:x]] system doesn't represent any fixed type of
relationship at all.

I hate to use the demon term "folksonomy", but... ;)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Lane, Ryan

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Five points we should be discussion about the me
	diawiki projects

body:
Alex,

> Do you not see that we are having weekly outages? So we hit 500k
> articles and lo, it holds together. Where do we go from here? With our
> one master database server. Somebody goes out and drops $100k on an
> 8-way 848 opteron. Somebody drops a further $100k on disk. Problem
> solved until we hit 100M articles. Right, because every single power
> ranger should have their own page, and every single villain, and every
> single care bear, and every character from charmed, and every dicdef
> that never makes it into the wiktionary, and so on and so forth.
>
> You can't just say "let's just stick with what we're doing, it works
> for now, and we'll just grow the architecture we've got by throwing
> cubic dollars at it until it works properly."
>
> You're wasting my and the foundation's money by doing so. FIx the
> architecture and you reduce the cost of operation.
>
It seems to me that you are proposing consolidation of articles (or
specifically removing the ability for people to use multiple pages for
multiple things from a single larger topic) as an architectural change. It
seems to me that you are approaching this from the wrong side. As someone
else pointed out, this does take away freedom from the writer. Who is to say
that each villain from power rangers does not deserve their own page? What
if the person writing is able to go into pages and pages of mind numbing
detail about each character, and consolidation of these would take up a
books worth of space? Also, if you force consolidation, you still run into
the problem of characters that don't fit into "villain" or "good guy".

If you want to talk about architectural changes, then lets talk about code
changes, or systems changes exclusively (lets try not to force users into an
organizational scheme).

> I mean, have you actually ever designed anything near as complicated
> as the wikipedia? Have you actually ever been in a board room with the
> program manager, project manager, VP, eight developers, and two
> sysadmins when you all realize at the same time that the architecture
> you've got just won't scale to the point you need it to?
>
How do you know he hasn't?

V/r,

Ryan Lane
NAVOCEANO


from_name: Jonathan ILIAS

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Trail of pages visited

body:
Alex J. Avriette a ?crit :
> No, it should not be done at all.
>
> I don't want you seeing that I viewed [[double-sided dildo]] prior to
> viewing [[GAU-17]].
>
> Why in the hell would you want this other than a blatant disregard of
> somebody else's privacy?

As some others answered :
1) I never requested this for wikipedias, nor for mediawiki software,
but it may be useful in some private mediawiki installations. This can
also be useful on wikipedia as long as such a feature does not break
anybody's privacy.
2) With this technical solution (javascript + cookie), i thought it was
possible to respect this privacy

BTW, keep cool, i have never and will never dictate what wikimedia
community must do :)

--
Jonathan ILIAS


from_name: Michael Snow

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Image deletion

body:
Stan Shebs wrote:

> Michael Snow wrote:
>
>> J.F. de Wolff wrote:
>>
>>> Perhaps the image uploading page should have a dropdown box that
>>> lets the uploader select a copyright format. "Possibly unfree" is
>>> NOT an option.
>>
>> Yes, we're long overdue for this, as well as a required field for
>> entering source information.
>
>                         -------------------------------
> Source (required field): | sfsoifjpvoiaf   joey is gay |
>                         -------------------------------

Yes, yes, I know. But that just means that when this feature fails in
its intended purpose, it has the handy side benefit of encouraging
vandals to flag their contributions for easier identification and
removal. So either way, it would be good to have.

--Michael Snow


from_name: John Lee

body:
Blair P. Houghton wrote:

> David Gerard wrote:
>
>> Blair P. Houghton wrote:
>>
>>> No, I didn't violate the 3RR.  I read it right before I made the
>>> second reversion.  I knew what I was doing.  After a couple of
>>> reversions, I acquiesced to changes others wanted in the edit.  The
>>> following revert was to that revision of the edit.  The 3RR kept me
>>> from refusing to move on the issue.  That I was then accused of
>>> "evading" the 3RR is just another of GeorgeStepanek's
>>> prevarications.  That you're buying into it is a shame.
>>
>>
>> Reverting to different previous versions is reverting.
>
>
> I'm not going to argue the point of the rule with you.  If you wish
> to continue being a willing dupe of those who wish to railroad honest
> people, then just keep on sullying your robes.
>
> --Blair

I've been trying my best to avoid feeding, but I'm going to make an
exception for this one. In case you haven't noticed, from the 3RR:

*Don't revert <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Revert> any _page_
more than three times within a period of 24 hours.*
/(This doesn't apply to self-reverts or correction of simple vandalism
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Vandalism>.)/

That means you have a maximum of three reverts per page for every 24
hours. It does not matter which revision you choose to revert to; a
revert is a revert is a revert.

What you must understand is that reverting is bad. It's a slap in the
face. If you would stop blabbing about Taxman and George for a minute to
understand this, we might get somewhere. Just because they are the
aggressors does not give you the right or privilege to go ahead and
participate in the fight. Instead, follow the steps of dispute
resolution and/or ask an uninvolved party for help (if you were welcomed
to Wikipedia by a certain user, asking him/her would probably be a good
idea).

The problem in a lot of disputes is that one side allows themselves to
be dragged down to the other's level. Maintain the moral high ground,
and you'll lose the battle but win the war.

As for the 3RR, I strongly agree with Fuzheado. I do not believe it
should be applied so drastically, though. Need anyone be reminded, the
text of the wording voted upon stated that admins *may* block users who
violate the 3RR. May, not must. If good will can be demonstrated, and
all parties involved (or at least the one who violated the rule) appear
to be working towards a solution peacefully, a block shouldn't be
required. If the revert is part of a larger pattern of MPOV, article
ownership or simply just being an asshole and using reverting as a tool
for getting one's way, then, yes, I would support a block.

Now, some personal advice for you, Blair:

Wikipedians strongly believe in assuming good faith and wikiquette (or
whatever it's called). The tone of your messages to this mailing list
have certainly been very accusatory and defensive, and reflect more
badly on you than George and Taxman. Often this damages your point, even
if it is correct. I advise you to be more conciliatory in your manner,
and you might get a better hearing from roughnecks like RickK as well as
others like David Gerard. Accept you made mistakes. Don't try to pin the
blame on others by accusing George and/or Taxman of inciting you into
breaking the 3RR. Remember, assume good faith and win the moral high
ground. Losing the battle but winning the war is a far better
proposition than vice-versa.

John Lee
([[User:Johnleemk]])


body:
Blair P. Houghton wrote:

> Jim Cecropia wrote:
>
>> I really don't think this is helpful. I sense that Blair can be a
>> useful contributor to Wikipedia. He is new and can be engaged. I've
>> seen those more agreesive than he become valuabled members of the
>> community. I would like him to calm down and work with the community,
>> and also for the community to not go out of their way to bait him or
>> any other honest user.
>>
>>
> One of my favorite parts of the whole debacle was when GeorgeStepanek
> claimed I was a newbie.  His account is dated December 10.  Mine is
> dated January 1, but if I look around I can find edits I made over a
> year ago without having created a login.

In all fairness, how could George possibly know that?

> Oh, and check through my contribution list.  I'm well-engaged, almost
> whoring myself for barnstars, and not a little peeved that the people
> railroading me didn't see what they were doing to my reputation.

Ignoring the implicit personal attack there, don't be pissed you haven't
got a barnstar. I've written two articles featured on the main page, and
several more that have been voted as featured articles (which makes them
eligible for featuring on the front page). I don't moan about a lack of
recognition. Keep up the good work you've been doing, though; some day,
our work will be acknowledged. Take pride in the fact you're
contributing to history, and write good articles anyway. Barnstars are
an important incentive for writing, but shouldn't consume you. Just
focus on doing a good job, and slowly acclaim will come to you. :-P

Best of luck,
John Lee
([[User:Johnleemk]])


from_name: Erik Moeller

body:
Nicolas-

> so I wonder how you did? With your developer access?

Yep.

Erik


from_name: Nicolas Weeger

body:
>
>> so I wonder how you did? With your developer access?
>
>
> Yep.

My bad, I thought developer access was supposed to be used only for
server maintenance, and that stewards where there to handle that kind of
issues.
The part I don't like is that there is no trace - you can change
anything without anyone knowing (i don't expect people to dig in the
zillion mailing lists to actually find what was changed through
developer access)...

> Erik

Nicolas


from_name: Bryan Derksen

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Image deletion

body:
Stan Shebs wrote:

>                         -------------------------------
> Source (required field): | sfsoifjpvoiaf   joey is gay |
>                         -------------------------------

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Friends_of_gays_should_not_be_allowed_to_edit_articles

:)


from_name: Brian

subject: [Wikitech-l] many-wiki spam solution

body:
Small wikis no-doubt get the most spam. I run several smallish wikis
and removing spam from them is nearly an everyday occurance. Take for
instance the bomis wiki. [1]. Scroll down to the bottom and take a
look at how hard it is getting hit (that's use mod)

So the idea is to build into the mediawiki software an interwiki
watchlist, hosted by the foundation. This requires little modification
as we can use the RSS feed that is already generated by the software
and found at RC.  A simple opt-in during the install of the software
and a message will be sent home to retrieve the feed every so often.

What it is appropriate to do after that, i'm not sure. But there are a
lot of ways it could go.

Just wanted to throw this out there and see if it has merit. I think
it is a simple solution at identifying lots of spam around the web.

/Alterego

[1] http://www.bomis.com/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?RecentChanges

--
"I'd hate to die twice. It's so boring." - Richard Feynman's last words
--
http://www.br1an.net (website)
http://www.gawr.com/br1annet/gallery2 (photos)


from_name: Gerard Meijssen

body:
Ray Saintonge wrote:

> cookfire wrote:
>
>> There is already a policy on the English Wiktionary to redirect words
>> that are very often misspelled to their correctly spelled
>> counterparts. If somebody asks for such a page, it will say
>> 'redirected from ...' at the top. This will teach people who thought
>> the wrong spelling was correct, how to properly write those words.
>> I'm not in favour or against deleting the redirects, but there was
>> somebody who said that there were probably a lot of sites
>> (en.wikipedia comes to mind but it certainly isn't the only one)
>> linking to the capitalised versions of the words. It would be a very
>> bad idea to break all those links. I think it is wise not to take out
>> those redirects right away.
>>
>> Polyglot
>
>
> As I said in my direct response to Sabine I believe that a statement
> like "common error for [[...]]" is more meaningful than a redirect,
> because it makes them pause to see that they have made an error.
>
> As a person who would prefer to minimize the number of redirects, I
> agree that there is no rush to do this.
>
> The question of inter-project links is an interesting one.  I believe
> that each project should be free to develop its own capitalization
> policies.  This understandably leads to problems when inter-project
> links are desirable.  The fact that the English Wikipedia does not yet
> use Unicode also implies an entire range of problems.  When one
> project makes a link to another project the link should follow the
> rules of the target project rather than its own rules.  To this end
> there have been no problems in creating inter-Wikipedia links between
> languages for personal names.  Some projects use middle names, but
> others don't.  The Esperanto Wikipedia puts surnames in all capitals,
> and that does not appear to carry any problems.  My suggestion for
> links, when there is no ambiguity, would be for a link from Wikipedia
> to default to whatever form exists on Wiktionary.  The ambiguous cases
> may need further consideration.
>
> Ec

Hoi,
With the ultimate wiktionary, the question of interlanguage links will
be solved. There will be no interlanguage links. Also, there will be no
redirects. There will be no records for common errors. Only words
spelled correctly will have a place.

The links to another project will use a parameter; you have to specify
the name of the article you want to link to and spell it correctly. This
is not ambiguous at all, it does not need explaining.

I reply to this threat, because it makes sense to consider the
implications of what we decide for the eventual conversion to the
ultimate wiktionary. Personally I stopped adding words that are not
Dutch to the nl:wiktionary. The translations of the Dutch words will be
there implicitly when the Dutch words are converted into the ultimate
wiktionary. I also am spending much time on adding pronunciations. These
will be available when you look at a Dutch word nevermind what language
you start from.

The most important words when implementing the ultimate wiktionary will
be the ones for the values that will be used in the interface. They will
be the names of languages, the names of wordtypes. These are the same
values that are currently used in the templates as used in many
wiktionaries like nl: fr: hi: it: etc.

Thanks,
    GerardM


from_name: BJörn Lindqvist

body:
> to realize overnight.  It's becoming clear to me that by reading the "Ko
> rule" into the 3RR I am being led to a different interpretation than
> many take from the rule.  The Ko rule allows a repeat of a Ko when
> progress is made between repeats.  That's what I focussed on and
> believed to be the letter and intent of the law.  Perhaps having the Ko
> rule as an analogy in the rule is a mistake.

That analogy fooled me too. The rules for what constitutes three
reverts or not is so unclear that you have to be extremely careful
when editing contentious articles.

--
mvh Bj?rn


from_name: James R. Johnson

body:
I can make a WAV file, and send it to someone for ogg encoding.  Just add
some pronunciation requests to my user page [[User:JamesR1701]] on en:

James

-----Original Message-----
From: wikipedia-l-bounces at Wikimedia.org
[mailto:wikipedia-l-bounces at Wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Ilya Haykinson
Sent: Sunday, March 13, 2005 10:09 PM
To: wikipedia-l at wikimedia.org
Subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Pronunciations of things foreign

For what it's worth, the Voice of America runs a Pronunciation Guide
for names at http://names.voa.gov/

I think it might be public domain, as is all other VOA material, and
if so, could be used at Wikipedia.

-ilya

> Date: Sun, 13 Mar 2005 16:00:09 +0100
> From: Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com>
> Subject: [Wikipedia-l] Pronunciations of things foreign
>
> Hoi,
> There is this joke about these Americans asking for the "tjamps
> ilajsies" in Paris, and nobody ever heard of it... Many words cannot be
> properly pronounced by people not speaking the language. Many news
> organisations have their presenters trained in pronouncing foreign words..
>
> When we write about things foreign, there is often no difinitive word
> for the subject in the language that the article is written in. So often
> we try to find something that will do. Most often we use what others
> used before us, often it is a transliteration or a transcription to yet
> another language. With our digital encyclopedia, it is easy to add
> pronunciation of words in the local language. We often add how it is
> written in another script and, it would make equal sense to add the
> pronunciation in the local language as well.
>
> As an example I have done this in the wikipedias for "Jaap de Hoop
> Scheffer" and for "Silvio Berlusconi". I have also pronounced and
> uploaded the category of Dutch politicians from the en:wikipedia to
> Commons... Could an American please pronounce and upload George W. Bush
> and a Chinese ????"???? ??
>
> Thanks,
> GerardM
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subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re:WikiIndex (idea)

body:
I'd also agree to augmenting the existing category system, so that the
categories are somehow logical to one another, i.e.

On the page on Liam Neeson, having the categories in order

[[Category:Human]]
[[Category:Men]]
[[Category:Americans]]
[[Category:Actors]]

Would place him in a logical tree from human->men->Americans->actors.  It
could be arranged differently, maybe with other Category tags that are
automatically hidden, similar as to those that were earlier suggested:

[[Gender:Male]]
[[Animal:Homo Sapiens]]
[[Nationality:American]]

The Category+ tags would be set in a "All Category Tags" special page, so
they would be translated for each language wikipedia, but be useful across
wikipedias, enabling cross-wiki searching/indexing.  I would hope to see
some basic categories that allow any article to be categorized, and
logically structured in the Wiki-DB, such as: Person, Place, Animal, Thing,
Event (wars, time periods, etc.), then Fictitious/Non-Fictitious, then so
forth.

I would like to see recursive category listings, so that if an article is in
Cats, Black Cats, then on the category page for "Black Cats", I can click on
Cats to go one category up, and find other colored cats.

Page:
Category: Cats
    Subcategory: Black Cats

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

If it gets to more than 3 subcategories down, then have the uppermost
category at top, a vertical ellipsis, then the bottom two categories.  The
ellipsis would be clickable to reveal the hidden categories that are hidden
from view to save page space.

Page: Cats
:
:
    Subcategory: Himalayan Cats in Entertainment
        Subcategory: Cats on Television

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

Something like that.

James

-----Original Message-----
From: wikipedia-l-bounces at Wikimedia.org
[mailto:wikipedia-l-bounces at Wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Marc O'Morain
Sent: Tuesday, March 15, 2005 7:25 PM
To: wikipedia-l at wikimedia.org
Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Re:WikiIndex (idea)

> > How about this:
> > [[Category:1929 births]]
> > [[Category:German authors]]
> > [[Category:Women]]

Hi all, this is my first mail to the list,

Firstly, a small gripe of mine: The current category system does not
recursively list pages. Consider a Category:Cats, with two
subcategories; Category:WhiteCats and Category:BlackCats. If I go the
the Category:Cats page, I am not shown any pages that are part of
Category:WhiteCats or Category:BlackCats. Also, someone could make
Category:BlackCats have a subcategory Category:Cats. This creates a
loop in the category hierarchy. Cats -> BlackCats -> Cats.
In my opinion:
- When displaying Category:Cats, all members of this category and
subcategories should be displayed to the user.
- If a user adds a subcategory to a category, wikipedia should check
for loops as a post-condition of the edit, and reject the edit if it
does create a loop.

Now, This thread is about adding meta data (data about the data) to
pages. Broadly speaking, there seem to be two suggestions put forward
here to accomplish the same goal.

1. To use better categories to store data about page.
2. To invent a new, separate way of classifying pages.

There are benefits and drawbacks to associated with each suggestion:

1. To use better categories to store data about page:

This method does not store any information about the links between
data. For example, there are subtle semantic differences between
defining a person as Category:Irish and defining a ship as
Category:Irish.

2. To invent a new, separate way of classifying pages:

This way of adding meta data to pages would be custom designed to
achieve the goal, and would be better than the current category
system. However, new code would have to be written to add this, which
would take time, labour, money and introduce bugs that would need to
be fixed, costing more time, labour and money. The current Category
system exists, and works.  I therefore feel that it would be a better
decision to augment the current category system, than to create a
second system that shares a lot of common features with the category
system. Also, most of the pages in Wikipedia currently have
categories, and if a new system was created, all the existing pages
would have to be tagged (mostly by hand) for the new system.

If I were in charge of Wikipedia, I would have an overhaul of the
current categories, removing the very specific categories, and adding
the ability to perform the basic set of set operations to categories.

For example:
Currently these exists a Category:Irish_Poets. I would delete this
category and add all pages in it to Category:Irish and Category:Poet.
If a user wants list of Irish Poets, he would ask wikipedia for
(Irish) Intersection (Poets).

Also I would create a category Person. All people in Wikipedia would
be part of this category. Also I would create Category:Men and
Category:Women. These would be subcategories of Category:Person. All
people in Wikipedia would be part of either Category:Men or
Category:Women. If a user is looking for articles about people, they
can simply search within Category:Person to find the information that
they are looking for.

Now we must think about data storage. consider the article on Liam
Neeson. Do we mark it as Category:Person and Category:Men? Or do we
mark the page as just Category:Men. If we store it as both we have
redundancy - it can be deduced from the fact that a page is part of
Category:Men that it must be part of Category:Person too, since Person
is a superset of Men. But for Wikipedia to reason that a Man is a
Person takes computation. The fact that a Man is a Person should never
change, so we could make the page as Category:Person automatically
when a page is marked Category:Men. We are storing more information
that is necessary, but future reasoning becomes faster.

Disjointness must also be considered:
Category:Men is disjoint from Category:Women. How can we store this
information in the database? We may have to add a new tag to category
pages:

Category:Men
[[DisjointFrom:Woman]]

(A page cannot be a member of both Men and Women - For this sake of
argument please ignore trans genders, transsexuals etc, this is just a
blackboard example.)

Also, when someone adds the above tag, the page Category:Woman must
automatically be marked as [[DisjointFrom:Men]].

What happens when a wikipedia user edits the Liam Neeson page and adds
Category:Women? Should wikipedia search what categories have been
marked as disjoint (this is computationally expensive operation), and
not add not allow the edit?

Also, with the category system we could save Categories as virtual
Categories. For example, consider that a VCategory is a virtual
category:

VCategory:Irish_Poets would simply be a re-direct to:
Category:Irish (intersection) Category:Poets

What do other people think?

Best Regards,

Marc O'Morain
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