from_name: Minty

subject: [WikiEN-l] version control

body:
Been reading the threads about a stable 1.0 etc, and they are
interesting.  Here is my 2 pageclicks worth.  I apologise up front if
this has been bashed out before, in which case, ignore me :)

Wiki's are about letting anyone contribute, in anyway they want.
Anyone should be able to review - same way anyone can create, add,
amend, edit, categorize, summarise or convert between british and
american spellings ;)

It is *your* opinion of the reviewer's reputation that seems to matter
more.  I might be happy with the most recent edit, my mum may want
some approval from a well known (commercial?) brand she can trust.  My
friend in research would only accept articles that have been peer
reviewed by at least two other subject aware academics.  Having said
I'd be happy with the most recent edits, I might actually want
something more authoritative in some cases.

For instance, if I put my personal mark of approval on these two articles.

  http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=The_A-Team&oldid=5836501
  http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_view&oldid=5748514

... these (as far as I can tell) will never change [1].  You probably
don't care - you don't know me from adam.  Still, my mum might use my
list.

I need a way to list articles I have reviewed (and which versions).  A
watchlist with added version numbers?  A Reviewlist?  Only I can amend
my watchlist, so this isn't a big leap forward.

You need a way to read (but not edit) my reviewlist.  A list of all
the pages I have reviewed would be a start.  Going further, and
assuming I had reviewed enough, have the software only show links to
articles on the reviewlist of your reviewer of choice.  Or the
reviewers of your choosing.

There is a limit to how much one person can review, but *you* can
choose to trust many people.  Once you've seen articles reviewed by
your own list of reviewers, add the second degree reviewers.  Friends
of friends.

m.

ps. reputation systems.  basis for trust, eg amazon, ebay, etc.
reviews.  There is a connection here me thinks.  Why do people buy
from complete strangers on ebay who they've never met?  If I've sold a
lot of stuff, and 99% of people where happy, are you any more likely
to trust me as a seller?  What if seller becomes reviewer, and buyer
is the reader and we are trading in words?

[1] The only minor issue being I cannot find a way to get this style
of perma-link for the most recent version.


list: foundation-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Elisabeth Bauer

subject: [Foundation-l] Re: create new function; domain name administrator

body:
Jens Ropers wrote:

> On 13 Sep 2004, at 22:11, Anthere wrote:
>
>> Yo. Fully agree with you on this Walter.
>>
>> Well, I have been seeing you taking care of such matters for perhaps 2
>> years now, as well as setting portal pages for country domain name.
>>
>> I would be personnally delighted that you be this person responsible
>> of domain names.
>>
>> What do you think ? Would you be interested ? What do other people
>> think ?
>>
>> Anthere
>
> Support. ~~~~
Support. --elian


list: wikimedia-l


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Kate Turner

subject: [Wikitech-l] Sub-wikis?

body:
On Mon, 13 Sep 2004 17:20:07 -0700, Nick Triantos <nick at triantos.com> wrote:
> What I mean by this
> is that if you're on a page called, say, "Foo.Bar.SomePage", and you
> link to [[Blah]], I'd perhaps augment the link indexing to first search
> for [[Foo.Bar.Blah]],  then [[Foo.Blah]], and then finally just plain
> [[Blah]].  Something like [[::Blah]] would let you pick names from the
> topmost hierarchy.

I think you're looking for sub pages.  Create a page called [[Foo]], then put
a link to [[/Bar]] inside it: the link is actually to [[Foo/Bar]], and so on.

You'll need to explicitly enable subpages in the article namespace for this
to work.  Look at the DefaultSettings.php for an example.

> thanks all!
> -Nick

Kate.


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Olve Utne

subject: [Wikipedia-l] nn (Norw. Nynorsk) wikipedia

body:
At Tue Sep 14 02:15:23 UTC 2004, Lars Aronsson wrote:
>Neil Harris wrote:
>
> > I was told by a Norwegian that the Scandanavian languages are all so
> closely
> >
> > Perhaps the nearest equivalent might be "Scots" vs. "English".
>
>If I speak Swedish in the streets of Oslo, I will make myself understood
>but the locals will treat me as a speaker of a foreign language.  With
>English (British or American) in the streets of Glasgow, I'm not a foreign
>speaker.  Therefore I think Scots would be analogous to Nynorsk, and
>Nynorsk now has its own Wikipedia (nn.wikipedia.org with 151 articles).

Hello Lars,
I fail to quite see your logic, but I will be happy to listen to your
explanation of what you mean.

In the mean time -- here are some of my thoughts on the subject of accent
vs. dialect/language and on the place of Nynorsk within the major lineages
of post-Mediaeval written Scandinavian:

"English", the way the term is usually used, is a language which has a
uniform grammar, including syntax -- but which has a number of minor
variant spellings (e.g., UK, Australia, Eire, Canada, USA) and a standard
basic pronunciation which has a range of actual *accents* (e.g., somewhat
simplified, of London, Cardiff, Manchester, Glasgow, Belfast, Dublin,
Toronto, New York, Seattle, Sidney, Auckland, Praetoria, etc.).

Different from accents sre the *dialects* of English, which may have more
or less profound differences in deep-level phonology, morphology, syntax,
and vocabulary. Dialects of English include Cockney, Yorkshire, Geordie, US
"Black English", and -- according to one view, Lowlands Scots.

Scots (in th Lallands/Lowlands variety) has been viewed as a separate
language in former times, and this view has been re-emerging in modern times.

People in Glasgow, Edinburg, Aberdeen, etc., have grown up in a system
where "English", albeit with a Scottish *accent" (rolling R's, narrow
diphthongs, neutralised vowel quantity, etc.), has been the standard language.

Of course, if you arrive in Glasgow with your London or Dublin or New York
accent of the common English language, people will recognise you as a
speaker of this common English language.

But this has no bearing in itself on the nature of Scots -- which is a
language or (set of) dialect(s) (depending on your poitical as well as
linguistic reasons...), rather than an accent of standard English.

When you speak Swedish in Oslo, you are most likely to be understood pretty
well. But you are also likely to be sociologically classified as a speaker
of a Language with a Different Name. That this language of Sweden happens
to be more similar to local accents/dialects of Oslo than to a number of
Swedish dialects is a fact that is as true as it is sociologically
insignificant.

What bearing this again has on the identity of Nynorsk versus Scottish is
not quite clear to me.

What is interesting, though, is that morphologically, Nynorsk is actually
closer to Swedish than to Bokm?l. The same actually goes, to some extent,
for vocabulary. When working on the NN Wikipedia, it often strikes me how
many of the differences between Nynorsk and Bokm?l happen to at the same
time be similarities between Nynorsk and Swedish.

Another fact that needs to be considered in this respect, is the fact often
that Bokm?l/Riksm?l/Danish actually forms a complete written-language
continuum and is often, quite naturally,  seen as variants of the same
written language.

Linguistically speaking: Within the dialect continuum of Scandinavia, there
seems to be three major separate written language lineages: Danish, Nynorsk
and Swedish.  Bokm?l/Riksm?l as a written code arose gradually from Danish
and has moved slowly in the direction of Nynorsk.  (There is also, of
course, the separate lineage of Dalm?l -- which is about as different from
any of the other contemporary Scandinavian written language lineages as
Faeroese, Icelandic or Old Norse are...)

Politically/sociologically speaking, the languages of Scandinavia can also
be grouped into three, but from this perspective, Bokm?l belongs with
Nynorsk rather than with Danish.

All this being said, I personally believe that it should be a long-term
goal to coordinate the Scandinavian wikipedias as closely as possible, and
that it would be desirable in the long run to build an integrated system
where each user selects their language [yes, this is descriptively correct
English grammar, and has been for many centuries] interface, AND that
preferred language/s for articles can also be set as a separate user
preference.

Until this happens, I believe that we are all best served with the
following goals:

1) Build up the article database for each of the four main forms
    of written Scandinavian;
2) Coordinate the contents to the extent practically possible; and
3) Work on improving and coordinating the user interfaces
    to make each of these as well-written and mutually intelligible
    within the given linguistical and stylistical constraints
    as practically possible.

B?sta h?lsningar / Beste helsing / Best regards,

Olve

___________________

Olve Utne
http://utne.nvg.org


list: wiktionary-l

from_name: Andrew Dunbar

subject: [Wiktionary-l] Chinese, traditional and simplified

body:
 --- Gerard Meijssen <gerardm at myrealbox.com> wrote:
> There is a big thing on the wikipedia-l about
> writing up Chinese. One thing I gleaned from this
> discussion is that zh-tw and zh-cn are used to
> indicate respectively traditional and simplified
> Chinese. As it is relevant to wiktionary to have
> both correct spellings, I propose to use these codes
> as well as the zh code to indicate Chinese words.

I don't have references but I'm sure I've read this is
not a good idea. Because all countries actually do use
both scripts sometimes, because sometimes the
countries
use entirely different words for the same thing, so it
doesn't always even come down to a choice of
character.
I think we'd be overriding a country code as a script
code when what we really need is a script code. That
would not be ambiguous. Something like zh-trad and
zh-simp. Or zh-trd and zh-smp.

I think I've seen a page on Microsoft's site which
does it this way somewhere but I doubt they really
use it. They do have language numbers to take into
account the different scripts though, including the
Serbians below.

> I hope someone has a good suggestion for Serbian,
> cyrillic and alphabetic.

Umm Cyrillic is still alphabetic. I think you meant
Cyrillic and Latin. How about sr-cyr and sr-lat?

> There are more language that are written in
> different charactersets. I am looking forward to
> suggestions.

The least obscure I can think of is Punjabi which is
written in Gurmukhi, its own indic script; Shahmukhi,
a derivation from the Urdu script which is itself a
derivation of the Arabic script; and finally in Deva-
nagari, the most common script in India. - But this is
already quite obscure. Many former Soviet Republics
have 2 or 3 scripts as well.

Andrew Dunbar (hippietrail)

> Thanks,
>     GerardM
> _______________________________________________
> Wiktionary-l mailing list
> Wiktionary-l at Wikipedia.org
>
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiktionary-l
>

=====
http://linguaphile.sf.net/cgi-bin/translator.pl    http://www.abisource.com

___________________________________________________________ALL-NEW Yahoo! Messenger - all new features - even more fun!  http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com


subject: [Wikitech-l] Sub-wikis?

body:
I've kinda got the same problem.  I work in a place where plenty of
people are happily using wiki's, and getting them to use sub-pages
would not be a huge effort

But the majority are still a little wary, and for me, explaining sub
pages is when I start to see eyes glaze over.   See also InterWiki
links.

What I would really like is to have a wiki within a wiki.  Seperate
name spaces, or at least automatically prefixed with the parent wiki
name, and simultaneously be able to get a recent changes for each
sub-wiki, the global wiki as a whole.

Ditto search.  If I'm on the "sub project wiki" and I run a search, it
gives precedence to pages within my local area, but can also return
things from other sub wikis.  Equally, if I have some weird term, I
don't care which sub project is referencing it - I want to search the
whole thing.  Namely across all sub-projects.

Sub pages to where I want to be, but they rely on *all* the users
getting the concept.  Which isn't always true.

m.


list: wikien-l

from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [WikiEN-l] version control

body:
Minty-
> There is a limit to how much one person can review, but *you* can
> choose to trust many people.  Once you've seen articles reviewed by
> your own list of reviewers, add the second degree reviewers.  Friends
> of friends.

This is a good model for a system where we want many different versions to
coexist, i.e. where we agree that there is not one "good" version", but
everyone might have their own preference of what constitutes a good one.
In Wikipedia terms, Robert Brookes might flag his POV version of the
circumcision article, for example. It certainly would be a good way to end
many edit wars as people would start maintaining their preferred branches
in parallel, not caring whether they are instantly reverted or not. The
fight over the current "top" version would become less dramatic.

I predict that such trust systems will evolve outside Wikipedia and will
develop Wikipedia content into versions written from a shared POV of an
individual community. To some extent, this is already happening
(Disinfopedia etc.).

If we establish trust-based versioning within Wikipedia, I believe it
means that we essentially abandon our belief that we can increasingly
approach a single article written from the neutral point of view. People
have been pushing separate branches already for a few controversial
articles; if we give them the tools to do so, this is almost inevitable,
in my opinion.

Humans are social creatures. When they feel very strongly about something,
they seek out others who agree with them - just browse the "Wikipedians"
pages on Meta. Ironically, I believe that if we want to maintain the NPOV
principle, we have to sabotage that natural instinct to some degree. We
have to focus on the one thing that connects us all, the desire to build a
great, neutral encyclopedia, and we have to be able to repress any
revulsion we feel at the stupid ideas of others.

My preferred approach is one where the peer review process actually
results in increased work on the article, where disagreements are resolved
not by flagging your preferred version, but by backing up your opinion
with citations for any individual statement of fact that is in dispute.

On the Featured Article Candidates page, we have introduced the principle
of "actionability". If an objection is not actionable, it can be ignored.
This principle needs to be developed further and permeate all of
Wikipedia, so that POV partisans cannot easily sabotage discussions.

Together with an improved discussion system that encourages refactoring
the results of discussions into policy pages, I believe we can deal with
many of the same problems that keep coming up again and again, like
explicit content or balance in controversial articles.

Regards,

Erik


from_name: Lars Aronsson

body:
Neil Harris wrote:

> I was told by a Norwegian that the Scandanavian languages are all so closely
>
> Perhaps the nearest equivalent might be "Scots" vs. "English".

If I speak Swedish in the streets of Oslo, I will make myself
understood but the locals will treat me as a speaker of a foreign
language.  With English (British or American) in the streets of
Glasgow, I'm not a foreign speaker.  Therefore I think Scots would be
analogous to Nynorsk, and Nynorsk now has its own Wikipedia
(nn.wikipedia.org with 151 articles).

Lars Aronsson.
--
  Aronsson Datateknik


from_name: Poor, Edmund W

subject: [WikiEN-l] A great, free encyclopedia

body:
Let's not confuse goal with method (or ends with means): I don't agree
that the goal is "a great, neutral encyclopedia".

Rather, the goal is a "a great, free encyclopedia" and the METHOD OF
PRODUCTION is:

* to let anyone, anytime, edit any article; and,
* not to take sides on controversial issues

Either of these primary methods can be set aside, if it interferes with
the GOAL. We restrict some contributors (via bans) or some articles (via
'protection'). And as consensus develops on shared values we might even
set aside the restriction on taking sides.

For example, regarding [[terrorism]] the consensus is that it is "bad"
(in an absolute moral sense) to shoot children in the back as they run
away from gunmen who have taken over their school. Of course, we don't
say, "Those evil men murdered the children", because a matter of policy
we are writing the [[Beslan school massacre]] article with NPOV. But if
no one raised a significant objection, we *could* call it evil.

Our official mandate from Jimbo is the philosophy of WikiLove: i.e.,
consideration for others. In our dealings with one another on this
mailing list, it's mandatory: be nice, or be elsewhere (violators have
been exiled).

This dovetails with the Unification Church idea of "living for the sake
of others"; it's also consistent with the church's official definition
of Good as "benefiting others" and Evil as "taking advantage of another
for one's own benefit".

It's possible that Wikipedia could one day adopt an absolute value
perspective based on these ideas -- and STILL be "a great, free
encyclopedia".


from_name: Milos Rancic

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] August 14th,
	2004: Serbian Wikipedia reached 5.000 articles

body:
I am almost sure that it is text about Max Stirner
(http://sr.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9C%D0%B0%D0%BA%D1%81_%D0%A8%D1%82%D0%B8%D1%80%D0%BD%D0%B5%D1%80),
but it is possible that it is text about Mahatma Gandhi
(http://sr.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9C%D0%B0%D1%85%D0%B0%D1%82%D0%BC%D0%B0_%D0%93%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%B4%D0%B8)


from_name: Robert Pollard

subject: [Wikitech-l] wikispecies.org

body:
Hi

I was interested to see the establishment of wikispecies.org
and have added the page on scientific classification from
Wikipedia, with the links edited.

However, there seems to be a glitch in a script, with unexpected
additions of  "/wiki/Main Page" to the page names - eg
after saving a page, what is displayed is an empty page
with an address & title that has added  "/wiki/Main Page"
to the URL, while the saved page is found in the
address without this addition.

This has led to the duplication of the main page - the second being
at http://species.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page/wiki/Main_Page

Warm regards

Robert

At 2004.09.13 03:28 PM, you wrote:
>Hi,
>
>upon Jason's request, i set up a wiki for wikispecies.(org|com).
>
>It's using the specieswiki MySQL DB and the document root is
>/home/wikipedia/htdocs/species/
>
>Best regards,
>
>JeLuF
>_______________________________________________


from_name: Gerard Meijssen

body:
Andrew Dunbar wrote:

> --- Gerard Meijssen <gerardm at myrealbox.com> wrote:
>
>
>>There is a big thing on the wikipedia-l about
>>writing up Chinese. One thing I gleaned from this
>>discussion is that zh-tw and zh-cn are used to
>>indicate respectively traditional and simplified
>>Chinese. As it is relevant to wiktionary to have
>>both correct spellings, I propose to use these codes
>>as well as the zh code to indicate Chinese words.
>>
>>
>
>I don't have references but I'm sure I've read this is
>not a good idea. Because all countries actually do use
>both scripts sometimes, because sometimes the
>countries
>use entirely different words for the same thing, so it
>doesn't always even come down to a choice of
>character.
>I think we'd be overriding a country code as a script
>code when what we really need is a script code. That
>would not be ambiguous. Something like zh-trad and
>zh-simp. Or zh-trd and zh-smp.
>
>I think I've seen a page on Microsoft's site which
>does it this way somewhere but I doubt they really
>use it. They do have language numbers to take into
>account the different scripts though, including the
>Serbians below.
>
>
In a wikipedia context, it is not a good idea as you want to bring
people together. In a wiktionary context things are imho different as we
do provide all (correct) words in all languages. In English, many words
are spelled differently depending on it being en-us or en-uk or en-aus
etc. The meaning of a word may be subtly different as well, so it is not
always synonyms that we are talking about. With different scripts in one
language you have words in a different script that are synonymous.

The pronounciation is also often different depending on where you come
form. Patatoe, router etc

In a wiktionary you want to define the words and make it plain where the
word comes from. All English variants can understand each other. It is
up to wiktionary to allow for these differences. Consequently it is not
only about script I realise. As Wikipedia already has zh-tw and zh-cn as
codes, using them within wiktionary as well is reasonable. For Serbian,
sr-cyr and sr-lat makes sense to me.

What I am not sure about is, how do we indicate the word as such;
{{-xx-}} indicates a word in a language. I really want to keep it that
way. Does following it up with {{xx-xx}} to indicate the relevant subset
(characterset or regionality) as reasonable ?

Thanks,
    GerardM

>
>
>>I hope someone has a good suggestion for Serbian,
>>cyrillic and alphabetic.
>>
>>
>
>Umm Cyrillic is still alphabetic. I think you meant
>Cyrillic and Latin. How about sr-cyr and sr-lat?
>
>
>
>>There are more language that are written in
>>different charactersets. I am looking forward to
>>suggestions.
>>
>>
>
>The least obscure I can think of is Punjabi which is
>written in Gurmukhi, its own indic script; Shahmukhi,
>a derivation from the Urdu script which is itself a
>derivation of the Arabic script; and finally in Deva-
>nagari, the most common script in India. - But this is
>already quite obscure. Many former Soviet Republics
>have 2 or 3 scripts as well.
>
>Andrew Dunbar (hippietrail)
>
>
>
>>Thanks,
>>    GerardM
>>_______________________________________________
>>Wiktionary-l mailing list
>>Wiktionary-l at Wikipedia.org
>>
>>
>>


from_name: Ashar Voultoiz

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re: Wouldn't it be better to store Most of values in
 LocalSettings.php into database?

body:
JeLuF wrote:
> I've a UI for editing the site preferences, I'm just not yet sure how to
> store the settings. one big blob, with old versions kept around, or
> as a table with name=>value pairs? Probably have to replace all globals
> by a $globalConfig[] array to make storing/retrieving faster/easier.
>
> Any ideas?
>
> JeLuF

Lo JeLuF,

Probably better to get one row per setting, that will allow us to sort
settings per categories and define the type of data.

Ex:
category | setting    |  value      | type
---------------------------------------------
General  | ScriptPath |             | string
General  | UploadDir  | /mnt/upload | string
Tidy     | UseTidy    |           0 | boolean
---------------------------------------------

Then we can get different administrations pages.

For older versions, we probably just want to diff changes and saves them
directly in the new log system.

I will be out till october ... :(

cheers,

--
Ashar Voultoiz


from_name: Sabine Cretella

body:
>
> What I am not sure about is, how do we indicate the word as such;
> {{-xx-}} indicates a word in a language. I really want to keep it that
> way. Does following it up with {{xx-xx}} to indicate the relevant
> subset (characterset or regionality) as reasonable ?

Hi,

As far as translations are concerned CAT-software uses the following way
to distinguish different versions:

EN-GB
EN-US
EN-AU
(don't remember English - New Zealand - I should need to look it up)

DE-DE
DE-AT
DE-CH
For the different German versions.

There is indeed also diversification of four different chinese writings
alsways indicated with
ZH-...
I don't know these, but I'll look them up.

When localising websites often simplyfied Chinese is choosen as it is
read by Chinese people as well as by Taiwanese People. In case of
Wiktionary I feel that simplyfied Chinese and traditional Chinese should
maybe have two different wiktionaries as they are really very different.

So yes: the way you'd like to use to identify "sub-languages" is widely
used and therefore makes sense.

Ciao, Sabine

>


from_name: Thomas R. Koll

subject: [Wikitech-l] Ticket system

body:
On Mon, Sep 13, 2004 at 02:23:15PM -0700, Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote:
>
> With an otrs system, not open to the public, I could invite specific
> peopl who know enough about "the official wikipedia response" to
> things to help me out with these emails.
>
> If a first experiment seems to go well, we could publicize the address
> on the website, and even set up sub-addresses for specific types of
> inquiries.

Excellent idea. We have two or three serious mails every day in
info at wikipedia but the spam is anoying, so don't forget about a spam filter.

I'm sure the others who read info at wikipedia.de (which is
info-de-l at wikipedia.org) are happy about changing the system.

ciao, tom
--
== Weblinks ==
* http://shop.wikipedia.org - WikiReader Internet zu kaufen
* http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benutzer:TomK32
* http://www.hammererlehen.de - Urlaub in Berchtesgaden


from_name: andrew fabbro

subject: [Wikitech-l] Customizing navigation bar (FAQ?)

body:
I've been looking all over for info on customizing the "navigation" bar on
the left...adding entries to the list, removing some items I don't need,
etc.

The discussion on languages had some info, but nothing on how to add
pages.  The skinning articles seemed to focus mostly on CSS.  I couldn't
find a on-site page to edit it through the Wiki.

If I want to add/change/delete entries in the navigation menu, where do
I go?  Thanks,

andrew fabbro                                            [andrew at fabbro.org]
------------------------------[ quote-o-matic] -----------------------------
"We are number one!  All others are number two or lower!"
   -- The Sphinx


from_name: Mark Christensen

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: One Chinese Wikipedia

body:
> It's not you who can judge, but the people who feel
> threatened. Just a basic fact.

Actually such a question would need to be judged by an outside standard.
Neither side should be allowed to make this kind of call for themselves.

That's why we have codified laws and judicial systems.  But even for
arguments between children on the playground, a third party is often
called upon to decide a disputed point.


from_name: Walter Vermeir

body:
Anthere <anthere9 at ...> writes:

>
> Yo. Fully agree with you on this Walter.
>
> Well, I have been seeing you taking care of such matters for perhaps 2
> years now, as well as setting portal pages for country domain name.
>
> I would be personnally delighted that you be this person responsible of
> domain names.
>
> What do you think ? Would you be interested ? What do other people think ?
>
> Anthere

I must say that this was not my intension. I highly appreciate that you
nominated and support my for this and also the support from the others.

But am not sure of it possible for my to do this. This function would be a
highly trusted function.

The full setup;
The domain name administrator would be;
- the key holder of Wikimedia; has access to all domain settings. Change DNS,
whois info and so. Be the contact person for that domain. Has the authority to
renew domain names and buy new if needed and access to Wikimedia funds . Also
the person who does the transfer of domains now owned by friends of Wikipedia.
Can also have a role regarding squatted domains. Maintaining a  public page
whit a overview of all domains whit all useful info about those domains. In
direct contact and under supervision of a core Wikimedia foundation person.

Like a sysop (at least like that function exist on the dutch Wiki), he is a
servant of the community and can only act for so far those actions are
authorized by a list of rules defined by the Wikimedia foundation and supported
by the community. Autonomous decision for so far not granted by earlier
established rules are strictly forbidden.

+ The benefit of this setup is that one person can do his job without the need
to ask to other persons to do things, have wait for responds. Can directly
give  responds to requests.

- The down side is that you put a lot of trust and potential power whit one
person.

A light version;
The "domain name administrator" is only a intermediary.  Is the contact person
for domain name related requests for all projects. Maintains a list of all
domains, there expire data, there status and use, sounds alarm when the are
close to there expire data, keeps other people annoying until whatever needs to
be done is done. Has a direct contact whit the people of the Wikimedia who can
actually do something.

+ No security risk because the "domain name administrator" has no powers except
the power of e-mail.
- The usefulness is doubtful. If the function only is to act like a gateway to
whoever does it really you can ask why bother.

*********************************

I am willing to do it. But i am not very much in favor of the light version
because you can not really do anything.

Greetings,
Walter Vermeir


from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [Wikipedia-l] mail WikiSpecies

body:
--- Benedikt Mandl <benedikt.mandl at gmx.at> wrote:

> WikiSpecies in currently in the process of being launched as an official
> wikimedia project with an initial interface and basic functions at
> www.wikispecies.org/
>
> A big thank you to everybody who contributed to the project so far, from the
> constructive discussion to the technical support. I hope that the interest
> in wikispecies will remain as high as it seems to be right now.
>
> In order to allow an efficient communication between all those who are
> interested in wikispecies, a mainling list was created. To register at this
> mailing list, please go to:
>
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikispecies-l
>
> I hope many of you register and want to become part of an evolving
> wikispecies! Best,

What the hell is this? There was a lot of opposition to setting up a separate
project. Who the hell authorized this?

This is NOT the way to set up a new project.

-- mav

_______________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Declare Yourself - Register online to vote today!
http://vote.yahoo.com


from_name: Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales

subject: [Wikitech-l] Allowed content on wikis

body:
Rowan Collins wrote:
> have an effect - IANAL, but this is my understanding: if your site is
> publically accessible, the exact nature of your changes to the core
> software must also be made public, since the GPL forbids you to have
> users who cannot build further on your changes.

It is my impression that this is not true.

It's perfectly o.k. under the GPL to use modified GPL code on a
website without disclosing your modifications.

http://slashdot.org/askslashdot/00/07/13/1831245.shtml

Is a sort of old slashdot article about it.


from_name: Kiss All

subject:
[Foundation-l] I am really tired of registering an account for each
	MetaWiki site I found

body:
I found it is very tedious or even annoying for users and developers
to register an account for each MetaWiki site they encountered.

Take myself for example:
1. First, I got an account from wikipedia, that was my first visit to
wiki in fact.

2.Then, I found metawiki, was asked to register. Ok, I was still happy
to do it to be a more involved volunteer.

3.After that, I found the chinese version of eikipeida. I always
wanted to contribute to my own people. I registered an account there
without reluctance.

4. Today, I want to add my new feature request and bug report. You
know what? A MediaZilla poped out  requesting me to register again!

5. I suspect if I happen to access wikidictionary, wikibook, and so
on, I have to register again and again...

I don't know how many people have the same problem as me. But wouldn't
it be better to have a single account to access all sites within
MetaWiki? I know there is a passport project from Microsoft dealing
with the similar problem. It would be much easier for us to do the
same thing within MetaWiki because we don't need to worry about the
identify,money issue in the real world.

--
Be good....


subject:
[Wikitech-l] I am really tired of registering an account for each
	MetaWiki site I found


from_name: Yann Forget

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: One Chinese Wikipedia

body:
Hi,

Le Tuesday 14 September 2004 00:12, Mark Williamson a ?crit :
> >Threatening is exactly what you are doing.  And such threats don't
> > strike me as a very helpful way to resolve this particular issue.
>
> No, threatening is *not* what I am doing. All I'm saying is that if
> the solution eventually reached is *not* mutually accomodative, there
> will be a fork.

It's not you who can judge, but the people who feel threatened.
Just a basic fact.

> --Jin Junshu/Mark

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


from_name: Tim Starling

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: no more PD satellite photos?

body:
Ray Saintonge wrote:
> Legally a corporation IS a person, and does have rights.

As much as I hate to add to off-topic channel noise, I can't help but
point out that a corporation is a legal entity, not a person.
Corporations can own property, form contracts and be sued for
negligence. But they can't vote, you can't assault them or murder them.
They don't have a right to bear arms, or a right to free speech. Just a
minor point of terminology, obviously corporations do have rights to
creative works made by their employees.

-- Tim Starling


from_name: Jure Spik

subject: [Wikitech-l] Allowed content on wikis

body:
Hi all.
Our company wishes to use a wiki to create a user-browsable database of law
regulations, best practices and other accounting material. I tried to read
the GPL but I find it incomprehensible :S

>From what I've read I think I should not use material that must not be
changed so can Laws be published on a wikipedia or is it forbidden ?

Also, am I allowed to display banners on the wiki ?

Thank you for your advice,
Jure


from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [Wikitech-l] Portal namespace

body:
Guillaume-
> Hi all,
> I saw the German Wikipedia create WikiProject's "portals" [1] into the
> encyclopaedia's namespace (ns=0).
> What do you think about create a new namespace just for those pages
> (already 103 on de:) ?
...
> If no one disagree I'll patch Mediawiki to allow that.

No need, there's already a $wgExtraNamespaces variable. Do you have server
access? If so, you just need to edit InitialiseSettings.php, you can take
the help namespace additions for meta as an example.

Regards,

Erik


from_name: Delirium

subject: [WikiEN-l] Why Academics are Useful to Wikipedia

body:
Jens Ropers wrote:

>> A minimally cheap newly built computer system these days can be easily
>> had for under $500
>
>
> Which is COMPLETELY out of reach for probably well over 90% of the
> world population. They just can't spare $500. Nevermind electricity
> (good point).

You seem to either not be reading the email, or entirely missing the
point.  My point is that they CANNOT AFFORD TO BUY A 20-VOLUME
ENCYCLOPEDIA SET EITHER.  Bold that or underline it or something.

So, we have to buy it for them either way.  My argument is that buying
them computers, and mailing out periodic CD-ROM updates, is a better
approach than printing up mailing out periodic encyclopedia sets.  The
sole caveat is that this applies to places with electricity, as I
mentioned when I originally suggested the matter.

To summarize what I said 10 posts ago:
In places with electricity, we ought to investigate whether it is
cheaper to distribute information digitally (including distributing the
means to read it) than it is to distribute information in paper form.

Does anyone have any objections to that other than the ones I already
mentioned when I first proposed it?

-Mark


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re: An urgent Proposal: A fair,	effective and free
	rewarding system for WikiPedia volunteers

body:
Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote:

>Ray Saintonge wrote:
>
>
>>For the economist taking time off work to care for a sick child is
>>not a rational act.
>>
>>
>This statement betrays an almost complete ignorance of economic
>theory.
>
Then I must agree with your implication that economics is not scientific.

>In any event, this discussion should be taken to a different list from
>wikitech-l.
>
>
Certainly.  Removal of the context about what motivates people did allow
the topic to drift a little.  A reply to your offlist POV will follow.

Ec


subject: [Wikipedia-l] mail WikiSpecies

body:
--- Gerard MeMeijssengegerardmymyrealboxom> wrote:
> Yes, you opposed it. The wiwikimediaoard approved it; all votes were in
> fafavourThere was discussion, the arguments were weighed. What is your
> problem ?

Check the record, I am most certainly not the only person who opposed it on the
mailing list. Several people also emailed me and left messages on my talk page
indicating they agreed with me as well. And why the hell can the board create a
new project when there is no consensus to do so in the community? Whenever
there is no consensus we should have a vote; in this case a Wikimedia-wide one.
Top-down paternal decision making needs to *only* be for non-controversial
issues. This is so un-wiki that I'm at a loss for words.

I'm *especially* perplexed by the *one* example given by Jimbo of the type of
entry that Wikispecies would have given that *all* that info should be in
Wikipedia. He did not even try to refute what I wrote and others backed me up
on that point.

I think that I presented a very good case against having a separate project for
this and that this type of functionality it needed in other areas (such as
Chemistry).

Balkanization and forking like this is very dangerous; now people will want to
have separate Wikihistory, Wikichemistry, Wikiphysics and whatnot.

What we *need* is a far more general approach that does not equal any type of
fork. Thus my suggestion of starting this on WiWikimediaommons and
concentrating  on language independent data that could be called upon and used
by any WiWikimediaroject.

But all the didiscussion we had on this topic was for naught; the board went
ahead and had a secret meeting about this and decided this issue when there was
a lot of opposition to it. That is *not* the way we should be doing things and
I'm flabbergasted that the board would act in this way.

> WiWikispeciess not a fork. It is not intended as a fork, it will prove
> not to be a fork.. Encyclopedic information is in the Wikipedias
> Wikispecies will refer to the other projects as much as the other
> projects may refer to WiWikispecies

It is a fork of the Commons and the tree of life WikiProject. Most importantly
it is the first project (other than the embarrassing failure of the 9/11 wiki
that is *not* general (while not limited by space or the amount of detail they
can present, Wikipedia, Wikibooks, Wiktionary and Wikiquote all cover a great
variety of different topic areas; Wikispecies covers a sub-topic area of a
branch of science).

Further, its existence will only encourage more balkanization (Wiki{insert
category here}).

-- Daniel

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail - 50x more storage than other providers!
http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail


subject:
[Wikipedia-l] The board has overstepped its mandate and authority
	(was: mail WikiSpecies)

body:
--- Angela <beesley at gmail.com> wrote:

> The wiki is there to allow discussion to take place and to evolve what
> features are needed.

*That* is what Meta is for. Fork.

> This is most definitely not a fork of Wikipedia. Wikispecies is more
> about collecting data than writing articles. This data will be saved
> in a way that allows all Wikipedias, not just the English one, to use
> the data. As a project, Wikispecies has different aims to Wikipedia.
> It is aimed at the needs of scientific users rather than general
> users. Integrating Wikispecies into Wikimedia prevents a fork.

*That* is what the Commons is for. Fork.

> The board met at the start of this month, and the notes from this
> meeting are on Meta and the Foundation wiki. Four members voted to
> support the following points:

Creating this when there was significant (I?d say large) amount of concerns and
opposition oversteps the bounds of the board, IMO. New projects *must* be
started when there is a consensus to do so, *not* by fiat. I can?t believe this
is happening.

> I apologize to those who had not seen the above report already.
> Perhaps we need to find a way of ensuring that people who do not
> follow either of those wikis are aware of meetings that take place
> such as this one.

Perhaps we need to return to a consensus decision-making process instead of one
by fiat.

Truly disgusted,

Daniel Mayer (who is now seriously re-evaluating his participation in Wikipedia
and Wikimedia)

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


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Not a fork! (was: mail WikiSpecies)

body:
Then what the hell is this:

http://species.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classification

Looks like a fork of the English Wikipedia's article on scientific
classification to me.

-- mav

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


from_name: Rowan Collins

subject: [Wikitech-l] Allowed content on wikis

body:
On Tue, 14 Sep 2004 11:49:15 +0100, Jure Spik <webdesign at carpediem.si> wrote:
> Hi all.
> Our company wishes to use a wiki to create a user-browsable database of law
> regulations, best practices and other accounting material. I tried to read
> the GPL but I find it incomprehensible :S
>
> >From what I've read I think I should not use material that must not be
> changed so can Laws be published on a wikipedia or is it forbidden ?
>
> Also, am I allowed to display banners on the wiki ?
>
> Thank you for your advice,
> Jure

The GPL only applies to the use and modification of the program and
its source code. It has no effect on the kind of content that can be
hosted on a site running the MediaWiki software.

Wikipedia itself licences its content under the GFDL, so that the
encyclopedia articles themselves are licenced to be used in various
ways by anyone who so wishes - obviously a law that fell under a more
restrictive copyright would not be compatible with that. But there is
no compulsion to use the same licencing arrangement just because you
use the same software - if you set up your own wiki installation, you
are as free to choose its copyright status as you would be for any
other website.

Similarly, you are free to modify the software in any way you so wish,
such as to accomodate banners or interface changes. Here, the GPL does
have an effect - IANAL, but this is my understanding: if your site is
publically accessible, the exact nature of your changes to the core
software must also be made public, since the GPL forbids you to have
users who cannot build further on your changes. Basically, if you
improve on the work given freely by others, you have to give your
improvements equally freely.

Hope this clarifies things a little.
--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


from_name: Stirling Newberry

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Interview

body:
I'm looking to interview various wikipedians for bopnews.com, if anyone
is interested drop me an email.


from_name: Christian Semrau

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re: EmailNotification on page changes - a question
	to	Wiki-Sysops

body:
Thomas Gries writes:

> Question to you (Sysops of the big WikiPedias):
> =====================================
> Please can you send me recent statistical data about the amount of
> ***User_talk page changes*** per time unit (hour or day) on the big
> WikiPedias ?
>
> For user_talk page changes only one E-mail is sent to the owner of that
> User_talk page, and not for own edits. This feature could ***perhaps***
> be enabled generally or switched on for privileged contributors,
> developers and sysops only. But is written above, I am just curious
> about this number, if it you can supply me with this.

Hello Tom,

I checked the german database dump of aug 11 (cur and old):
In the 5 weeks of july 4 to aug 8 there were _per day_

175 _user page_ edits, thereof
38 edits by (registered) others than the owner
8 edits by anons other than the owner
130 edits by the (registered) owner

317 _user talk page_ edits, thereof
231 edits by (registered) others than the owner
15 edits by anons other than the owner
69 edits by the (registered) owner
1 edit by the anon owner

Christian Semrau
de:Benutzer:SirJective


from_name: Jens Ropers

subject: [Foundation-l] Rewarding volunteers

body:
John Collison wrote this email:
http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2004-September/
000959.html

Erik Moeller replied with this email:
http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2004-September/
000962.html
(also see below)

Erik,

John was making some valid observations.

Some sysops and developers ARE getting more power, some Wikipedians DID
repeatedly float the (IMHO inane) idea of blocking anon editing and
there IS a trial for paying developers.

It's true that there are offsetting factors:
- Most if not all of the powers that sysops and developers are getting
were previously held by Jimmy Wales et al. (who however--as far as I'm
aware--exhibited considerable restraint in using them).
- The idea of blocking barring anons from editing was not accepted by
the wider Wikipedia community and indeed never got very far.
- At this stage of our project, where there is a large user base and
thus frequent demands to our developers, paying them might simply
reflect the economics of demand and supply: Developers can't put in all
that time the community cries out for without some remuneration.
Thinking about paying developers could be seen as more on par to
investing in hardware -- it's paying for a more or less essential
component towards the continued success of the Wikipedia.

So there are pros and cons. The situation and recent developments can
be interpreted differently. John voiced his concerns based on his
reading of the situation and his POV. You may see an emphasis on other
things and have a different POV.

However, for you to categorically state that "the trend is the exact
opposite of what you claim it is" and then move on to irony and
ridicule (if not sarcasm) -- I feel that that was not very kind to say
the least. As John wrote, this was his first post to this mailing list.
If this is how you welcome people and invite them to participate in our
discussion -- well... I trust you're getting my drift.

I may want to add: I strongly seconded John's email -- I feel there IS
a danger and temptation for us "two-legged pigs" to become like the
human peasants and for some of us to become "more equal than others".
(cf. Animal Farm) That that hasn't happened yet is a testament to those
intrepid Wikipedians who defended our freedoms by eloquently and
successfully making the case to the community that they should be
preserved, even as other fruits looked tempting and were hanging low.
But just because farsighted people voiced warnings in the past and
successfully got the community to choose a better course (where some
things even improved) doesn't mean that that was natural or inevitable.
I also feel it would be unfair to construe John's email as belittling
these past efforts (which maybe could be a reason for your
indignation?) -- his words IMHO don't detract from the good things that
have happened in the past but are a warning about our present course.
Things can go wrong and we as are not infallible, even as a community.
That's why we need words of warning like John's and he should be
''commended'', not rebuked for saying them.

-- Jens [[User:Ropers|Ropers]]
     www.ropersonline.com


subject: [Foundation-l] Rewarding volunteers


subject: [Foundation-l] questions about complying with the GFDL

body:
I had a question about complying with the GFDL in medium-print-run,
subset-of-Wikipedia distribution efforts.

Say someone wanted to distribute a few Wikipedia articles in connection
with some event---the one that came to mind would be distributing some
information about Greek culture together with a local Greek festival,
but there are plenty of other possibilities.

Now, the GFDL requires that if you distribute more than 100 copies of a
document, you must also distribute the source (i.e. wikitext) version of
the document, and the text of the GFDL itself.  I don't see a good way
to do this on a smallish pamphlet (say, 5 pages): the text of the GFDL
itself would nearly double the size of the pamphlet.  The wikitext
version is permitted to be distributed electronically (i.e. "see
http://blah/ for a source version of this document"), but even that is
somewhat onerous, as a small organization may not have the resources or
interest in maintaining a mirror of the documents it distributes for the
required year.  Notably, pointing to wikipedia.org is not
sufficient---the GFDL requires that the person doing the distribution
maintain an exact source mirror of the document exactly as distributed,
"free of added material", and including any changes, so "derived from
the Wikipedia article [here]" would not be enough.

In googling to see how people handled this, I came across Wikitravel,
which has a lengthy rant on somewhat similar issues, and they concluded
that the GFDL is simply impractical for pamphlet-type distribution
[http://www.wikitravel.org/en/article/Wikitravel:Why_Wikitravel_isn't_GFDL].
Hopefully there are more creative solutions though, as it would be a
shame to be unable to use Wikipedia material in pamphlets for logistical
reasons.

So really to summarize, my questions are:
--- Do I really have to print the full text of the GFDL?  It's not a
very short document relative to a small pamphlet.
--- Do I really have to make available the exact source of my pamphlet?

Thanks for any suggestions,
Mark


subject: [Wikitech-l] Sub-wikis?

body:
On Tue, 14 Sep 2004 02:25:59 +0100, Minty <mintywalker at gmail.com> wrote:
<snip>
> What I would really like is to have a wiki within a wiki.  Seperate
> name spaces, or at least automatically prefixed with the parent wiki
> name, and simultaneously be able to get a recent changes for each
> sub-wiki, the global wiki as a whole.
<snip>

Actually, there have been some attempts made to tackle exactly this
problem. I don't know how far any of them have got, and how well they
fit your needs, but you might want to look around at projects such as
PeriPeri [1][2], FractalWiki [3][4], and FacetWiki [5] (a 'facet'
being somewhere between a namespace and a category), and some of the
related discussions on MeatBallWiki such as [6]. Also similar, but
simpler, is the idea of 'page clusters' in UseMod and its descendant
OddMuse [7].

Hope something out there goes some way to meeting your needs.

 ~ References: ~
[1]: http://www.srcf.ucam.org/~cjp39/Peri/PeriPeri
[2]: http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?PeriPeri
[3]: http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?FractalWiki
[4]: http://www.wikiservice.at/fractal/wikidev.cgi?action=HomePage
[5]: http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?FacetWiki
[6]: http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?WikiFractality
[7]: http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?PageClusters

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


subject: [Wikitech-l] Allowed content on wikis

body:
On Tue, 14 Sep 2004 14:43:41 +0200 (MEST), Alfio Puglisi
<puglisi at arcetri.astro.it> wrote:
> On Tue, 14 Sep 2004, Rowan Collins wrote:
>
> >IANAL, but this is my understanding: if your site is
> >publically accessible, the exact nature of your changes to the core
> >software must also be made public, since the GPL forbids you to have
> >users who cannot build further on your changes.
>
> This is incorrect: you can modify the software any way you want, and use
> it for whatever purpose you want, without making anything public. So a
> site does not have to make its wikimedia-derived software public.
>
> If you redistribute the modified software to other parties, either for
> free or selling it, you have to use the same GPL license. That is, you
> must grant the same rights and obligations of free use, free modification,
> and GPL redistribution.
>
> Alfio

Oops! Of course - I somehow muddled using the software in a publically
visible way with distributing the software itself.

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re: Wouldn't it be better to store Most of values in
	LocalSettings.php into database?

body:
I am very happy to see the progress you guys have made so far! Thank
you very much for your good work!

On Tue, 14 Sep 2004 19:46:36 +0200, Jens Frank <jeluf at gmx.de> wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 14, 2004 at 07:57:06AM +0200, Ashar Voultoiz wrote:
> > Lo JeLuF,
>
> Salut,
>
> > Probably better to get one row per setting, that will allow us to sort
> > settings per categories and define the type of data.
> >
> > Ex:
> > category | setting    |  value      | type
> > ---------------------------------------------
> > General  | ScriptPath |             | string
> > General  | UploadDir  | /mnt/upload | string
> > Tidy     | UseTidy    |           0 | boolean
> > ---------------------------------------------
> >
> > Then we can get different administrations pages.
>
> I already have different pages, much like the User Preferences page.
> Also grouping and sorting them in the single pages, I think hardcoding
> this in PHP is fine, no real need to get the layout of the forms from
> the DB.
>
> > For older versions, we probably just want to diff changes and saves them
> > directly in the new log system.
>
> Good idea. Visible to sysops and developers only.
> Special:Sitesettings for developers only.
>
> Draft is at
> http://mediawiki.mormo.org/index.php/Special:Sitesettings
>
> Not all messages are defined yet. Prototype. Save not implemented.
>
> Regards,
>
> JeLuF
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>

--
Be good....


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Interview

body:
On Sep 14, 2004, at 2:01 PM, Mathias Schindler wrote:

> Stirling Newberry schrieb:
>
>> I'm looking to interview various wikipedians for bopnews.com, if
>> anyone is interested drop me an email.
>
> Hi,
>
> why don't you open a page on meta.wikipedia.org and ask your
> questions. That's how we did once in the past for a newspaper article
> and it did work.
>
> Mathias
>

I may try the experiment at some point, but not at the present time.


from_name: zhengzhu

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: One Chinese Wikipedia

body:
Thanks to Rowan for a good summary! I think most Chinese speakers
would agree that the difference between Simplified and Traditional
Chinese is a minor one. On the other hand, a pure automatic
translation between the two isn't likely to work, either, no matter
how sophisticated the technique is. This is generally true for any
machine translation, I think.

However, I think the wikipedia project provides a unique platform to
tackle this problem, because there are lots of PEOPLE working together
to provide quality content. The solution has been suggested several
times here before: we use a program to do a simple automatic
translation, using some sort of mapping tables. Since there are only
minor difference between the variants, we can expect that in general
there are not a lot of errors in the translation. We can then add a
special wiki tag in the wikitext to specify how to correct those
errors. Since most (if not all) articles in wikipedia is going to be
edited again and again anyway, by many different people, to add
content, correct errors, etc, why not put in the little bit of extra
effort to correct these translation errors as well?

Thus I have started to implement this idea. I am running a test site
at http://s87257573.onlinehome.us/wiki, to see how far this can go. It
is not going to be easy to make the initial transition--lots of
editing involved. But who says writing an encyclopedia should be easy?
I welcome all to visit the test site, to try editing a few articles,
and see the results. (There is a short English description there as
well.)

--
----------------------------
gmail.com at zhengzhu


subject: [Wikipedia-l] mail WikiSpecies


body:
On 14 Sep 2004, at 06:34, wikien-l-request at Wikipedia.org wrote:

> Message: 3
> Date: Mon, 13 Sep 2004 18:47:09 -0400
> From: Delirium <delirium at hackish.org>
>
> A minimally cheap newly built computer system these days can be easily
> had for under $500

Which is COMPLETELY out of reach for probably well over 90% of the
world population. They just can't spare $500. Nevermind electricity
(good point).

--Jens


from_name: Robert

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Re: A future for Nupedia? Academic degrees have real
	usefulness

body:
re:A future for Nupedia? Academic degrees have real
usefulness

Jens Ropers wirtes:
> The only thing I am lobbying you all against is
> that we (a) make degrees a requirement of some sort
> at any stage in the process

I would agree with this.

> (b) and/or automatically value input from an academic
> more than input from a non-academic. I still think
> it is obvious (to me anyway) that ''most'' of the
> time academics will prevail with their views.
> ''But they will do so '''based on the merit of what
> they say'' and NOT based on the recognition of their
title.''

I would agree with this as well.  I do feel that someone
who spent four years in college and an additional two years
earning a master, or an additional three to seven years
earning a Ph.D. is much more likely to be worth listening
to.  Wikipedia contributors, myself included, are a
self-selected bunch of Internet-advocates.  Some of us are
very much worth listening to, while some are not.

Interestingly, our qualifications change while we are
writing.  I know more now about cladograms and the
evolution of reptiles than I knew two years ago. What I
would have written two or more years ago probably would
have been misleading, incomplete or totally wrong. What I
have written in the last year, in contrast, is pretty much
up to snuff (That is, AFAIK.)

Having an expert or two on a particular subject adds quite
a bit, because they can correct oversights on points we
aren't even cognizant of!

Jen writes:
> Currently, no contributor is allowed to argue: "But I am
> a senior professor of quantum dynamics, so I win and you
> shut up!"  It is VERY important that this remains so.

Well, this depends on the case. If someone is saying that
multiple theories on quantum dynamics exist, and our
reviewer favors one theory, then Jen is correct: Such an
argument by a reviewer would be invalid.  Even Ph.D.s have
to follow our NPOV policy.  At best they could say "Most
physicists accept Prof. Simon's formulation of QED, while a
small minority accept Prof. Timov's forumlation of QED."
No Wikipedia contributor can speak "ex cathredra".

However, a a Ph.D. in this subject can and should say "so I
win and you shut up" when dealing with someone who is
trying to write stuff like "I am a self-taught PHYSICIST,
and I have discovered that QUANTUM MECHANICS is NOT real,
and my theory is being SURPRESSED by the intellectual
elite. My theory, on my WEB PAGE for $25, should have equal
mention in this article!!!"  Statements that clearly and
obviously erroneous, or crank views held by a tiny
population (often a population of one!) do not need mention
in our articles.

IOW, I agree with Jen's concerns. As I currently understand
it, our standard NPOV policy should prevent the abuses that
she is correctly concerned about.

Robert (RK)

=====
I?m astounded by people who want to "know" the universe when it?s hard enough to find your way around Chinatown. - Woody Allen

_______________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Declare Yourself - Register online to vote today!
http://vote.yahoo.com


from_name: Alfio Puglisi

subject: [Wikitech-l] Allowed content on wikis

body:
On Tue, 14 Sep 2004, Rowan Collins wrote:

>IANAL, but this is my understanding: if your site is
>publically accessible, the exact nature of your changes to the core
>software must also be made public, since the GPL forbids you to have
>users who cannot build further on your changes.

This is incorrect: you can modify the software any way you want, and use
it for whatever purpose you want, without making anything public. So a
site does not have to make its wikimedia-derived software public.

If you redistribute the modified software to other parties, either for
free or selling it, you have to use the same GPL license. That is, you
must grant the same rights and obligations of free use, free modification,
and GPL redistribution.

Alfio


from_name: Sj

subject: [Wikitech-l] Sub-wikis?

body:
I'm with you, minty.

The lack of easy subproject creation is one of the reasons I don't use
mediawiki in my everyday note-taking.

subproject rc, subproject searches, subproject new-art creation (say,
a new short prefix for an art within the current subproject; another
for one within the parent subproject).  Subpages are fine if there are
just one or two, and the long url doesn't matter.  If you have more
than a handful of subpages, you need another solution.

On Tue, 14 Sep 2004 02:25:59 +0100, Minty <mintywalker at gmail.com> wrote:
> What I would really like is to have a wiki within a wiki.  Seperate
> name spaces, or at least automatically prefixed with the parent wiki
> name, and simultaneously be able to get a recent changes for each
> sub-wiki, the global wiki as a whole.
>
> Ditto search.  If I'm on the "sub project wiki" and I run a search, it
> gives precedence to pages within my local area, but can also return
> things from other sub wikis.  Equally, if I have some weird term, I
> don't care which sub project is referencing it - I want to search the
> whole thing.  Namely across all sub-projects.

--
+sj+


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: One Chinese Wikipedia

body:
zhengzhu wrote:

>However, I think the wikipedia project provides a unique platform to
>tackle this problem, because there are lots of PEOPLE working together
>to provide quality content. The solution has been suggested several
>times here before: we use a program to do a simple automatic
>translation, using some sort of mapping tables. Since there are only
>minor difference between the variants, we can expect that in general
>there are not a lot of errors in the translation. We can then add a
>special wiki tag in the wikitext to specify how to correct those
>errors. Since most (if not all) articles in wikipedia is going to be
>edited again and again anyway, by many different people, to add
>content, correct errors, etc, why not put in the little bit of extra
>effort to correct these translation errors as well?
>
>
Just a question out of curiosity about how you handle this: what's the
base language, or is there one?  Is the primary version of a document in
Simplified, and then there are annotations for how to correctly
translate it to Traditional (i.e. [simplified character|proper
traditional character]), or is it the other way around, or are both
Simplified and Traditional equally base languages?

I'm asking because I was trying to think of a way to do this earlier
with two other similar languages, and couldn't think of a good one due
to things not being the same in both directions.  To take a made-up
example, say that Simplified 'a' can be either 'b' or 'c' in
Traditional, while Traditional 'b' can be either 'a' or 'd' in Simplified.

Then you could have a "simplified-base" form, that is: [a|b] [a|c] d
Or an equivalent "traditional-base" form, that is: [b|a] [c|a] [b|d]

The problem with using only one being that if a traditional user edited
the translated "simplified-base" form, there would be no annotation on
the 'b', because in the simplified->traditional direction it wasn't needed.

Or does this never happen in Chinese?  I realize the example is somewhat
confusing, but I couldn't come up with a clear one.  The plain-English
version of the question is: what do you do when there are one-to-many
mappings in both directions?  Or are the one-to-many mappings in Chinese
only from Simplified to Traditional, and never in the other direction?
(Even if so, that would still leave it as an interesting question for
other language pairs.)

-Mark


subject: [Wikitech-l] Allowed content on wikis

body:
Thank you Rowan and Alfio. You have made it very clear what I can do with my
Wiki.

Have a very nice day,
Jure


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: One Chinese Wikipedia

body:
On Tue, 14 Sep 2004 15:10:10 -0400, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:

> Just a question out of curiosity about how you handle this: what's the
> base language, or is there one?  Is the primary version of a document in
> Simplified, and then there are annotations for how to correctly
> translate it to Traditional (i.e. [simplified character|proper
> traditional character]), or is it the other way around, or are both
> Simplified and Traditional equally base languages?
>

This is a problem in general, but I think a minor one for the case of
Simplified/Traditional Chinese. In short, there is no "base" language,
the wikitext can in fact be mixed, using both Simplified and
Traditional characters. Here is the long explanation:

Out of about 5000 to 6000 commonly used Chinese characters, about half
of them (~2600) have different Simplified/Traditional forms. However
the difference is very regular; there are pretty clear rules on how
one maps to another. You can think of this in English as, for example,
always change Simplified character begining with "sh" to "ch" to get
the Traditional form (i.e. ship -> chip, sheep->cheep, etc.) There are
a few exceptions, but most of the time these rules work. As a result,
there would be little difficulty for a Chinese editor to recognize
both Simplified and Traditional characters, regardless of his or her
native language. Plus, the editor must have read the (automatically)
translated article first, which should contain far less unfamilar
characters. I imagine it would be no more difficult to locate the
place one wants to correct than say, to make changes to a table.

--
---------------------
gmail.com at zhengzhu


body:
Matt R wrote:

> --- Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
>
>
>>Does anyone have any objections to that other than the ones I already
>>mentioned when I first proposed it?
>>
>>
>You mentioned electricity availability. I would add that digital distribution
>requires some IT skills by those receiving it; paper only requires literacy.
>There are financial costs with computers apart from the initial outlay, namely,
>maintenance. Computers develop faults -- books just get musty.
>
>
Perhaps the paper in the books should be treated with some kind of
anti-fungal agent, or something else as well to discourage ravenous
insects - especially in hot humid climates.

Ec


subject: [Wikitech-l] Ticket system

body:
Le Tuesday 14 September 2004 08:06, Thomas R. Koll a ?crit :
>
> Excellent idea. We have two or three serious mails every day in
> info at wikipedia but the spam is anoying, so don't forget about a spam
> filter.

I already suggested installing a spam filter on Wikimedia mail server.
I was told the version of Postfix is too old.
I would be really beneficial to solve this.
I can help configuring the spam filter.

> ciao, tom

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


from_name: Pedro Fortuny Ayuso

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: One Chinese Wikipedia

body:
You are threatening us? :D

Pedro

On Tue, 14 Sep 2004 09:48:50 -0400, Mark Christensen
<mchristensen at humantech.com> wrote:
> > It's not you who can judge, but the people who feel
> > threatened. Just a basic fact.
>
> Actually such a question would need to be judged by an outside standard.
> Neither side should be allowed to make this kind of call for themselves.
>
> That's why we have codified laws and judicial systems.  But even for
> arguments between children on the playground, a third party is often
> called upon to decide a disputed point.
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>

--
----
Pedro Fortuny Ayuso
http://pfortuny.sdf-eu.org
pfortuny_at_gmail.com


from_name: Jens Frank

subject: [Wikitech-l] Portal namespace

body:
On Tue, Sep 14, 2004 at 11:53:00AM +0200, Erik Moeller wrote:
> Guillaume-
> > Hi all,
> > I saw the German Wikipedia create WikiProject's "portals" [1] into the
> > encyclopaedia's namespace (ns=0).
> > What do you think about create a new namespace just for those pages
> > (already 103 on de:) ?
> ...
> > If no one disagree I'll patch Mediawiki to allow that.
>
> No need, there's already a $wgExtraNamespaces variable. Do you have server
> access? If so, you just need to edit InitialiseSettings.php, you can take
> the help namespace additions for meta as an example.
>
He can add the namespace using InitialiseSettings.php, but this won't help
his case of special treatment of these pages except for not counting as
articles. No special handling in sorting, no list of portals, etc.

Regards,

JeLuF


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: One Chinese Wikipedia

body:
Well, having read through a lot of the discussion here, I must say the
complexities of this issue fascinate me - most aspects of language do.
And although I didn't even know of the existence of the two writing
systems, I am now going to wade into the discussion from a technical
and just generally interested point of view.

One of the key issues seems to be to what degree the two writing
systems differ: are they just different representations of the same
language, of different dialects, or do they represent fundamentally
different languages?

For instance, ??? <mugua_q0_0p at yahoo.com.tw> wrote:
> Yes, Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese are originated from the
> same language. But now it had grown into two different language.  The problem of
> translating Simplified Chinese to Traditional Chinese is not only about characters (While
> translating from Simplified character to Traditional character is already a headache).Many
> of the phrases and idioms are different.

Others have suggested that "most" words and phrases are the same, just
written differently, with exceptions in specific areas. Henry H.
Tan-Tenn gives a specific example:

> ... Will PRC users accept that a computer is known as an
> "electronic brain" in Taiwanese Mandarin, and not as a "calculator"?
> Will a Taiwanese Mandarin (or Japanese) user accept that what looks like
> the term for "calculator" often refers to a "computer" in PRC Mandarin?
>  Clearly such differences can not always be avoided, and one or another
> or both have to be used without affecting intelligibility for one of the
> user groups.  The evolution toward mutual textual intelligibility
> (through learning) and mutual acceptability (through tolerance and/or
> compromise) might *eventually* contribute to some kind of International
> Mandarin.  Probably there are already transnational business incentives
> to do so.

Of course, this may not be a representative example of the general
kind of difference, but it suggests two things to me:

1) The differences (beyond character mapping) are not particularly
major. The comparison that springs to mind is US vs UK English: most
of the differences amount to spelling conventions, such as
color/colour etc, but there are some terms that are quite different,
like sidewalk/pavement. A good example is "jelly": in the UK, "jelly"
means a kind of pudding that in the US is generally called "Jell-O";
in the US, "jelly" means a fruit spread that in the UK is generally
called "jam". Things like this do cause occasional confusion, and even
friction, in international English projects, but en.wikipedia: doesn't
seem to suffer a great deal from trying to appeal to both audiences.
Now, I'm sure this comparison isn't perfect, but from what people have
said so far, the Chinese issue is far more similar to en-gb vs en-us
than it is to, say, en vs jp (an example somebody gave where it would
be very hard to meaningfully merge the projects).

2) There is a tendency to equate the different dialects of Chinese
with the different writing systems, when the two issues may in fact be
more or less orthogonal. That is, the Taiwanese use of "electronic
brain" for "computer" is a *dialect* issue, which probably exists in
speech as well as writing, and there are probably far more dialects
with such differences than there are writing systems. Such differences
occur in all languages that have diverse populations of speakers: in
English, we have not only US and UK variants, but Australian, Irish,
Scottish, 'Black English' ('Ebonics'), etc etc. If the differences
between dialects/variants of Chinese are genuinely more complex than
these, then this needs to be discussed *independent* of the discussion
of writing systems.

I understand that the issues necessarily overlap, but if there are
multiple dialects/variants that [can] use the same writing system, and
multiple writing systems that [can] be used fo the same
dialect/variant then splitting the project based on one variable won't
solve the problems of the other - you will either have a
single-charset project where multiple dialects still have to coexist,
or a single-dialect project where multiple charsets still have to
coexist.

Well, that's added a lot of words and probably not many ideas to the
debate, but I thought I'd throw my thoughts into the mix...

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


from_name: Neil Harris

body:
Jens Ropers wrote:

>
> On 14 Sep 2004, at 06:34, wikien-l-request at Wikipedia.org wrote:
>
>> Message: 3
>> Date: Mon, 13 Sep 2004 18:47:09 -0400
>> From: Delirium <delirium at hackish.org>
>>
>> A minimally cheap newly built computer system these days can be easily
>> had for under $500
>
>
> Which is COMPLETELY out of reach for probably well over 90% of the
> world population. They just can't spare $500. Nevermind electricity
> (good point).
>
> --Jens
>
The logistic problems of distributing 100 M words on paper are
interesting too. My best guess would be 100 BIG books, each with a
printing cost of $5 each (with a large print run > 10,000), total cost
$500 per encyclopedia. (Unless the printers of telephone directories can
do better than that). A "best 10% of articles" version would cost a more
reasonable $50, and take up 10 volumes. Tiny print could help, at the
cost of usability. Still, at least there's no need for power, and more
than one person can access it at a time in a library or school. Does
anyone have a better guess for printing costs?

One thing which can be done, though, is to piggyback on existing
charitable projects like Computer Aid (http://www.computer-aid.org/),
which distribute second-hand computers to developing-country educational
projects. Computer Aid's cost per PC to a recognized not-for-profit NGO
is ?39. The cost of installing a static copy of Wikipedia on these
machines, or supplying it as a DVD, would be near zero.

There's also a U.S. university project to send cached bulk educational
Web data to African universities, given that even when they have
computers and electricity available, Internet access is still very
expensive by the standards of the developed world. We should talk to
them, so we can get Wikipedia included in their data package, but I
can't remember their name,

-- Neil


from_name: Guillaume Blanchard

subject: [Wikitech-l] Portal namespace

body:
Hi all,
I saw the German Wikipedia create WikiProject's "portals" [1] into the
encyclopaedia's namespace (ns=0).
What do you think about create a new namespace just for those pages
(already 103 on de:) ?
I see some benefits:
* allow special settings for this namespace (for example, CSS),
* don't count those page as article,
* no more need of [[category:Portal|Foo]] to put [[Portal Foo]] at
letter 'F' (the new title may be [[Portal:Foo]]),
If no one disagree I'll patch Mediawiki to allow that.

Aoineko

[1] http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kategorie:Portal


from_name: Mark Williamson

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: One Chinese Wikipedia

body:
The "dialect" question is a very difficult one to answer and the
creation of zh-min-nan: has already made ripples in the zh: community.
The difference between Minnan and other "dialects" though is that, as
far as I'm aware, none of the other Chinese dialects/Sinitic languages
has a large movement to switch to a different writing system.

First and foremost this problem could be looked at in terms of Cantonese.

Modern Cantonese actually has two different versions, one that is just
reading text written for Mandarin speakers but with Cantonese
readings, the other being using Cantonese grammar and vocabulary words
that Cantonese has but Mandarin doesn't.

Until very recently the latter had the higher status in Hong Kong and
Macau, however upon reunification the former gained the higher status.

Most Cantonese speakers, even if they don't know Mandarin, can read
texts written by a Mandarin speaker with little difficulty, but much
of the sentences are not how they would say them in everyday speech.

Then there is also an issue with Classical Chinese which is very
different from modern Mandarin. Until very recently any sort of
reference work like an encyclopedia would've been written in Classical
Chinese which was the literary language.

There may be some movement to start a Classical Chinese Wikipedia but
if there is it must be very small.

However Classical Chinese sentences often seem more natural in
Cantonese or Hakka or other Southern dialects than do the equivalents
in written Mandarin.

Also if you were to convert zh-min-nan: into Chinese characters it
would become apparent very quickly that it wasn't Mandarin, especially
because Mandarin uses such words as ? (de) which many people say is
"bastardized classical Chinese" because originally ? was created
exclusively for writing Mandarin, the character properly used for
Taiwanese and Classical Chinese is ? (as you can see ? is a basic
character, but ? has two different parts).

--???/Mark

On Tue, 14 Sep 2004 20:43:29 +0100, Rowan Collins
<rowan.collins at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Just a question out of curiosity about how you handle this: what's the
> > base language, or is there one?  Is the primary version of a document in
> > Simplified, and then there are annotations for how to correctly
> > translate it to Traditional (i.e. [simplified character|proper
> > traditional character]), or is it the other way around, or are both
> > Simplified and Traditional equally base languages?
>
> Glancing at the current test implementation, I gather that neither has
> 'precedence': to put a manual translation, you say {-zh-cn one version
> zh-tw the other-}. Wether the mappings are one-to-many in one
> direction, the other, or both, is not a problem: you simply define
> what you want displayed, in that particular case, in both versions.
>
> What I'm not clear on, having not looked in any depth, is how the
> article is actually *stored*. The explanation seems to imply that the
> characters are simply recognised as being either:
> a) in the desired writing system; no action needed
> b) in the non-desired writing system; automatic translation required
> or c) marked up as a special case; version chosen to match preference
> as per special syntax
>
> I may be wrong, but if I'm right this obviously no use to the more
> general case of languages/dialects. For that, you'd probably need to
> store which language the 'original' was in in the database, and then
> convert based on that. Although then you'd have the problem of changes
> that weren't easily translatable back to that base, wouldn't you? i.e.
> base is LangA, a LangB user makes a change, but that change is
> ambiguous in LangA; how is that change recorded? Similarly, if a naive
> LangB user "corrects" the automated translation, they may end up
> creating an error in the LangA document, because they overwrote the
> original rather than adding special syntax. Ouch. It's more
> complicated than I expected, unless that's just cos I'm hungry... ;)
>
> --
> Rowan Collins BSc
> [IMSoP]
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


from_name: Angela

body:
See bug 57 at http://bugzilla.wikipedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=57. The
code is available for this, but there are social issues involved in
deciding who gets to keep their name when more than one person is
using that name on different wikis.

Angela.

On Tue, 14 Sep 2004 10:49:42 -0500, Kiss All <kissall at gmail.com> wrote:
> I found it is very tedious or even annoying for users and developers
> to register an account for each MetaWiki site they encountered.
>
> Take myself for example:
> 1. First, I got an account from wikipedia, that was my first visit to
> wiki in fact.
>
> 2.Then, I found metawiki, was asked to register. Ok, I was still happy
> to do it to be a more involved volunteer.
>
> 3.After that, I found the chinese version of eikipeida. I always
> wanted to contribute to my own people. I registered an account there
> without reluctance.
>
> 4. Today, I want to add my new feature request and bug report. You
> know what? A MediaZilla poped out  requesting me to register again!
>
> 5. I suspect if I happen to access wikidictionary, wikibook, and so
> on, I have to register again and again...
>
> I don't know how many people have the same problem as me. But wouldn't
> it be better to have a single account to access all sites within
> MetaWiki? I know there is a passport project from Microsoft dealing
> with the similar problem. It would be much easier for us to do the
> same thing within MetaWiki because we don't need to worry about the
> identify,money issue in the real world.
>
> --
> Be good....
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>


from_name: Christopher Mahan

subject: [Wikipedia-l] The Board -> Mav's disgust

body:
--- Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com> wrote:

<snip></snip>

> Daniel Mayer (who is now seriously re-evaluating his participation
> in Wikipedia
> and Wikimedia)

When mav says things like this, I don't have to go read 25+ posts to
know that something has gone horribly wrong.

I suggest that we:
--Just build a free encyclopedia
--Work with each other respectfully
--Leave the rest of the ideas for another project, another year.

PS: If we all even get close to becoming another ICANN, I'll be out
the door with mav.

=====
Chris Mahan
818.943.1850 cell
chris_mahan at yahoo.com
chris.mahan at gmail.com
http://www.christophermahan.com/

_______________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Declare Yourself - Register online to vote today!
http://vote.yahoo.com


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: domain name administrator--> Trust level

body:
--- Walter Vermeir <walter at wikipedia.be> wrote:

> I am willing to do it. But i am not very much in favor of the light
> version
> because you can not really do anything.

I agree with Walter. The person who takes care of this needs to have
complete power to make any technical decisions immediately. I
personally manage 15+ domains and it's a PITA when something needs to
be done ASAP and I have to ask for permission.

As far as who to trust, I suggest Jimbo put a name or two in a hat
and have the board pull one of those out.  I also suggest that this
should be a paid function (as, say, $100/month) because it is such a nightmare.

=====
Chris Mahan
818.943.1850 cell
chris_mahan at yahoo.com
chris.mahan at gmail.com
http://www.christophermahan.com/

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail is new and improved - Check it out!
http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail


from_name: Tomasz Wegrzanowski

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Interwiki and summaries

body:
To everyone who adds interwiki links on other Wikipedias:

	If you don't log in, then say in the summary that the edit
	is just for interwiki. Otherwise, you're making our life
	more difficult and increase chances that a genuine vandalism
	will go unnoticed.


from_name: Matt R

body:
 --- Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:

> Does anyone have any objections to that other than the ones I already
> mentioned when I first proposed it?

You mentioned electricity availability. I would add that digital distribution
requires some IT skills by those receiving it; paper only requires literacy.
There are financial costs with computers apart from the initial outlay, namely,
maintenance. Computers develop faults -- books just get musty.

-- Matt (User:Matt Crypto)

___________________________________________________________ALL-NEW Yahoo! Messenger - all new features - even more fun!  http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com


from_name: Jochen Magnus

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: better search engine for MediaWiki?

body:
Meanwhile I have completed the work on ioda fulltext engine.
It is available from http://ioda.sourceforge.net/ including
tools to archive a cur table from Wikipedias MySQL database.

A complete ready-to-run example, using a fully indexed de-wikipedia from
Sept 8 2004, and including the binaries is available for download from:
http://magnus.de/wikipedia/wikidemo.tar.bz2 (91 MB bz2). Unpack and run
it for a performance test.

Cheers

jo


subject: [Foundation-l] Rewarding volunteers

body:
--- Erik Moeller <erik_moeller at gmx.de> wrote:

> Jens-

> > some Wikipedians DID
> > repeatedly float the (IMHO inane) idea of blocking anon editing
>
> If people provide logical arguments, then we should discuss them
> and try
> to refine our reasoning and our conclusions. I for one remain
> unconvinced
> that the larger Wikimedia projects benefit from anonymous editing,
> and
> there's little empirical evidence either way. Putting the account
> creation
> form on the edit screen would probably filter out many random
> vandals and
> spammers while still assuring near-instant participation.
>
> "IMHO inane" is quite dismissive - especially given the fact that
> people
> have actually provided very coherent arguments here.

He did say that this was his opinion.
I personally would not have participated in W if anons could not
edit. Not because I want to edit as an anon, which I very seldom do,
but because allowing anons to edit says something about our embracing
the wiki philosophy that resonates with me, and I am sure, a great
many contributors.

I doubt seriously that any study or set of studies could demonstrate
that.

<snip>

> I refuse to pretend that I see insight where I see fear, but I
> acknowledge
> that the sarcasm was slightly over the top and apologize for any
> hurt
> feelings. Please let's have discussions based on sound arguments
> rather
> than on emotional themes from George Orwell books. That is more
> productive
> and more respectful towards everyone involved in this project.
>
> Sysops and developers fulfill many thankless duties. There's no
> need to
> constantly praise them, and they are obviously not beyond reproach.
> But
> criticism should be constructive ("actionable") and have a clear,
> empirically demonstrated basis in reality.

Well put.

=====
Chris Mahan
818.943.1850 cell
chris_mahan at yahoo.com
chris.mahan at gmail.com
http://www.christophermahan.com/

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
New and Improved Yahoo! Mail - Send 10MB messages!
http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail


subject: [Foundation-l] Rewarding volunteers


from_name: Daniel Mayer

body:
--- Christopher Mahan <chris_mahan at yahoo.com> wrote:
> I agree with Walter. The person who takes care of this needs to have
> complete power to make any technical decisions immediately. I
> personally manage 15+ domains and it's a PITA when something needs to
> be done ASAP and I have to ask for permission.

We could have a petty cash PayPal account of say $3000 that such an admin and a
few other highly trusted people (esp a developer) could have access to when
needed (a domain is about to expire or a server needs to be replaced fast). If
I'm still around, I would help provide oversight for that.

> As far as who to trust, I suggest Jimbo put a name or two in a hat
> and have the board pull one of those out.

I think only Walter mentioned an interest in this so I don't see a need for an
extra step.

> I also suggest that this
> should be a paid function (as, say, $100/month) because it is such a
> nightmare.

Managing the 8 or so Wikimedia domains wasn't a pain for me. The only issue was
keeping up with yearly expirations, but Jimbo has since paid those for long
time periods (that was my impression at least since I no longer have access to
my GoDaddy account that holds those domains). So I don't think this is the type
of thing that we would have to pay a person for. All IMO.

-- mav

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Y! Messenger - Communicate in real time. Download now.
http://messenger.yahoo.com


from_name: Nick Triantos

subject: [Wikitech-l] Charts, spreadsheets, and other plugins

body:
Hi all,

I've been searching without luck to see if there's also a roadmap of
plug-ins being developed.  Within my company, another group is using the
Twiki wiki (http://www.twiki.org), and one of the key cool features they
like are all the plug-ins that have been developed so far.

I'm trying to see if any comparable plug-ins are planned or have been
discussed for mediawiki.

(and yes, I do know about EasyTimeline, but that's pretty different than
some of the twiki plugins)

regards,
-Nick


body:
--- Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> We could have a petty cash PayPal account of say $3000 that such an
> admin and a
> few other highly trusted people (esp a developer) could have access
> to when
> needed (a domain is about to expire or a server needs to be
> replaced fast). If
> I'm still around, I would help provide oversight for that.

That would be good.

> I think only Walter mentioned an interest in this so I don't see a
> need for an
> extra step.

Except he also said he wasn't too hat on the idea.  He just threw it
out there as something that would be nice without saying he would
want to do it.

> Managing the 8 or so Wikimedia domains wasn't a pain for me. The
> only issue was
> keeping up with yearly expirations, but Jimbo has since paid those
> for long
> time periods (that was my impression at least since I no longer
> have access to
> my GoDaddy account that holds those domains).

Granted, I might have exagerated.

> So I don't think this
> is the type
> of thing that we would have to pay a person for. All IMO.

Ok too. By the way, have moved to godaddy exclusively, and things
have become much easier.

On a personal note, I would particularly miss your contribution to W
if you decided to seek other forms of online enjoyments.

I think though that you have to do what's best for yourself.

=====
Chris Mahan
818.943.1850 cell
chris_mahan at yahoo.com
chris.mahan at gmail.com
http://www.christophermahan.com/

_______________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Declare Yourself - Register online to vote today!
http://vote.yahoo.com


subject: [Wikipedia-l] The board has overstepped its mandate and authority

body:
--- Tomasz Wegrzanowski <taw at users.sf.net> wrote:

> Think-first act-later is the wrong order of actions. Every (and I
> mean literally
> every) successful project was act-first think-later. Wikipedia
> started this way too.

There was a lot of thinking done before wikipedia started. (lookup
GNUpedia on google).

=====
Chris Mahan
818.943.1850 cell
chris_mahan at yahoo.com
chris.mahan at gmail.com
http://www.christophermahan.com/

_______________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Declare Yourself - Register online to vote today!
http://vote.yahoo.com


body:
--- Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Christopher Mahan a ?crit:
> > --- Walter Vermeir <walter at wikipedia.be> wrote:
> >
> >
> >>I am willing to do it. But i am not very much in favor of the
> light
> >>version
> >>because you can not really do anything.
> >
> >
> >
> > I agree with Walter. The person who takes care of this needs to
> have
> > complete power to make any technical decisions immediately. I
> > personally manage 15+ domains and it's a PITA when something
> needs to
> > be done ASAP and I have to ask for permission.
>
> Technical and financial decisions are two different things imho.
> Technical responsability Walter is mentionning is currently
> typically
> one some developers are trusted to do I think.
> However, the financial responsability mentionned is right now only
> limited to Jimbo and perhaps to our treasurer.
>
>
> > As far as who to trust, I suggest Jimbo put a name or two in a
> hat
> > and have the board pull one of those out.  I also suggest that
> this
> > should be a paid function (as, say, $100/month) because it is
> such a nightmare.
>
> Hmmmm.
> I disagree.
> It is not Jimbo's job to name people. And I am not sure he would
> like to
> do that. The proposal should come from the person himself. Not from
>
> Jimbo, nor from the board. But from people.
>
> A few questions are
>
> * Do we have a problem with our domain names handling ?
>
> * Is there a need to have one person in charge of this ?
>
> * What could the job recover ?
>
> Walter gave us his opinion on these three questions. Are there
> other
> opinions ?
>
> If the first ones are fixed, next questions become
>
> * What will the job recover ?
>
> * Who else is interested in doing this ?

I peronally think that the job is highly critical, and should not be
left to a volunteer. You should either hire someone who does this
already for a living, as a professional, or jimbo should handpick
someone he trusts explicitely. I think Jimbo does the DNS stuff now,
and probably will in the future.
So the point is probably moot.

=====
Chris Mahan
818.943.1850 cell
chris_mahan at yahoo.com
chris.mahan at gmail.com
http://www.christophermahan.com/

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail is new and improved - Check it out!
http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail


from_name: Charles Matthews

subject: [WikiEN-l] A great, free encyclopedia

body:
Ed Poor wrote

>Let's not confuse goal with method (or ends with means): I don't agree
that the goal is "a great, neutral encyclopedia".

Well, I rather thought it was.  Perhaps those who want a great, partisan
encyclopedia would be kind enough to fork off, before introducing the
partisan stuff.

Charles


body:
--- Christopher Mahan <chris_mahan at yahoo.com> wrote:

> There was a lot of thinking done before wikipedia started. (lookup
> GNUpedia on google).

see here for backgrounders:
http://gne.sourceforge.net/eng/index.html

Note also archives of the mailing list for GNE:
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gne/

look at January through June 2001. The rest fell prey to junk mail.

=====
Chris Mahan
818.943.1850 cell
chris_mahan at yahoo.com
chris.mahan at gmail.com
http://www.christophermahan.com/

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail - You care about security. So do we.
http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail


from_name: Timwi

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re: An urgent Proposal: A fair,
 effective and free   rewarding system for WikiPedia volunteers

body:
Ray Saintonge wrote:

> Timwi wrote:
>
>> It's like with the milk and the lightning. People have observed that
>> milk tends to go sour when there is a thunderstorm. They conclude from
>> that that the thunderstorm causes the milk to go sour, because that
>> would fit the picture. But the conclusion is false. In reality there
>> is a third factor, namely humidity, which causes both the milk to go
>> sour and a thunderstorm.
>
> This kind of analogical argument is extremely unsound.  In that
> investigation proposing the initial hypothesis that thunderstorms caused
> milk to go sour was perfectly valid.  It was a hypothesis, not a
> conclusion.  Subsequent experimentation showed the hypothesis to be
> false, and that was what science is all about.  At best raising this
> issue is completely irrelevent.

OK, so as long as we regard the proposed results of the study as nothing
more than a hypothesis, then we agree.

Timwi


body:
--- Tomasz Wegrzanowski <taw at users.sf.net> wrote:

> On Tue, Sep 14, 2004 at 06:47:15PM -0700, Christopher Mahan wrote:
> >
> > --- Tomasz Wegrzanowski <taw at users.sf.net> wrote:
> >
> > > Think-first act-later is the wrong order of actions. Every (and
> I
> > > mean literally
> > > every) successful project was act-first think-later. Wikipedia
> > > started this way too.
> >
> > There was a lot of thinking done before wikipedia started.
> (lookup
> > GNUpedia on google).
>
> No, you got it wrong - what they came up with was completely
> unworkable Nupedia.
> Wikipedia started as a quick hack.

Don't want to get into an argument.

Ever heard of bootstrapping?

Anyways, if someone wants to ge start their own project somewhere,
there's freshmeat and soursceforge waiting with arms wide open. They
don't have to use wikimedia resources.

I also want to point out that Nupedia and GNUpedia (different, trust
me, I was there) did not rake up the users needed to make a go at it
_because_ of their "logged-in users"/"moderation" systems.

Anyways, going home now. Catch ya'll later.

Peace and Wikilove.

=====
Chris Mahan
818.943.1850 cell
chris_mahan at yahoo.com
chris.mahan at gmail.com
http://www.christophermahan.com/

_______________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Declare Yourself - Register online to vote today!
http://vote.yahoo.com


subject: [Wikitech-l] testmail, pls ignore