subject: [Wikipedia-l] Death to the comma count!

body:
--- Andre Engels <engels at uni-koblenz.de> wrote:
> On Mon, 10 Mar 2003, Jimmy Wales wrote:
>
> > Tomos at Wikipedia wrote:
> > > 2. English-centrism
> >
> > I would say that if at all possible, within the
> parameters of trying
> > to come up with a better and more reasonable
> counting system, that any
> > changes should benefit (if possible!) the
> non-English wikipedias more
> > than the English wikipedia.
>
> I disagree. We should try to get the greatest
> benefit for ALL Wikipedias.
> What we should try to avoid is changes that benefit
> the English one but
> are disadvantageous to (some of) the others, but if
> we have to options, one
> of which benefits the English a lot and the others
> somewhat, and the other
> the English a little bit and the others somewhat,
> then the first one is
> preferable.

I disagree. The option 1 is more often chosen because
of the weight of people, so that is a fact, but I see
not why it would be the *best* option. It might be the
best choice for english, not for others. I am not even
sure it is the best choice at all.

> > In this particular case, Brion's motivation is
> that the French has
> > seen people adding commas for no good reason,
> right?  I absolutely do
> > NOT want the French to get the feeling that we're
> changing the rules
> > in order to penalize them.
>
> If I remember correctly, the French that are present
> at this list were
> just as negative about this action as the others
> were.

Absolutely
Comma hunting is a lot of distraction, but most seem
very willing to go to another system.
Some favor the >0 count. Other go to 100 to 200 bytes

So I don't think the french would be a pb to quit the
current system.

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list: wikien-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: tarquin

subject: [WikiEN-l] enough with the chinese character names!

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:

>... I've seen your Kanji, I know what they link to, but I have no idea what the Kanji themselves
>are.
>
>
>
>
Just a final note on this topic to say I have thrown down the gauntlet.
from [[User talk:Stevertigo]]:

Hi Stevertigo. If you have such a thing for kanji, I have a suggestion:
we currently have pages for latin letters: A
<http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/A>,B <http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/B>,C
<http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/C>, and Greek letters. How about a page
for each letter of Kanji <http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanji>? --
Tarquin <http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Tarquin> 13:40 Mar 10, 2003
(UTC)

That should keep him busy!! *evil laugh* ;-)

>
>


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Andre Engels

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Image usage

body:
On Sun, 9 Mar 2003, Jens Frank wrote:

> the page you referenced above contains the following paragraph:
>
>    Ganz anders sieht es mit den Abbildungen aus. Wo sonst steht
>    heutzutage eine vollst?ndige Sammlung von Abbildungen aller
>    mitteleurop?ischen (und etlichen anderen) V?gel zur
>    Verf?gung, die nach entsprechender Bearbeitung in die PUBLIC
>    DOMAIN des Internets eingegeben werden, und somit frei f?r
>    jedermann zug?nglich gemacht werden kann. Die Abbildungen,
>    hingegen, k?nnen f?r Unterrichtszwecke sehr wohl genutzt, mit
>    neuen Texten, zus?tzlichen Abbildungen, Filmabschnitten und
>    Tonsequenzen kombiniert werden, um dadurch unter Einbeziehung
>    neuer Multimedia - Techniken Interesse an der heimischen
>    Vogelwelt zu wecken.
>
> I read this paragraph as a donation of the scanned images to the PD.

I agree.

Andre Engels


from_name: Christopher Mahan

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Cliches

body:
> <name12323 at hotmail.com> wrote:

> > On a related note, how do you make a e with an accent mark?

on win 98/2000, use"

ALT+0233 for ?
ALT+0232 for ?
and Ta-daa
ALT+0234 for ?

note: you must use the keypad to enter these characters.

Press ALT key, type all 4 numbers (zero inluded), then release ALT key.

=====
Christopher Mahan
chris_mahan at yahoo.com
818.943.1850 cell
http://www.christophermahan.com/

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subject: [WikiEN-l] sysop vs sysop

body:
Worst case scenario:

two sysops go on an edit war. against each other. They lock the page,
to no avail because the other can still edit it. Then one bans the
other other's IP. The other retaliates by blocking the account. The
last then goes to Jimbo (hard to stop email) and both get
permantently banned?

hummm....

=====
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chris_mahan at yahoo.com
818.943.1850 cell
http://www.christophermahan.com/

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from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [WikiEN-l] sysop vs sysop

body:
On Mon, 10 Mar 2003, Christopher Mahan wrote:
> Worst case scenario:
>
> two sysops go on an edit war. against each other. They lock the page,
> to no avail because the other can still edit it. Then one bans the
> other other's IP. The other retaliates by blocking the account.

This is only possible in the case of a very few people who have login
access to the server for development and maintenance. In general, sysops
cannot identify the IP address of a logged-in user, nor block a user
account.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [WikiEN-l] Cliches

body:
Daniel Ehrenberg wrote:

> I've noticed that on the Internet it is fairly hard to look up
> cliches.  I've only found two websites that have lists of cliches, but
> they only have one sentence about each cliche.  I created the entry
> [[List of cliches]], but maybe there should be a different wikipedia
> for cliches. Am I just crazy?

I've looked at what you've started, and it's interesting.  Still it
seems like the sort of thing that may be more suited to Wiktionary than
Wikipedia.

> On a related note, how do you make a e with an accent mark?

There are several ways to go about this, but what works for me on the
characters in ISO 8859-1 is the following that always use the numbers
from the numeric keypad, and always include the leading "0".

For ? use Alt + 0232
For ? use Alt + 0233
For ? use Alt + 0234
For ? use Alt + 0235
The coresponding capitals use numbers that are 32 less.

Eclecticology


subject: [WikiEN-l] sysop vs sysop

body:
--- "Poor, Edmund W" <Edmund.W.Poor at abc.com> wrote:
> LOL, not very likely to happen!
>
> Only good-natured, responsible people have become sysops so far.
>
> The type of user likely to indulge in a bar brawl such as you
> described either abstains from requesting admin rights, or is
> vetoed by others.
>
> We're actually a fairly well-behaved bunch here (a bunch of what, I
> won't say :)

Just wanted to illustrate that as maybe a good criteria to sysophood.

=====
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chris_mahan at yahoo.com
818.943.1850 cell
http://www.christophermahan.com/

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from_name: Stevertigo

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Offline reader

body:
> > I also installed the software and the complete German wikipedia (~26MB,
> > no images, though) on an USB memory stick, so I can have it with me at
> > all times ;-)

Serious is not even the word... Congrats on the alpha... Im downloading the
SQL dump now... SV


subject: [WikiEN-l] sysop vs sysop

body:
> > Only good-natured, responsible people have become sysops so far.
> > The type of user likely to indulge in a bar brawl such as you
> > described either abstains from requesting admin rights, or is
> > vetoed by others.
> > We're actually a fairly well-behaved bunch here (a bunch of what, I
> > won't say :)
> Just wanted to illustrate that as maybe a good criteria to sysophood.

All of this; in other words... can ''my sysop beat up your sysop?"
Ed's qualification of "good nature" is of course, very subjective.. -SV


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Cliches

body:
Christopher Mahan wrote:

>><name12323 at hotmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>>On a related note, how do you make a e with an accent mark?
>>>
>
>on win 98/2000, use"
>
>ALT+0233 for ?
>ALT+0232 for ?
>and Ta-daa
>ALT+0234 for ?
>
>note: you must use the keypad to enter these characters.
>
>Press ALT key, type all 4 numbers (zero inluded), then release ALT key.
>
Strange, I basically answered LittleDan in the same way, but your
message appeared with question marks in black diamonds, but mine came
back to me OK.  The quoted message above in this reply now also appears
correct.

This seems to have something to to with the source coding.
On yours it was

Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii

On mine it was Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed

Eclecticology


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia slo...o...o...w

body:
MOnday afternoon GMT -- wikipedia seems awfully slow........
I keep getting "connection refused" messages too :(


subject: [WikiEN-l] sysop vs sysop

body:
Christopher Mahan wrote:

>Worst case scenario:
>
>two sysops go on an edit war. against each other. They lock the page,
>to no avail because the other can still edit it. Then one bans the
>other other's IP. The other retaliates by blocking the account. The
>last then goes to Jimbo (hard to stop email) and both get
>permantently banned?
>
>hummm....
>
It sounds like you've been reading the "Spy vs. Spy" feature from Mad
Magazine. :-D
Ec


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Cliches

body:
--- Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> Christopher Mahan wrote:
>
> >><name12323 at hotmail.com> wrote:
> >>
> >>>On a related note, how do you make a e with an accent mark?
> >>>
> >
> >on win 98/2000, use"
> >
> >ALT+0233 for ???
> >ALT+0232 for ???
> >and Ta-daa
> >ALT+0234 for ???
> >
> >note: you must use the keypad to enter these characters.
> >
> >Press ALT key, type all 4 numbers (zero inluded), then release ALT
> key.
> >
> Strange, I basically answered LittleDan in the same way, but your
> message appeared with question marks in black diamonds, but mine
> came
> back to me OK.  The quoted message above in this reply now also
> appears
> correct.
>
> This seems to have something to to with the source coding.
> On yours it was
>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
>
> On mine it was Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8;

Yeah, in Unicode, it's little questioning diamonds.

=====
Christopher Mahan
chris_mahan at yahoo.com
818.943.1850 cell
http://www.christophermahan.com/

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from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Death to the comma count!

body:
On Sunday 09 March 2003 12:01 pm, Brion Vibber wrote:
> Aha, again demonstrating the obsession over the count. Why was it
> important to hit or not hit 100,000? Because of an offhand remark made a
> couple years ago about "we hope to reach 100,000 articles"?
>
> When did this become our holy mission?

Round numbers, especially large ones, are milestones that get people's
attention. That is why x.0 is so important in the software world, why cities
celebrate the day they reach 1,000,000 inhabitants, why there was so much
mania when our calendars hit the year 2000, why the first billion-dollar
business and billionares are mentioned in history books, and why we got a lot
of media attention after en.wiki hit the 100,000 count.

The article count is also a measure (however crude) of our progress. So there
is nothing wrong with trying to improve that measure and make it more
conservative where it makes sense (Jimbo has already stated he wanted a more
conservative count. However right after he said that we had already hit the
100,000 mark and were being slashdotted).

> Did the messianic age begin when the counter flipped into six digits?
> Have we all been betrayed by a sinister being who wants to make us look
> bad by leading us astray and "inflating our count"?
>
> What the *heck* does it matter?

Boy are you in a really bad mood today. See above.

> Bad to whom? Embarrassing to whom? Is it solely the use of the word
> "article" that throws us off? Are we obsessed with proving that our
> "articles" are so fricking wonderful that every single one of them must
> be the greatest pinnacle of writing prowess or we must lock it in the
> basement of shame and never admit its existence?

No - a simple automatic measure is all that is needed. We mention the
definition of the count on en.wikis [[Wikipedia:What is an article]] page.

> Go open up a paper encyclopedia sometime. Look at it. A fair chunk of
> the articles are *one paragraph long*. Do their editors worry themselves
> over the metric they use to stamp "over 60,000 articles!" on the cover?
> Or do they just count the number of entries at some point and say "at
> least this many"?

Exactly - and how many bytes would a smallish complete paragraph be in such an
encyclopedia? Around 500 bytes. Then we could say that we *at least* have x
number of articles. Right now the count includes many entries that do not
consist of even one complete paragraph. A per language set
{{HEADLINEARTICLECOUNT}} would be flexible enough for both large and small
wikis. {{NUMBEROFARTICLES}} would be used for comparison purposes.

> Mav, thanks for proving my point again about count-mania. Are you
> seriously suggesting that the pseudo-random number spit out on the front
> page actually *defines* what articles are in a meaningful way?

Again, more unnecessary anger. Please calm down - we are not talking about
anything of such cosmic importance to warrent such feelings. :-)

The answer to your question is above (the part talking about tracking our
progress and how the outside world sees our progress). So, yes it is
important to have a conservative estimate of the number of articles we have.
That's not to say that everything a computer would recognize as an article is
actually what a human would consider to be one. But since the computer will
also miss entries that /could/ be considered articles, then everything
averages out in the end (some really obscure subjects can, in fact, be
covered in a sub-500 byte entry).

In short, I'm not asking for an AI article count - I just would like to see a
more conservative crude method used on en.wiki that excludes more entries
that are probably not articles (however we shouldn't go live with such a
count until after have enough entries to still be above 100,000 - otherwise
we could get some negative media attention and a drop in morale).

IMO the best way to do that is to have a per wiki set
{{HEADLINEARTICLECOUNT}} in addition to {{NUMBEROFARTICLES}}. It would be up
to each language to define their own byte threshold for their own headline
count (or they could choose to ignore {{HEADLINEARTICLECOUNT}} and use the
much less conservative {{NUMBEROFARTICLES}}. Of course, each wiki that uses
{{HEADLINEARTICLECOUNT}} would then have to publicly document their threshold
for their own headline count.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

WikiKarma
The usual at [[March 8]] (I'm fresh out of WikiKarma so I need to work on
creating some more balance in the Universe before I respond to your
response).


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Cliches

body:
--- Christopher Mahan <chris_mahan at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> --- Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> > Christopher Mahan wrote:
> >
> > >><name12323 at hotmail.com> wrote:
> > >>
> > >>>On a related note, how do you make a e with an accent mark?
> > >>>
> > >
> > >on win 98/2000, use"
> > >
> > >ALT+0233 for ???
> > >ALT+0232 for ???
> > >and Ta-daa
> > >ALT+0234 for ???
> > >
> > >note: you must use the keypad to enter these characters.
> > >
> > >Press ALT key, type all 4 numbers (zero inluded), then release
> ALT
> > key.
> > >
> > Strange, I basically answered LittleDan in the same way, but your
>
> > message appeared with question marks in black diamonds, but mine
> > came
> > back to me OK.  The quoted message above in this reply now also
> > appears
> > correct.
> >
> > This seems to have something to to with the source coding.
> > On yours it was
> >
> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
> >
> > On mine it was Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8;
>
>
> Yeah, in Unicode, it's little questioning diamonds.
>
>
Using Unicode this time:
è
é
ê

=====
Christopher Mahan
chris_mahan at yahoo.com
818.943.1850 cell
http://www.christophermahan.com/

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subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Cliches

body:
Christopher Mahan wrote:

>>Yeah, in Unicode, it's little questioning diamonds.
>>
>Using Unicode this time:
>è
>é
>ê
>
Those instructions were interpreted as text rather than instructions.  I
can use this on Wiki-pages but not in e-mails.
Eclecticology


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Tomasz Wegrzanowski

subject: [Wikitech-l] Footnotes?

body:
On Mon, Mar 10, 2003 at 01:46:07PM +0000, tarquin wrote:
>
>
> Sheldon Rampton wrote:
>
> >I think it would be nice if the Wiki syntax could facilitate
> >footnoting of articles.
>
> I don't think footnotes are suitable for webpages.
> Unlike paper, the user has to travel (potentially) a long way for
> related information.
> I have been trying to reintegrate them into the text where I see them in
> articles -- I suggest we try and write without them

Related useful feature would be a way to link to places in articles.

[[Foo#Bar|Something]]

[[Foo#Bar]] = [[Foo#Bar|Bar]]
[[#Bar|Something]] = [[Current Article#Bar|Something]]
[[#Bar]] = [[Current Article#Bar|Bar]]

Archors may be generated automatically from headers.


from_name: Jens Frank

subject: [WikiEN-l] http://fi.wikipedia.org/

body:
On Mon, Mar 10, 2003 at 06:14:20AM -0700, Fred Bauder wrote:
> I was just over there looking at that. Has that address but all links seem
> to be back to www.wikipedia.org.  Does it exist and what is it's status? You
> link to this from the link Suomi under other languages on the main page.
>
> Is it just a place holder, or a seed in Finland of a Finnish wikipedia.
>
> I ask as I journey every day to Finlind via Batmud and could juice this if
> it were a real thing.

Hello Fred,

there seems to be a wildcard-entry *.wikipedia.org that shows the english
wikipedia. Try http://i.love.wikipedia.org/  :-)

The Finish wikipedia is at http://fi.wikipedia.com/

Regards,

jens frank


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Cliches

body: User Qian Li is a vandal:


from_name: Daniel Ehrenberg

subject: [WikiEN-l] a more "confident" username

body:
>Someone said that you
>pranked around a bit when you started, but I guess those days are
>over.

Who said that about me? I never "pranked around".

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subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Qianli

body:
> User Qian Li is a vandal:
Correction: she may be getting a little nuts with her chairman mao sig...


from_name: Toby Bartels

subject: [WikiEN-l] Cliches

body:
Daniel Ehrenberg wrote at last:

>On a related note, how do you make a e with an accent mark?

See [[Wikipedia:Special characters]].
The "Entity" column in the table (with all the "&...;" stuff)
shows how to create special characters using only ASCII input.

Why is this a good idea?  (I claim that it is on [[en:]].)
Because some people have browsers that mangle anything else.
(Anthere's browser famously mangles non-Latin-1 characters --
and no insult meant to you, Anthere, you're just a well known example --
and I have occasionally seen even Latin-1 but non-ASCII characters mangled
by various anonymous editors.)  In particular, "?" is "é".

You would want to input the "?" directly on, say, [[fr:]];
how to do that depends on your browser, operating system, and keyboard.

-- Toby


subject: [WikiEN-l] Cliches

body:
I've noticed that on the Internet it is fairly hard to look up cliches.
I've only found two websites that have lists of cliches, but they only have
one sentence about each cliche.  I created the entry [[List of cliches]],
but maybe there should be a different wikipedia for cliches. Am I just
crazy?

On a related note, how do you make a e with an accent mark?

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subject: [WikiEN-l] a more "confident" username

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:

>? wrote:

>>When did we start having quizzes for sysops?

>Daniel has forwarded an off-topic petition to this list, a telltale sign
>of newbie-ish behavior. He's also new to the community. Is it too much to
>ask whether he understands how the process works? The last thing we need
>is sysops who delete pages willy nilly.

Actually, I used to see lots of new sysops delete pages too much
(not willy nilly, but also not in accordance with policy).
And it doesn't matter that I don't see it now,
because I'm not looking for it anymore.
I think that it's good to give new sysops a quiz
(or perhaps better, a summary course of instruction).

Although I don't see that LittleDan needs to be singled out for it.

-- Toby


subject: [WikiEN-l] Cliches

body:
On Mon, 10 Mar 2003, Toby Bartels wrote:
> See [[Wikipedia:Special characters]].
> The "Entity" column in the table (with all the "&...;" stuff)
> shows how to create special characters using only ASCII input.
>
> Why is this a good idea?  (I claim that it is on [[en:]].)

Well, it's a bad idea at present because it breaks our search engine. A
directly input e-acute will be searchable, while é is not.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [WikiEN-l] a more "confident" username

body:
>please describe in your own words how you think the current process of
>page deletion, page protection and IP banning works. If you name the right
>pages and describe the process correctly, I have no objections to making
>you a sysop.

Y'know, this isn't that good a test because I could have just looked it up.
Anyway, IP banning keeps vandals out of wikipedia.  When one person from a
consistant IP address keeps vandalizing pages, his IP address is banned by a
sysop.  After that, his computer can't go to wikipedia anymore, which he can
get around by using a different computer, but more importantly, he is
detered.  In page protection, a sysop decides to protect a page from vandals
by making it a protected page.  After that, only another sysop can edit that
page.  An example of this is the home page, which, before it was protected,
was frequently vandalized.  In page deletion,  a sysop decides that a page
is worthless and that they don't want it there.  The sysop deletes the page
permenantly and then all records of the page are deleted from the server.
An example of this is the contravercial [[Fuck you]] page.

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subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Cliches

body:
>Are you on a windows box Daniel? Start|Program Files|Accessories|Character
>Map

Nope, debian linux with KDE.

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subject: [WikiEN-l] mascot

body:
I wish I could draw :-(

>In case anybody hadnt seent this.. heres the sketch I did of a Meerkat as a
>possible mascot...

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from_name: Poor, Edmund W

subject: [WikiEN-l] a more "confident" username

body:
I think LittleDan has _more than_ passed his test -- not that a test was really required, but thanks, Daniel, for showing good faith and putting up with a little hazing from us old farts. :-)

By the way, you've been a sysop since this morning.

Uncle Ed
http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Death to the comma count!

body:
On Mon, 10 Mar 2003, Jimmy Wales wrote:

> Tomos at Wikipedia wrote:
> > 2. English-centrism
>
> I would say that if at all possible, within the parameters of trying
> to come up with a better and more reasonable counting system, that any
> changes should benefit (if possible!) the non-English wikipedias more
> than the English wikipedia.

I disagree. We should try to get the greatest benefit for ALL Wikipedias.
What we should try to avoid is changes that benefit the English one but
are disadvantageous to (some of) the others, but if we have to options, one
of which benefits the English a lot and the others somewhat, and the other
the English a little bit and the others somewhat, then the first one is
preferable.

> In this particular case, Brion's motivation is that the French has
> seen people adding commas for no good reason, right?  I absolutely do
> NOT want the French to get the feeling that we're changing the rules
> in order to penalize them.

If I remember correctly, the French that are present at this list were
just as negative about this action as the others were.

If you want another reason, the current comma-count underestimates the
Japanese Wikipedia quite a bit because Japanese uses less commas than most
western languages.

Regarding other issues mentioned here:
1. If we measure from some minimum size, I would like to put my vote at
   100 bytes.
2. Voting seems like a good idea. My proposal would be to use two questions,
   the first what kind of counting system to use (keep the comma count, count
   all non-redirect main namespace articles, set a minimum size, anything
   else that gets proposed, do not count at all), the second what minimum
   size to use (taking the median answer, and counting people who do not fill
   in something here but say 'all articles' to question 1 as voting for 0).
3. Some languages have taken over the 'Wikipedia is not a dictionary' attitude
   from the English, others tend to welcome very stubby articles with only
   a dictionary definition. Both ways of working are valid, but I do think
   that the 'dictionary' encyclopedias tend to appear 'too large' if we use
   article count - especially if we do it to all articles, or with a cutoff
   at only 6 or 10 or even 100 bytes. I would therefore like to propose to
   extend the existing statistics by _also_ making a list of the sizes by total
   article _size_ rather than total article _number_.

Andre Engels


from_name: Lee Daniel Crocker

subject: [Wikitech-l] "cleandb" script

body:
I added a script "cleandb.php" to the maintenance directory on the
source.  This is for use by the test suite, but I wanted to warn
anyone else working on the code not to take it lightly and try it
out for fun--it "cleans" the database as in wiping out its contents
completely.

--
Lee Daniel Crocker <lee at piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/>
"All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past,
are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified
for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC


from_name: Pedro M.V.

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia slo...o...o...w

body:
Was there any manteinence ???

Regards.

----- Original Message -----
From: "tarquin" <tarquin at planetunreal.com>
To: <wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org>
Sent: Monday, March 10, 2003 3:49 PM
Subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia slo...o...o...w

> MOnday afternoon GMT -- wikipedia seems awfully slow........
> I keep getting "connection refused" messages too :(
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
> http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


subject: [WikiEN-l] sysop vs sysop

body:
LOL, not very likely to happen!

Only good-natured, responsible people have become sysops so far.

The type of user likely to indulge in a bar brawl such as you described either abstains from requesting admin rights, or is vetoed by others.

We're actually a fairly well-behaved bunch here (a bunch of what, I won't say :)

Uncle Ed


from_name: Jay Bowks

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Offline reader

body:
From: "Magnus Manske" <magnus.manske at web.de>
> I just set up a little README about my wikipedia offline reader (V0.1
> alpha) at
> http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/WINOR
> I also installed the software and the complete German wikipedia (~26MB,
> no images, though) on an USB memory stick, so I can have it with me at
> all times ;-)

That is some serious dedication
to the wiki-way! Wiki on!
:-)
Jay B.


from_name: Anthere

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Death to the comma count!

body:
--- Oualmakran Youssef <youssefsan at altern.org> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> > In this particular case, Brion's motivation is
> that the French has
> > seen people adding commas for no good reason,
> right?  I absolutely do
> > NOT want the French to get the feeling that we're
> changing the rules
> > in order to penalize them.
>
> That is a job for an ambassador ;-) Unfortuantely, I
> am very busy now.
> Can anyone give me a summary ? I am willing to
> translate any message
> linked to the French Wikipedia and send it on the
> mailing list and
> our village pump.
>
> Does someone have any question about French
> Wikipedia ?
>
> Regards
>
> Youssef aka youssefsan

Rebonsoir Youssef

bah, j ai un peu de temps moi meme ces jours ci. Il n
y a pas de probleme. L'inqui?tude de Jimbo n'est pas
fond?e. Et l'auteur des derni?res insertions de
virgules entre commentaires a eu la g?n?rosit? de les
retirer pour me faire plaisir ! Cool ! je mettrais un
lien vers le vote dans m?ta au bistro...si quelqu'un
ne le fait pas avant :-)

__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Tax Center - forms, calculators, tips, more
http://taxes.yahoo.com/


from_name: Zoe

subject: [Wikipedia-l] New Bug: Newline within a Link

body:
This doesn't look like a bug to me.  You've added a newline character in the middle of the link.  Why would you expect it to create a link to an article which doesn't have a newline character in its name?
Zoe
 Karl Eichwalder <ke at gnu.franken.de> wrote:This is from my bug page http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/User%3AKeichwa:

Testing links
=============
Input
-----
Let's learn [[Italian
language|Italian]].

Output
------
Let's learn [[Italian language|Italian]].

Expected Output
---------------
Let's learn Italian.

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- cut here -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Any Emacs user out there? How to prevent Emacs from breaking lines in
"[[some words|"?

--
ke at suse.de (work) / keichwa at gmx.net (home): |
http://www.gnu.franken.de/ke/ | ,__o
Free Translation Project: | _-\_<,
http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/contrib/po/HTML/ | (*)/'(*)
_______________________________________________
Wikipedia-l mailing list
Wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l

---------------------------------
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Tax Center - forms, calculators, tips, and more
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from_name: Magnus Manske

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:
>>the comma count : 109062
>>for length > 0  : 116199 <-
>>for length > 500:  90991
>
>
> This is interesting.

What would be *really* useful is a "diff" between each two of these, so
we could see which ">0" articles don't contain a comma, so we can fix
them (well, I know how to do that, but SQL is not everyone's favourite;-)

We'd need to cache these diff pages, though, because of the full-text
search :-(

Magnus


from_name: Chuck Smith

subject: [Wikipedia-l] uh oh

body:
> I also installed the software and the complete
> German wikipedia (~26MB,
> no images, though) on an USB memory stick, so I can
> have it with me at
> all times ;-)

Uh oh.  Don't tell me there's finally a good reason to
get a Palm Pilot!  Um, that would work on a palm,
wouldn't it?

Chuck

=====
Learn Esperanto! - http://www.lernu.net/
Enciklopedio: http://eo.wikipedia.org/

__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Web Hosting - establish your business online
http://webhosting.yahoo.com


from_name: Tomos at Wikipedia

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Death to the comma count!

body:
I posted some explanations on the matter in Japanese village pump and
solicited opinions for those who prefer communicating in Japanese.

Here is an input from Gombe, (as I understood).

Gombe thinks that while it's a little disappointing that article count
doesn't really increase, counting comma is not totally unacceptable because
the main focus of the project is elsewhere anyway.

As an alternative, Gombe suggested counting more-than-two-paragraph could be
good.

----
By the way, for those who are interested, Japanese wikipedia is like this
right now:

3762 pages
296 counted as articles
distribution of file-sizes in article namespace
7 = 0 bytes
127 < 50bytes
270 < 100bytes
812 < 200
1132 < 300

_________________________________________________________________
Help STOP SPAM with the new MSN 8 and get 2 months FREE*
http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail


from_name: Fred Bauder

subject: [Wikitech-l] Mysql privileges

body:
Which mysql privileges should wikiuser have?

How about sysops?

Developers?


from_name: Karl Eichwalder

body:
This is from my bug page http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/User%3AKeichwa:

Testing links
=============
Input
-----
Let's learn [[Italian
language|Italian]].

Output
------
Let's learn [[Italian language|Italian]].

Expected Output
---------------
Let's learn Italian.

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- cut here -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Any Emacs user out there?  How to prevent Emacs from breaking lines in
"[[some words|"?

--
ke at suse.de (work) / keichwa at gmx.net (home):              |
http://www.gnu.franken.de/ke/                            |      ,__o
Free Translation Project:                                |    _-\_<,
http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/contrib/po/HTML/             |   (*)/'(*)


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] Mysql privileges

body:
On Mon, 2003-03-10 at 19:39, Fred Bauder wrote:
> Which mysql privileges should wikiuser have?

See buildusers.sql in the maintenance subdirectory.

> How about sysops?

SQL query access for sysops goes through the 'wikisql' user. Should be
in buildusers.sql as well... Basically, read-only access to all tables
except for the password and e-mail fields in the user table.

> Developers?

SQL query access for developers goes through wikiuser, same as the wiki
interface.

Note that the user 'wikiadmin' is used only by the maintenance scripts
(createdb.php, rebuildLinks.php etc) and, optionally, manual
maintenance.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Krzysztof P. Jasiutowicz

subject: [Wikitech-l] Search problem - Polish Wikipedia

body:
Hello all,

I have come across this error during this complex search
"Historia not informatyki"

   Wyst?pi? b??d sk?adni w zapytaniu do bazy danych. Mog?o to by?
   spowodowane przez z?e sformu?owanie zapytania (zobacz Przeszukiwanie
   Wikipedii) albo przez b??d w oprogramowaniu. Ostatnie, nieudane
   zapytanie to:

     SELECT cur_id,cur_namespace,cur_title,cur_text FROM cur,searchindex
     WHERE cur_id=si_page AND ( (MATCH (si_title) AGAINST ('historia'))
     NOT (MATCH (si_title) AGAINST ('informatyki')) ) AND
     (cur_namespace=0) LIMIT 0, 20

   wys?ane przez funkcj? "SearchEngine::showResults". MySQL zg?osi? b??d
   "1064: You have an error in your SQL syntax near '(MATCH (si_title)
   AGAINST ('informatyki')) ) AND (cur_namespace=0) LIMIT 0, 20' at line
   1".
"Historia and Polski" seems to work OK.

Can you fix it ?

Regards,
Kpjas.
--


subject: [Wikitech-l] Mysql privileges

body:
> (Fred Bauder <fredbaud at ctelco.net>):
> Which mysql privileges should wikiuser have?
>
> How about sysops?
>
> Developers?

The maintenance directory has a script "buildusers.sql" that
grants all the needed privileges to users "wikiuser", "wikiadmin",
and "wikisql".  Developer status is a function of the software and
isn't manifested as a different MySQL user.

Bascially, wikiuser can do anything but create and change the database,
and most of the normal wiki functions happen as that user.  Wikisql is
a restricted user that can only select; it is used for the direct SQL
query function of Sysops to limit potential damage.  Wikiadmin is not
used by the software at all, but is used by the build scripts and such.
It is meant for those with real access to the server.

--
Lee Daniel Crocker <lee at piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/>
"All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past,
are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified
for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC


body:
On Mon, Mar 10, 2003 at 09:40:10PM +0100, Krzysztof P. Jasiutowicz wrote:
>
> Hello all,
>
> I have come across this error during this complex search
> "Historia not informatyki"
>
>    Wyst?pi? b??d sk?adni w zapytaniu do bazy danych. Mog?o to by?
>    spowodowane przez z?e sformu?owanie zapytania (zobacz Przeszukiwanie
>    Wikipedii) albo przez b??d w oprogramowaniu. Ostatnie, nieudane
>    zapytanie to:
>
>      SELECT cur_id,cur_namespace,cur_title,cur_text FROM cur,searchindex
>      WHERE cur_id=si_page AND ( (MATCH (si_title) AGAINST ('historia'))
>      NOT (MATCH (si_title) AGAINST ('informatyki')) ) AND
>      (cur_namespace=0) LIMIT 0, 20
>
>    wys?ane przez funkcj? "SearchEngine::showResults". MySQL zg?osi? b??d
>    "1064: You have an error in your SQL syntax near '(MATCH (si_title)
>    AGAINST ('informatyki')) ) AND (cur_namespace=0) LIMIT 0, 20' at line
>    1".
> "Historia and Polski" seems to work OK.
>
> Can you fix it ?

Is this really a bug?

"Historia and not informatyki" should work.

Regards,

jeluf


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Offline reader

body:
I just set up a little README about my wikipedia offline reader (V0.1
alpha) at
	http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/WINOR

I also installed the software and the complete German wikipedia (~26MB,
no images, though) on an USB memory stick, so I can have it with me at
all times ;-)

Magnus


from_name: Guillaume Blanchard

subject: [Wikitech-l] Footnotes?

body:
> Sheldon Rampton wrote:
>
> > I think it would be nice if the Wiki syntax could facilitate
> > footnoting of articles.
>
> I don't think footnotes are suitable for webpages.
> Unlike paper, the user has to travel (potentially) a long way for
> related information.
> I have been trying to reintegrate them into the text where I see them in
> articles -- I suggest we try and write without them

It can be some time useful to make a sentence/paragraph more easy to read
and redirect the reader to a more detailed paragraph (for exemple in the
article introduction).

Aoineko


from_name: Tony Wilson

subject: [WikiEN-l] Susan Mason is doing OK

body:
I pleaded to have Vera Cruz banned. She was driving me and a whole
stack of other people absolutely crazy.

But Susan Mason is doing OK. It's still early days and she's looked at
that invisible line a couple of times, but not crossed it. She's
treating people with a lot more respect and not getting into stupid
edit wars. You can say "no" to her, and if you say it in a reasoned and
respectful way, she accepts it.

Please people, let's treat *her* with respect. She is making a real and
I believe genuine efffort to start afresh, to be a useful member of
this community. I'll be the the loudest singer in the chorus calling
for a final and permanent banning if she gets up to her old bad ways -
you can look back through some of my old posts and be quite sure of
that - but right now she is trying hard to be good. Let's not make it
impossible for her, folks. Let's just pretend we don't know who she
really is. If *she* can toe the line (as she has done with pretty fair
success these last few weeks), then *we* can make the effort to avoid
personal comments and stay off her back.

It's early days but she's doing OK.


from_name: Erik Moeller

body:
> This seems like a good place for us to have an experiment in voting,
> since it's a relatively minor issue, since there are a variety of
> opinions, etc.

Sure, I'll put something on meta tomorrow. However, without proper
software support (i.e. a simple voting interface) the process of
collecting votes will always be cumbersome and prone to error.

Regards,

Erik


subject: [WikiEN-l] a more "confident" username

body:
Daniel-
>   In page deletion,  a sysop decides that a page
> is worthless and that they don't want it there.  The sysop deletes the page
> permenantly and then all records of the page are deleted from the server.
> An example of this is the contravercial [[Fuck you]] page.

Wrong.

1) Deletion is *not* permanent. When a page is deleted, it can still be
restored using the undelete function.

2) Sysops only delete pages on their own determination in cases of
*obvious* nonsense (AKA "crapflooding"). Whenever there is even a hint of
doubt, the page "Wikipedia:Votes for deletion" must be used instead, where
pages to be deleted are listed and picked by sysops (you should not delete
a page you have added yourself).

A sysop really does not have much room to decide "that a page is worthless
and that they don't want it there". Rather, he is more or less a servant
of non-sysop users who want certain actions which are a bit harder to
revert than simple editing to be taken. Sysops are *not* editors.

Understanding this is really essential to being a sysop. Do you see how a
quiz can be useful now?

Regards,

Erik


from_name: Jimmy Wales

body:
Jens Frank wrote:
> > "Historia and Polski" seems to work OK.
> >
> > Can you fix it ?
>
> Is this really a bug?
>
> "Historia and not informatyki" should work.

I think in one sense it is not a bug (not OUR bug anyway) but in
another sense it is.  We're just passing a query to SQL here, and it
does what it does.  It would be nice (in a perfect world) if we did
what the user expected here, rather than astonishing them in this way.

I'm not sure how easy it is to fix, though, without writing a more
complicated search parser, which might not be a good use of time right
now.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Cliches

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:
> > Nope, debian linux with KDE.
>
> AltGr+apostrophe, e

What is 'AltGr'?  Is that the one naive people like me call "the
Windows key"?

--Jimbo


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: a more "confident" username

in_reply_to: <oprlt9juojk4g8ki@news.gmane.org>; from dramatic@xtra.co.nz on Tue, Mar 11, 2003 at 10:48:56AM +1300

body:
Richard Grevers wrote:
> Daniel, I have posted this a couple of times previously, and not yet
> been challenged on it: I.P.  blocking is ineffective against dial up
> users and, to a lesser extent, broadband users. Dial up users are
> assigned a new IP No. from their I SP's pool each time they
> reconnect, and seldom receive the same number twice. As a broadband
> user, I can change my IP number simply by cycling up the power on my
> router.

Well, you're right to an extent, but we have found that in most cases
of simple drive-by vandalism, it works just fine.  Most people aren't
so motivated as to disconnect/reconnect just to keep being jerks, esp.
knowing that someone will just block them again quickly.

>  An IP block should only be used if there is a pattern of abuse from
> the same IP No. over a couple of days or longer. Otherwise there is
> the risk of blocking innocent users dialing up from the same
> Internet provider.

Only editing is affected, not reading, and the chances of some
innocent person unluckily getting a banned *single ip* just when they
happen to want to edit wikipedia is pretty low.  It *is* a concern,
mind you, but considering the odds -- how many dynamic ips are there,
versus how many people edit wikipedia in a way -- it's less of a
concern than letting vandals waste too much of our time.

We could end all vandalism by requiring everyone to sign in, and
requiring everyone to apply for permission to edit.  We could be
Nupedia, with onerous-sounding participation requirements.  And we
could have 12 articles.  :-( That's the tradeoff that we face: either
deal with vandals, or get rid of vandals and lose the incredible value
of openness.

> Of course, it is possible that Wikipedia has a higher than usual
> proportion of users who have a fixed IP numbers because they are
> connecting from universities or similar institutions.

That's probably true.

--Jimbo


subject: [WikiEN-l] sysop vs sysop

body:
Christopher Mahan wrote:
> two sysops go on an edit war. against each other. They lock the page,
> to no avail because the other can still edit it. Then one bans the
> other other's IP. The other retaliates by blocking the account. The
> last then goes to Jimbo (hard to stop email) and both get
> permantently banned?

Fun to contemplate but pretty unlikely.  I would certainly pull sysop
privileges because one of the fundamental rules of the sysop
priesthood is "never in a fight".  Another is "don't ban signed in
users without yet another agonizing and incredibly annoying discussion
on the mailing list in which Jimbo waits too long to decide".

I try hard to send out a vibe of: co-operation, not competition.  A
vibe of production, not destruction.  A vibe of relaxation and fun,
not argumentation.  Most of the sysops are in full agreemet with that.

--Jimbo


subject: [WikiEN-l] sysop vs sysop

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:
> This is only possible in the case of a very few people who have login
> access to the server for development and maintenance. In general, sysops
> cannot identify the IP address of a logged-in user, nor block a user
> account.

And woe be unto us if people who have the root password get locked
into this kind of battle of the gods.  :-)

Well, when Brion and Lee get into a flamewar, I'll be impressed.

--Jimbo


subject: [WikiEN-l] a more "confident" username

body:
Toby Bartels wrote:
> (or perhaps better, a summary course of instruction).
>
> Although I don't see that LittleDan needs to be singled out for it.

I think Toby is right.  We probably should have a sysop constitution
page which emphasizes the purely technical nature of it, and
explaining both to users and to new sysops what the limitations are,
etc.

--Jimbo


in_reply_to: <8hd9F1XxpVB@erik_moeller>; from erik_moeller@gmx.de on Tue, Mar 11, 2003 at 12:48:00AM +0100

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:
> Sure, I'll put something on meta tomorrow. However, without proper
> software support (i.e. a simple voting interface) the process of
> collecting votes will always be cumbersome and prone to error.

Great!  I agree.  I figure that if we set up a good voting system
(Condorcet or similar) and this particular case works out o.k., we can
learn from the process and improve it as we go along.

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikitech-l] Mysql privileges

in_reply_to: <BA92A885.F0E%fredbaud@ctelco.net>; from fredbaud@ctelco.net on Mon, Mar 10, 2003 at 08:39:33PM -0700

body:
Hey, Fred, I hope you'll keep some notes, however sketchy, on
how you're getting all this done, and then if those notes were on
the meta.wikipedia.com, other people could add/edit them over time,
to help other people install the software.

Fred Bauder wrote:

> Which mysql privileges should wikiuser have?
>
> How about sysops?
>
> Developers?
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikipedia.org
> http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l


subject: [Wikitech-l] Mysql privileges

in_reply_to: <BA933B70.F26%fredbaud@ctelco.net>; from fredbaud@ctelco.net on Tue, Mar 11, 2003 at 07:06:25AM -0700

body:
Well, if you can handle the embarassment, you're the perfect guy for
this.  :-) There's a lot of stuff that developers forget that other
people don't have as background knowledge.  Coming in "fresh" you have
an important perspective.

Fred Bauder wrote:

> Well, my experience is interesting. I am using space from a web-hosting
> service, cheap but with minimal support (this can get nasty when you don't
> have root access to the server; you have to not only figure out what to do
> but beg someone else to do it). I did invest in some books which have been
> illuminating.
>
> PHP & MySQL for Dummies and Build Your Own Database Driven Website Using PHP
> & MySQL.
>
> I'll try to get something onto meta (I don't know how much embarrassment I
> can stand though).
>
> Fred
>
> > From: Jimmy Wales <jwales at bomis.com>
> > Reply-To: wikitech-l at wikipedia.org
> > Date: Tue, 11 Mar 2003 05:37:36 -0800
> > To: wikitech-l at wikipedia.org
> > Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] Mysql privileges
> >
> > Hey, Fred, I hope you'll keep some notes, however sketchy, on
> > how you're getting all this done, and then if those notes were on
> > the meta.wikipedia.com, other people could add/edit them over time,
> > to help other people install the software.
> >
> > Fred Bauder wrote:
> >
> >> Which mysql privileges should wikiuser have?
> >>
> >> How about sysops?
> >>
> >> Developers?
> >>
> >> _______________________________________________
> >> Wikitech-l mailing list
> >> Wikitech-l at wikipedia.org
> >> http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
> > _______________________________________________
> > Wikitech-l mailing list
> > Wikitech-l at wikipedia.org
> > http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikipedia.org
> http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l


subject: [Wikitech-l] Mysql privileges

body:
Well, my experience is interesting. I am using space from a web-hosting
service, cheap but with minimal support (this can get nasty when you don't
have root access to the server; you have to not only figure out what to do
but beg someone else to do it). I did invest in some books which have been
illuminating.

PHP & MySQL for Dummies and Build Your Own Database Driven Website Using PHP
& MySQL.

I'll try to get something onto meta (I don't know how much embarrassment I
can stand though).

Fred

> From: Jimmy Wales <jwales at bomis.com>
> Reply-To: wikitech-l at wikipedia.org
> Date: Tue, 11 Mar 2003 05:37:36 -0800
> To: wikitech-l at wikipedia.org
> Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] Mysql privileges
>
> Hey, Fred, I hope you'll keep some notes, however sketchy, on
> how you're getting all this done, and then if those notes were on
> the meta.wikipedia.com, other people could add/edit them over time,
> to help other people install the software.
>
> Fred Bauder wrote:
>
>> Which mysql privileges should wikiuser have?
>>
>> How about sysops?
>>
>> Developers?
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Wikitech-l mailing list
>> Wikitech-l at wikipedia.org
>> http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikipedia.org
> http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l


subject: [Wikitech-l] How to turn off bot access

body:
How does one disable editing by bots such as the one RamMan used?

Fred


from_name: Richard Grevers

body:
On Sun, 09 Mar 2003 22:24:12 +0100, Youandme
<wikipedia at wp.pl> wrote:

> On 9 Mar 2003 at 21:54, Youandme wrote:
>
>> Count the total length of all the the pages (uncompressed wiki!)
>> then divide it by
>> 1) the number of articles
>> or
>> 2) 1800 (DTP's standard length of A4 page in latin chars)
>
> Opss... forget about the second one as it's just scaling
> of the total length.
>
But it would give an equivalence for the amount of text compared to a
traditional encyclopedia. The average Britannica page has more than 1800
chars, I'd wager!

--
Richard Grevers


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Re: Death to the comma count!

body:
On Mon, 10 Mar 2003 04:53:27 -0800, Jimmy Wales
<jwales at bomis.com> wrote:

>
> How about we wait a bit longer than that, but set a good deadline.
>

March 17th seems to be popular for deadlines at present!

--
Richard Grevers


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [Wikitech-l] Mysql privileges

body:
>
>
>Fred Bauder wrote:
>
>>Well, my experience is interesting. I am using space from a web-hosting
>>service, cheap but with minimal support (this can get nasty when you don't
>>have root access to the server; you have to not only figure out what to do
>>but beg someone else to do it). I did invest in some books which have been
>>illuminating.
>>
The most frustrating message you can get when you're trying to solve a
problem on a stand-alone home computer is "See system administrator." :-)

Ec


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Cliches

body:
On Mon, 10 Mar 2003 15:39:40 -0500, Daniel Ehrenberg
<name12323 at hotmail.com> wrote:

> I've noticed that on the Internet it is fairly hard to look up cliches.
> I've only found two websites that have lists of cliches, but they only
> have one sentence about each cliche.  I created the entry [[List of
> cliches]], but maybe there should be a different wikipedia for cliches.
> Am I just crazy?
>
> On a related note, how do you make a e with an accent mark?
>
Are you on a windows box Daniel? Start|Program Files|Accessories|Character
Map

--
Richard Grevers


from_name: koyaanis qatsi

subject: [WikiEN-l] a more "confident" username

body:
Erik writes:
> A sysop really does not have much room to
> decide "that a page is worthless and that
> they don't want it there". Rather, he is more
> or less a  servant of non-sysop users who want
> certain actions which are a bit harder to
> revert than simple editing to be taken. Sysops
> are *not* editors.
>
> Understanding this is really essential to
> being a sysop. Do you see how a quiz can be
> useful now?

Erik, please don't continue singling out LittleDan for
special schooling--there's no reason to condescend to
him because he's young, unless you're hoping to
embarass people watching.  If that's your goal, I'll
tell you that you've succeeded in at least one case.
At any rate I think most of us would agree that
LittleDan has proven both humble & patient, so perhaps
you could continue quizzing him in private, if you
must continue quizzing him.

best,

kq

__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Web Hosting - establish your business online
http://webhosting.yahoo.com


subject: [Wikitech-l] How to turn off bot access

body:
One of the great and amazing discoveries of wikipedia is that while
there are a few jerks out there of course, the general population of
the Internet as a whole is not filled with rabid savages looking to
wreck websites.

Brion blocks abusive bots from time to time, but it's not often a big
problem.  I'd say for a smaller site just starting out, there's almost
no chance of a bot doing anything.

--Jimbo


from_name: Takuya Murata

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Death to the comma count!

body:
>I am sorry Takuya but I didnot understand what you
>meant there...
>Do you mean we should stop to try to set a common
>policy all together, and just all of us go our own
>way, with policy defined on each wiki separatly ? This
>could cause trouble in terms of software development
>if only.

Sorry. I see what I mean was not so clear. Some policities
such as NPOV are inalienable. We are buliding a sole
international, multilingual encyclopedia not the collection
of encyclopedias in different languges.

>Sure.
>We can also claim we don't have exactly the same goals
>as they were defined on the english wiki; we can claim
>we don't use the same means; we can claim the
>community doesnot function the same way. We can claim
>each wikipedia has a set of individual references. We
>may.
>But, still, we share common software, that requires
>common agreement on some points.

No, the goal should be the same, that is, building free
encylopedia, which is under GFDL and edited by everyone.

I have come to see some people fear allowing more automity
might undermine the coherence in the whole project of
wikipedia. I totally agree with that.

What I don't like is that it seems to me non-English edition
tends to replicate the English edition. Non-english editions
should not be translation version of English edition. Comma
is a good example that we simply applied English system to
Japanese edition. And worse, the problem remains unsolved
for long time. Something wrong. No?

Oh, I got. Maybe first we should write a conrete mission
statement writtin in every language we support. It should
not be a translation from mission statement in en wikipedia
but multilingual one. Or is there any already? Writing new
one should not be a snap because there is already a draft.

> Now there is you
>and Aoineko on the Japanese to speak up, we are quite
>a bunch from the french, germans and polish are quite
>present also; there's Elian and Giskart, and others...

Please don't include me. I rather write an article, which is
much more fun.

And there is almost none of Chinese, Korean and never talked
about Arabic and so on.

>You know...guy's stuff...car race...naked women (or
>men...no offense meant) ...football...beers...that's
>is not something I understand very well...;-)

Yeah, I understand while some don't care at all, some does
much. This is a personal preference rather than debatable
subject.


from_name: Anthere

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Death to the comma count!

body:
--- Takuya Murata <takusi at manjiro.net> wrote:
> >I am sorry Takuya but I didnot understand what you
> >meant there...
> Sorry. I see what I mean was not so clear. Some
> policities
> such as NPOV are inalienable. We are buliding a sole
>
> international, multilingual encyclopedia not the
> collection
> of encyclopedias in different languges.
>
> >Sure.
> >We can also claim we don't have exactly the same
> goals
> >as they were defined on the english wiki; we can
> claim
> >we don't use the same means; we can claim the
> >community doesnot function the same way. We can
> claim
> >each wikipedia has a set of individual references.
> We
> >may.
> >But, still, we share common software, that requires
> >common agreement on some points.
>
> No, the goal should be the same, that is, building
> free
> encylopedia, which is under GFDL and edited by
> everyone.

Good evening Takuya

You are right that ideally all wikipedias should
respect about three things, free (that we french
divide in "gratuit" (you don't pay) anad "libre" (no
copyright)), neutral and built in cooperation.

Well....even this goal is tough too reach...I wish you
success on the japanese wiki :-)

> I have come to see some people fear allowing more
> automity
> might undermine the coherence in the whole project
> of
> wikipedia. I totally agree with that.
>
> What I don't like is that it seems to me non-English
> edition
> tends to replicate the English edition. Non-english
> editions
> should not be translation version of English
> edition. Comma
> is a good example that we simply applied English
> system to
> Japanese edition. And worse, the problem remains
> unsolved
> for long time. Something wrong. No?

Very true of course.
You'll notice later maybe that though some articles in
japanese are translation from english, very few
english articles will be translated from japanese...
I don't think any should be mere translations. But
both should be strongly related. After all, in the
goal of complete coverage of a topic, both should be
quite similar in terms of information content. But not
necessarily so in terms of "precision" and lay out (I
mean here that it doesnot have to be displayed in the
same way, it must adapt to each type of user).
It would be great that some bilingual editors take the
time to enrich both articles with things taken from
the other.

> Oh, I got. Maybe first we should write a conrete
> mission
> statement writtin in every language we support. It
> should
> not be a translation from mission statement in en
> wikipedia
> but multilingual one. Or is there any already?
> Writing new
> one should not be a snap because there is already a
> draft.

It is a very good idea.
I am not so sure about the multilingal
statement...cause all that unite us is pretty
well-known from everyone (neutrality...)

But it would be very interesting that all languages
take care to point out at what describes their
wikipedia. It is evident there will be some
differences, and maybe a statement of what is
important to each (a mission statement) would help to
understand our differences and to take them more into
account.
I know for example that the english wiki doesnot want
to be a dictionary; but as Tarquin said one day, in
french, dictionary and encyclopedia are maybe more
strongly related than in english, so many of us say
our "mission" is to build a tool which will be an
encyclopedia AND a dictionary (in different
namespaces, but at the same place). Aoineko disagrees
with wiktionary being separated from wikipedia for
example. That means that for Aoineko (and others), the
french wikipedia could also be a dictionary...

These differences all define us, but they should not
lead all of us to disagree too strongly, and if there
was somewhere an article for each wikipedia - in its
own language - that would say "here, we believe that
wikipedia is...", it would help to negociate better
and defend better what is important for each of us.

Do you think this is coherent with what you think ?

<personal>Thanks Athymik for hunting the hidden
commas...are they many more still ? incredible, there
was even one hidden in the home page ???</personal>

> > Now there is you
> >and Aoineko on the Japanese to speak up, we are
> quite
> >a bunch from the french, germans and polish are
> quite
> >present also; there's Elian and Giskart, and
> others...
>
> Please don't include me. I rather write an article,
> which is
> much more fun.

oh, depends....
but if you are here on the mailing list, you are
included...

> And there is almost none of Chinese, Korean and
> never talked
> about Arabic and so on.

Be patient, that will probably come
I hope

Anthere

__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Web Hosting - establish your business online
http://webhosting.yahoo.com


body:
On Mon, 10 Mar 2003 15:55:03 -0500, Daniel Ehrenberg
<name12323 at hotmail.com> wrote:

>> please describe in your own words how you think the current process of
>> page deletion, page protection and IP banning works. If you name the
>> right
>> pages and describe the process correctly, I have no objections to making
>> you a sysop.
>
> Y'know, this isn't that good a test because I could have just looked it
> up.  Anyway, IP banning keeps vandals out of wikipedia.  When one person
> from a consistant IP address keeps vandalizing pages, his IP address is
> banned by a sysop.
Daniel, I  have posted this a couple of times previously, and not yet  been
challenged on it:   I.P.  blocking is  ineffective against dial up users
and, to a lesser extent, broadband users. Dial up users are assigned a new
IP No. from their I SP's  pool each time they reconnect, and seldom receive
the same number twice. As a broadband user, I can change my IP number
simply by cycling up the power on my router.

 An IP block should only be used if there is a pattern of abuse from the
same IP No. over a couple of days or longer. Otherwise there is the risk of
blocking innocent users dialing up from the same Internet provider.

Of course, it is possible that Wikipedia has a higher than usual proportion
of users who have a fixed IP numbers because they are connecting from
universities or similar institutions.
--
Richard Grevers


from_name: Sheldon Rampton

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Footnotes?

body:
Tarquin wrote:

>I don't think footnotes are suitable for webpages.
>Unlike paper, the user has to travel (potentially) a long way for
>related information.
>I have been trying to reintegrate them into the text where I see them in
>articles -- I suggest we try and write without them

I have to disagree. Footnotes add an additional layer of difficulty
in both paper and web formats, but sometimes they're necessary.

As for how far the user has to go, let me clarify my language a bit.
"Footnotes" refer to the notes that appear at the bottom of the same
page on which a footnote reference appears. "End notes" refer to
notes that appear at the bottom of an entire article. Both notating
schemes are used in academic and other paper-based publishing
contexts, but the only one that could really be used on web pages
would be the "end note" scheme, and that's actually what I had in
mind. Instead of "footnotes," I should have written "end notes." Once
that point is clarified, I think it's clear that users wouldn't have
to travel any further to find the end notes in a Wikipedia article
than the readers who look up end notes in a book or scientific
journal.

The reason for using footnotes and end notes is precisely so that
readers who *don't* want to read the minutiae of documentation can
skip past it, while enabling others to find that information if they
so choose. This isn't necessary for all articles, but it can be a big
help when writing about complex or controversial topics. For complex
topics, it enables the writer to "hide" some of the complexity
without ignoring it. For controversial topics, it enables the writer
to provide meticulous documentation in support of assertions that
readers might question, without bogging down the text.

I'm not saying that anyone here *has* to use end notes, just that
they should be *able* to do so if they think it's appropriate.
--
--------------------------------
|  Sheldon Rampton
|  Editor, PR Watch (www.prwatch.org)
|  Author of books including:
|     Friends In Deed: The Story of US-Nicaragua Sister Cities
|     Toxic Sludge Is Good For You
|     Mad Cow USA
|     Trust Us, We're Experts
--------------------------------


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia slo...o...o...w

body:
Well, for once it doesn't seem to be the database! It's hardly being
used. Slowdown seems to be on the Apache end; I'm not sure where, but it
looks like non-php pages are coming through slow as well at times (or
maybe that's just my modem).

I've tried reverting my bugfix from the other day -- didn't help. I
tried reenabling the APC cache -- didn't help. Put miser mode on the
german wiki, hasn't helped. I've tried blocking off some more spiders
just to lighten up traffic -- hasn't helped. Restarted apache a few
times for fun, hasn't helped.

CPU load average is floating in 4-6 range (*very* low for this time of
day.) Memory usage looks typical.

I hafta go to work now...

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Vicki Rosenzweig

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Death to the comma count!

body:
At 10:29 AM 3/11/03 -0600, Takuya Murata wrote

>Sorry. I see what I mean was not so clear. Some policities
>such as NPOV are inalienable. We are buliding a sole
>international, multilingual encyclopedia not the collection
>of encyclopedias in different languges.
>
> >Sure.
> >We can also claim we don't have exactly the same goals
> >as they were defined on the english wiki; we can claim
> >we don't use the same means; we can claim the
> >community doesnot function the same way. We can claim
> >each wikipedia has a set of individual references. We
> >may.
> >But, still, we share common software, that requires
> >common agreement on some points.
>
>No, the goal should be the same, that is, building free
>encylopedia, which is under GFDL and edited by everyone.
>
>I have come to see some people fear allowing more automity
>might undermine the coherence in the whole project of
>wikipedia. I totally agree with that.
>
>What I don't like is that it seems to me non-English edition
>tends to replicate the English edition. Non-english editions
>should not be translation version of English edition. Comma
>is a good example that we simply applied English system to
>Japanese edition. And worse, the problem remains unsolved
>for long time. Something wrong. No?

Agreed. The interlanguage links should be a tool, not a restriction.
If someone who knows Japanese is reading an article on the English
wikipedia and sees a link to the Japanese one, they can follow it.
But neither needs to be a translation of the other. There's no rule
against translating, of course, if a contributor finds it useful, but
the details may well differ, and of course the structure. Comma
count is an excellent example.

--
Vicki Rosenzweig
vr at redbird.org
http://www.redbird.org


from_name: tarquin

subject: [Wikitech-l] Footnotes?

body:
Guillaume Blanchard wrote:

>
>Yesss... anchors can solve the problem but we are not liable enough to have
>the right to use this feature ;o)
>
>
>
aaarg!
anchors are bad.

if you need to drop into the middle of an article then   you have two
articles that ought to be split.

could we drop it?

>
>


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: what's going on with wikipedia ?

body:
--- Lee Daniel Crocker <lee at piclab.com> wrote:
> > (Giskart <giskart at wikipedia.be>):
> > Tomasz Wegrzanowski <taw at users.sourceforge.net>
> > wrote in news:20030311170503.GA20326 at tavaiah:
> >
> > > it's really slow again today
>
> It appears we're being Googled this morning.
> Googlebot is very
> well-behaved, and I'm not sure if that's the problem
> or not, but
> I suspect it might be, especially since it doesn't
> really know
> that all the international wikis are on one server,
> so while it's
> being very nice to each of them, it might be
> collectively bogging
> them down.  Let's see if it clears up when Google is
> done; if not,
> then we know something else is going on.

ah !!! That explain this. I wondered why the french
wiki was sure slow, but workable, while the english
was a "pot au noir"

If google is working, I want the french wiki to be
slow too ! Could somebody pass the word to google
please ?

__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Web Hosting - establish your business online
http://webhosting.yahoo.com


body:
On Tue, 11 Mar 2003, Lee Daniel Crocker wrote:
> It appears we're being Googled this morning.  Googlebot is very
> well-behaved, and I'm not sure if that's the problem or not, but

Googlebot is fairly light (several seconds to 30 seconds between requests,
and follows our robots.txt restrictions - its getting articles, not
millions of diffs or contribs pages. It's only a fraction of total pages
being served). I have written them an e-mail asking if it's possible to
restrict the spidering to off-peak hours, though.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Chas Brown

subject: [WikiEN-l] Best approach for dealing with... er... cranks?

body:
How do those on list suggest dealing with contributors like FWappler?

http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Fwappler

See our current game of ping-pong:

http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Curve

He's polite, he's not a vandal, but (for those not mathematically
minded) he's really not contributing here. Although he's using
mathematical language, the result is basically gibberish.

Two thoughts come to mind:

(1) Ever terser reverts.
(2) Wait a few days, and ''then'' revert.

I figure if I do (2), he'll lose focus and play somewhere else; but
there's certainly no guarantee. In the meantime, we have incorrect
material in the 'pedia. Furthermore, it seems to "spread"; for example,
I notice that's he's also added incorrect material to the similar topic

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

which I hesitate to revert lest it stimulate ''another'' flurry of
gibberish.

Any advice?

Cheers - Chas


from_name: Toby Bartels

subject: [Wikitech-l] Anchors (Was: Footnotes?)

body:
tarquin wrote:

>aaarg!
>anchors are bad.

>if you need to drop into the middle of an article then you have two
>articles that ought to be split.

Absolutely.  Thus we shouldn't support [[foo#bar]].
(These would be impossible to maintain anyway,
since people would change the names of anchors in [[foo]]).

OTOH, if you need to move around in a single article,
then this doesn't follow.  Thus we could support [[#bar]].
(And maintenance would be confined to a single article's edits.)

>could we drop it?

If there keep being people that want anchors, then apparently not.
You may find the conclusion crystal-clear and flagrantly obvious,
but others -- who have had this conversation with you before -- don't.
So asking to drop it won't convince them (but might insult them).

-- Toby


from_name: Stevertigo

subject: [Wikipedia-l] A plea

body:
> Please folks, if you want to start a new thread, don't do so by replying
to
> a random message and deleting the previous subject and contents. When you
> do this, the message still contains headers referencing which messages it
> is a child of, and those of us with proper threading mail/news clients see
> the mutant message in an existing thread on a totally different topic.
>
> There has been a real rash of this in the past couple of days.

Its been in part, i think due to the nature of conversations threading off
into other topics... 'Comma count' mutated into a discussion about
democratic software on the wikipedia.... -SV


subject: [WikiEN-l] Cliches

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:

>Toby Bartels wrote:

>>Why is this a good idea?  (I claim that it is on [[en:]].)

>Well, it's a bad idea at present because it breaks our search engine. A
>directly input e-acute will be searchable, while é is not.

Blast!

I guess this means that I'll be inputting them directly on most pages,
but using HTML entities on pages like [[Talk:Main Page]],
which are not so much searched for but frequently edited by random users.

-- Toby


in_reply_to: <3E6E480C.8CD4242A@cbrownsystems.com>; from cbrown@cbrownsystems.com on Tue, Mar 11, 2003 at 12:33:16PM -0800

body:
I have no advice.  The curve article talk page is mostly over my head
right now.  (I'm more intelligent in the mornings, though, so I'll
clear my head and look at it then.)

I think his change to the line article, whether true or not, made it
too specialized.  His information could be added (if true) as a more
techincal exposition, but the stuff that was there should have
remained.

Chas Brown wrote:

>
> How do those on list suggest dealing with contributors like FWappler?
>
> http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Fwappler
>
> See our current game of ping-pong:
>
> http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Curve
>
> He's polite, he's not a vandal, but (for those not mathematically
> minded) he's really not contributing here. Although he's using
> mathematical language, the result is basically gibberish.
>
> Two thoughts come to mind:
>
> (1) Ever terser reverts.
> (2) Wait a few days, and ''then'' revert.
>
> I figure if I do (2), he'll lose focus and play somewhere else; but
> there's certainly no guarantee. In the meantime, we have incorrect
> material in the 'pedia. Furthermore, it seems to "spread"; for example,
> I notice that's he's also added incorrect material to the similar topic
>
> http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line
>
> which I hesitate to revert lest it stimulate ''another'' flurry of
> gibberish.
>
> Any advice?
>
> Cheers - Chas
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at wikipedia.org
> http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l


subject: [Wikitech-l] Footnotes?

body:
Tarquin wrote:

>please give an example of a specific article which would be improved
>with anchors

Any article which refers to other sections of itself would be so improved
under the proposal to support only [[#bar]] and interpret
== bar == as
bar
 instead of
bar
.

Since the only example so far is from [[pl:]], which maybe you don't read,
see [[Real number]] for another.  (The references are in the section
"The complete ordered field", to the sections Axioms and Completeness.)
You might want to break up [[Real number]] (I'd break off the constructions),
but you'd hardly break off Axioms and Completeness into separate articles.
You might rewrite "The complete ordered field" to avoid the references,
but there's no need to -- supporting [[#bar]] gives *options*.

-- Toby


body:
> Any Emacs user out there?  How to prevent Emacs from breaking lines in
> "[[some words|"?

Emacs is not a good text editor, it is a good code editor. It doesn't even
have built-in support for soft line wrapping, i.e. word wrapping at the
window edge. You can wrap *characters* at the window edge using
AutoFillMode, but to wrap words properly you need an ugly hack such as
longlines.el (check CategoryFilling on emacswiki.org). Even the built in
editor of my mail client is better than that.

Or you could use a decent *text* editor like nedit, scite or gvim.

I long for the day when Unix fetishists will realize that much of their
software is broken for real world tasks.

Regards,

Erik


from_name: Jason Williams

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Cliches

body:
On Tue, Mar 11, 2003 at 05:11:43AM -0800, Jimmy Wales wrote:
> Brion Vibber wrote:
> > > Nope, debian linux with KDE.
> >
> > AltGr+apostrophe, e
>
> What is 'AltGr'?  Is that the one naive people like me call "the
> Windows key"?

The right-hand Alt key.

--

jason at jasonandali.org.uk    http://www.jasonandali.org.uk/jason/


from_name: Lee Daniel Crocker

body:
> (Giskart <giskart at wikipedia.be>):
> Tomasz Wegrzanowski <taw at users.sourceforge.net>
> wrote in news:20030311170503.GA20326 at tavaiah:
>
> > it's really slow again today

It appears we're being Googled this morning.  Googlebot is very
well-behaved, and I'm not sure if that's the problem or not, but
I suspect it might be, especially since it doesn't really know
that all the international wikis are on one server, so while it's
being very nice to each of them, it might be collectively bogging
them down.  Let's see if it clears up when Google is done; if not,
then we know something else is going on.

--
Lee Daniel Crocker <lee at piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/>
"All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past,
are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified
for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC


from_name: Brion Vibber

body:
On Tue, 11 Mar 2003, Brion Vibber wrote:
> Googlebot is fairly light (several seconds to 30 seconds between requests,
> and follows our robots.txt restrictions - its getting articles, not
> millions of diffs or contribs pages. It's only a fraction of total pages
> being served). I have written them an e-mail asking if it's possible to
> restrict the spidering to off-peak hours, though.

I should point out too that I tried barring googlebot (by 403 Forbidden
reponses) for the last ten minutes or so. No improvement in response time,
so I've restored access.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Andre Engels

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Death to the comma count!

body:
On Mon, 10 Mar 2003, Anthere wrote:

>
> --- Andre Engels <engels at uni-koblenz.de> wrote:
> > On Mon, 10 Mar 2003, Jimmy Wales wrote:
> >
> > > Tomos at Wikipedia wrote:
> > > > 2. English-centrism
> > >
> > > I would say that if at all possible, within the
> > parameters of trying
> > > to come up with a better and more reasonable
> > counting system, that any
> > > changes should benefit (if possible!) the
> > non-English wikipedias more
> > > than the English wikipedia.
> >
> > I disagree. We should try to get the greatest
> > benefit for ALL Wikipedias.
> > What we should try to avoid is changes that benefit
> > the English one but
> > are disadvantageous to (some of) the others, but if
> > we have to options, one
> > of which benefits the English a lot and the others
> > somewhat, and the other
> > the English a little bit and the others somewhat,
> > then the first one is
> > preferable.
>
> I disagree. The option 1 is more often chosen because
> of the weight of people, so that is a fact, but I see
> not why it would be the *best* option. It might be the
> best choice for english, not for others. I am not even
> sure it is the best choice at all.

If it's better for English, and as good for the others, it's better
in my opinion. I consider that self-evident. Or would you prefer that
we intentionally cripple the English Wikipedia to get more people at
the other languages?

Andre Engels


body:
It may or may nor have helped, but I've pushed the max_connections setting
for Apache up from 100 to 240, close to MySQL's setting of 250 connections
(a few spare are nice). This has pushed the load average up to 15-20
(rather than 4-6), but in my very unscientific testing (click a bunch
of links and see how it looks) seems to have improved responsiveness.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Tomasz Wegrzanowski

subject: [Wikitech-l] Footnotes?

body:
On Tue, Mar 11, 2003 at 09:25:34PM +0900, Guillaume Blanchard wrote:
> > >Yesss... anchors can solve the problem but we are not liable enough to
> have
> > >the right to use this feature ;o)
> > >
> > aaarg!
> > anchors are bad.
> >
> > if you need to drop into the middle of an article then   you have two
> > articles that ought to be split.
> >
> > could we drop it?
>
> I don't think split article is always the solution ;o)
> I agree only in the case of very long article.
> Split article make it less readable, less printable and over all make it
> more longer to load for slow connection.
> Imho say "anchors are bad" is the better way to answer the Tomasz problem.
> I'm very disappointed that decision maker don't believe we are smart enough
> to use anchor in the right way.

There are some articles for which one article + anchors are good design.
I'm talking mostly about internal anchors here.

Example: http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C5%82owniczek_japo%C5%84ski


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Cliches

body:
Jason Williams wrote:

>On Tue, Mar 11, 2003 at 05:11:43AM -0800, Jimmy Wales wrote:
>
>
>>Brion Vibber wrote:
>>
>>
>>>>Nope, debian linux with KDE.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>AltGr+apostrophe, e
>>>
>>>
>>What is 'AltGr'?  Is that the one naive people like me call "the
>>Windows key"?
>>
>>
AFAIK US keyboards don't have it

>
>


subject: [Wikitech-l] Footnotes?

body:
Guillaume Blanchard wrote:

>I'm very disappointed that decision maker don't believe we are smart enough
>to use anchor in the right way.
>
>
>
No, I don't think it's that.
I for one cannot see a "right way" of using anchors.
please give an example of a specific article which would be improved
with anchors

>
>
>


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia slo...o...o...w

body:
Takuya Murata wrote:

>>MOnday afternoon GMT -- wikipedia seems awfully slow........
>>I keep getting "connection refused" messages too :(
>>
>>
>
>That is usual. I think it depends on your Internet
>connection. I quite frequently get a time-out every day.
>

I'm only on 56k, but other sites load at a good speed.

This "GMT 2-4pm slowdown" used to happen in the Phase II days.


from_name: Leonard Tulipan

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Re: Install problem

body:
So, my mail-client crashed, so I'm writing this a second time

I do not get a lot of debugging output. If you can help me turn on more
debugging please tell me what to do.
I did the following things in LocalSettings.php:

$wgDebugComments       = true;
$wgDebugLogFile         = "$wgUploadDirectory/logfile";

the logfile looks like this

20030311154840  0000.219
/admin/wiki/wiki.phtml?title=Hauptseite&action=edit     (proxied via xxx
forwarded for 192.168.0.24)
20030311154843  0000.220
/admin/wiki/wiki.phtml?title=Hauptseite&action=submit   (proxied via xxx
forwarded for 192.168.0.24)
(xxx is the firewall)

When I press the submit-botton on the edit form, I am still in the edit
mode, so It doesn't exit to the normal startpage.
Preview mode seems to work, so I still suspect PHP to be the wrong version.
HTML Debugging shows:

<body bgcolor='#FFFFFF'>
<!-- Wiki debugging output:
-->
<div id='content'>

So not really much info there.
Can anybody tell me if updating PHP would fix this. I need a definitve yes
to persuade the server maintainer to do this.
If you can help me with further debugging, feel free to mail me.

Cheers
Leo

>
> It would help to diagnose the problem if you can provide a more detailed
> description of the problem. If there are any error messages (in the page
> or in the logs), please copy them in their entirety...
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
>
>
> On Mon, 3 Mar 2003, Leonard Tulipan wrote:
>
> > Hi there!
> > So I am currently installing the third wikipedia. The first two installs
> > (inhouse) worked flawlessly.
> > I wanted to setup a third wiki on an external server:
> > Apache: 1.3.20
> > PHP: 4.0.6
> > MySQL: 3.23.44
> >
> > I am guessing my problems relate to the PHP Version, since the INSTALL
> > Document mentions 4.2
> > The problem seems to be with saving to the DB. It is actually able to
> > access the DB. I verified this, by deliberately mistyping the username
> > and getting and error, and by changing the start-text in the "cur"
> > table.
> > Are there any quick suggestions, or do I need to bother my provider to
> > try to get this shared server updated.
> > If the latter is the only options, maybe someone could point me to
> > potential security problems with any of the above older software
> > versions.
> >
> > Cheers
> > Leonard


subject: [Wikitech-l] Bug in Recent Changes

body:
I have minor edits turned off in Recent Changes.

The bug is this:

Suppose I see a page which has had one edit made to it.
I click the "diff" link --
but what I see is the diff for a more recent minor edit, which was not
listed in RC.

What I *should* see is either:
a) the diffs of both edits, the major and the subsequent minor.
b) the diff showing what the major edit added -- ie the "last" of the
major edit. Of course, this leaves me in the dark about the more recent
edit, and is somewhat misleading. this option is therefore less
preferable IMO


subject: [Wikitech-l] Footnotes?

body:
On Tue, Mar 11, 2003 at 03:49:15PM +0000, tarquin wrote:
> please give an example of a specific article which would be improved
> with anchors

http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C5%82owniczek_japo%C5%84ski


from_name: Tom Parmenter

subject: [WikiEN-l] a more "confident" username

body:
|From: erik_moeller at gmx.de (Erik Moeller)
|Sender: wikien-l-admin at wikipedia.org
|Reply-To: wikien-l at wikipedia.org
|Date: 11 Mar 2003 23:28:00 +0100
|
|> Erik, please don't continue singling out LittleDan for
|> special schooling--there's no reason to condescend to
|> him because he's young,
|
|I have already cited the reasons, I don't care how old he is. As for
|moving this to private mail:
|1)Understanding the deletion process is essential, especially as
|undeleting pages is currently a PITA. Therefore, the more often the
|process is publicly summarized, the better.
|2)The whole process of sysop nomination and sysop status transfer is a
|public process, not a private one.
|
|I will therefore continue to publicly "quiz" nominated sysops whom I
|suspect may not be familiar with our process about its finer details.
|
|Regards,
|
|Erik

We can all use a refresher on what the sysop is all about.  No harm
done.

Tom P.
O88


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Footnotes?

body:
>> Any article which refers to other sections of itself would be so improved
>> under the proposal to support only [[#bar]] and interpret
>> == bar == as
bar
 instead of
bar
.

There was less objection (and frankly, very little reason to object)
to the original design of anchor links which simply made [[foo#bar]]
behave exactly as expected.  There was more objection to the syntax
I chose for target anchors ([[##bar]]), and the idea of being able
to use target anchors in the first place.

Some of those objections might be addressed by agreeing to not allow
/arbitrary/ anchors, but make all H2s implicit anchors.  So that, for
example,

  == This is a subhead ==

is rendered as

This is a subhead

That way, one can /only/ link internally to sections of an article
that are already clearly marked as sections.  Likewise, you could
name a section "Endnotes" and use it for that purpose, and it would
be clearly marked as such.  There would be the slight annoyance that
links would only point to the endnotes section as a whole, not to
each individual note, though auto-numbering of links and lists
might compensate for that a bit:

  Darwin [[#endnotes]] believed that...
  ...
  == Endnotes ==
  # ''Origin of Species'', Charles Darwin, 1875, pp 185..190.

would render as:

  Darwin 1 believed that...
  ...

Endnotes

Origin of Species</e>, ...

and so on.

--
Lee Daniel Crocker <lee at piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/>
"All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past,
are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified
for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC


subject: [Wikitech-l] what's going on with wikipedia ?

body: it's really slow again today


from_name: Daniel Ehrenberg

body:
>Daniel, I  have posted this a couple of times previously, and not yet  been
>challenged on it...

Sorry, I only recently heard about this mailing list. I never got that
mesage.

_________________________________________________________________
The new MSN 8: advanced junk mail protection and 2 months FREE*
http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail


subject: [WikiEN-l] a more "confident" username

body:
> I have already cited the reasons, I don't care how old he is. As for
> moving this to private mail:
> 1)Understanding the deletion process is essential, especially as
> undeleting pages is currently a PITA. Therefore, the more often the
> process is publicly summarized, the better.
> 2)The whole process of sysop nomination and sysop status transfer is a
> public process, not a private one.
>
> I will therefore continue to publicly "quiz" nominated sysops whom I
> suspect may not be familiar with our process about its finer details.

LittleDan to me sounds surprisingly articulate for a thirteen year old. I
can fully understand the resistance to judging anyone by their age..
especially that age... when they can become involved really young in
something of substance, rather than watching the news, or playing GTA3. On
the other hand, I still agree with Eric's rightful caution, in handing out
the car keys. -SV


from_name: Jens Frank

subject: [Wikitech-l] How to turn off bot access

body:
On Tue, Mar 11, 2003 at 07:33:46AM -0700, Fred Bauder wrote:
> How does one disable editing by bots such as the one RamMan used?
>

There is no easy way to do so. Your server has no means to
distinguish between a human editor or a bot.

The technique used by most websites to get rid of bots is
to force the user to type in a text that is presented to
the user in an image. Ideally, the image should be hard
to scan by a computer.

Regards,

	JeLuF


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Re: Footnotes?

body:
>>
This is a subhead

>>
>An inline element () may not contain a block element (
)

Yep, didn't check that.  Make it

This is a subhead

and otherwise the idea remains the same.

--
Lee Daniel Crocker <lee at piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/>
"All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past,
are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified
for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC


subject: [Wikitech-l] How to turn off bot access

body:
On Tue, Mar 11, 2003 at 06:41:18PM +0100, Jens Frank wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 11, 2003 at 07:33:46AM -0700, Fred Bauder wrote:
> > How does one disable editing by bots such as the one RamMan used?
> >
>
> There is no easy way to do so. Your server has no means to
> distinguish between a human editor or a bot.
>
> The technique used by most websites to get rid of bots is
> to force the user to type in a text that is presented to
> the user in an image. Ideally, the image should be hard
> to scan by a computer.

This is extremely stupid technique of course - it does much
more to annoy users than to prevent an attack.
Just make a policy that bots should not be used on your site.


from_name: Guillaume Blanchard

subject: [Wikitech-l] Footnotes?

body:
> On Mon, Mar 10, 2003 at 01:46:07PM +0000, tarquin wrote:
> >
> >
> > Sheldon Rampton wrote:
> >
> > >I think it would be nice if the Wiki syntax could facilitate
> > >footnoting of articles.
> >
> > I don't think footnotes are suitable for webpages.
> > Unlike paper, the user has to travel (potentially) a long way for
> > related information.
> > I have been trying to reintegrate them into the text where I see them in
> > articles -- I suggest we try and write without them
>
> Related useful feature would be a way to link to places in articles.
>
> [[Foo#Bar|Something]]
>
> [[Foo#Bar]] = [[Foo#Bar|Bar]]
> [[#Bar|Something]] = [[Current Article#Bar|Something]]
> [[#Bar]] = [[Current Article#Bar|Bar]]
>
> Archors may be generated automatically from headers.

Yesss... anchors can solve the problem but we are not liable enough to have
the right to use this feature ;o)

Aoineko


from_name: Karl Eichwalder

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: New Bug: Newline within a Link

in_reply_to:
<8hd9PkhCpVB@erik_moeller> (erik_moeller@gmx.de's message of
 "11 Mar 2003 13:30:00 +0100")

body:
erik_moeller at gmx.de (Erik Moeller) writes:

> It doesn't even have built-in support for soft line wrapping,
> i.e. word wrapping at the window edge.

Unix tools work best on hard "wrapped" lines (grep, awk, wc) and proper
file formats can cope perfectly with long lines and "wrapped" lines
(TeX, SGML, etc.).  The wikipedia file format is, errm, the wikipedia
file format--it's not that bad, but it surely has issues; esp. when it
comes to lists

> Or you could use a decent *text* editor like nedit, scite or gvim.

Was there done that--but now I'm using Emacs since 10 years or so and I
still don't regret this decision.  More likely I'll stay away from
wikipedia than dropping Emacs ;)

--
ke at suse.de (work) / keichwa at gmx.net (home):              |
http://www.gnu.franken.de/ke/                            |      ,__o
Free Translation Project:                                |    _-\_<,
http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/contrib/po/HTML/             |   (*)/'(*)


from_name: Giskart

body:
Tomasz Wegrzanowski <taw at users.sourceforge.net>
wrote in news:20030311170503.GA20326 at tavaiah:

> it's really slow again today
>

The same on the Dutch Wikipedia. There is even a posting from a vistor on
be.comp.internet asking what is happening whit Wikipedia NL.

Is there a structural problem? If so we should attempt to make no publicty
anymore for wikipedia until wikipedia can serve it present visitors.

---
Contact: giskart AT wikipedia.be
Ook een artikeltje schrijven? WikipediaNL, de vrije GNU/FDL encyclopedie
http://www.wikipedia.be


from_name: Pedro M.V.

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia down

body:
I never before recieved this down messages from Wikipedia and it never went so slowly.

For me wikipedia is down, I almost cannot read the articles and edit is  impossible...

----- Original Message -----
From: "tarquin" <tarquin at planetunreal.com>
To: <wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org>
Sent: Tuesday, March 11, 2003 4:52 PM
Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia slo...o...o...w

>
>
> Takuya Murata wrote:
>
> >>MOnday afternoon GMT -- wikipedia seems awfully slow........
> >>I keep getting "connection refused" messages too :(
> >>
> >>
> >
> >That is usual. I think it depends on your Internet
> >connection. I quite frequently get a time-out every day.
> >
>
> I'm only on 56k, but other sites load at a good speed.
>
> This "GMT 2-4pm slowdown" used to happen in the Phase II days.
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
> http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


from_name: Zoe

subject: [WikiEN-l] a more "confident" username

body:
And I'll put you in my email filter so I don't have to read it.
Zoe
 Erik Moeller <erik_moeller at gmx.de> wrote:> Erik, please don't continue singling out LittleDan for
> special schooling--there's no reason to condescend to
> him because he's young,

I have already cited the reasons, I don't care how old he is. As for
moving this to private mail:
1)Understanding the deletion process is essential, especially as
undeleting pages is currently a PITA. Therefore, the more often the
process is publicly summarized, the better.
2)The whole process of sysop nomination and sysop status transfer is a
public process, not a private one.

I will therefore continue to publicly "quiz" nominated sysops whom I
suspect may not be familiar with our process about its finer details.

Regards,

Erik
_______________________________________________
WikiEN-l mailing list
WikiEN-l at wikipedia.org
http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

---------------------------------
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subject: [Wikitech-l] META tags

body:
Meta-tag or similar solution would be very interesting of pages with words to translate to antoher languages.

I.e. imagine the Halloween phrase : "Trick or treat" ( or similar ). I would translate it directly to spanish "Truco o trato" using these metatags ( we don?t need an article about this "trick or treat" expression.

This is very interesting to understand another cultures.

Regards.


subject: [WikiEN-l] AltGr junk (Was: Cliches)

body:
Tarquin wrote:

>Jason Williams wrote:

>>Jimmy Wales wrote:

>>>What is 'AltGr'?  Is that the one naive people like me call "the
>>>Windows key"?

>>The right-hand Alt key.

>AFAIK US keyboards don't have it

I'm sitting at a US keyboard now (made by Sun) that has it.
Probably most keyboards on Linux boxes don't have it,
since they use standard keyboards with few neat keys --
maybe even a Micro$oft one that certainly has no AltGr.

But Jason's response suggests that Linux is often set up
when using these keyboards to that the right-hand Alt key
will run as AltGr.  I never heard that, but maybe it's so.

That said, even my Sun isn't set up to use AltGr this way.
What I use instead is the greatest key in the world, Compose.
If you have no Compose key, then your keyboard suxors ^_^.

-- Toby